The EU's president urged leaders gathering for an emergency summit Wednesday to stop fighting over a refugee quota deal and take urgent action to secure the bloc's borders in the face of "millions" of migrants. After ministers forced through a deal to relocate 120,000 refugees in the teeth of opposition from eastern states, Hungary's hard-line prime minister angrily denounced Germany's "moral imperialism".
Slovakia furiously vowed to dispute the quota deal in court, underscoring the deep divisions that have emerged over Europe's biggest migration crisis since World War II. Donald Tusk, head of the European Council, called for an end to "the cycle of mutual recriminations and misunderstandings" fuelling the split between the EU's richer west and poorer former communist east.
"The most urgent question we should ask ourselves tonight is how to regain control of our external borders," Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, told reporters. "The conflicts in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iraq, will not end anytime soon," he said. "This means today we're talking about millions of potential refugees trying to reach Europe, not thousands." Draft summit conclusions seen by AFP call for EU states to give one billion euros ($1.1 billion) to the World Food Programme and UN refugee agency to help refugees in Syria.
They further called for more aid to affected countries outside the bloc including the western Balkans and Syria's neighbours Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The EU leaders also said extra staff and equipment should be sent to shore up border controls and the EU's border agency Frontex. The 120,000 refugee relocations are just a faction of the 500,000 migrants who have come to Europe's shores so far this year and the estimated four million camped on Syria's borders.
The scale of the challenge was evident in Croatia, where nearly 9,000 migrants entered on Tuesday alone, a record daily number since they started to arrive a week ago after Hungary built a fence on its border with Serbia. Over the last week, more than 44,000 refugees have entered Croatia from non-EU Serbia. Yet unity has eluded the EU so far. In a rare move on the eve of the summit, EU interior ministers did not wait for unanimous agreement but passed the relocation plan by majority vote despite strong resistance from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia.
The eastern states argued that the EU has no right to override national sovereignty and make them accept people from overwhelmed frontline states such as Greece and Italy. "The most important thing is that there should be no moral imperialism," Hungary's premier Viktor Orban said during a visit to the southern German state of Bavaria when asked what he expected from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Orban then piled pressure on Greece, a frontline state struggling to deal with thousands of refugees flooding in by sea, mainly from Turkey, even as Athens is still reeling from its debt crisis.
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