A migrant holding his baby after arriving yesterday with others on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey.

AFP
Ljubljana
EU member Slovenia outlined plans yesterday to build “obstacles”, potentially including fences, on its border with Croatia, as it braced for a new spike in migrants bound for northern Europe this week.
Prime Minister Miro Cerar, whose country last month found itself on the main Balkans route for thousands of migrants after Hungary sealed its southern borders, insisted however that its frontier would remain open.
“We decided yesterday to start building over the following days on the Schengen (zone) border with Croatia some temporary technical obstacles,” Cerar told reporters in Ljubljana. “These obstacles, including fences if needed, will have the objective of directing migrants towards the border crossings. We are not closing our borders.”
Instead, he said, the measures were aimed at avoiding a “humanitarian disaster” caused by an expected sharp rise in migrant numbers this week following a dip in recent days.
“We know right now that some 30,000 migrants are heading from Greece towards the north,” he said.
In addition, he said, Austria – the next destination for the migrants – planned to restrict the daily number of new arrivals to 6,000, and that Germany might follow suit.
“Slovenia could face in the near future an overwhelming number of migrants who would remain for a longer time on our territory,” Cerar said.
“With the winter coming and temperatures dropping, we could face a catastrophe if we do not act at the right time.”
Cerar also hit out at the rest of the European Union for failing to stop the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of them from hotspots like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The “commitments from Brussels ... are not being fulfilled. The flow of migrants hasn’t reduced or slowed down”, he said.
Interior Minister Vensa Gyorkos Znidar added: “An uncontrolled crossing of the Schengen border is happening. This is a European problem which is a consequence of the fact that Europe has slept over too long, we lack a EU level solution for the problem.”
Slovenia, which unlike fellow bloc member Croatia belongs to Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone, has seen more than 170,000 migrants pass through the country since mid-October.