WARSAW, Sept 28 (AFP) - A sudden influx of Chechen refugees to Poland after the Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia has slowed back to its normal rate, Polish Interior Minister Ryszard Kalisz said Tuesday.
"The rush has come to a halt, and we are back to the previous rate of 20 to 30 people a day," the minister told journalists.
Over the past fortnight, hundreds of Chechens a day were arriving at Poland's borders on the eastern edge of the European Union asking for political asylum, most travelling overland through the neighbouring ex-Soviet republic of Belarus.
Kalisz had sounded the alarm, announcing that Warsaw would ask for financial assistance to cope with the refugees from the EU, which Poland joined on May 1.
"For the moment, we have enough funds, but I cannot exclude that in the future we will appeal for outside help because this is a problem that concerns the EU as a whole," he said.
Last year, more than 80 percent of asylum seekers in Poland came from Russia's war-torn breakaway Chechen republic, representing 5,600 out of 6,900 cases, according to the Polish office for refugees.
Poland, a neighbour of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, "has the longest land border in the EU" and would like to have a new European border agency operating on its territory, the minister said.
Other ex-Communist Eastern European countries which also joined the EU in May, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia, would also like more EU border assistance, he added.
Frontier controls and the fight against organised crime are due to be discussed during an informal meeting of the 25 EU interior ministers on Thursday at the Hague.
Kalisz announced that he would visit Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on October 4 to 5 to discuss bilateral cooperation with the three Baltic states, new EU members which also have long EU borders to protect.