E.U.

leaders show little unity ahead of

emergency conclave on refugees

Refugees from the Middle East are silhouetted against the setting sun as they walk on
railway tracks from Serbia, in Roszke, Hungary, Sunday, Aug. 30, 2015. (Darko
Bandic/AP)

By Michael Birnbaum and Anthony Faiola-August 31

BRUSSELS European leaders traded barbs Monday about who was to blame for a
worsening migration crisis, as mounting calls to take in desperate asylum-seekers
mixed with skepticism that swift changes would actually take place.
There was little unity ahead of a planned emergency meeting to be held in two weeks,
despite a growing agreement that Europes unpredictable asylum system has spurred
migrants to take dangerous steps to scale the continents high walls. The problem has
grown worse by the day, with aid groups in Greece saying that new arrivals were on
track Monday to top record-breakingweekend highs.
From Greece, migrants flow northward through the Balkans and try to reach Western
Europe, where generous benefits can await. The growing numbers raised the risk of
further tragedies such as the grisly discovery last week of 71 corpses packed into the
back of a delivery truck on an Austrian roadside.

The presumed migrants are believed to have suffocated while trying to reach friendlier
nations such as Germany and Sweden. In addition, more than 100 people drowned off
the coast of Libya last week while trying to reach Europes shores, underscoring the
dual pressures on the continents borders.
At a time when Germany is taking the lions share of refugees an estimated
800,000 this year alone German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday urged other
European Union nations to share the burden. She called for new E.U.-run asylum
processing centers in entry nations such as Greece to better assess and safely funnel
refugees deeper into Europe.

"There's no point in publicly calling each other names, but we must simply say that the
current situation is not satisfactory," Merkel told reporters in Berlin, saying that the
current system needed urgent reforms.
Leaders in Germany and Sweden, the two countries that have taken in the most
migrants, have said that their generosity cannot be unlimited. Merkel has also called
for swift measures to streamline the asylum process by separating countries
presumed safe from ones embroiled in conflict. That would speed deportations of
economic migrants while allocating more resources to people fleeing the bitter wars in
Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.
But there were signs that unity within Europes consensus-driven policymaking would
be elusive. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico on Monday firmly rejected any
decision that would force his nation to take in a fixed number of refugees.

We strongly reject any quotas, Fico told reporters in the Slovakian capital of
Bratislava, according to Reuters. We will wake up one day and have 100,000 people
from the Arab world, and that is a problem I would not like Slovakia to have.
E.U. leaders have grown increasingly concerned about smugglers who have profited
from Europes fragmented response to the crisis. Hungary has arrested five suspected
human traffickers in connection with the deaths in Austria. The truck was believed to
have been filled with asylum-seekers inside Hungary and driven across the border.
We are seeing that human traffickers are acting increasingly brutally and
unscrupulously, and we have to take tougher measures, Austrian Interior Minister
Johanna Mikl-Leitner told reporters in Vienna on Monday, announcing tougher police
controls in the Austrian region that borders Hungary.
Police officers on Sunday had already rescued 10 asylum-seekers in the eastern
Burgenland region from a van with French license plates, the interior minister said.
Inspections of trucks coming from Hungary were creating long traffic delays on the
Hungarian side of the Austria-Hungary border, local media reports said, a rare
spectacle given the lack of controls on many of Europes borders.
Separately, Greece's coast guard said Monday that it had picked up more than 2,400
migrants in dozens of sea-based search-and-rescue missions over the weekend, a
sign that the flow of asylum-seekers is continuing unabated. Many migrants take
rickety boats from Turkey to Greece before proceeding overland through the Balkans
and into Western Europe.
On the Greek island of Lesvos, a first port of call for many migrants coming from
Turkey, aid workers said the island was swiftly becoming overwhelmed with new
asylum-seekers, who are arriving faster than others can be transported away.
The system broke this weekend, particularly yesterday, said Simon Clarke, deputy
team leader of the International Rescue Committee team on Lesvos. In a telephone
interview from the island, he said Mondays numbers appeared likely to rival the
approximately 4,000 who arrived a day earlier nearly four times as many as had
been coming just 10 days ago.
Migrants are under even more pressure because of the wide disparities in the way
European countries have responded to the crisis. A quirk of European law allows
nations to deport asylum-seekers to the first E.U. country where their presence was
registered by authorities. But front-line nations such as Greece, Hungary and Italy are
far less generous in their benefits than richer nations such as Germany. Migrants are
paying smugglers to get them through countries such as Hungary undetected a
process that is getting ever harder as authorities crack down.
Hungarys far-right leaders have had the toughest response in Europe so far, stringing
a line of razor-wire across their 109-mile border with Serbia and building a taller fence
behind it. Leaders are pushing hard to deport migrants or at least to keep them

from passing onward into Europe.

Crowds of asylum-seekers packed Budapests fin-de-siecle train station over the
weekend, as security officers stopped people with dark skin from boarding trains and
demanded to see their papers. There was confusion Monday about whether they
would be allowed to travel onward. Witnesses said some were permitted to board a
train bound for Austria but were detained again on the train before they left Hungarian
territory.
With the patchwork of European migrant policies fraying, calls are mounting for a
unified response to the crisis, potentially through a quota system by which each of the
European Unions 28 nations commits to taking in a certain number of refugees.
Vast gaps currently exist: against Germanys expected influx 800,000 asylum-seekers
this year, Hungary has so far granted asylum to only 278 of the 148,000 who have
applied, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Refugee advocates also want to establish a process by which asylum-seekers could
file applications with Europe even before they cross Europes borders. Armed with the
proper paperwork, they could bypass the dangerous journey altogether.
But even the most generous E.U. nations may be wary of creating too streamlined a
process for refugee claims, fearful that they would make it too easy for the millions of
Syrians who have fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to move to Europe, analysts
say.
Its not the fear of who comes this year, but of how many could come next year, and
the unknown, that sometimes holds politicians back from establishing a process that
would help countries like Turkey and Lebanon, said Elizabeth Collett, director of the
Migration Policy Institute Europe.
Faiola reported from Berlin. Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin contributed to this report.

Michael Birnbaum is The Posts Moscow bureau chief. He previously served as the
Berlin correspondent and an education reporter.

Anthony Faiola is The Post's Berlin bureau chief. Faiola joined the Post in 1994, since
then reporting for the paper from six continents and serving as bureau chief in Tokyo,
Buenos Aires, New York and London.
Posted by Thavam