Slovenia gives army more power amid migrant crisis

Saying that thousands of people have overwhelmed its infrastructure at Slovenia's border with Croatia, Slovenia is moving to deploy its army.

Bostjan Sefic, state secretary at the interior ministry, said Tuesday that the last 24 hours had been the "most hard, the most challenging" in Slovenia's effort to deal with the thousands of migrants reaching the country since Hungary closed its border with Croatia on Saturday and forced migrants to find new routes toward Germany and western Europe.

"[On Wednesday] we will officially ask the European Union... for police back-up and for financial help", the country's prime minister said before the vote, as cited by Reuters. Hungary, long the most popular eastern gateway for people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, has padlocked its borders for migrants progressively over the past month, forcing the tide west through Croatia and Slovenia.

Last week Hungary closed its border with Croatia and Serbia and refused to let any more migrants cross, citing security concerns.

Migrants rest after crossing the border from Croatia in Rigonce, Slovenia October 21, 2015.

"I am from Hama in Syria, I have family in Turkey, I will tell them not to come as this is not for people, this is for animals", Mustafa said as he was trying to break a piece of wood to put it in a fire.

Meanwhile, a fire broke out briefly this morning at a refugee camp near another Croatian border crossing. Officials on the Croat side planned to bus the newcomers either to a Croat refugee camp or - far more likely, given asylum seekers' reluctance to stop before reaching their desired destinations - to the Slovenian border. Croatian police had deployed on the boundary to stop them but then moved away. Two days after a man with a neo-Nazi background stabbed a pro-refugee politician in the neck, badly wounding her, thousands of people joined a mass rally marking the first anniversary of Germany's anti-ref-ugee Pegida movement.

Pressing the European Union for more solidarity, Ljubljana warned it was "delusional" to expect individual countries to tackle the bloc's greatest refugee crisis since 1945.

Chancellor Angela Merkel says that those who come to Germany only for economic reasons must be told: "You must leave our country, otherwise we won't manage to provide protection for those who need protection". "European solidarity is being challenged", the government said.

The government of Slovenia said that it is increasing the capacity of its reception centers to 14,000 beds.

Slovenia's government said 6,000 migrants, mostly women and children, arrived on Monday.

Reporting from a camp where thousands of people spent the night and endured heavy rains, Lauren adds that cleanup crews are now "shoveling out huge piles of donated clothes, tents, blankets, that are all caked in mud".

Information for this article was contributed by Darko Bandic, Philipp-Moritz Jenne, Jovana Gec, Pablo Gorondi and Shawn Pogatchnik of The Associated Press and by Katrin Bennhold of The New York Times. Hundreds were evacuated from the camp and transported to the Austrian border, according to local journalists at the scene.