A refugee bottleneck on Greece’s easternmost islands has eased after recent dangerous overcrowding, rescue agencies said on Friday, as thousands of migrants per day continue to arrive on the mainland.

The debt-strapped country is struggling to cope with a wave of mostly Syrian refugees using Greece, Macedonia and Hungary as transit routes to wealthier northern European nations, in one of the biggest migratory shifts in Europe in a century.

Greek authorities this week began fast-tracking refugees off its worst-hit island, Lesbos, laying on extra ferries after a sharp increase in arrivals and slow processing threatened to overwhelm the 80,000-strong local population.

“Overcrowding conditions have eased and people are being processed very quickly and put onto ships for Athens,” an official at the Northern Aegean Prefecture told Reuters.

Scuffles broke out on Lesbos last week, prompting warnings from local officials they would boycott national elections on Sept. 20 if the state did not address the problem.

Although congestion had eased, aid agencies said arrivals on the island had not.

“We think there are still 2,000 to 3,000 people arriving every day,” said Tyler Jump of the International Rescue Committee, which offers aid in Lesbos. The prefecture covers a swathe of Greek islands facing Turkey, and has become the main European Union gateway for tens of thousands of migrants making a short sea crossing in flimsy dinghies.

An estimated 15,000 people had been moved off Lesbos in the past four days after authorities introduced quicker processing, Jump said.

The Greek coastguard said around 6,000 migrants on three government-chartered ferries had disembarked at the port of Piraeus, part of the Athens conurbation, on Thursday.

The vast majority of arrivals head north to the border with Macedonia, where an official with the United Nations refugee agency said some 7,600 had crossed in the 24 hours to Thursday evening, far more than previously.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW