Share refugee burden, EU implores members

Associated Press

BRUSSELS

The European Union implored its member countries Wednesday to better share the burden of refugees flooding the continent, but the numbers involved were small compared with the half-million who have already arrived and the hundreds of thousands more on their way.

With Syrians, Eritreans and Afghans often hoping to settle in wealthy nations such as Germany and Sweden, the EU is struggling find a more equitable solution that would also send a fair share of refugees to less-desirable and less-welcoming places such as Slovakia and the Baltics.

Hours after EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Europe had a historic duty to act and relocate 160,000 who have arrived in overwhelmed Hungary, Greece and Italy, a number of Eastern European and Baltic states vowed to reject the imposition of any kind of quotas from Brussels.

The plan is a drop in the ocean for an economic power like the EU, where a half-billion people live, compared with efforts by Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, which are hosting more than 4 million refugees, mostly from Syria.

But despite the troubling scenes of drowned children on beaches, or thousands of people running at razor-wire fences or crammed into buses and trains, the 28 nations simply cannot agree on modest proposals, let alone profound ways to tackle Europe’s biggest refugee emergency since World War II.