admin
Macedonian police have fired tear gas at refugees trying to enter from Greece after a night spent stranded in no-man’s land by an emergency decree effectively sealing the Macedonian frontier. At least four bloodied refugees were taken for treatment on the Greek side of the border, Reuters reported yesterday. “They shoot us today, they shoot us today, I can tell you, I see it. We was in front of the place. Officer people, they … Officer people in Macedonia, they shoot the people,” a refugee, who did not want to be identified, said.
Several thousand people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, many of them Syrian refugees, spent a cold night in no-man’s land after Macedonia on Thursday declared a state of emergency and effectively blocked its southern frontier to refugees fleeing war. The flow into Macedonia had reached 1,500-2,000 per day in recent weeks, up from some 200 daily in May, leading to desperate scenes of crowds wrestling to board packed trains at a nearby railway station, children squeezed through open carriage windows.
Macedonian authorities, however, denied any clashes had taken place. Interior Ministry spokesman Ivo Kotevski said, there was “no incident, no tear bombs . . . nothing like that on Macedonian side”.
Earlier speaking to Reuters Kotevski said that “we can’t hermetically close the borders”. But “we will try to reduce illegal border entry to a minimum”, he said.
The measure could create a huge backlog of refugees on the Greek side of the border.
“We can’t believe that we’re here from this morning,” Ahmet Husa of Syria said. “People from Syria escaped from war, escaped death and we want to see our future in Europe. We need this road to see our future.”
Thousands of refugees are holed up in Macedonian town of Gevgelija, from where they planned to catch trains that would take them to the Serbian border on their way to Hungary.
Hungary has begun erecting a fence to try to keep the distraught refugee out. Macedonia appealed on Wednesday for neighbouring countries to send train carriages to address the demand.
The United Nations refugee agency urged the government to do more, saying it should allocate a site to accommodate people fleeing war.
“Depending on how Greece uses ships to de-congest the islands, that will also temporarily increase the arrivals here,” said Alexandra Krause, senior protection officer at the UNHCR in Macedonian capital, Skopje.
Almost 39,000 refugees, most of them Syrians, have been registered passing through Macedonia over the past month, double the number from the month before. — Al Jazeera
Online Reporter