As tens of thousands of migrants fleeing war and poverty attempt to reach safety in Europe, the death toll rose above 2,400 on Wednesday, and skirmishes broke out along the Serbian-Hungarian border.
This summer’s unprecedented exodus from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and other nations in turmoil has inundated Southern Europe and exhausted the generosity of countries suffering their own economic woes.
Still, the tide of desperate refugees has continued to mount in spite of new obstacles thrown in their path, such as the razor-wire fence being built on Hungary’s southern border that is bottling up the migrants in impoverished Serbia.
Italy’s coast guard found the bodies of 50 migrants in the hull of a ship off the Libyan coast from which a Swedish vessel had rescued more than 400 survivors.
The latest deaths from dehydration and suffocation bring the seasonal toll to more than 2,400, from among the migrants expected to number well over 1 million by year’s end, according to United Nations figures.
Relatively calm seas and escalating violence in the Middle East and North Africa have encouraged thousands to make the perilous Mediterranean crossing each day and fueled the rugged passage through Italy and the Balkans by those hoping to reach the more prosperous countries of Northern Europe.
The Greek coast guard reported Wednesday that crews had rescued 578 migrants in the previous 24 hours from boats off the Aegean islands west of Turkey. Most of the refugees entering Europe through that route are Syrians fleeing the civil war now in its fifth year.
Those who make it to shore on the islands are transferred to Athens for registration, which is supposed to happen in the first European Union country they enter. But many elude the official processing and head north for Germany, Sweden, Austria or the Netherlands — all countries where refugees can expect better treatment than in the economically teetering Balkans.
That onward migration has created a bottleneck at the Greek-Macedonian border, where authorities have been struggling to provide water, food and shelter to the crowds expanding by about 3,000 people per day, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees reported Tuesday.
In recognition of the spiraling humanitarian crisis, the European Commission on Wednesday released $1.7 million for refugee assistance to the Red Cross operations of Serbia and Macedonia.
Macedonian authorities have been quickly packing the daily arrivals on to buses after registration procedures, so they can travel north through Serbia and attempt to cross into Hungary through weak spots in the unfinished fence along the 110-mile border.
Tuesday saw another record number of arrivals who Budapest officials consider illegal, with 2,533 detained, up from the former record on Monday of 2,093. Hungary has counted more than 160,000 migrants so far this year.
The migration crisis not only poses economic challenges to the 28 nations of the European Union, it strains their solidarity and alliance cohesion.
