BERLIN — Three thousand migrants a day will pour into the Balkans trying to reach Western Europe in the next few months, the United Nations forecast Tuesday, a few hours after a suspected arson attack destroyed a sports hall in
BERLIN — Three thousand migrants a day will pour into the Balkans trying to reach Western Europe in the next few months, the United Nations forecast Tuesday, a few hours after a suspected arson attack destroyed a sports hall in Germany where some migrants were to be sheltered.
The German police said they believed the fire in Nauen, about 25 miles west of Berlin, had been deliberately set, the latest of more than 200 attacks directed against migrants in the country this year. It was spotted just after 2 a.m. and swiftly destroyed the sports hall, which had been prepared to serve as temporary housing for about 100 migrants, authorities said. No one was injured in the fire.
Officials throughout the country have scrambled to find or adapt decent places to shelter new arrivals in Germany, where the struggle to stop anti-immigrant violence has vied for headlines with a mass migration not seen in Europe since the wars that ripped apart Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The U.N. refugee agency said it expected about 3,000 people to cross into Macedonia every day from Greece, the first European Union nation they reach in their flight from conflict and deprivation in the Middle East and beyond.
“We do not see any end to the influx of people in coming months,” Melissa Fleming, chief spokeswoman for the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said Tuesday in Geneva. She cited continued violence in Syria and Iraq and deteriorating conditions for refugees in overcrowded camps and homes in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
Fleming said that Germany and Sweden had taken in 43 percent of the asylum seekers in the 28-nation European Union, and she suggested that the burden should be divided more evenly.
“We honestly believe if correct measures are taken this is something that Europe can handle,” Fleming said, according to Reuters. “It’s a bigger number than last year, yes. But it’s not going to turn Europe upside down.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who on Monday denounced neo-Nazi riots near Dresden late last week as “repugnant,” said she would visit Heidenau, the site of those disturbances, on Wednesday, a day before she attends a conference in Vienna to discuss stanching the flow of arrivals from the Balkans.
Merkel’s visit to Heidenau will be her first to a refugee facility since the crisis intensified in recent weeks, when many migrants started moving north from Turkey, through Greece and the Balkans, to Hungary and beyond.
On Tuesday, a day after she joined France in urging more European action, Merkel reiterated that Germany and a handful of other countries needed help in tackling the problem.
“Three or four out of 28 cannot bear the whole burden,” the chancellor told a crowd in Duisburg, a city in the German state with the most refugees, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Germany, Sweden, Austria and France have led the way in sheltering new arrivals, according to European officials.
The vice chancellor of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democrats and minister for the country’s booming economy, visited Heidenau on Monday, diverting from a planned tour of “Silicon Saxony,” the technology startup scene around Dresden.
An amateur video posted on the website of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel on Tuesday showed battles between right-wing protesters, some of them masked, and the police in Heidenau. The clashes over the weekend left at least 31 wounded.
German news media have reported that hundreds of people turned out for a demonstration Friday evening organized by the far right National Democratic Party in Heidenau, which like Nauen has a population of about 16,000. Some of those demonstrators then battled the police.
On Saturday evening, anti-immigrant protesters and a group welcoming the new arrivals were both on the streets of Heidenau as police officers escorted four busloads of migrants to the converted building where they are now housed. Bottles and stones were thrown at the buses and at the police.
“It is repugnant how right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis are trying to spread their dumb message of hate around a facility for refugees,” Merkel said Monday. She particularly condemned those who just watched, some of whom even took children along.
German leaders have so far failed to halt the attacks on arriving foreigners.
After returning from vacation and trying to settle the financial crisis over Greece, Merkel predicted that the new wave of migration would command the attention of European leaders for even longer than the past months of negotiations over a new bailout for the government in Athens.
Since then, barely a day has passed without fresh accounts of migrants moving north, or of facilities for them coming under attack. A refugee shelter burned Sunday night in the western German state of Baden-Wurttemberg.
So far, no injuries have been reported in the attacks, which totaled 202 in the first six months of this year, compared with 198 in all of 2014.
