Serbia and Macedonia’s foreign ministers yesterday called for EU action on Europe’s migrant crisis at a summit of leaders from the western Balkans, attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Both have become major transit countries for tens of thousands of migrants trying to reach the EU in recent months, with Macedonia last week forced to declare a state of emergency.
“We are faced with the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. It is a true migration of peoples and Serbia is a transit country,” Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivica Dacic told a news conference at the event in Vienna.
Photo: AP
“This is a problem of the European Union and we [the transit countries] are expected to come up with an action plan,” he said.
“I think the European Union has to come up with a plan first,” he said. “I have to be very direct here. Please understand, we are bearing the brunt of the problem.”
This was echoed by Macedonian Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Poposki, who said that he is currently having to deal with 3,000 migrants arriving every day from EU member Greece.
Photo: AP
“We are not going to do the job with the 90,000 euros [US$101,525] that we have received so far and we are probably not going to reach the objective with the 1 million euros that have been announced,” he said.
“Unless we have a European answer to this issue, none of us should be under any illusion that this will be solved,” Poposki said. “Now we will need to act, and probably with this Vienna conference we can ... come to a solution which is a European one.”
German Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that Europe’s migrant crisis is a “challenge that strikes at the very core of our European values, the values of humanity and solidarity.”
The human cost of the migrant crisis was driven home to the ministers and others meeting in Vienna by the news that up to 50 migrants had been found dead yesterday in a truck in on a highway in Austria.
The vehicle, which contained between 20 and 50 bodies, was found in an emergency lane off the highway near the border with Hungary, police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil told a news conference in Vienna.
It is thought that the truck had been parked in the area since Wednesday.
Merkel told a summit news conference that everyone at the meeting had been “shaken by the appalling news.”
“This reminds us that we must tackle quickly the issue of immigration and in a European spirit — that means in a spirit of solidarity — and to find solutions,” she said.
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