Robert Stevens
Brutal anti-migrant policies claimed the life of at least one woman and possibly a child in a fire at the Moria camp on the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos.
Moria is a hellhole, established by the 2015-2019 pseudo-left Syriza government, where refugees and asylum seekers are held under intolerable conditions, pending deportation. Ostensibly built to house 3,000 people, it now hosts 12,000 in squalid conditions.
According to reports, after months of protests and repression by riot police, two fires broke out. One was contained but the other quickly spread, with large sections of the camp engulfed in flames.
Migrants and refugees stand next to burning house containers at the Moria refugee camp, on the northeastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, Sunday, Sept. 29, 2019 [InTime News via AP]
On Sunday, the authorities at first reported no fatalities. But UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) Greece tweeted, “we learned with deep sadness that the lives of a woman and a child were lost in a fire on Lesvos today.” The BBC later reported, “They say the charred body of a woman was found at Moria camp. But unconfirmed reports say there was another victim, a child.”
The Guardian reported, “The body of the woman was taken to the island’s general hospital while the body of the child was handed over to authorities by migrants.”
It added, “The death toll, however, was unclear. One witness said three people died as a result of the fire, which spread to six or seven containers used as shelters. ‘We found two children completely charred and a woman dead. We gave the children covered in blankets to the fire brigade,’ Afghani migrant Fedouz, 15, said.
“An AFP [Agence France-Presse] correspondent saw two bodies, one surrounded by weeping family members.”
Other sources Monday cited the Greek Health Ministry that only one person died. The Greek Reporter website said, “A child which was initially thought to have been also killed, is injured but is recovering at a local hospital having sustained burns.”
It is unclear how the fires started. Greek daily Kathemerini reported, “The fire inside the camp started shortly after 5 p.m., about 20 minutes after another blaze in an olive grove just outside the facility where hundreds of asylum seekers who cannot be accommodated inside the overcrowded camp are living in tents and other makeshift shelters.”
In an indication of the appalling conditions endured by thousands at the camp, the main fire started in one of the converted shipping containers the migrants live in, in grossly overcrowded circumstances.
After some of the migrants protested that firefighters were too slow to respond to the blaze, riot police met them with volleys of teargas. Harrowing photos and video with the camp burning in the background show men, women and children desperately seeking to flee the fire and teargas attack.
A video accompanying a Reuters news report showed scenes from the fire and its aftermath, revealing more of the horrific conditions that those in the camp live in surrounded by high fences and razor wire. Among the shocking scenes in the clip are those showing burnt out shipping containers stacked on top of each other with migrants packed around them like sardines.
A photo of a half-naked man carrying a similarly clad child—with both engulfed in teargas and fleeing past dilapidated wooden sheds that serve as shelters, with bin bags strewn by his feet—was taken by Giorgos Moutafis of Reuters. It and other photos can be viewed here .
The conservative New Democracy government is planning further repression, with the Guardian reporting, “Additional officers were sent from Athens in C-130 army planes, although local police sources said calm had returned to the camp by 11 p.m. GMT [Sunday].”
Built on land that once housed a military compound, the refugees and asylum seekers are held captive in a place that Human Rights Watch in 2017 described as “unfit for animals.” Migrants at the camp have long demanded that they be transferred to more hospitable and civilised living conditions on the Greek mainland.
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