A week after the fire that ravaged the Moria migrant camp, Greek police began on Thursday (September 17th) to evacuate some of the thousands of refugees who were left homeless.
These are routed to a new camp to be "provisional", according to the UN and Athens, which evoke Easter as the deadline for a transfer from the islands of Lesbos.
At the end of the morning, a few hundred people lined up in front of the new camp, noted an AFP journalist.
Family by family, bags in hand, some with strollers, others pulling crates full of things, the refugees were entering the camp, where they are all to be tested for Covid-19.
>> To read on InfoMigrants: "'Rather die here than go to a new camp': in Lesbos, migrants do not want another Moria"
The operation began at around 7 a.m. local time (4 a.m. GMT) on Thursday.
The police, present in force after blocking the area to Doctors Without Borders and the media, went around the tents, calmly, to gradually empty the area of its homeless and take them to the new camp hastily erected after the fire, a week ago.
"Migrants are transferred from the streets to the new structure, from abandonment to care, from health risks to public health control", welcomed the Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chryssohoïdis, present during the operation.
2,800 people in the new camp
So far, a thousand people have been transferred to the new camp during this operation, he added, stressing that this initiative "responds to humanitarian purposes" and "will continue" during the day.
According to an official of the Ministry of Migration, 2,800 people in total are currently in this camp, taking into account the migrants who entered it voluntarily in recent days.
Since the fire in Moria camp, where nearly 13,000 refugees lived in dire conditions, thousands of people had settled in makeshift shelters, on a corner of the road and in closed supermarket car parks.
Access denied to MSF during the night
Médecins sans frontières (MSF), which opened an emergency clinic in this area, was denied access overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, while rumors of evacuation were circulating, the NGO said. to AFP.
The clinic was however allowed to reopen at the end of the morning, according to an MSF statement.
The Moria camp, the largest in Europe, set up five years ago at the height of the migration crisis and decried by many NGOs for its sordid conditions, was completely destroyed by the fire, premeditated according to the authorities. Greek.
Six young Afghan migrants were arrested, four of whom were indicted for "arson".
The Greek authorities and the UN have been building a new camp since Saturday from which, they say, asylum procedures can resume.
But many refugees have refused to settle there, fearing they will be stranded again for months awaiting a possible transfer to mainland Greece or another European country.
Driven by the exhaustion of a week in the street under a blazing sun, without sanitary facilities, a movement has finally started towards the new camp, where several hundred migrants settled on Wednesday, according to humanitarians.
A "provisional" camp
On Wednesday evening, 1,000 tents, each accommodating 8 to 10 people, were erected there.
Medical tents have yet to be erected, and two quarantine zones are planned while a few dozen cases of Covid-19 have been detected - but for the time being not serious.
The objective of this new camp - "provisional", the authorities promised - is that the refugees "can gradually, and in peace, leave the island for Athens" or "be resettled elsewhere", the representative said on Wednesday. Greece of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Philippe Leclerc, who visited Lesbos.
Michalis Chryssohoïdis for his part estimated that "half" of the exiles could leave Lesbos "by Christmas" and "the others by Easter".
With AFP
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