European solution to migration creates humanitarian crisis

One of Europe’s main solutions to migration – Greece’s overcrowded, unsanitary Moria migrant camp – has suicidal children and conditions that a psychiatrist compared to “an old-fashioned mental asylum”.

In a heavily criticised solution to immigration, imprisoned men and women have been shuttled away from one gun battle only to end up incarcerated on the front line of another, vulnerable to both trafficking and new abuse.

The Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and the dangerous migrant detention centres in Libya serve as a reminder to EU leaders that statistical success in curbing migration has spawned what the UN and others condemn as major humanitarian failures.

Migrant sea arrivals to Europe have plummeted this year, but each journey now carries increasing risks of death or indefinite detention in squalid conditions. More than 1,700 people have already died on Mediterranean crossings this year.

Abbas Elnaser, an Iraqi who arrived in Moria about three weeks ago, said his eight-yearold daughter’s health had always been frail and she was deteriorating quickly in the camp that was built for 3,100 but now houses more than 9,000 people.

“She has problems breathing most of the time, she has problems in her lungs,” he said. “The tent is surrounded by garbage.”

In the central Mediterranean, Europe has effectively outsourced sea rescues of migrants to the Libyan coast guard, whose boats have returned 13,000 migrants to Libyan detention centres this year. In some of those centres around the Libyan capital of Tripoli, migrants ended up on the front lines of gun battles as militias fought for control of the city.

As a Tripoli ceasefire brokered by the UN threatens to fracture, food for the detainees there is dwindling. Libyan officials complain that both they and the migrants have been largely abandoned by Europe. In the Janzour detention centre, around 900 people were crammed into a space intended for half that many.

“We have difficulties in providing subsistence, difficulties in providing food, and difficulties in sheltering them,” said 1st Lt Jamal Hussain.

If migrants have made it to Lesbos they are already one step ahead of those trapped in Libya, but conditions are hardly better.

Greece has agreed to transfer 2,000 asylum-seekers from the camp to the mainland this month. The move that cannot come soon enough for the migrants there. Ali Sajjad Faizy, a 19-year-old from Afghanistan, said conditions at Moria have steadily worsened and residents must stand in line “for four or five” hours just to get food.