STRASBOURG (France): Euro­­pe has “no more than months” to get the migration crisis under control, or else its Schengen passport-free travel zone will collapse, the chairman of European leaders Donald Tusk told European Parliament on Tuesday.

“We have no more than two months to get things under control,” Tusk said, adding Schengen would otherwise fail.

Tusk also said the EU would “fail as a political project” if the bloc could not exercise proper control of its external borders.

The European Union is facing its biggest migration challenge since the World War Two, with more than 1 million refugees and migrants entering the 28-nation last year alone.He said a summit of EU leaders in Brussels on March 17-18 “will be the last moment to see if our strategy works”.

Tusk said that “if it doesn’t, we will face grave consequences such as the collapse of Schengen,” the 26-nation zone in Europe where people can travel without ID checks.

The EU spent most of 2015 devising policies to cope with the arrival of more than 1 million people fleeing conflict or poverty, but few are having a real impact.

The four Central European members of the European Union have reconfirmed their fierce opposition to a plan to redistribute 120,000 asylum-seekers among the bloc’s 28 nations and called for the strict control and registration of all refugees on the external border of the EU visa-free Schengen zone.

Representatives of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, who form an informal grouping known as the Visegrad Four or V4, say they are united against the plan.

Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec, said: “The V4 countries still reject the system of compulsory quotas for relocation”. Slovakia and Hungary have already legally challenged the system.

In another disagreement with Brussels, the four also refused a recent EU proposal to tighten the gun-control rules following the Paris attacks.

Officials from Slovenia and Serbia have warned that if Austria scales down the influx of refugees into the country that would cause a domino effect and tensions down the so-called Balkan migrant corridor.

Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec and Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic called on Tuesday for a joint EU-backed plan to manage the crisis before an expected surge in the number of Europe-bound migrants in spring.

Erjavec says “we can expect some states to introduce stricter controls on their borders, which means countries in the western Balkans could become a pocket.” Erjavec says Austria has announced new measures for this week.

Dacic says migrants won’t be allowed to return to Serbia if turned back elsewhere. He warns of a “collapse” if case of a Balkan bottleneck.

Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2016