REFUGEES broke down the barbed wire fence on the Greek border with Macedonia yesterday, using a steel pole as a battering ram.
The protesters shouted: ‘Open the border!’ and threw stones at the Macedonian police. Macedonian police then charged the refugees, firing volleys of tear gas and causing chaos as men, women and children fled the scene, coughing and choking from the gas.
A number collapsed on the floor and needed urgent medical attention. Over 6,500 people are stuck on the Greek side of the border with Macedonia, camping in squalid conditions for more than a week, with little food or medical help.
Macedonia and some other Balkan countries have erected barbed wire fences surrounding the whole of Greece, turning it into one enormous concentration camp. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing imperialist war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are now trapped.
On Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Europe to help Greece in the current migrant crisis. In a TV interview, she said: ‘Do you seriously believe that all the euro states that last year fought all the way to keep Greece in the eurozone, and we were the strictest, can one year later allow Greece to, in a way, plunge into chaos?’
She defended her decision last year to allow migrants into Germany without a cap on numbers, saying she had no ‘Plan B’. Greece said that up to 70,000 refugees could end up stranded in Greece and that the Greek army will be deployed.
Yannis Mouzalas, Greece’s Migration Minister said: ‘In the next month between 50,000 to 70,000 will come. Wherever the army is needed it will play a role just as it does in western democracies.’
Clashes have also broken out in Calais in France where demolition teams have stormed the refugee camp there after a French judge ruled that the demolition could proceed.
Riot police fired tear gas at angry refugees while water cannon was used to extinguish a fire in one of the shacks. Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, asking an urgent question in Parliament on the refugee crisis in Calais, said yesterday: ‘Many in the camps are from Syria and Afghanistan and this includes over 400 children and teenagers with no one to look after them.
‘Like the twelve-year-old boy I met from Afghanistan with a huge scar across his face which happened when his home was attacked. Unaccompanied children are not allowed in the new container shelters. The Jules Ferry Centre for Women and Children is now full.
‘The Temps and Volunteer Support Network is about to be bulldozed and there is no safeguarding plans in place at all. Save the Children warn that things are extremely chaotic and this is making an appalling situation for children worse. This is dangerous.’
