IDOMENI, Greece — There has been a rough triage taking place the last few weeks along the barbed-wire and chain-link fence separating Greece from Macedonia.
“Only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans!” a Greek police officer shouted recently, looking over the bedraggled families coming forward at this transit camp, one of the main gateways for people fleeing conflict, persecution and poverty in search of better lives in Europe.
The rest — the Iranians, Yemenis, Ugandans, Moroccans, Algerians, Pakistanis, Congolese, Somalis and more — are left to look on with anger and despair.
The border crossing here ran smoothly for months, an efficient funnel for tens of thousands of people who had made it across the Aegean and the Mediterranean and were heading toward Germany and beyond. In orderly groups of 50, they were shepherded into Macedonia and onto trains heading north.
But the door to Europe, seemingly flung open this summer to all, has quietly shut for many of them, without much fanfare or explanation and over the objections of Greece. The idea is to slow the flow of people — nearly a million have reached Germany this year — and filter out some of those who would not qualify for refugee status on the basis of fleeing a war.
Since the new policy took effect last month, thousands of migrants, unable to move forward and unwilling to go back, have been living in the fields around here, making do in ragged pup tents, their laundry drying nearby. They have huddled by campfires to stay warm, eagerly telling anyone who will listen that they, too, should be allowed to go north.
After clashes between the police and the migrants, and amid concern that the encampment was blocking rail traffic across the border, the Greek authorities sent forces in on Wednesday to clear it out. They demanded that journalists and aid workers leave the scene, and they began herding hundreds of migrants onto buses that would take them to Athens, where they are to be housed while the government figures out what to do with them. A news release issued by the Greek police on Wednesday afternoon said that about 2,300 migrants had been transferred to temporary accommodations in Athens. Most are from Pakistan, Somalia, Morocco, Algeria and Bangladesh, the statement said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/world/europe/greece-macedonia-migrants-refugees.html?ref=world