Balkan land routes to north Europe close

Road and rail routes to northern Europe from the Balkans are closing to migrants after a string of countries closed their borders to a relentless human wave.

The crisis, challenging the EU's humanitarian reputation and its vaunted policy of border mobility, has triggered an emergency summit of the 28-nation bloc on Wednesday.

Desperate to reach Germany and Sweden, seen as welcoming havens of peace and prosperity, thousands of refugees have travelled by car, bus and train, reaching the southern EU rim in Serbia.

But Hungary sealed off its border with Serbia on Tuesday, displacing the flow to Croatia, a fellow EU member.

After initially vowing to let the refugees through, Croatia on Thursday said it was overwhelmed by the influx, and closed seven of its eight crossing points with Serbia.

"Up to now we have registered 13,000 migrants on Croatian territory," Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told N1 television station on Friday.

"This figure means that our capacities to take in more are saturated."

Migrants tried to continue their northward trek by train through Croatia's neighbour, EU member Slovenia, which then announced it was suspending all Croatian rail links until late Friday.

Scenes of chaos and despair at the Croatian-Serbian border brought home the human scale of the problem.

Thousands were camped in the fields around the rural town of Tovarnik on Friday, whose little train station has become the latest flashpoint in a months-long drama.

A train there had been waiting to leave since 4am local time, Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told an AFP reporter.

"It's pretty dramatic. People are getting very angry. If the train doesn't leave they're going to start fighting," he warned.

"It's complete chaos. There are still thousands waiting after spending a rough night with little food or shelter. This is a one-street town which is completely overwhelmed."

Bouckaert added: "If people avoid the official crossing, they could end up in landmine fields."

Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the UN refugees agency UNHCR, said more people were arriving there from Serbia.

"More and more people are coming from Serbia. I've just seen 60 Syrians that just arrived and one young man said there were 1000 more behind them."

Hungary came under renewed criticism on Thursday, a day after riot police on its Serbian border fired tear gas and water cannon at migrants enraged at being blocked from entering the country.

UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said Hungarian government policy was apparently being guided by "xenophobic and anti-Muslim views", while Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said: "This torture and non-European behaviour must stop."

Unabashed, Hungary's hardline conservative premier, Viktor Orban, announced on Friday that hundreds of troops had begun laying a razor-wire barrier along the country's border with Croatia.

The barrier will add to a fence that Hungary has set down alongside its border with Serbia.

Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them Syrians fleeing war, have sought refuge in the EU this year.

The influx has dug a deep rift between western and eastern EU members, with Orban leading the hardline group.

EU nations are battling over how, or whether, to share out the refugee flow.

Germany on Friday warned that it could invoke EU's majority voting system to force reluctant states to accept quotas of migrants.

Another worry is that the proliferation of frontier controls within the EU could wreck the Schengen accord, which allows borderless travel between member states.

And under a draft law seen by AFP, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is seeking to toughen asylum laws by sending migrants back to the first EU country they reached and by reducing benefits.

If passed, the law would represent a major reversal on Germany's easing of asylum laws for Syrians, a factor contributing to the influx that has left Germany bracing for up to a million asylum seekers this year.

EU President Donald Tusk has called for an emergency summit next Wednesday.