Macedonian police officers control a crowd of migrants and refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija.

AFP
Brussels


The EU’s president yesterday urged leaders gathering for an emergency summit to stop fighting over a refugee quota deal and take urgent action to secure the bloc’s borders in the face of “millions” of migrants.
After European Union ministers forced through a deal to relocate 120,000 refugees in the teeth of opposition from eastern states, Hungary’s hardline prime minister angrily denounced Germany’s “moral imperialism”.
Slovakia meanwhile said it would dispute the quota deal in court, underscoring the deep divisions that have emerged in Europe over its biggest migration crisis since World War II.
Donald Tusk, head of the European Council, called for an end to “the cycle of mutual recriminations and misunderstandings” fuelling the split between the EU’s richer west and poorer former communist east.
“The most urgent question we should ask ourselves tonight is how to regain control of our external borders,” Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, told reporters.
“The conflicts in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iraq, will not end anytime soon,” he said. “This means today we’re talking about millions of potential refugees trying to reach Europe, not thousands.”
Greece, still reeling from its debt crisis, was expected to come under particular pressure to accept EU help to strengthen its borders as a frontline state besieged by thousands of refugees flooding in by sea from Turkey.
Tusk will also press EU leaders to offer more aid to affected countries outside the bloc including the western Balkans and Syria’s neighbours Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, as well as to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Ahead of the meeting, the European Commission, the executive arm of the 28-nation bloc, proposed an extra 1.7bn euros ($1.9bn) in funds.
The 120,000 refugee relocations are just a faction of the 500,000 migrants who have come to Europe’s shores so far this year and the estimated 4mn camped on Syria’s borders.
In a rare move on the eve of the summit, EU interior ministers did not wait for unanimous agreement but passed the relocation plan by majority vote in the teeth of opposition from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia.
The eastern states argued that the EU has no right to override national sovereignty and make them accept people from overwhelmed frontline states such as Greece and Italy.
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, whose country will have to take 800 migrants under the relocation plan, said he was prepared to break the EU’s rules rather than accept the “diktat” from Brussels.
“Slovakia is not going to respect mandatory quotas. We are filing a lawsuit with the (EU’s) Luxembourg court,” Fico said, quoted by the website of Slovakia’s leading SME daily.
The scale of the challenge was evident in Croatia, where nearly 9,000 migrants entered on Tuesday alone, a record daily number since they started to arrive a week ago after Hungary closed its borders. Over the last week, more than 44,000 refugees have entered Croatia from non-EU Serbia.
But EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos rejected any suggestion that the rare failure to reach a unanimous agreement on the relocation plan did more harm than good.
“On the contrary, it is a victory for the EU and for all member states,” Avramopoulos said yesterday.
However, Brussels flexed its muscles by issuing formal warnings to 19 EU states including Germany and France for breaching the bloc’s established rules on the treatment of asylum seekers.
“It is about time that member states stepped up to the plate and did what they need to do,” European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said.
US President Barack Obama had on Tuesday pressed European nations to take their “fair share” of refugees, despite accusations that Washington has done little to address the crisis.
With millions of Syrians forced into camps across the Middle East, tens of thousands crossing Europe on foot and hundreds washing up dead on beaches, America has promised to take in only 10,000 refugees next year.
That figure is dwarfed by 1mn asylum seekers that Germany is expecting to welcome by the end of this year.

New 1,000-bed UN refugee camp on Greece border
The UN refugee agency will today open a new 1,000-bed camp, equipped with rows of toilets and showers, wi-fi and chargers, on the Greece-Macedonia border for thousands of people on the move from the Aegean to western Europe.
The makeshift stopover facilities near the small town of Idomeni in northern Greece aim to offer temporary shelter and facilities including health care to the streams of refugees from war and persecution, ANA news agency said.
George Repanas of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told ANA there would be 80 toilets and showers, and medical aid as well as wi-fi and chargers.
“The idea is for people to take a few hours of rest before continuing on their journey,” he said.
Some 5,000 people daily pass through Idomeni on the Balkans route towards prosperous western European economies, more than double the numbers a few weeks ago, police said.
Though NGOs and humanitarian workers have deployed in the area it has been difficult to provide assistance on a continuous basis in the isolated rural region.
Greece yesterday came in for fresh criticism from the European Commission for failing to offer sufficient material aid to refugees.  France, Germany, Italy and Hungary also received formal warnings from the Commission for breaching rules on the treatment of asylum seekers.