[ad_1]
Thousands of asylum seekers have spent a fourth night sleeping outdoors on the Greek island of Lesbos, after successive fires destroyed a notoriously overcrowded refugee and migrant camp during a coronavirus lockdown.
Authorities have said the fires on Tuesday and Wednesday night (local time) were deliberately set by some camp residents angered by quarantine and isolation orders imposed after 35 people at Moria camp tested positive for Covid- 19.
With the camp gutted, men, women and children were found sleeping under makeshift shelters made from reclaimed cane stalks, blankets and tents on Saturday morning.
Petros Giannakouris / AP
A migrant holds her baby as she runs to avoid a small fire in a field near the town of Mytilene, on the northeast island of Lesbos, Greece.
Thousands of people gathered for a protest demanding that they be allowed to leave the island, gathered on a road blocked by police buses. The demonstration was loud but peaceful, with mainly children and women leading the way. Riot police watched nearby as protesters chanted slogans and held makeshift banners made from pieces of cardboard or leaves.
READ MORE:
* Little remains of Europe’s largest refugee camp after the second fire
* At least 15 people drown when a migrant ship sinks off the island of Greece
“We need peace and freedom. Moria kills all lives, ”said one.
Some of the protesters wore masks in the tight crowd of people who had recently lived in the camp, which had dozens of confirmed cases of coronavirus before it caught fire.
Leaving the island would require a flexion of European Union rules, according to which asylum seekers arriving on the Greek islands from Turkey must remain there until they are granted refugee status or deported back to Turkey.
Panagiotis Balaskas / AP
Migrants participate in a rally, demanding that they be allowed to leave.
The Moria camp was built to house some 2,750 people, but it was so crowded that this week’s fires left more than 12,000 in need of emergency shelter on Lesbos. The camp had long been viewed by critics as a symbol of Europe’s failures in immigration policy.
Moria was subjected to a virus lockdown until mid-September after the first case confirmed that it was identified in a Somali man who had been granted asylum and left for Athens, but then returned to the camp.
On Friday, 200,000 rapid virus detection kits were flown to the island for a comprehensive test that would include asylum seekers and islanders.
Petros Giannakouris / AP
Refugees and migrants cook on makeshift bonfires near an abandoned factory on the island of Lesbos, Greece.
The World Health Organization said Greece had requested the deployment of an emergency medical team. Two of these teams, one from Belgium and one from Norway, were expected to arrive on Saturday and Monday.
Authorities have said that none of the camp’s residents, except for 406 unaccompanied teens and children, would be allowed to leave the island. The unaccompanied minors were flown to mainland Greece on Wednesday and several European countries have said they will take some of them in.
Soldiers have been setting up new tents to house some 3,000 people at a new site nearby, airlifted by helicopter to avoid protests by local residents angered by the use of their island as a detention center for thousands of people from the Middle East. , Africa and Asia arrive from neighboring Turkey.
Moria’s overcrowded squalor created tension among both the villagers and the locals, whose initially welcoming attitude during the height of the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015 has diminished over the years.
Many of the asylum seekers in Moria described life there as worse than much of what they had endured on their long, often painful journeys towards what they hoped would be a better life in Europe.
“While we were in Africa, we walked from 7 pm to 5 am to avoid the heat and the police. That was difficult. But being here, stuck, I think it’s worse, ”said Amados Iam, a 23-year-old from Mauritania. “I did not come to the end to stay here. (I) I want to leave Greece. “
I came to Moria three months ago with his 19 year old brother. Both have suffered from severe stomach problems and were told by a local hospital doctor in Lesbos it was due to poor living conditions, including poor food and water quality, in Moria, Iam said.
The brothers left Mauritania in 2017, crossed North Africa on foot, and then headed for Turkey by truck. The drought had ruined his mother’s farm, so he could not continue studying, and the brothers feared mandatory military service or being killed by the various armed groups that came from Mali and roamed the south and west of Mauritania, they said. .
All of their paperwork had been completed, but the brothers had not heard anything about the status of their asylum application, they said. His intended destination was France or Belgium.
