The latest from the migrant crisis in Croatia.
From midnight to 9 pm on Sunday, 4,273 migrants entered Croatia. However, the temporary refugee centre in Slavonski Brod is currently empty. Since the beginning of the migration crisis, 473,736 migrants and refugees have passed through Croatia. Due to better weather conditions in the following days, it is expected that the influx of refugees from Serbia will continue, reports Vecernji List on December 7, 2015.
More than 4,600 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean Sea in front of the Libyan coast between Thursday and Saturday, announced the operational centre of the Italian Coast Guard in Rome. Just on Saturday, in nine separate operations 1,123 immigrants in nine boats were rescued. In the last few days, calmer seas have prompted migrants to leave Libya for the nearby Italian islands.
The rescue operations involved several coast guard vessels of the Italian navy and the German military vessel Berlin. On Saturday, an Italian military ship unloaded 301 migrants in the Sicilian port of Catania. Additional 800 migrants arrived on Sunday in the port of Reggio Calabria.
In Germany, tensions between coalition partners Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) about the refugee crisis continue to grow. CSU President Horst Seehofer announced over the weekend that national measures to reduce the number of refugees will be adopted if measures at the European level do not demonstrate their effectiveness by the end of the year. “I support Chancellor Angela Merkel’s efforts to secure the external borders of the European Union, distribution of refugees and combat the causes which make people leave their homes. But, if this whole response does not happen on time or in the way that we expect, then we must see to it that an order is re-established in Germany and Europe”, Seehofer said in his address to the CDU congress.
One of the measures would be a signal which would make it clear that the upper limit of the number of refugees in Germany has been reached. “No country in the world is able to accommodate an unlimited number of refugees”, Seehofer said.
In her regular weekly message, Angela Merkel spoke about the refugee crisis. “We hope that together we will make things better”, the Chancellor said. Due to the increasing resistance even in her own party against her refugee policy, Angela Merkel intends to put her refugee policy to a vote at the next weekends’ CDU party convention.
All three parties of the ruling coalition in Germany, CDU, CSU and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), are in agreement over the need to regulate the flow of refugees, but are not in agreement about the mechanisms which would lead to that goal. Although the pace of the influx of refugees in recent weeks has declined, it is still expected that by the end of the year Germany could receive over a million refugees.
