Croatia and Serbia have banned each other's vehicles from entering their territory and traded sharp accusations over their handling of Europe's migration crisis, which is causing havoc as thousands move through the Balkans each day.
Serbia banned Croatian goods and cargo vehicles from entering the country yesterday, and Croatia responded by barring all Serbian-registered vehicles from crossing into its territory.
Officials in Serbia also angrily accused its neighbour of “racism”, amid reports that Serb citizens had been barred from travelling into Croatia, in incidents that Zagreb said were caused by a computer problem.
Croatia riled Serbia last week by closing seven of eight border crossings between the ex-Yugoslav states to road traffic, in response to Serbia allowing thousands of migrants to cross their frontier unchecked each day.
Since Hungary completed a 175km 4m-high fence 10 days ago, along its border with Serbia, scores of buses and cars bringing migrants north through Serbia each day now drop them off at the Croatian border.
Stuck near frontier
While Serbia moves migrants through its territory as quickly as possible – and its taxi and bus firms make good money charging them for the journey – Croatia is under pressure to slow the onward flow towards western Europe.
A new state-run camp at Opatovac near Croatia’s border with Serbia is working reasonably smoothly, although several hundred migrants were stuck near the frontier last night.
From Opatovac, Croatia provides fleets of buses to take the migrants to its northern border with Hungary, where more buses wait to transport them directly to the Austrian frontier.
Croatia’s prime minister Zoran Milanovic – whose Social Democrats are under pressure from the right-wing opposition ahead of forthcoming elections – said he would not allow Serbia “to make fools of us”, after a record 10,046 migrants were transported through the country to Hungary on Wednesday.
“Citizens of Serbia, all your prime minister needs to do is to stop such an intense flow of migrants.
“We can function with 4,000 to 5,000 people a day. But more than that will not work, and I will not allow it,” Mr Milanovic said.
He urged Serbia to “set up camps, like Croatia did, or send some of those people to the north, to the border with Hungary: Belgrade and Budapest are playing in tandem, and I think they are completely alone in that [in Europe],” he added.
’Insane measures’
Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, accused Croatia of launching “economic aggression” against his country.
“Serbia will not respond to these insane measures. We thought the time when buses were boarded and when it was said, ‘you, you and you cannot continue’ was long past,” he added, in reference to reports of Serbs being barred from entering Croatia.
The foreign ministry in Belgrade summoned Zagreb’s ambassador to lodge a protest, and issued a statement comparing Croatia’s actions to “measures taken in the past at the time of the fascist regime” that ran the country during the second World War.
Serbia’s social affairs minister Aleksandar Vulin, who claims like other officials that Belgrade cannot do anything to stop the migrants or make Hungary accept them, accused Croatia of racism: “There is no other word to describe it,” he said.
With relations between the ex-Yugoslav states plunging towards their lowest ebb since the 1991-5 war, Hungary looks set to increase the pressure by completing its fence along the Croatian border in the coming days.
Prime minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of state, Janos Lazar, said yesterday however that Hungary may allow migrants to transit the country from Croatia “if Austria and Germany want this and take responsibility for this along with other EU members”.
