Vucic: thousands of migrants won’t settle in Serbia, UNHCR: They only go through

“If need be, no one will enter Serbia but we will decide that on our own and won’t demean those people. We will certainly not be a parking lot for migrants and 400,000 migrants will not be settled here, of course not,” Vucic said in a live appearance on the pro-government TV Pink morning show. 

 Vucic said that Serbia will continue to show solidarity but will not allow anyone to endanger its citizens. He said that additional police forces have been sent to the town of Sid on the border with Croatia where the largest group of migrants is now.

In the meantime, the UNHCR says Serbia cannot become the so-called parking lot for migrants since all those people did not want to stay in the country.

"It is impossible to stop people who are escaping wars and persecution. Our data say that some 30,000 people went through Serbia in 2019, and only 252 of them applied for asylum," Mijana Milenkovski from the UNHCR said.