LESVOS, Greece — On the surface, Europe appears to have woken up to the urgent humanitarian crisis on Greece’s islands.
In the aftermath of the fire that burned Moria — Europe’s biggest refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos — to the ground last week, the European Union said it was willing to take a more direct role in running a new reception facility on the island and promised to reform its flawed asylum system. A long-awaited migration pact is set to be unveiled at the end of the month.
But if Europe is sending all the right signals, locals are skeptical of the new promises. They see them as a continuation of the same policies that led to the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Moria: some 12,000 people out on the street, without access to water, food or shelter, following the fire that ravaged an overcrowded, unhygienic camp built for 3,000 people.
Faced with EU-backed plans to build a new facility for migrants, many are wondering: Why should this new camp be any different to the last?
“The only solution for these people is to get off the island,” said Caroline Willeman, a coordinator for Doctors Without Borders (MSF). “If they make a new camp, any issues that existed in Moria will be recreated. It will lead to the same disaster.”
Ultimately, the future of Lesvos and its neighboring islands depends on whether a permanent relocation mechanism can be negotiated at an EU-level.
In the week since the fire tore down their makeshift homes, migrants have protested efforts to take them to the new temporary facility and demanded to be released from the island. Some protests turned violent, with police using tear gas to break up a gathering.
Only 1,200 people — just 10 percent of those who now find themselves out on the streets of the island — have so far moved into the new temporary facility, which was built by the Greek military with the help of UNHCR on a former artillery range beside the sea.
The site was constructed almost overnight, and every day since, more tents have been added in bright white rows right up to the shoreline. There is little space between the tents, which are each meant to house six people. A wooden shelter had been built in which to carry out COVID-19 tests.
To incentivize people to enter the camp, Greek authorities announced that the country’s asylum service would only process claims from those inside and distributed leaflets printed in several languages with additional information about the camp.
But rumors spread quickly, and many fear their phones will be confiscated on entry, that conditions inside are bad, and that they will be detained there indefinitely.
“We came [to Greece] for a better situation,” said Madina, an Afghan woman living under a bamboo shelter along the highway with her 18-year-old daughter Rehana. “I’d rather die than go back to a camp.” As we spoke, women and children marched up and down the road, chanting “No camp, freedom.”
Currently, those inside the camp are not permitted to leave under any circumstance, according to Alexandros Ragavas, the spokesperson for the Greek Ministry for Migration and Asylum, who said he could not clarify how long the camp would be locked down.
It is also unclear how long the site will be in use, local NGOs said. Greek authorities have called it a temporary measure until a new permanent facility is built, but according to a report by local news site Stonisi, the Ministry for Migration and Asylum paid €2.9 million to secure the site until 2025.
Conditions at the new facility are less than ideal, according to Stephan Oberreti, MSF’s head of mission, who said there is no water or electricity yet at the camp. “If this is another Moria with better tents, with people kept for months on end in bad conditions, that’s not good enough,” he said.
Opposition to the new facility is also strong among locals and NGOs. Stratis Kytelis, the mayor of Mytilini, a town near Moria, said his constituents were dead set against keeping migrants on the island indefinitely. “We cannot hold the burden anymore,” he said. “This is the will of the people of Mytilini, but also of the refugees and migrants. They want to leave.”
Thomas von der Osten-Sacken of Stand by Me Lesbos, a local NGO, said the idea of a permanent structure to handle asylum claims is not a bad one in itself. But the facility would need to have functioning amenities and ensure migrants are not stuck there for months on end, something many don’t trust the Greek government to be able to guarantee.
Migrants enter a new temporary site in Lesbos on September 17, 2020 | Manolis Lagoutaris/AFP via Getty Images
Ultimately, the future of Lesvos and its neighboring islands depends on whether a permanent relocation mechanism can be negotiated at an EU level to distribute new arrivals among EU countries, said Angeliki Dimitriadi, a senior research fellow specializing in migration at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP).
The issue has been the greatest sticking point within the bloc since the 2015 migrant crisis, with some EU governments fiercely opposed to so-called quotas on how many migrants to take in.
Even if Greek authorities succeed in getting migrants off the islands — the government has said 6,000 of the migrants on Lesvos would be transferred to the mainland by Christmas, and the rest by Easter — the one-off solution would not solve the underlying problem, which is a lack of a streamlined system to deal with new arrivals, according to Dimitriadi. As that is not something that is necessarily in the EU’s interest, NGOs aren’t hopeful this will happen, she said.
“The hotspots in Greece have evolved because of mismanagement, but also as a message of deterrence that was backed by the EU and its member states,” said Dimitriadi. “And this is a message the EU does not want to shift away from.”