Europeans struggle with refugees ahead of key meetings this week

Reporting from London —  Authorities across Europe struggled to impose some order Monday on the rivers of migrants flowing into and across the continent as political leaders staked out sharply differing positions at the start of a key week of talks to resolve the crisis.

Thousands of asylum seekers continued to stream into Croatia and Austria, which have become key way stations en route to most migrants’ preferred destinations of Germany and Scandinavia.

Croatian officials said their country has been overwhelmed by the arrival of more than 27,000 people in less than a week, after the human tide diverted in their direction when Hungary sealed its border with Serbia. Workers rushed to open a camp in the eastern village of Opatovac to diminish the chaotic scenes of migrants fighting to board trains, walking for miles along main roads and sleeping in the open.

Austrian officials reported that thousands of asylum seekers continued to cross the border from Hungary, which let them pass through despite tough new laws authorizing the arrest of people present in the country illegally. The government of right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban approved a new measure Monday allowing the army to use non-lethal force to patrol Hungary’s borders and keep refugees out.

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“The migrants are not just banging on our door. They are breaking it down,” said Orban, who has also warned that the migrants, many of them from Muslim countries such as Syria and Afghanistan, threatened Europe’s Christian heritage.

Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland are adamantly against a European Union proposal for binding refugee quotas for most of the bloc’s countries. The four nations’ leaders met Monday to unite in their opposition ahead of a gathering of EU interior ministers Tuesday and an emergency summit of all 28 EU heads of government Wednesday.

Those meetings are expected to be tense, and very possibly inconclusive. So far, Europe’s leaders for the most part have succeeded only in accusing each other of acting selfishly or inhumanely and trading blame over who’s responsible for the crisis.

Wednesday’s summit will weigh a proposal to resettle 120,000 refugees across the EU through mandatory quotas – a drop in the bucket considering that Germany alone expects to receive 800,000 to 1 million asylum seekers this year.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has also floated a new plan for the EU to take refugees directly from their war-torn homelands, in order to discourage them from making the perilous journey to Europe. (Britain has already adopted such a policy.) They would then be distributed across the EU according to each member state’s size and economic strength.

Asylum seekers who came to Europe on their own steam, exceeding the “generous” quotas set by the EU, would be sent to specially established safe zones offshore – in Africa, for example, De Maiziere said.

Currently, EU rules dictate that people fleeing war and persecution must apply for sanctuary in the European country where they land, not the country of their choice.

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But that procedure is now essentially defunct. Nations such as Greece have simply hustled new arrivals on to new countries, while Berlin has pledged to accept asylum seekers regardless of their first port of call. Critics of that policy say it has only fueled the relentless tide of people sailing to Europe and trying to make their way overland to Germany.

In a sign of growing frustration, a senior Austrian official, whose country has so far been welcoming of refugees, criticized asylum seekers for refusing to apply for sanctuary in Croatia and Slovenia and insisting on going to Germany, Europe’s strongest economy.

“What we see here has nothing to do with seeking refuge and safety,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told reporters Monday. “It’s nothing but opportunism.”

Whatever the case, the number of migrants and refugees continues to grow. Over the weekend, the Greek coast guard rescued about 1,000 migrants trying to reach Europe, the Associated Press reported. Hundreds more made it without assistance.

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