Reuters reports: Migrants walked through cornfields into the European Union through Serbia’s western border with Croatia, opening a new front in the continent’s migration crisis after Hungary shut the main overland route.
Croatia said it was urgently sending demining experts to the border area to identify minefields left on the frontier from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the last time hundreds of thousands of displaced people marched across Europe.
Hungary’s decision to shut the EU’s external border with Serbia this week was the most forceful attempt yet by a European country to close off the unprecedented flow of refugees and economic migrants overwhelming the bloc.
The route through Hungary has been the main one used by migrants who arrive first by dinghy in Greece and then trek across the Balkan peninsula to reach the EU’s frontier-free Schengen zone, most eventually bound for Germany.
With that route closed, thousands of migrants remain in the Balkans seeking other paths north and west, possibly through Croatia and Romania, both of which are in the EU but not in Schengen.
Hundreds of people, some of whom identified themselves as Iraqis, trek through fields near the official Sid border crossing between Serbia and Croatia, a fellow former Yugoslav republic which joined the EU in 2013.
They arrived by bus from the southern Serbian town of Presevo, rerouted late on Tuesday to the Croatian border after the Hungarian border shut.
Serbian media reported that at least 10 migrant buses had left Presevo overnight bound for Sid. Three arrived, one a double-decker that offloaded its passengers within a few hundred meters of the border.
Hungary has thrown up a 3.5 meter (10 foot) high fence along the length of its border with Serbia. Engineers and soldiers were marking out a path to extend the fence along the border with Romania, a plan that has angered Bucharest.
Hungary says it is simply enforcing EU rules by sealing the Schengen zone’s external border. It says Serbia is a safe country, so asylum seekers who reach the frontier there can be automatically turned back in a process that should take hours.
Hungary blames Germany for exacerbating the crisis by announcing in August it would suspend normal EU asylum rules and take in Syrian refugees regardless of where they enter the EU. Thousands have since been trekking across the bloc, mainly through Hungary and Austria, to reach Germany, clogging railway stations and forcing trains to be canceled.
Record numbers rushed to cross Hungary in the days before the border was shut, with thousands now backed up in Austria trying to reach Germany.
