Thousands of rain-soaked migrants, including many women and children, remain trapped in a no man’s land between Greece and Macedonia as authorities continue to prevent them from heading north to the European Union.
Overnight, police allowed only small groups of families with children to cross the border by walking on railway tracks to a station in the Macedonian town of Gevgelija, where most take trains to the border with Serbia before heading further north toward EU-member Hungary.
Those who could not cross spent the rainy and chilly night in the open with little food and water. They massed close to a razor wire separating them from machine-gun toting Macedonian policemen. Some raised their babies above their heads to try to persuade the policemen to let them through.
“These men are heartless,” said Yousef, a Syrian refugee who gave only his first name, as he held a little wide-eyed girl with curly hair in his arms and pointed toward the policemen. “They don’t care about our tragedy.”
Army troops were deployed throughout the forested hills which line the 50-kilometre (30-mile) border, according to army spokesman colonel Mirce Gjorgoski.
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On Thursday Macedonia declared a state of emergency and sealed off the border for 24 hours.
But after clashes between police and migrants left at least eight refugees slightly injured, Skopje decided to allow a limited number of refugees in to continue their journey late on Friday.
The unrest came after Macedonian police fired tear gas and stun grenades to drive back angry crowds of Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis and others seeking passage through the impoverished Balkan country, the latest flashpoint in a crisis that has dragged the conflicts of the Middle East to Europe’s doorstep.
Figures from the UN refugee agency show thousands of migrants, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been pouring into Greece on a weekly basis with the aim of travelling through Macedonia and Serbia to reach the European Union.
Those stranded inside no-man’s land sat on the ground in desperation, with some of the children in tears. Other people wandered through piles of rubbish, gazing towards the Macedonian border.
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During the night, police doubled the barbed wire fence at the border, as some of the refugees pleaded with them, shouting “Help us!”
“It rained and many people couldn’t protect themselves. One mother lost her daughter and was calling for her all through the night,” said Samer Moin, a 49-year-old doctor from Syria who cross from Turkey to the Greek island of Halki, before managing to reach the Macedonian border.
“I’ve been here for days. I want go to Norway.”
Meanwhile hundreds more migrants could be seen headed towards the border from the Greek side, coming on foot or arriving on buses from the direction of the northern Greek port of Thessaloniki.
In the Macedonian border town of Gevgelija, five trains, each capable of holding between 100 and 700 passengers, were scheduled to run today with the service laid on exclusively for refugees and migrants, a railway official said.
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It takes some four hours by train to reach Tabanovce on Macedonia’s northern border with Serbia, which lies some 180 kilometres (110 miles) away.
At the station, several hundred people could be seen waiting for the next train, some of whom had set up small tents in a bid to shelter from the rain.
For weeks, the railway station has been a scene of chaos. Up to 2,000 migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia poured over the border daily and pressed to board trains going north, small children squeezing through open carriage windows. Over 40,000 entered Macedonia in the past two months. Some 50,000 hit Greek shores by boat from Turkey in July alone.
Meanwhile the BBC reported that the Macedonian government has defended its treatment of the migrants who were repelled with truncheons and riot shields.
Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki told the broadcaster he had not seen pictures of people being beaten back but there had been an “intervention” after the situation had “dramatically deteriorated”.
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He said: “In the last several days there has been a dramatic increase of inflow of migrants and we have reached numbers of 3,000 to 3,500 per day which obviously is not something a country of two million people and our resources can handle on a daily basis.”