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rehe Moria Camp on the Greek island of Lesbos was almost completely burned down and thousands of refugees now live in the open. Anne Will discusses with her studio guests what role Germany and the other EU countries should play. There are also impressive words live from Moria.
Greens co-chair Annalena Baerbock, Manfred Weber (CSU) MEP, Marie von Manteuffel from “Doctors Without Borders”, Gerald Knaus (founding director of the “European Stability Initiative” think tank) and Europe correspondent Ulrich Ladurner from “Zeit”.
Manfred Weber MEP (from left, CSU), Gerald Knaus, Annalena Baerbock (The Greens) and Anne Will
What: ARD
Correspondent Isabel Schayani is connected live from the Greek island of Lesbos. She crouches next to three refugee children and a woman with a headscarf. In her living room, she says, on asphalt. A sidewalk. The family had just finished cooking rice and had previously stood in front of the camp supermarket for hours for some eggs. Dozens more people surround Schayani. It is mainly men who, as Schayani says, wait for news from Germany.
“People are going crazy here,” reports the WDR correspondent. The refugees had the feeling that they were being sent from the closed prison to a new prison, the newly established makeshift camp for some 3,000 people.
The woman in the scarf has been living with her children in Moria for over a year and says in Persian that she and her children are afraid to go to the new camp. And also before a new fire. Schayani: “The boy I spoke to after the fire is no longer the boy he was in February. And then it was bad too. “
The Greek government would be based on deterrence, according to the motto: “The situation has to be bad so that more people do not come.” The people of the countryside target Germany as a “promised land”.
The numbers of the night
So the situation in the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos is tense. Thousands of migrants wait in the streets after the great fire of a few days ago. 3,000 people, mostly families, will move into a newly built tent camp. Moria was designed for 3,000, but recently around four times as many lived there. There are currently 27,000 refugees on all the Greek islands combined.
Baerbock criticizes the decision of the federal interior minister, Horst Seehofer, to accept only 150 unaccompanied minors. After all, 174 German municipalities have already joined the Seebrücke “Safe Haven” initiative and want to host refugees from Greece.
Germany and Europe could do more, admits Seehofer’s party colleague Manfred Weber. At the same time, he is convinced of great progress. “Last year there were 25,000 refugees on Lesbos, now there are only 13,000.” Of the 1,600 unaccompanied youth in 2019, “only 400 are still on the island.” The situation in Moria is “out of the question” and the frustration and fear are understandable.
The demands of the night
A first step was taken with the admission of minors, Weber says, but Germany should not do it alone. “Everybody wants to go to Germany, but that doesn’t work.” The mistakes made in 2015 should not be repeated. “Let’s go down a common European path.”
However, his Union colleague Norbert Röttgen, a candidate for the presidency of the CDU party, had demanded the admission of 5,000 refugees after the Moria fire to alleviate the situation in Greece.
Zeit’s correspondent Ladurner believes that other countries would lean back if Germany accepted thousands of people. “The question is whether other states can be made to host refugees. It will not be easy. The European Union does not agree at all ”. The situation has been locked in since 2015, the beginning of the refugee crisis.
Annalena Baerbock criticizes European states and has a three-step plan. “The EU was founded as a union of values and that happens on Lesbos in the center of Europe.” First, the Greek government would have to provide active emergency aid on the ground. “It can’t be that people are blocking sewer pipes to get water,” says Baerbock. After that, Moria had to be evacuated, “and there should be a state of orderly structures.” The third step is an asylum and refugee policy with initial reception centers where people are “quickly registered and distributed”.
The dates of the night
Marie von Manteuffel sees the federal government as responsible for hosting the 13,000 people. “We see photos of families on the ground in the street and we discuss whether we can afford to bring people here. That’s crazy “. Germany needs a different image of man.
In Lesbos, doctors help people who have suffered torture and sexual violence and then live in adverse conditions in refugee camps. “People are homeless, they live somewhere in the old football stadiums and we are seriously arguing because the Greek government is not willing to take care of these people.” There is a “horror picture” on the islands and in mainland Greece. .
Gerald Knaus believes that the Greeks fear changing the situation in the refugee camps. “They fear that if the conditions of the people improve and they make them come down from the islands, more people will come.”
It is the cynical, illegal and immoral policy of the Greeks to produce bad images to make it clear to the refugees who remain in Afghanistan or Lebanon. Knaus offers a solution: “Let Europe say that we will not leave the Greeks alone and that we will not close the Balkan route.” Furthermore, Europe would have to re-negotiate with Turkey. The EU-Turkey agreement expired at the beginning of the year.
