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reThe city leaders of ten large German municipalities agreed in a joint letter to Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer to accept immigrants from the burning Greek camp of Moria. In the letter they appeal to Merkel and Seehofer to pave the way for this, as the Germany publishing network (RND) reported on Thursday night.
The letter was signed by the mayors of Bielefeld, Düsseldorf, Freiburg, Gießen, Göttingen, Hannover, Cologne, Krefeld, Oldenburg and Potsdam. City leaders affirmed their willingness to “make a humanitarian contribution to human accommodation for those seeking protection in Europe”: “We are ready to welcome people from Moria in order to defuse the humanitarian catastrophe.”
The Federal Ministry of the Interior has so far refused to accept refugees from Greece on its own in Germany. Calls for a joint European initiative. Therefore, Seehofer is under strong internal political pressure. Coalition partner SPD assumed it was blocking.
Merkel has since announced that Germany, like France, will accept underage refugees from Moria. As the news agency AFP learned from the negotiating circles, it is about the distribution of around 400 children and young people within the EU. Some 12,000 people lived in the camp on the Aegean island of Lesbos, the largest in the European Union, before the fires.
Merkel said at an event organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin that she had asked Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “how we can help.” She asked to host unaccompanied refugee minors. French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed at a meeting of the EU-Mediterranean countries in Corsica that he was planning a European initiative with Merkel to host refugees.
“We will try to move as many European countries as possible to host refugees, especially minors,” Macron said. The Netherlands has already agreed to host about 100 people.
The causes of the fires are not yet clear.
Mitsotakis told the meeting in Corsica that the EU had to move “from slogans of solidarity to a policy of solidarity” on the refugee issue. Moria had been completely packed for years. People lived there in sometimes catastrophic conditions.
The camp was almost completely destroyed by fires. The fires that broke out on Tuesday destroyed the most remote parts of the camp, where some 4,000 people lived. Another fire on Wednesday also largely destroyed parts of the camp where around 8,000 people lived in barracks and makeshift tents, according to the Athens Migration Ministry.
The causes of the fires were not yet clear. Before the outbreak of the first fire, there were protests against the quarantine order for 35 residents of the camp who tested positive for the corona virus.
Thousands of refugees on Lesbos stayed out in the open for the third night in a row, often without enough food. Many of the homeless were families with young children, reporters from the AFP news agency noted. Many of him didn’t even have proper blankets. “Is this Europe?” Asked Syrian woman Fatma Al-Hani, as she clung to her two-year-old son. “I’ve had enough, I want my baby to grow up in peace,” she said through tears.
Meanwhile, local residents are opposing the construction of new tents for refugees by erecting barricades in the streets. “Now is the time to finally close Moria,” Vangelis Violatzis, president of the Panagiouda Congregation, told AFP. The Greek authorities planned to temporarily house some of the refugees on a ferry and two warships.
