Protests as refugees sleep on Lesbos streets
The only shelter for some children is cardboard in a supermarket car park after camp was destroyed by fire
THOUSANDS OF asylum seekers forced to sleep on the streets after their camp burned down on the island of Lesbos staged a demonstration yesterday, demanding to be evacuated.
The migrants and refugees chanted and banged empty plastic water bottles, while children carried cardboard placards reading “We want to be free” and “Don’t want camp” – a reference to the notorious Moria facility that was reduced to a wasteland of ash by the fires.
The camp was inhabited by about 12,500 asylum seekers, many from Afghanistan and Syria. It also included Africans, who are now sleeping on roads, on patches of waste ground and in supermarket car parks.
There are 4,000 children, with toddlers and young children left to sleep on blankets and scraps of cardboard as the Greek authorities struggle to deal with the crisis.
“We have spent three days here without eating, without drinking. We are in conditions that are really, really not very good,” said Freddy Musamba, from Gambia.
“We’ve suffered here for three days,” Patricia Bob, a Congolese asylum seeker, told AFP on the side of a road, a piece of cardboard serving as her mattress. “We are hungry and thirsty. We have no toilets or showers.”
The demonstrators were blocked by Greek police from walking to Mytilene, the nearby port and main settlement on Lesbos.
The Greek authorities claim the fires were deliberately lit by asylum seekers who were angry with quarantine measures that had been introduced after 35 migrants tested positive for Covid-19.
The government has said that apart from 400 unaccompanied minors, none of the asylum seekers will be allowed to leave the island for now. Instead, a new camp will be built on
Lesbos, with Greek security forces arriving on Friday to start construction.
The new facility will be built on the site of an army firing range, not far from the destroyed camp.
The Greek army had to use helicopters to bypass roadblocks that were set up by islanders who are furiously opposed to another camp being built. In February, there were clashes between locals and riot police.
With few EU countries willing to take in large numbers of asylum seekers, the crisis has once again exposed acute tensions in the bloc’s migration policy. The EU will present a new “pact for migration and asylum” on Sept 30, said Margaritis Schinas, vice-president of the European Commission.
It will include new agreements with migrants’ countries of origin to persuade people not to embark for Europe in the first place, and a beefing-up of the border defence.
An EU agreement to distribute the hundreds of thousands of refugees who arrived in 2015 and 2016 broke down, with only small numbers resettled and some member states, such as Hungary, refusing point blank to take any.
That left thousands of asylum seekers stuck in filthy, overcrowded camps on islands like Lesbos, Samos and Kos.
Aid agencies said it was imperative that the 12,000 homeless migrants on Lesbos should be moved off the island.
“Now is the time to show some humanity and move these people to a healthy, safe and humane place,” said Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
‘Now is the time to show some humanity and move these people to a healthy, safe, humane place’