Governments in the Balkans are beefing up borders and readying soldiers in the event of a new influx of migrants and refugees, with Serbia reportedly ready to seal its southern frontier with North Macedonia after Turkey abandoned a 2016 migration pact with the European Union.
The Balkan peninsula became the crossing point for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war, poverty and repression in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in 2015.
A 2016 deal between the European Union and Turkey helped stem the flow but at the end of February, smarting from military setbacks in neighbouring Syria, Ankara scrapped the pact and lifted restrictions on millions of refugees and migrants within its borders.
Tens of thousands are now on the border with Greece and at Aegean ports, their route to Europe blocked by Greek police whom rights group accuse of using increasingly heavy-handed tactics to keep them out.
Rights groups are concerned at Greece’s EU-backed effort to keep the migrants and refugees out, and at the language deployed by politicians framing the issue as one of security, not human rights.
On Friday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic ordered the country’s borders closed in the event of a “threat to national security” from a new wave of migrants and refugees.
In a statement on March 3, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles warned against inflammatory language.
“Refugees seeking protection should not be treated as a security threat, with heavy-handed military tactics and language,” the organisation said.
“We are alarmed at the hysterical and inappropriate language of political leaders: this is not a war; this is not an invasion.”
In Croatia, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said Zagreb was considering deploying the army to reinforce 6,500 border police officers, already accused by rights groups of illegal ‘pushbacks’ of migrants and refugees trying to enter from Bosnia and Serbia.
“All this is just a possibility for now, a fallback plan,” Plenkovic said after meeting NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Zagreb on Wednesday.
Croatia has also said it is ready to send a second police boat to the Aegean and border police officers to the Greek border. Bulgaria, too, says it has 400 soldiers on standby to reinforce the border, while neighbouring North Macedonia has increased army and police numbers on its southern border with Greece.
Visiting the southern border on Tuesday, North Macedonia President Stevo Pendarovski said there was no sign of an imminent “wave of people”. Zoran Zaev, who recently resigned as prime minister ahead of an election next month, said authorities were in “direct communication and coordination with the foreign ministries of Turkey and Greece, as well as with NATO structures and the EU.”
Serbia Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said Belgrade had sent “a number of police officers” to the border between North Macedonia and Greece “to help deter migrants from crossing this border illegally and then continuing, among other things, towards Serbia.”
Vucic vowed on Wednesday that Serbia, which like North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia is not a member of the EU, would not become a “parking lot for migrants” trying to reach the bloc.
The situation claimed its first victim on Monday – a Syrian boy who died after the boat he was on capsized off the Greek island of Lesbos. Also on Monday, the BBC broadcast video of Greek coastguards near Lesbos firing into the water around a boat carrying refugees and migrants.
“Increasingly, the policy of maximum deterrence is being translated into reality,” German MEP Erik Marquardt of the Alliance 90/The Greens party told BIRN from Lesbos.
“Deaths are being accepted,” he said. “The Greek government has given up on the rule of law in many places.”
Marquardt said Greek television was broadcasting pictures of military exercises, giving the impression of a country at war.
Turkey moved to open its borders after at least 34 Turkish soldiers were killed in air strikes in Syria; Ankara blamed Syrian government forces under Bashar al-Assad, but Russian planes were also operating in the area around Idlib in northern Syria at the time in support of Assad’s forces.
Analysts say Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the migrants and refugees as a tool to win European backing for Ankara’s intervention in Syria, which it says is about establishing a safe zone to resettle some 3.7 Syrian refugees currently on Turkish territory.
The EU has backed Greece’s efforts to keep them out. “Our first priority is making sure that order is maintained at Greece’s external border, which is also Europe’s border,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday during a visit to the Greek-Turkish border.
Speaking on Wednesday in Brussels, Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said the bloc needed to think of Balkan countries too.
“We must not forget them, they are on the route, and if we help them, we are actually helping ourselves as well,” he said.
Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s tripartite presidency, wrote to the Greek government expressing gratitude.
“Protecting the borders of Greece, you have defended not only the borders of the European Union but the entire Balkans,” he wrote. “Illegal migration brings with it a number of humanitarian and security challenges, and only through joint decisive action can we adequately respond to them.”
Bosnia, in particular, has struggled to cope with the some 24,000 migrants and refugees who entered the country in 2019. Croatian police have pushed many back as they try to cross the EU’s external border.
“Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot accommodate new migrants because there are already between six and seven thousand migrants in its territory, and its capacity is less than half that,” Bosnian Security Minister Fahrudin Radoncic said on Monday.
In Montenegro, Interior Minister Mevludin Nuhodzic said on Tuesday: “We are ready to protect Montenegro from illegal migration and provide security for our citizens.”
Montenegrin soldiers and police officers have manned joint patrols with Albania since August 2018, while Podgorica signed a cooperation agreement in October 2019 with Europe’s border agency, Frontex.
Frontex sent 50 officers to Albania in May 2019 with the aim of tackling irregular migration and beefing up border controls on the Albanian-Greek frontier.
Kosovo, where a Serbian counter-insurgency war in 1998-99 created hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees, has expressed greater readiness to accommodate those fleeing war and repression twenty years later.
An updated ‘response plan’ from 2019 foresees handling up to 2,500 migrants and refugees “during all stages of their arrival in Kosovo,” the Interior Ministry told BIRN.
Very few of those crossing the Balkans want to stay in the region, where economies are weak and poverty rife. Nevertheless, authorities have frequently taken a hard line on keeping them out.
At the height of the crisis in 2015 and 2016, fences were erected on the borders of Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Slovenia and Hungary.
Writing from Turkey for the Bulgarian news website Dnevnik.bg, Bulgarian photographer Georgi Kozhuharov said some of those trying to leave Turkey were afraid of crossing into Bulgaria.
“Some of the refugees said that they avoid heading to the Bulgarian border because they could be shot with ‘real bullets,’” he wrote.
On the other hand, Milena Nikolova, program assistant at the Bulgarian office of the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, told Bulgarian National Radio on March 2 that Bulgaria could “easily accept up to 10,000 refugees.”
The issue, however, has become a political football.
In Serbia, which faces a parliamentary election on April 26, the right-wing opposition party Dveri has launched an anti-immigration campaign.
Rados Djurovic, executive director of Asylum Protection Centre, which provides support to refugees and migrants, said politicians and other groups were exploiting the situation.
“Instead of dealing with other issues of crucial importance to Serbia, they found migration as an undefended field where they can mark refugees with whatever they want, refugees who have no one to represent them,” he said. They are fuelling “fear and prejudice” he told BIRN.
In Croatia, the non-governmental organisations Centre for Peace Studies and Are You Syrious sent an open letter to Plenkovic urging him to push for reform of the Common European Asylum System, CEAS.
The reform must be human rights-based, have clear objectives and eliminate current problems in the system, they wrote on behalf of the network Forum 2020.
“Finally, any reform of the CEAS must protect and empower rather than diminish the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees,” they wrote.
Marquardt, on Lesbos, said the EU had to act.
“We must help on the ground. We also need quotas in the Member States and a fair distribution of refugees in Europe. I know that not all states will participate, but some should move forward now,” he said.
Framing the issue as a security problem “is already part of the problem,” he told BIRN.
“Not everyone has the right to asylum in Europe, but everyone has the right to a fair trial and humane treatment. To respond to this situation with tear gas, military deterrence and violence is unworthy of Europe.”