Nearly 13,000 people have been left without shelter after a fire ravaged a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where the migrant crisis has been compounded by a coronavirus outbreak.
“We saw an exodus of people fleeing from a burning hell with nowhere to go,” Marco Sandrone, the local field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, said Wednesday. “Children are scared and parents in shock. We are relieved that there seem to be no victims, and we are working now to address the immediate needs.”
The cause of the fire is unclear, but some local authorities have suggested that arson is to blame after a clash took place between the refugees and the island residents who fear that COVID-19 will spread from the camp after 35 people tested positive for the virus.
“We have been informed about reports of tensions between people in neighboring villages and asylum seekers who were trying to reach Mytilene’s town,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Wednesday. “We urge all to exercise restraint and ask all those who were previously staying at the [camp’s Registration and Identification Center], which was under quarantine as some 35 people had tested positive with COVID-19, to restrict their movements and stay near RIC, as a temporary solution is being found to shelter them.”
The fire has forced European Union officials to scramble to care for the people at the camp that was almost totally destroyed by the fire, although initial assessments suggest that no one died in the blaze.
“We stand ready to support, with Member States,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted Wednesday. “Our priority is the safety of those left without shelter.”
The camp reportedly has “quadrupled in size” over the last year as European governments failed to agree on how to settle the migrants.
“The Greek authorities have provided whatever they could for these desperate people,” former EU migrant affairs chief Dimitris Avramopoulos told German media on Wednesday. “But it is true to say that a number of migrants were stuck, and the hot spots were overwhelmed by the big number of new arrivals.”
State authorities in Germany have offered about 1,000 refugees from the island in the wake of the fire, while German foreign minister Heiko Maas has hinted that more countries have to step up.
“With the European Commission and EU member states, we need to clarify as quickly as possible how we can support Greece,” Maas tweeted. “This also involve[s] other willing countries taking in migrants in the EU.”
Sandrone blamed the tensions on the lack of political and humanitarian support for the camp. “How can state authorities keep 12,000 people tightly trapped in inhumane conditions and tell them that they have to respect physical distancing? They have to queue even to receive some food every day,” he said. “There is no question as to the cause of this fire: The yearslong orchestration of human suffering and violence produced by European and Greek migration policies are to blame.”
