EU's newest states put up the 'stay out' signs

Refugees entering Hungary have been optimistic but the welcome awaiting them has at times been cool. Photo / AP

When Latvia last month decided to accept 250 of the tens of thousands of refugees seeking shelter in Europe, hundreds of protesters including elderly people and families with children rallied outside Parliament with placards warning that the foreigners would bring doom to the Baltic country. Some slogans spoke darkly of a threat to "white nations".

A similar demonstration featuring anti-Muslim slogans was held in neighbouring Estonia against plans to receive about 150 refugees from the Middle East and Africa this year.

While eastern Europe's new European Union member states are being asked to absorb the fewest, they are putting up the fiercest resistance to plans to spread the refugees more evenly across the 28-nation bloc.

Even mainstream political leaders in these countries have described refugees and migrants as welfare opportunists, terrorists and carriers of disease.

The Baltic countries, as well as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, have all rejected mandatory refugee quotas, often saying they don't want their relatively homogenous societies to become multicultural.

EU officials and human rights groups say they've been disappointed by the animosity toward asylum-seekers in countries from which hundreds of thousands of people once fled communist dictatorships.

"We are struggling to understand this hardening of attitudes," said Babar Baloch, the Budapest-based spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in central Europe. "They have been through this themselves."

There had been an outpouring of generosity from volunteers helping refugees in Hungary, despite the Government's hard stance.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Government is refusing to accept a single refugee under the EU plans and resisting their attempts to cross the country to reach more welcoming countries like Germany and Sweden. Slovakia has offered to accept 200 people - as long as most are Christians.

The President of the Czech Republic, which has offered to receive 1500 refugees, has warned that asylum-seekers might bring terrorism and infectious diseases. In an interview republished on his official website, President Milos Zeman told Czech tabloid Blesk that they should be told three things when they arrive.

"The first one: Nobody invited you," he said. "The second one: When you're already here, you have to respect our rules as we respect your rules when we arrive in your country. The third one: if you don't like it, get out of here."

Critics say the ex-communist countries might do well to be more generous in light of their own history.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc nations to escape communist dictatorships after World War II.

In scenes similar to those on the Mediterranean today, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians streamed across the Baltic Sea in crowded boats as the Red Army retook their countries in 1944. Thousands died at sea.

"For Latvians who have been welcomed to so many countries, now to say that we cannot afford taking in refugees is not nice from a moral perspective," former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga said.

The current president, Raimonds Vejonis, rejected the comparison, saying: "It was 70 years ago and the situation was totally different."

He said many of those entering Europe today "are economic refugees who try to find a better life in Europe. A better job and a higher salary and so on." He also warned that terrorists could be among them.

UN officials say the vast majority of those crossing the Mediterranean are fleeing war and persecution in countries including Syria and Eritrea. There are also migrants seeking to escape deep poverty in west Africa who normally don't get asylum in Europe.

Only the Czech Republic has significant experience in resettling refugees, having done so since 2011, according to the International Catholic Migration Commission. The former communist countries say they don't have nearly the same capacity to absorb refugees as countries in western Europe.

Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak said Western nations were multicultural, diverse societies while there was "not a single mosque" in Slovakia.

US to accept extra 8500

The United States is making plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming budget year, a significant increase from the 1500 people who have been cleared to resettle in the US since civil war broke out in the Middle Eastern country more than four years ago, the White House said yesterday.

The White House has been under heavy pressure to do more than just provide money to help meet the humanitarian crisis in Europe.

Germany is bracing for some 800,000 asylum seekers this year.

- NZ Herald, AP