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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Refugee dynamic shifts as EU meets this week

Los Angeles Times

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 measure Monday allowing the army to use nonlethal force to patrol Hungary’s borders and keep refugees out.

“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 today and an emergency summit of all 28 EU heads of government Wednesday.

Those meetings are expected to be tense, and 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.