Chaotic scenes have intensified across Greece as the embattled government edged closer to declaring a state of emergency to deal with tens of thousands of migrants and refugees trapped in the country.

With authorities from the Athens port of Piraeus in the south to Pella in the north scrambling to accommodate desperate men, women and children, tensions escalated at the Greek-Macedonian border on Monday as police from the neighboring Balkan state fired teargas at refugees who broke through a frontier fence at Idomeni.

“Even Greek police were teargassed,” said Gemma Gillie, a spokeswoman for Médecins sans Frontières who witnessed the scene.

“It all happened so suddenly as a group of about 300 people, shouting ‘open the border’, were shaking the fence,” she told the Guardian. “At some point they broke through it but no one actually tried to run the border.”

Greek officials said more than 7,000 people had massed at a makeshift camp on the border. The vast majority were Syrians and Iraqis determined to continue their journey north into central Europe. “Everywhere you look there are children, we’ve never seen so many,” added Gillie. “They were gassed too. Ten of the 22 we had to treat for respiratory problems were kids and four were under the age of five.”

Greek government insiders said the pressure on the country’s public infrastructure – eviscerated by seven years of budget cuts to keep debt-laden Athens afloat – was overwhelming. Schools, sporting arenas and passenger terminals have all been turned into impromptu refugee camps.

Between 2,000 to 3,000 migrants and refugees are reaching Greece every day with close to 25,000 stranded within its borders as a result of Balkan countries’ decision to close Europe’s eastern migrant corridor. More than 9,500 are marooned in Athens alone.

Volunteers described scenes of mayhem at passenger terminals in Piraeus and the arrival hall of the former Ellinikon airport in Athens, where up to 4,000 have been housed. “We should have resorted to using the armed forces long ago,” said one. “[But] being [a] leftwing [administration], there was hesitation. There were humanitarian values we wanted to uphold.”

The bottleneck has increased demand for people smugglers and fake travel documents, with traffickers reportedly flooding Victoria Square, the main meeting point for refugees in Athens.

For several days, Macedonian authorities, citing a similar move by Serbian police, have reduced the migrant flow to a trickle. “People here are not so much angry as scared,” said Gillie. “The border has only been opened at night and just for a few hours. Although they are Syrians and Iraqis, many are worried that they will fall victim to the same abrupt decision that was taken with Afghans.”

Thousands of Afghan nationals have been returned by bus to Athens in the six days since restrictions were tightened. The desperate scenes came as Angela Merkel warned that other European countries could not afford to let the continent’s refugee crisis plunge Greece into chaos by shutting their borders to migrants.

With up to 70,000 refugees expected to become stranded on Greece’s northern borders in the coming days, the German chancellor said the recently bailed-out Athens government could become paralyzed by the huge numbers of arrivals from Syria, Afghanistan and conflict-ridden African countries.

“Do you seriously believe that all the euro states that last year fought all the way to keep Greece in the eurozone – and we were the strictest – can one year later allow Greece to, in a way, plunge into chaos?” Merkel said in an interview with the public broadcaster ARD.

As its northern neighbours tightly restrict the number of people coming into their territory, and with about 22,000 people in Greece seeking to travel to countries in northern Europe, the European parliament president, Martin Schulz, warned on Monday that Greece was in danger of becoming a “parking lot” for stranded refugees if a scheme to resettle thousands from Greece and Italy was not put into immediate effect.

This month Austria, which took in 90,000 asylum seekers in 2015 and saw almost 10 times as many pass through, imposed a daily cap on the number of asylum claims it would hear and the number of migrants and refugees it would allow to enter its territory.

At a meeting in Vienna last week, it persuaded nine countries along the Balkans migrant route from Greece to impose tighter controls too. Neither Greece nor Germany were invited to the talks, starkly exposing the rifts within the E.U. as it faces the biggest influx of migrants since 1945.

Germany in particular has criticized the limit on the number allowed to pass through Austria. Vienna has said Germany itself imposed daily caps in December, leading to “huge backlogs” in Austria.

On Sunday Merkel said she found Austria’s “unilateral” decision “a little unfortunate” and said it had derailed a timetable for a series of E.U. measures and meetings to tackle the migrant crisis.

She said Vienna’s move had come just before an E.U. summit on February 18 and led her to insist that leaders move forward their next Brussels debate on the issue from a regular March 18 summit to March 7.

“If Austria had not taken this decision, we could have waited until our regular March 18 council,” she said, allowing time to see results from several measures, such as a Nato surveillance mission in the Aegean Sea to intercept refugee boats.

Originally published on The Guardian

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