Athens News Agency visits Moria for in-depth look at the Lesvos refugee and migrant camp




The problem with Moria, according to a migration policy ministry official at Greece’s largest migrant reception facility, was that “there is more than just one Moria.”

Speaking to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA) on Saturday morning, as he made preparations for the departure of another 400 asylum seekers to the mainland on Monday, the official pointed out that the bloated camp with its 8,600 residents was actually the second-largest urban conglomeration on the entire island of Lesvos, after its capital Mytilene.
Efforts to relieve overcrowding that have stretched facilities at the reception and identification centre to breaking point are now underway, with 400 scheduled to leave on Monday, another 80 on Tuesday, 400 on Wednesday and 600 on Thursday and Friday.
Authorities aim to have transferred a total of 2000 asylum seekers to camps on the mainland by the end of the month and another 1000 in the first third of October, sending them to migrant centres in Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Grevena and Philippiada.
“Was it really necessary for things to reach breaking point for people to leave the camp,” ANA asked the hotspot’s director Yiannis Balbakakis.
“Who says people haven’t left Moria,” he replied, noting that a total of 8,406 people had left Moria between January 1 and September 19. According to Balbakakis, the island would now be completely empty if there had been no new arrivals but the pace of arrivals since the start of the year had far exceeded that of departures, with a total of 11,934 migrants reaching the island, or roughly 3,500 more than those that left.
The total number of migrants and refugees officially residing on Lesvos is currently 10,841 as of September 21, of which 8,706 live in Moria, 1,191 in the Lesvos municipality camp Kara Tepe, 748 in facilities managed by the NGO “Iliachtida”, 91 in a former PIKPA facility and 105 held in the guarded pre-departure facility within the Moria camp.
The camp is divided into a bewildering puzzle of zones and sections, including a ‘safe zone’ where access is restricted to the unaccompanied underage girls that live there and staff that work there, as well as areas for new arrivals, a neighbouring olive grove managed by an NGO, all of which comprise the anarchic “town” that has grown around the Moria camp.
A tour in the facility reveals that most of the hotspot is “open access” with residents and the 300 staff free to come and go, though visitors require permission and an escort to enter.
“Moria is not a prison,” Balbakakis notes, adding that it does not and could not work that way. Inspection reveals that the “many Morias” can be split into roughly two: the interior of the camp that is entirely supervised by the migration policy ministry and an “exterior Moria” that receives the ‘spillover’ from the main camp and is under the supervision of NGOs, or in some cases no one at all.
The interior of the camp contains ISO huts and UN tents, as well as toilets, showers and other hygiene facilities that, according to Balbakakis, meet the UN-mandated ratios. There are also “shops” set up by migrants and areas to cook, wash clothes, get haircuts or buy teas and areas where food and water is distributed to residents – a process that involves long queues, short tempers and occasional conflicts and clashes.
The areas outside the camp include a rented olive grove managed by an official and internationally recognised NGO, which aims to provide shelter in humane conditions for those that don’t fit inside the facility, though its activities have incensed residents of the local village of Moria who have made complaints of an illegal permanent extension of the camp.
North of this section are areas housing new arrivals that don’t fit anywhere else and also some that don’t wish to live inside the centre and have set up their own, separate camps. This section supplies many of the images of Moria broadcast in the international media, with makeshift facilities, illegal and dangerous power supply connections, rubbish strewn everywhere and inadequate hygiene.
This area also serves as a hotbed of every type of criminal activity and is accessible to all comers, with locals coming here for illegal transactions that includes sales of tobacco, alcohol, drugs and even prostitution, sources claimed.
According to Balbakakis, reports of children attempting suicide and self-harming were “exaggerated” and many were made by NGOs that were not actually operating on Lesvos. “That is not to say that such incidents don’t exist, especially those of rapes. But they occur at the same rate as they do outside Moria, in modern and organised societies,” he said.
Balbakakis admitted that the facility has real problems, with 52 pct of its population currently housed in tents (4,500 people), but suggested that the complaints were motivated more by frustration by the people trapped on Lesvos as a result of the EU-Turkey Statement. He also blamed the circulation of rumours that he said bordered on “fake news” that targeted both those inside Moria and those outside, by parties that stood to gain in various ways.
“I hear that Moria is ‘hell’ and that Moria is a ‘place of torture’ all the time. Nevertheless, Moria is the place where 300 and more people continue to battle every day, giving their heart and soul to make this new town work. A town built without infrastructure that gradually came to be the second-largest on the island, after Mytilene. It is not a place of torture because no one is tortured. It is not a hell because there is no paradise in such cases. It is a difficult situation that it is our duty to manage,” he said, urging critics to come look at the camp and the efforts being made for themselves.

Source: ANA-MPA

Hellasjournal - Newsletter


%d bloggers like this: