The Balkan nation of Macedonia was overwhelmed late this week with a surge of migrants fleeing over the country’s border with Greece. Most of these migrants are not Greek, but rather Syrian — refugees fleeing the five-year civil war that has engulfed that nation.
Macedonia is but a planned pit stop for most of the refugees, a gateway into the wealthy states of northern Europe, where these migrants hope to start a new life, the BBC reports.
The migrants’ goal is to first make safe passage into Hungary, an EU country, which would enable them to move freely to other EU states without having to show papers at the borders. This hypothetical has raised alarm throughout Europe. Macedonia is not a European Union member, and neither is Serbia, to the north, however, beyond that lies Hungary.
There is no firm count on the number of refugees that poured in, but the figure is considered to be well into the thousands. For the second consecutive day Saturday, police fired stun grenades into the crowds, and the foreign minister of the country commented that the situation had “dramatically deteriorated,” the BBC reports.
While the majority of these displaced peoples are Syrian, others are Iraqi or Afghani, fleeing middle eastern war zones further east.
The war in Syria, now in its fifth year, has been the single-largest driver of world displacement since early 2011. The numbers of people displaced hit 59.5 million worldwide last year, the United Nations reported.
The migrants that flooded into Macedonia were previously living in Greece. Despite its economic woes, Greece has become something of a sanctuary nation for refugees from Africa and Asia recently due to its geographic location.
Macedonia is the ancestral homeland of such figures of history as Alexander the Great, and became its own country in 1991, following the dissolution of Soviet-era Yugoslavia, which encompassed all the nations of the beautiful, but historically impoverished and war-torn Balkan peninsula.
