IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Refugees stuck at the closed border crossing between Greece and Macedonia have little hope that a summit of EU leaders on the migrant crisis this week will lead to any improvement in their desperate plight.

European Union leaders will hold talks in Brussels on Thursday with Turkey’s prime minister to try to hammer out a deal to end the continent’s worst migrant crisis since World War Two.

But the deal will entail returning the migrants holed up in Greece to Turkey, including more than 10,000 people living in the tent city near Idomeni on the Macedonian border who want only to be allowed to continue their trek northwards to Germany and other wealthier west European countries.

“Nothing will change (due to the summit),” said Hussam Jackl, a 25-year-old Syrian law student who fled to Lebanon two years ago and, after working there illegally as a photographer, sold his equipment to pay a smuggler to bring him to Europe.

He has spent more than two weeks in rain-soaked Idomeni, where migrants’ shoes have taken on the same muddy brown hue of the fields and children stand knee-deep in dirt.

“If the borders remain closed I’m thinking of killing myself,” said Jackl. “I’m thinking seriously of killing myself if there is no solution.”

He held up a piece of cardboard in protest: “Dear Sun, please shine on us, it’s very cold here. They are not going to let us in but we have nowhere to go back.”

“NO OTHER CHOICE”

Most of the migrants have fled conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They are unable to continue their journey because Macedonia and other countries along the so-called Balkan route have shut their borders to the migrants.

“We have nothing – no money, no clean clothes, no clothes to face the bad weather,” said Mazari, 20, who traveled from Afghanistan with her three children. One of the children drowned as they crossed from Turkey to Greece in an inflatable boat.

“I’ll stay here as long as it takes to cross (into Macedonia),” she sobbed. “I have no other choice.”

Humanitarian organizations on the ground say several hundred people have moved to two petrol stations near the camp because of the bad weather, while others have returned to Athens.

Sanitary conditions have deteriorated and concern about the spread of infection has risen.

Waiting in line for clothes and shoes for his nephew, 18-year-old Ismail Sayed, who left Afghanistan in the hope of reaching Germany to study civil engineering, said all he could do was wait.

“I don’t have anything back in Afghanistan. I sold everything,” he said. “We want only one thing from European leaders: to open the borders. We want a proper future.”

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Gareth Jones)

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – It took Hassan Omar four long hours to cross into Macedonia, his wheelchair pushed by strangers across the muddy paths of Greece’s border – but a day later he found himself back at the squalid migrant camp he had left.

Like scores of people, many from war zones in Syria and Iraq, who streamed out of the camp near the Greek town of Idomeni on Monday and crossed into Macedonia, he was rounded up and sent back.

“We were surprised to see the army there,” said Omar, who fled fighting in Iraq, recounting how one man carried him for hours during their 8 km (5-mile) trek, up mountains and through valleys.

“They were very harsh with us. It felt like a death machine, not humans dealing with us,” he said.

An estimated 1,500 people left the camp on Monday trying to find a way past the razor-wire fence erected by Macedonia, on a route they hoped would take them to Germany and other wealthy European Union countries.

Most were picked up by Macedonian security forces, put into trucks and driven back over the border late on Monday or overnight, a Macedonian police official said.

The Macedonian action was part of a drive by Western Balkans states to shut down a migration route from Greece to Germany used by nearly a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Asia over the last year in Europe’s biggest refugee influx since World War Two.

Greek authorities said they could not confirm the return as there had been no official contact from the Macedonian side, but those who arrived back at the camp recounted their experiences on Tuesday.

One man from the northern Syrian province of Raqqa, who gave his name as Abdo, said Macedonian authorities divided the detainees into groups of 25 to 50 people, put them in cars and dropped them off at the border.

“They told us to run, so we started to run,” he said.

CHILDREN

Authorities estimate at least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in the Idomeni camp, where sanitary conditions have deteriorated after days of heavy rain. Concern about the spread of infection grew after one person was diagnosed with Hepatitis A.

It was unclear why so many people made for the border on Monday, but Greek officials say leaflets that circulated at the Idomeni camp before the march showed it was a planned action.

Sixty-year-old Syrian Mohammad Kattan, who hoped to be reunited with his family in Serbia, said it had taken him six hours to trudge to the border.

“At my age it was very difficult,” he said, bundled up in a thick blanket. “My hope was to get to Macedonia … so that I could continue on to another country.”

Downcast and exhausted, he returned along with a second group of migrants, numbering about 600, who were prevented from even crossing the border by Macedonian security forces.

They waded back knee-deep through the icy river near the border on Tuesday, some barefoot, others weighed down by children and their worldly belongings on their shoulders.

On the riverbank, men and women stood around a fire drying their feet and clothes. One woman sobbed, her face framed by a pink headscarf. Others dragged their belongings across the dirt, and pulled along their children in fruit baskets.

A Syrian woman who gave her name as Nasreem described how she sheltered her children overnight with plastic bags and said she believed they would finally be “done with all the rain and the cold” when they arrived at the border.

“But they didn’t let us through.”

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Pravin Char)

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Hundreds of dejected migrants returned to a transit camp in northern Greece on Tuesday after Macedonian authorities blocked their attempt to cross the border or drove those who did get across back to Greece.

Around 2,000 migrants marched out of the Idomeni camp on Monday, hiking into the mountains and fording a river in what Greek authorities said was a well-planned attempt to find a way around a barbed wire fence built by Macedonia to keep them out.

Three migrants drowned on Monday trying to cross a river into Macedonia, one stage on a route that the migrants hoped would take them to Germany and other wealthy European Union countries.

Macedonia loaded about 1,500 migrants and refugees who had succeeded in crossing the border onto trucks and drove them back to Greece, Macedonian police said. Reporters and aid officials said the migrants were left at the Greek border.

Hundreds more migrants were prevented from crossing the border on Monday. Many of them streamed back to Idomeni on Tuesday after spending the night in the mountains.

Migrants carried children across a fast-flowing river before trudging back along muddy paths. One small child was dragged along on a blue plastic container attached to a rope.

“It’s a long way from the camp to the mountains, it took me six hours of walking. At my age it was very difficult,” said one of those returning, 60-year-old Mohammad Kattan.

Back in Idomeni, the camp was crowded, muddy and wet. People started fires to dry their clothes and to warm up. Several hundred migrants found shelter in a deserted farm in the area.

Greek officials said they could not confirm that Macedonia had sent back the migrants.

“No one has been returned from our official border crossings, and no request has been submitted by Skopje (the Macedonian capital),” said George Kyritsis, a spokesman for Greece’s migration coordination center:

Ties between the two neighbors are fraught because of Greece’s long-standing refusal to recognize Macedonia’s name, which is the same as that of a northern Greek province.

At least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in the Idomeni camp, their path to the EU blocked after Balkan nations closed their borders.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Tuesday there was “no chance” that borders which had been shut down throughout the Balkans would be re-opened. He urged refugees to move to reception centers set up by the state.

European Union leaders, trying to stem a flow of migrants and refugees fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, are due to hold a new summit with Turkey this week to seal an agreement intended to halt the exodus.

Jan van’t Land, an official with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres at Idomeni, said around 400 migrants had returned to the camp.

“There are still many hundreds of people on both the Greek and the Macedonian side of the border,” he told Reuters.

EU Migration Commission Dimitris Avramopoulos, on a visit to Idomeni, urged EU countries to put into action immediately a long-stalled plan to re-house asylum seekers from Greece elsewhere in the bloc.

“Our aim is within the next two weeks to reach the level of 6,000 to be relocated every week,” he told reporters. “All our values are in danger today and you can see it here in Idomeni. I believe that building fences, deploying barbed wire, is not a solution.”

Conditions at the Idomeni camp have deteriorated after days of heavy rain. Concern about the spread of infection grew after one person was diagnosed with Hepatitis A.

(Additional reporting by Kole Casule in Skopje, Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade, Renee Maltezou and Karolina Tagaris in Athens, writing by Adrian Croft, editing by Larry King)

GENEVA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United Nations and human rights groups warned on Tuesday that a tentative European Union deal to send back all irregular migrants to Turkey in exchange for political and financial rewards could be illegal.

“I am deeply concerned about any arrangement that would involve the blanket return of anyone from one country to another without spelling out the refugee protection safeguards under international law,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

He was speaking hours after the 28 EU leaders sketched an accord with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Brussels that would grant Ankara more money to keep refugees in Turkey, faster visa-free travel for Turks and a speeding up of Ankara’s long-stalled membership talks.

Rights group Amnesty International called the proposed mass return of migrants a “death blow to the right to seek asylum”. Relief charity Doctors without Borders said it was cynical and inhumane.

But the executive European Commission insisted the deal to put an end to a mass influx of more than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, due to be finalised next week, was fully legal.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who pushed for the accord to assuage anxious voters before regional elections on Sunday, said things were finally moving in the right direction after nearly a million Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others flooded into Germany alone last year. She denied accusations that Turkey was using refugees to blackmail Europe.

The 28 EU leaders were taken by surprise by the bold, last minute Turkish initiative, which went beyond previous plans for more limited cooperation. Unable to sign up to firm commitments immediately, they agreed to wrap up a deal at their next summit on March 17-18 but several points remain sensitive.

Migrants marooned in squalor on Greece’s frontier with Macedonia by the closure of borders further north vowed to keep trying to cross Europe to wealthy Germany, while Syrian refugees in Turkey said they too would not be deterred by the lockdown.

“We will stay here even if we all die,” said Kadriya Jasem, a 25-year-old from Aleppo in Syria, one of 13,000 people living in a makeshift camp in Idomeni on the Greek side of the border with Macedonia.

ONE-FOR-ONE

Under the tentative deal, the EU would admit one refugee directly from Turkey for each Syrian it took back from the Greek Aegean islands, and those who attempted the perilous sea route would be returned and go to the back of the queue.

The aim is to persuade Syrians and others that they have better prospects if they stay in Turkey, with increased EU funding for housing, schools and subsistence.

EU officials questioned how the one-for-one scheme would work in practice, with several EU countries objecting to any quota system for resettling refugees.

It might also be overwhelmed if the volume of migrants crossing the Aegean remains high despite increased NATO-backed sea patrols by Greece and Turkey.

Brussels sought to dismiss concerns over the legality of the proposed re-admission arrangements.

“You can be sure that the agreement that will come at the end of it will comply with both European and international law,” Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein told a news briefing.

Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker cited EU asylum procedure rules to argue that member states were entitled to refuse to consider a claim from a person who arrives from a safe third country.

Some Commission officials have private misgivings both about Turkey’s “safe” status, given its human rights record, and the compatibility of mass returns with asylum seekers’ right to an individual assessment of their claim, an EU source said.

It was unclear whether an eventual deal could be challenged in European or international courts. Any case might take years to reach a ruling, with EU doors closed in the meantime.

Migration experts said refugees would likely try other routes if Turkey’s closure worked. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have begun tightening identity controls and erecting fences on their eastern borders, fearing the Baltic region will become a new entry point for migrants.

“MISERABLE”

EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, speaking in the European Parliament, welcomed the preliminary deal and said: “We need now to ensure a quick implementation of the voluntary humanitarian scheme from Turkey and to implement projects that will further improve the situation of the Syrians in Turkey.”

But many lawmakers criticized the strategy to regain control of the influx, saying the EU must ensure people needing international protection are able to claim asylum.

“In the name of ‘realpolitik’, member states seemed ready to trample on their principles to conclude a shameful bargain with Turkey,” the French Socialist group said.

Critics denounced a cascade of border closures down the main Western Balkan migration route that has left 33,000 people stranded in Greece, causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Avramopolus responded on Twitter: “It is our responsibility to create more legal pathways for people in need of protection to come to Europe legally and safely.

“Let me assure you that @EU_Commission does not forget and does not forsake its humanitarian duties.”

While Poland and others fretted about where the EU would find the money to double the existing 3 billion euros earmarked for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Cyprus dug in its heels on advancing Turkey’s EU accession process.

Nicosia has blocked the opening of five so-called negotiation chapters – vetting Turkish compliance with EU rules – to demand recognition by Ankara and trade access. It says it will not lift objections until Turkey opens its ports and airports to Cypriot-registered traffic.

Turkey has no diplomatic ties with Cyprus, an ethnically divided island which joined the EU split in 2004 and which is represented by the Greek Cypriot government. Ankara maintains ties with a breakaway Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus.

The two Cypriot communities are negotiating a peace deal to overcome 42 years of division, but until there is movement, Nicosia looks set to keep blocking Ankara’s EU progress.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, Lefteris Papadimas in Idomeni, Greece, and Michele Kambas in Nicosia; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Giles Elgood)

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – In muddy fields straddling the border with Macedonia, a transit camp hosting up to 12,000 homeless migrants in filthy conditions is the most dramatic sign of a new crisis tearing at Greece’s frayed ties with Europe and threatening its stability.

For the last year, Greece has largely waved through nearly a million migrants who crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey on their way to wealthier northern Europe.

Now, on top of a searing economic crisis that took it close to ejection from the euro zone a year ago, the European Union’s most enfeebled state is suddenly being turned into what Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras calls a “warehouse of souls”.

At least 30,000 people fleeing conflict or poverty in the Middle East and beyond are bottled up in Greece after Western Balkan states effectively closed their borders. Up to 3,000 more are crossing the Aegean every day despite rough winter seas.

“This is an explosive mix which could blow up at any time. You cannot, however, know when,” said Costas Panagopoulos, head of ALCO opinion pollsters.

Men, women and children from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq are packed like sardines in a disused former airport terminal in Athens, crammed into an indoor stadium or sleeping rough in a central square, where two tried to hang themselves last week.

The influx is severely straining the resources of a country barely able to look after its own people after a six-year recession – the worst since World War Two – that has shrunk the economy by a quarter and driven unemployment above 25 percent.

After years of austerity imposed by international lenders, who are now demanding deeper cuts in old-age pensions, ordinary Greeks say they feel abandoned by the European Union.

A staggering 92 percent of respondents in a Public Issue poll published by To Vima newspaper last Sunday said they felt the EU had left Greece to fend for itself.

The poll was taken before the European Commission announced 300 million euros in emergency aid this year to support relief organizations providing food, shelter and care for the migrants. But such promises do little to soften public anger.

“I want to spit at them,” said 40-year-old Maria Constantinidou, who is unemployed. “Those European leaders .. should each take 10 migrants home, feed them, look after them and then see how difficult things are.”

While the EU and Turkey will struggle to find a consensus at an emergency summit on Monday on how to stem the influx of migrants, Greece looks set to become Europe’s waiting room for months to come.

At Idomeni, a small border town in northern Greece, men from Syria held screaming babies close to a razor wire fence on Thursday, imploring Macedonian police they be allowed to cross.

Greece says it is a victim of geography; some EU partners say Greek fecklessness forced them to reimpose border controls, putting the future of a border-free Europe at stake.

“Its like watching a slow moving train wreck,” said Theodore Couloumbis, a veteran professor of international relations who is an expert on the Balkans and Greek foreign policy.

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister who took Greece to the brink of a euro zone exit last year by battling creditors over bailout terms, says the crisis was symptomatic of a moral, political and economic trauma in the EU.

“Greece has been, as it always is, the weakest link in the organism and shows the biggest symptoms of disease,” he told Reuters.

CRISIS IN A CRISIS

The initial response from the public has been an outpouring of generosity towards stranded migrants, although a neo-fascist party, Golden Dawn, which advocates forcing immigrants out of Greece, has captured 7 percent of the vote in recent elections.

The migrant crisis threatens a nascent economic turnaround forecast in Greece from the second half of 2016, after six years of deep recession. Business leaders and the central bank have warned that the uncertainty could be a drag on the economy.

The main uncertainty factor is stalled negotiations between Athens and its creditors – the euro zone, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

A first review of economic reforms under the bailout plan agreed last August, which Greece wants concluded fast to move on to debt relief talks, has been held up by disagreement among the lenders over how much more Athens needs to save in public spending, notably on pensions.

Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos insisted on Thursday that cuts in basic pensions were a “red line” for the government.

Publicly at least, nobody is making linkages between the refugee crisis and the bailout review or discussing trade-offs between the two, which are being handled separately.

“It is certainly not my intention to say, ‘look, I have a refugee crisis and that gives me leeway to operate beyond the framework of the (bailout) agreement’,” Tsipras said in a television interview this week. “The agreement will be kept.”

One of the most hawkish creditors, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told Reuters that while the EU should give Greece humanitarian aid, the bailout program must be kept separate.

Greece is funded till July when it faces bond repayments to the ECB, so there is no immediate financial pressure.

But a worsening migrant flow could further complicate Tsipras’ attempts to sell painful bailout reforms to a public which already feels maltreated by its EU partners.

And some policymakers in Brussels, Paris and even Berlin acknowledge that having averted a Greek exit from the euro last year, this would be the worst time for another Greek financial meltdown or political upheaval.

Greeks don’t need much prompting to take to the streets. Mass protests are a regular feature in a volatile country of 11 million where pensions have been cut 11 times since 2010.

Pollster Panagopoulos said he doubted the dual crisis would topple the government, but Tsipras might call another election — after two general elections and a referendum last year — if he felt in a deadlock.

CRISIS HOVERS OVER BREXIT

In mid-February, Greece briefly threatened not to sign off on final agreements at an EU summit on amending Britain’s membership terms unless Athens won assurances that EU states would not shut their borders. They did so anyway.

Now Tsipras has hinted at using the veto threat again to ensure his country does not become a holding pen for migrants.

“What I am seeking is the best possible outcome for Greece. Even if it means, to achieve that, using all tools provided for under (EU) conventions,” the leftist prime minister said in a television interview this week when asked if he could veto a deal between the EU and Turkey at a summit next week.

How Greece and the migrant crisis are handled may resonate at the other end of the continent in Britain, where voters will decide in a June 23 referendum whether to stay in the bloc.

James Ker-Lindsay, a Balkans expert at the London School of Economics, said leftist academics in Britain – a small but influential group typically supportive of the EU – were so dismayed by Brussels’ treatment of Greece in 2015 that it would not take much to alienate them completely.

“If it looks like a double dose harsh treatment, the euroscepticism which is coming in very strong from right-wing parties across the EU could start being repeated on the left, but for a very different reason,” Ker-Lindsay said.

(Writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Paul Taylor and Mark John)

IDOMENI/ATHENS (Reuters) – Macedonian police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of migrants who stormed the border from Greece on Monday as a deeply divided Europe traded barbs over the biggest humanitarian crisis in decades.

As frustrations boiled over at restrictions imposed on people moving through the Balkans, migrants trapped on the Greece-Macedonia border tore down a metal gate in the barbed wire fence.

A Reuters witness said Macedonian police fired several rounds of teargas into the crowd and onto a railway line where other migrants sat refusing to move, demanding to cross into the country.

Greece raced to set up temporary accommodation for a build-up of thousands of migrants stranded in the country after Austria and countries along the Balkans migration route imposed restrictions on their borders, limiting the number of migrants able to cross.

Many of the migrants, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa, hope to reach Germany, which last year took in 1.1 million asylum seekers.

There were an estimated 22,000 migrants and refugees trapped in Greece on Monday, some sleeping rough in central Athens, some in an abandoned airport and at the 2004 Olympic Games venues.

Greece’s migration minister said without any outlet, that figure could rise as high as 70,000 in coming days.

More than 1 million migrants passed through the country last year, prompting criticism from other European nations that Athens was simply waving them through.

“These people do not want to stay here,” said Thodoris Dritsas, Greece’s shipping minister. “Even if we had a system in place for them to stay here permanently it wouldn’t work.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing the biggest test of her decade in power, on Sunday defended the country’s open-door policy for migrants, rejecting any limit on the number of refugees it allowed in despite divisions within the government over the issue.

“It is my damn duty to do everything I can so that Europe finds a collective way,” she told state broadcaster ARD.

That way was lacking on Monday, however, a week before European Union leaders meet with officials from Turkey to discuss how it can help stem the flow of migrants from its shores.

In an increasingly shrill debate, Austria’s defense minister suggested Merkel take in all those who were stranded in Greece.

“The German chancellor … said that formally there is no upper limit in Germany. Then, I would invite her to take the people, who arrive in Greece now and whom she wants to take care of, directly to Germany,” Hans Peter Doskozil told Austria’s Oe1 radio.

TENT COMMUNITY

Thousands of people have been gathering at Idomeni, the small frontier community on Greece’s border with Macedonia, for days. Hundreds of tents were pitched in soggy fields on Monday and there were reports that fights had broken out among families over tents, which were in short supply.

Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki said that there was a problem with “shifting in responsibility” and shifting the problem to the next border.

“Frustration has accumulated because for several days some of these people have been blocked at the Greek border,” he told Reuters.

Nearly 100 foreign police officers – from countries including Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria – were deployed in Macedonia, he said, adding the figure could go up to 350.

In a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, he said that “encouraging” cooperation had been established with Greece on the issue but that it may not be enough.

On Monday, a crush developed along the frontier after rumors spread that Macedonian authorities had opened the border. Crowds gathered at the razor wire fence then used a heavy metal pole to bring down a gate. At least two people collapsed in the crush and after teargas was fired at them, Reuters television images showed.

Aid agencies said the border was opening with Macedonia intermittently, with about 7,000 people gathered in the area.

People were also being sent back for apparent discrepancies between registration documents they received from Greek authorities and their own travel documents, witnesses said.

“There are people who have been here for as long as 10 days,” said Gemma Gillie of aid agency Medicins Sans Frontieres. “Things are really stretched to the limit.”

(Reporting By Alexandros Avramidis in Idomeni, Lefteris Karagiannopoulos in Athens, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Kirsti Knolle in Vienna; Writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by Janet Lawrence)