The Guardian :Germany could take 500,000 refugees each year for “several years”, the country’s vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, has said, as fresh clashes broke out overnight between police and refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos and thousands of people gathered amid chaotic scenes on the Greek border with Macedonia.”I believe we could surely deal with something in the order of half a million for several years,” he told ZDF public television. “I have no doubt about that, maybe more.” Germany expects to receive 800,000 asylum seekers this year, four times the total for 2014. Gabriel also stressed that other European countries must also accept their fair share as refugees flee war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa and head for the EU.As Greece struggled to cope with an influx of refugees – many from war-ravaged Syria – Donald Tusk, the EU president, warned that the refugee “exodus” could last for years. “The wave of migration is not a one-time incident but the beginning of a real exodus, which only means that we will have to deal with this problem for many years to come,” he said.In Lesbos, where tens of thousands of refugees are stranded, about a dozen coastguards and riot police armed with batons struggled overnight to control about 2,500 migrants in the island’s main port as crowds surged towards a government-chartered ferry bound for Athens.The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, said Europe must offer guaranteed relocation for Syrian refugees. About 30,000 refugees are on Greek islands, with 20,000 on Lesbos alone, it said. The island has a population of about 85,000.Melissa Fleming, a UNHCR spokeswoman, told a news briefing in Geneva: “Discussions in Europe this week are taking on even greater urgency because it obviously cannot be a German solution to a European problem.”She welcomed announcements by Britain and France that they would take in Syrian refugees, but said reception centres must be set up in countries including Hungary and Greece.”Those can only work if there is a guaranteed relocation system whereby European countries saying yes will take X number. We believe it should be 200,000 – that’s the number we believe need relocating in Europe countries,” Fleming said.German chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her support for quotas for distributing refugees, telling a news conference in Berlin: “This joint European asylum system cannot just exist on paper but must also exist in practice – I say that because it lays out minimum standards for accommodating refugees and the task of registering refugees.”
