Greece have agreed to accept and accommodate 50,000 refugees in its territory. Along side this, yesterday at the refugee crisis summit in Brussels, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras also accepted the condition to begin a better border-crossing cooperation to be able to cope better with the refugees passing through the Balkans, Athens, Skopje and Tirana.
According to information from Greece, the European Commission has insisted on implementing confidence-building measures between Athens and Skopje immediately, specifically cooperation on the border.
The newspaper “Vima” reports that by the end of the month a meeting is scheduled between representatives of the Macedonian and the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs about confidence-building measures. There are concerns in Greece that European pressure will increase the implementation of the agreed measures, and prompt them to begin urgently, due to the refugee crisis.
Greek Prime Minister Tsipras already refused one of the European proposals. The Summit’s idea was that Frontex control the Macedonian-Greek, and Greek-Albanian border to have a better insight of the number of refugees crossing into Western Europe.
The final agreement was that the three countries will work on it intensively collaborate with each other on its borders and Frontex instead of having complete control, to assist in the registration of refugees crossing from Greece.
According to information, Tsipras rejected another idea which was to create an entire city for refugees in Greece, which, according to him, would be a huge burden and too much for Greece to handle. Instead, the state will accept 50,000 refugees and provide them refugee centres on the islands, in Athens and throughout Northern Greece.
