Thousands of desperate refugees break into Macedonia as Europe’s migrant crisis escalates

Thousands of rain-soaked migrants rushed past Macedonian riot police who were attempting to block them from entering Macedonia from Greece on Saturday, in what marks the latest dramatic chapter of Europe’s escalating migrant crisis. Police fired stun grenades and dozens of people were injured in the border clashes. The tumult started when police allowed a small group of migrants with young children to cross the frontier, and crowds in the back squeezed the migrants toward the shielded police wall. Many women, at least one pregnant, and children fell to the ground apparently fainting after squeezing past the cordon. Then thousands of others, including women with babies and men carrying small children, grabbed their chance to run across a field not protected by barbed wire to enter Macedonia. Police stun grenades did not to stop the rush. At least 25 injured people were brought to a railway station in the Macedonian town of Gevgelija by fellow migrants. Many children lost contact with their parents in the chaos and desperately called for “mama, baba!”

People are exhausted. It has rained all night and they had no shelter.

Alexandra Krause, a senior protection officer with the UNHCR

It was the second day of clashes between the migrants and baton-wielding Macedonian police who are attempting to block them from heading north toward the European Union. Police and soldiers along the country’s border with Greece have been struggling to control the crowds of refugees and migrants, many fleeing war-ravaged countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Elsewhere Italy’s coastguard on Saturday coordinated the rescue of 2,200 migrants in the Mediterranean after receiving distress calls from more than 20 overcrowded vessels drifting in waters off Libya. One of the biggest single-day rescue operations to date was ongoing as nightfall approached. Humanitarian organizations say the surge in the numbers of people trying to reach European Union countries is the result of conflicts or repression in Africa and the Middle East. They have called on European governments to shoulder more of the burden of absorbing the wave of asylum seekers and to help create safer routes for them to reach Europe.

World Macedonia