Thousands of migrants were trapped Friday in a vicious tug-of-war as bickering European governments shut border crossings, blocked bridges and erected new barbed-wire fences in a bid to stem the wave of humanity fleeing conflict and poverty in the West Asia and Africa.
Asylum-seekers who fled westward after being beaten back by tear gas and water cannon on the Hungarian-Serbian border just days earlier found themselves being returned to Serbia, where their ordeal began, after Croatia declared it could not handle the influx.
The EU’s failure to find a unified response to the crisis left this tiny
Balkan nation, one of the poorest in the European Union, squeezed between the blockades thrown up by Hungary and Slovenia
and the unending flood of people flowing north
from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.