Macedonia To Build Border Fence To Stop Flow Of Refugees

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Macedonia’s Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki has said that his country might follow Hungary’s example and build a border fence to stem the influx of refugees trekking through the Balkans to reach Western Europe. Aljazeera was there:

The news comes as foreign ministers from four Central European nations are meeting in Prague on Friday, amid a growing rift over the refugee crisis. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia reject quotas proposed by the EU Commission, which proposed 120,000 additional asylum seekers per year to be shared out between 28 member states.

“We too will need some kind of physical defence to reduce illegal border crossing… Either soldiers or a fence or a combination of the two,” Poposki was quoted as saying in an interview with Hungarian business weekly Figyelo on Thursday. He said his country was currently forced to let the 3,000 to 4,000 migrants who arrive in his country on a daily basis continue their journey to Serbia and Hungary unimpeded.

“There is no European consensus on how we can handle this question,” he said. As of 0600 GMT on Friday, an estimated 7,600 refugees had already crossed into Macedonia from Greece in a 24-hour period, according to the UN refugee agency.