Aftermath of war

The new camp was established in the village of Miratovac, near the southern Serbian town of Presevo, where a collective reception centre for migrants was opened in the reconstructed building of a tobacco processing company on July 8.

Macedonia on Sunday assisted thousands of migrants to resume their journeys through the country and into Serbia after the authorities tried to seal their southern border last Thursday and declared a crisis situation, which resulted in chaotic scenes and clashes with police.

Police used stun grenades in attempt to stop the crowd pass the barbed wire but could not stop people running into fields across the border.It is unclear if people were injured in the chaos and how many escaped from the zone guarded by police.

The United Nations refugee agency expressed concern on Friday over the increasingly precarious situation at the border between Greece and Macedonia, where Macedonian police used force earlier to prevent migrants trying to cross.

Macedonia said it was deploying troops on the border with Greece, in a last-ditch move to stem to flow of refugees into and across the country.

The aim was to enhance control of the border area, Ivo Kotevski, spokesperson of the Ministry for Interior, explained on Thursday.

Slovakia has said that it will only accept Christian refugees once it starts taking in its quota of 200 migrants from the Middle East under a relocation programme recently adopted by the EU.

According to Slovakia's Interior Ministry spokesman Ivan Metik the government's approach wasn't down to discrimination, but rather practical concerns around integration, CNN reported.

A record 107,500 migrants crossed the European Union's borders last month, according to new figures Aug. 18, showing they are arriving in dramatically increasing numbers and creating a humanitarian crisis for the 28-nation bloc.

Nearly 21,000 refugees and migrants arrived in crisis-hit Greece last week -- nearly half the total number in all of 2014 -- the United Nations said on August 18. 

The magnitude of the refugee crisis in Greece was outlined a UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) report, according to which the number of refugees that landed on the Greek islands in one week (August 8-15) was half the total in all of 2014!

Serbia has so far registered 83,000 migrants and 500 of them applied for asylum in the country, UNHCR representative in Serbia Hans Schodder said on Tuesday.