The migrants coming into Europe through the Western Balkans in recent months have been resourceful and adaptable enough to slip around unfriendly police officers, raging rivers, hostile borders and razor-wire fences. But there is one thing they cannot evade, and that is the looming winter.
Perhaps as soon as late October and certainly by the end of November, the season will shift in the Balkans. Finger-numbing rain, a fall fixture, will descend into snow and freezing winds, complicating and even endangering the arduous journeys starting from Syria and other war-torn nations into the heart of Western Europe.
Gotta love that lede: casting the “migrant” lawbreakers as heroes for daring to break into an undefended home. Plus, of course, the Gray Lady’s keen awareness of the inexorability of the calendar.
As long as the migrants kept moving, the countries along the route were able to deal with the numbers passing through, refugee officials and aid workers said. And as long as there was a steady flow, the opportunity for tragedy from the impending cold was lessened.
“Able to deal”? Try reading this report about the effect of the “migrants” on the small Austrian town of Nickelsdort, on the Hungarian border. Or this story, about how even “tolerant” Swedes have started to torch “immigrant” centers.
But with fall winds carrying the first hints of frost, and the situation along the borders unresolved, the migrants, aid workers and government officials are anxiously looking ahead. If the numbers increase drastically or, worse, if there are more border closings, there would be an almost immediate backup that would quickly repopulate border camps within a week — some of them open-air, others consisting mostly of unheated tents.
“For now, it is O.K.,” said Uros Jovanovic, the manager of a new processing center being set up in a former psychiatric hospital near the Serbo-Croatian border. “But in 20 days or so, it is going to be very cold here.”
The looming threats have kept migrants on the move, hurrying from border to border to try to reach their destinations — most often Germany and Sweden.
Right. Which pretty much puts the lie to the notion that they are “refugees,” doesn’t it?
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