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22.09.2016

B92

Serbia is facing biggest problems since migrants started arriving in Europe, Serbian PM Aleksandar Vucic said in New York on Wednesday.

Speaking at the EastWest Institute think-tank, he stressed that the migrant crisis "has not yet began" and that he was "not optimistic about the EU finding a solution."

"We have been facing biggest problems since the beginning of the crisis, because we have 7,000 people in Serbia who are not leaving our country, who don't know what to do with themselves, while we don't know what to do with them - because they don't want to stay in our country," Vucic said. 

According to him, 83 percent of migrants coming to Serbia are from Afghanistan, "99 percent of them being men without families - wives, children, parents." 

The prime minister said that his interior minister "joked after he arrived in New York that Serbia had already built a kilometer of a wall," but reiterated that "our country does not want walls and fences because that will not protect our borders and our country - but we cannot become a parking lot for Afghanis." 

Serbia treats migrants "very well," he continued, showing solidarity and its humane face, and the country agreed earlier to a system of permanent refugee distribution quotas. 

"But the problem is that these people don't want to stay, and that nobody within Europe (EU) has agreed to the quota system," Vucic stressed. 

He said that a meeting should be held in Vienna on Saturday with the goal of "finding a solution to the migrant crisis," where German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EC President Jean Claude Juncker will take part, along with representatives of the Balkan migrant route countries. 

"They are coming to see whether or not we can find a solution, whether or not the EU can protect our borders, but I'm not at all optimistic, because I was present at several (previous) meetings in Vienna," he said. 

Vucic added that Merkel "invested her time and was completely dedicated to solving the migrant crisis, but that did not yield results due to the different points of view in EU member-countries." 

"We've lost time, and we have also been left without conclusions and a solution to the problem. There are differences between the Visegrad Group and Austria and Bulgaria on one, and Germany and the Benelux countries on the other side. Those are completely different approaches," Vucic concluded.

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