EU Stumps up Aid for Refugees in Balkans

Ahead of the Western Balkans Summit in Vienna, the European Commission on Wednesday said it was releasing an additional 1.5 million euro in humanitarian funding to assist refugees and migrants in Serbia and Macedonia.

The aid will support humanitarian partners in helping with provision of basic emergency services, such as water, hygiene, health care, shelter, protection for refugees and migrants, improvement of reception centres and coordination and reporting on migration issues in the region.

"The Western Balkans are dealing with an unprecedented number of transiting refugees and migrants. The EU is stepping up its humanitarian aid to provide them with urgently needed relief. This is European solidarity at its core," Christos Stylianides, EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management, said.

The European Commission previously granted about 90,000 euro in humanitarian assistance to Macedonia in July and 150,000 euro to Serbia on August 20, in response to the emergency.

Germany will allocate another million euro in short-term humanitarian aid "in order to calm the dramatic situation" of refugees crossing the Western Balkans, the German Embassy in Macedonia said on Wednesday.

According to EU border agency, Frontex, some 102,000 migrants entered the EU via the "Western Balkan route"  between January and July this year, versus just 8,000 for the same period in 2014.

The Balkan region has become one of the main routes into the European Union for hundreds of thousands of migrants, in Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II.

Although originally planned as a high-level conference on the economic prospects and European perspectives of the Western Balkan states, the refugee crisis will...