Austria plans to close border as migrants surge across Europe

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The government of Austria announced on Sunday that it would close its border and resume controls blocking the travel of migrants from Hungary. Border restrictions had been temporarily lifted over the weekend, allowing thousands of refugees to travel on to Germany.

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann announced the decision after a phone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Merkel has made a show of accepting refugees, while Orban has stridently opposed any relaxation of travel restrictions.

The restrictions had been lifted after mass outrage followed the discovery of 71 refugees suffocated in the back of a truck on an Austrian highway and the appearance of horrific pictures of the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean.

Both Austria and Germany are seeking to quickly return to “normalcy,” i.e., restricted borders and onerous requirements. Closing the Austrian border also has the impact of cutting off the flow of refugees into its neighbor, Germany.

Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/09/07/refu-s07.html

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1. Europe struggles to handle accelerating flow of refugees

BRUSSELS — Waves of asylum-seekers fleeing conflict made their way across Europe on Monday, as leaders appeared surprised by the ever-accelerating numbers coming from a deep well of people displaced by war.

German authorities said they had taken in far more asylum-seekers than they had expected in a dramatic weekend after Hungary dropped attempts to bar their passage across Europe. Hundreds of migrants spent a shivering night on the border between Serbia and Hungary, after a brand-new reception camp there was filled over capacity. And in Greece, the refugees’ first port of call, authorities called for emergency E.U. assistance as islands received asylum-seekers faster than they could be ferried to the mainland.

There was no sign the crisis was easing, with a deep well of millions of refugees fueling a nearly endless supply of people making the risky voyage to Europe. Greece’s coast guard said it rescued more than 2,000 asylum-seekers in the Mediterranean Sea since Friday alone.

“We have a moving, in some ways breathtaking, weekend behind us,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Berlin on Monday. Authorities in Munich said they expected to take in 10,000 more people on Monday after a weekend in which 18,000 came by rail from Austria.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe-struggles-to-handle-accelerating-flow-of-refugees/2015/09/07/e2bbc509-414b-4890-bedf-c76b37ae109a_story.html

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2. Everyone wants to be Syrian: why Europe-bound migrants are ditching their identity documents

A Pakistani identity card in the bushes, a Bangladeshi one in a cornfield. A torn Iraqi driver's licence bearing the photo of a man with a Saddam-style moustache, another one with a scarfed woman displaying a shy smile.

Documents scattered only metres from Serbia's border with Hungary provide evidence that many of the migrants flooding Europe to escape war or poverty are scrapping their true nationalities and likely assuming new ones, just as they enter the European Union.

Many of those travellers believe that using a fake document - or having none at all - gives them a better of chance of receiving asylum in Germany and other western European states. That's because the surest route to asylum is to be a refugee from war and not an economic migrant fleeing poverty. That fact has led to a huge influx of people claiming to be Syrian.

Serbian police say 90 per cent of those arriving from Macedonia, around 3,000 a day, claim they are Syrian, although they have no documents to prove it. The so-called Balkan corridor for the refugee flight starts in Turkey, then goes through Macedonia and Serbia before entering the European Union in Hungary.

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1856083/everyone-wants-be-syrian-why-europe-bound-migrants-are-ditching-their

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3. Refugee Crisis: International divide over Bashar al-Assad means no solution in sight

While the desperate flight of Syrians from their country’s war was dominating news bulletins, yet another diplomatic push to end the four-year-old conflict was quietly running into the sand.

That largely unnoticed failure has reinforced the view among Syria experts that no solution is in sight, with one of the biggest obstacles a seemingly unbridgeable international divide over president Bashar al-Assad’s future.

Syria looks set for ever greater fragmentation into a patchwork of territories, one of them the diminishing Damascus-based state where Assad appears confident of survival with backing from Russian and Iranian allies.

While some Western officials say even Assad’s allies recognise he cannot win back and stabilise Syria, Moscow is setting out its case for supporting him in ever more forthright terms.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/refugee-crisis-international-divide-over-bashar-al-assad-means-no-solution-in-sight-352384.html

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4. Greek Island Overwhelmed by Stranded Migrants, Despair

MYTILENE, Greece — It was supposed to be the first step on their journey to Western Europe. But now thousands of migrants are mired in despair, anger and frustration on the scenic Greek island of Lesbos.

After perilous sea voyages from neighboring Turkey, they have been stranded here for days, some for nearly two weeks, running out of money and desperate to get to mainland Greece and continue their route.

The island of some 100,000 residents has been transformed by the sudden new population of some 20,000 refugees and migrants, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — and the strain is pushing everyone to the limit.

Fights break out among the migrants as they wait in long lines for hours in the summer heat and humidity, after days without showers. Families, sleeping on the streets, wander the seaside promenade of Mytilene, Lesbos' capital, asking at the swanky cafes and restaurants to use their bathrooms or charge phones. The small police force, overwhelmed by the numbers, charges in at any sign of trouble, beating crowds with batons to break them up.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/09/07/world/europe/ap-eu-migrants-stranded-on-the-aegean.html?_r=0