{"id":366856,"date":"2018-06-26T18:41:45","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T17:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/austria-sends-troops-to-border-for-migration-response-exercises\/"},"modified":"2018-06-26T18:41:45","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T17:41:45","slug":"austria-sends-troops-to-border-for-migration-response-exercises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/austria-sends-troops-to-border-for-migration-response-exercises\/","title":{"rendered":"Austria Sends Troops to Border for Migration Response Exercises"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Several hundred Austrian police officers and soldiers performed an exercise on the country’s southern border with Slovenia on Tuesday to simulate different responses to any repeat of the 2015 migrant crisis.<\/p>\n

Over 500 policemen and 220 soldiers took part at the border crossing of\u00a0Spielfeld, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene.<\/p>\n

“A state which can’t protect its borders when needed loses its\u00a0credibility,” said Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, who oversaw the exercise\u00a0along with Defence Minister Mario Kunasek.<\/p>\n

Both men are members of the far-right Freedom Party (FP\u00d6), which since\u00a0last year has been the junior partner in a coalition government under\u00a0conservative Chancellor Sebastian Kurz which has been at pains to emphasise\u00a0its anti-immigration message.<\/p>\n

Among the military hardware on display\u00a0on Tuesday\u00a0were two “Black Hawk”\u00a0helicopters. During the exercises police cadets played the role of migrants\u00a0standing at border gates asking to be let in.<\/p>\n

The event also saw the first outing for a new police border protection\u00a0force comprising some 600 officers, dubbed the “Puma” unit.<\/p>\n

Several thousand migrants passed through Spielfeld in the summer of 2015 as\u00a0part of the “Balkan route” towards northern Europe, although local police say\u00a0the current rate of such crossings is almost zero.<\/p>\n

A clampdown on immigration was a key message from the FPOe and Kurz’s\u00a0People’s Party (OeVP) in last year’s elections and the government has made\u00a0clear its wish for a restrictive…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Several hundred Austrian police officers and soldiers performed an exercise on the country’s southern border with Slovenia on Tuesday to simulate different responses to any repeat of the 2015 migrant crisis. Over 500 policemen and 220 soldiers took part at the border crossing of\u00a0Spielfeld, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene. “A state which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2520,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-366856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}