A volunteer carries a young boy after a boat with refugees and migrants sank while crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos on Wednesday. The Greek Coast Guard said it rescued 242 migrants off the eastern island of Lesbos on Wednesday after the wooden boat they traveled in capsized, leaving at least seven dead. — AP
A volunteer carries a young boy after a boat with refugees and migrants sank while crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos on Wednesday. The Greek Coast Guard said it rescued 242 migrants off the eastern island of Lesbos on Wednesday after the wooden boat they traveled in capsized, leaving at least seven dead. — AP
The European Union risks disintegrating if it fails to respond to its worst migration crisis since World War II collectively, its top foreign policy chief warned in an Italian daily on Thursday.
Federica Mogherini said that if the EU merely relied on national responses to a European issue, “the crisis will get worse, with chain reactions from public opinion and national governments”.
To prevent this, she told the Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper, the bloc needed to be equipped with “instruments up to the challenge” without which, she warned, “there is the risk of disintegration”.
The comments came a day after Austria announced plans to build a fence at a major border crossing with fellow EU state Slovenia to “control” the migrant influx.
The move would be a blow to the bloc’s cherished passport-free Schengen zone.
After hastily arranged talks between European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, the two issued a statement stating that “fences have no place in Europe”.
Meanwhile, at least seven children died when boats carrying migrants sank off Greece on Wednesday, as rescue workers battled to save more youngsters on the seashore.
Three adults also died as four vessels went down on the dangerous sea-crossing from Turkey and more than 200 people, many suffering hypothermia, were rescued from one sinking off the north coast of the Greek island of Lesbos.
Images from Lesbos, a major entry point for the huge flow of migrants trying to get to Europe, showed doctors attempting to revive unconscious children on the island’s shoreline.
Later in the evening, a drowned woman and the bodies of two children were found floating off the Greek island of Agathonisi, just a few kilometres from the Turkish coast.
German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday told Athens that Berlin would support it in dealing with the “burden of the influx” of thousands of migrants landing on Greek shores every day.
“At a moment when Greece is trying to recover economically, this influx is an extraordinary burden,” Mr Steinmeier told the Greek daily Ta Nea, while on a visit to Athens.
“We will support Greece as it faces up to this big challenge,” he said.
