160,000 join pro-refugee march
BARCELONA: Tens of thousands of people marched through Barcelona on Saturday urging the Spanish government to immediately meet its pledge to take in thousands of refugees.
Ada Colau, the mayor of Spain’s second city, had called on Barcelona residents to “fill the streets” and march under the slogan volem acollir (“We want to welcome them” in Catalan). Local police said some 160,000 people had heeded her call.
Many of those flooding the major Via Laietana thoroughfare carried signs reading: “Enough excuses, welcome them now.”
The protest came after Spain pledged to take in some 16,000 asylum seekers from other European Union countries under a quota system agreed in 2015 as the continent struggled with its biggest migration crisis since World War II.
Like other EU members, Spain has fallen far short of this target, with only 1,100 resettled in the country so far.
In Sept 2015, Spain’s government pledged to bring 17,337 refugees in within two years: 15,888 from camps in Italy and Greece and 1,449 from Turkey and Libya.
A group of 66 refugees — 65 Syrians and one Iraqi — who arrived in Madrid on Thursday raised the total number of refugees Spain has taken in to just 1,100.
Marchers held a large banner and signs with the slogan “Enough Excuses! Take Them In Now!” as they made their way through the city centre to the Mediterranean coast. Jacint Comelles, a 62-year-old potter who joined the protest with friends and family, said not enough was being done to help people who have fled conflict hoping to start a new life in Europe. “We demand this minimum amount of dignity, that at least this number of refugees [16,000] can come,” he said. “In Catalonia, everything is ready to welcome them.”
The protest, organised by a group calling itself Castra Nostra Casa Vostra (Our home is your home), finished at the Mediterranean coast, a symbolic location given the more than 5,000 migrants who lost their lives trying to cross the sea last year.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau joined the march. Ms Colau, a former anti-eviction activist, has pushed Spain’s government to let her city accept more refugees. She also criticised the federal government’s stance toward refugees in December at a Vatican conference on Europe’s refugee crisis.
Senior Barcelona lawmaker Merce Conesa on Wednesday said it was “shameful” that Spain had not taken in more refugees and urged the European Commission to begin “severely sanctioning” countries that did not meet their pledges on the issue.
In contrast with Spain, fellow EU member Germany took in 890,000 asylum-seekers in 2015 and another 280,000 in 2016.
Germany decided last year on more than 695,000 asylum applications. Nearly 60% of the applicants were granted either full refugee status or a lesser form of protection.