[LINK] "Migrants stranded in Greece becoming desperate"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star carries Anthony Faiola's Washington Post article noting the desperation of the refugees now trapped in Greece by border controls.

As Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras puts it, Greece is now “a warehouse of souls.”

In the freshly shovelled earth, lines of white tents stand in rows, the bunks inside filling up as fast as the army can build them. This camp in the north — one of more than a dozen being rapidly deployed to house a logjam of stranded migrants — is only days old. But flies already buzz around trash heaps. Food lines — for sandwiches on mouldy bread — stretch around corners. Breezes bring stenches of sweat and sewage. Babies cry, their mothers soothing them in Farsi, Dari and Arabic.

“Sir, please, can you help me?” a soft-spoken 29-year-old named Mohammad Yousof asks a foreign journalist in excellent English, his voice breaking. An Afghan economics professor, he is running, he says, from the Taliban. “I should not be in this camp. I don’t belong here. I was important. A VIP. I need help. Please. Can you please ask someone to let me cross?”

But in migrant-inundated Europe, the door to sanctuary is closing.

After a year and a half of massive human waves entering Europe from the war-torn Middle East and beyond, the nations lining a 1,600-kilometre road to hope — Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia — have stopped waving through the migrants aiming for the continent’s core. Some Syrians and Iraqis are still slowly crossing. But nearly everyone else — including thousands of Afghans and the many Syrians without rock-solid paperwork — is stuck in bankrupt Greece, a country that can barely afford to feed itself.

This week, European Union leaders reached a preliminary agreement with Turkey to halt irregular migration through the Balkans. Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia started demanding EU visas at their borders, effectively stopping migrants from moving north toward western Europe.