Papal visit This is the refugee community that receives Pope Francis in Lesbos today
Europe Pope Francis arrives in Cyprus to get closer to the migration drama
The most deafening thing about walking through the old Moria asylum seeker camp is the silence
. Of the almost 20 thousand people who came to oversaturate it, today only its horror remains captured in the cloudy air. The crunch of rubble as you walk through it, you, you, you, it marks the passage between the remains of the "shipwreck of civilization", as, not far from there, Pope Francis defined this Sunday
the scenario that is represented in the island five years after the outbreak of the refugee crisis
.
Here on the ground lies a piece of barbed wire with a little pink jacket wrapped around it;
beyond, the charred skeleton of one of the tents that once housed the longings of thousands of people fleeing poverty;
In the background of what remains of this installation, in a concrete brick wall that, as such, survived the great fire that ravaged this place in September last year, someone left another imperishable detail:
a large and pulsating reddish heart crossed by an arrow
.
Remains of the old field of Moria, caught in the flames last year.LUÍS MIQUEL HURTADO
No one clearly knew how the fire started.
Boredom had taken hold of Lesbos
. The paralysis of the administrative machinery, in charge of processing asylum applications, had become even more flu-like as a result of the pandemic. Thousands of irregular migrants, some crammed into Moria's barracks and tents for years,
were mentally exhausted by the situation
, which was exacerbated by forced confinements. The satiety had also infected the neighbors.
"There are vandals and criminals everywhere," insists Stratis Pallis, who was mayor of the capital, Mitilini, for the communist party KKE, during the 1980s. "
With the refugees, everything was exaggerated
. If any of them stole some few fruits, the rumor spread that the entire harvest had been destroyed. "
Thus, the embrace of the immigrants from this island, which almost a century ago began to welcome the Greeks who arrived from the incipient Republic of Turkey, became increasingly flaccid.
Reception center for immigrants and refugees, in Lesbos.Andreas SolaroAFP
"
The situation became stressful for the newcomers, but also for those who lived here
. The immigrants were tired, the neighbors were tired," sums up Anastasia Spiliopolou, manager of the psychosocial care project that Caritas Greece is developing in Lesbos. "There must be self-responsibility at the European level. Besides, on our side, the situation must be managed in a way that respects people's human rights and dignity," he adds.
This Sunday, Pallis leaned his shoulder in the tiny group of islanders, no more than fifteen who, summoned by the Siniparxi pacifist citizen movement, tried to send the Pope a message written on a large banner: "We stand together in support of refugees ".
The cordon of riot police that was deployed in front of the small committee
, separating it from the road through which the Holy Father had to pass, turned that act into an almost Numantine form of resistance.
When the flames wiped out Moria, nearly 13,000 people were left homeless, roaming the island. That was the moment when the ultra-right small groups, whose activity had increased as Lesbos' patience had waned,
increased the pressure by launching a hunt for activists and journalists
trying to relate what happened to
Mitilini
. The response of the newly elected liberal-conservative government of New Democracy was to put the gag on the refugees.
Mavrovouni, a corner 10 minutes' walk from the capital near where one of the most welcoming refugee camps once stood - closed later -
was the site chosen to install the Reception and Identification Center
. A temporary facility where the few asylum seekers who arrive by sea today are housed in barracks or tents. Walls and barbed wire surround the facility, on the seashore.
Francisco appeared there mid-morning on Sunday
.
As soon as he arrived at the Center, the Pope turned to the few dozen immigrants selected to be able to meet with him, handing them hugs, hands and words of encouragement. Among them was Christian Tango Mukaya, a Congolese, father of two girls,
who lost his wife and one of his other daughters in a shipwreck that occurred off the coast of Lesbos
two months ago, in an incident that activists on the island blame on a 'hot return' carried out by the Greek forces.
"I want to thank you for thinking of us. I want to ask you to send a message to all of Europe to help us.
We simply want to have a normal life, like everyone else,
" Christian had told EL MUNDO a day before his meeting with the Pope, when this journalist asked him what message he intended to convey to him. The response of the Supreme Pontiff, who has made the defense of refugees
one of the spearheads of his papacy
, was immediate.
"The future of all of us is at stake, and that future will be peaceful only if it is integrated. Only if it is reconciled with the most vulnerable, the future will be prosperous.
When we reject the poor, we reject peace,
" said Francis firmly from the same front line of the migratory drama, with the peaks of the Turkish shore looming a few kilometers beyond, on the horizon. "Please stop this wreck of civilization!" The Pope begged.
The phrases that the pontiff uttered on Lesbos were, as on other occasions, especially sharp against those in Brussels suits. "
In Europe there are those who persist in treating the problem as an issue that does not concern them
." To the children present at the reception, "Let us find the courage to be ashamed in front of them, who are innocent and our future." And he pointed to the Eastern Mediterranean, where 24 people have died this year: "
Let's not let our sea turn into a sea of the dead
."
The shock at the pope's presence inside the barbed wire of Mavrovouni contrasted with the general apathy of Lesbos, whose population is largely Orthodox. "Pfff ... What's he coming for? He cares little about us on the island. He's only for the refugees.
He can take ten or fifteen of them back to Rome, the rest will still be here,
" snapped an old man, cigarette Electronic in hand, watching the small Fiat 500L utility vehicle pass by the port of Mitilini in which Francisco traveled around the island, as co-pilot.
One of the curious who came to see the papal retinue was Haidar, who arrived from Afghanistan a quarter of a century ago.
But, unlike almost all his compatriots, who prefer to reach countries like Germany, he chose to settle on Lesbos.
"I do not think it is a bad thing that he comes to Lesbos,
but his presence is more necessary in countries at war
. If he went to Afghanistan to help in their pacification, it would not be necessary for him to come here to watch over those who have had to flee from there" , argument.
Hot potato
At the stroke of noon yesterday, the Pope was leaving Lesbos;
the problem remained, a hot potato that is approached with an increasingly hard hand
. To the multiple complaints of Greek hot returns through beatings of immigrants and abandonments on the high seas, denied by Athens, has been added a more punitive policy with the activity of NGOs, which last month brought 24 of their members, and more restrictive with the freedom of movement of asylum seekers on the islands.
Brussels reports
as a success the sudden decline in the number of arrivals to the
Greek
islands
experienced in recent times, due in part to practices that Amnesty International calls "illegal". Far from the numbers of 2015 and 2016, in 2020 there were 9,714 arrivals by sea; 3,653 so far this year, 1,424 of them to Lesbos. All this despite the fact that living conditions in Turkey are in
incipient impoverishment due to the political and economic ups and downs of the country
.
"Asylum seekers only have the right to leave the Mavrovouni center once a week," says Emmanouil Chatzichalkias, a local lawyer who handles asylum cases. "The main problem is that they spend long periods here on the islands waiting for the resolution of their demand. In many cases, by the time it arrives, be it positive or negative,
these people have already fled to another place, to continental soil or even to another country,
"he explains.
The paradox, as Silvyne, a local activist, relates, is that Greece does allow people to leave the island, in a kind of decision aimed at alleviating demographic pressure. In fact, in
the camp that the Pope visited yesterday, there are only 2,200 left of the 12,000 who had been left homeless
when Moria caught fire. The reason, Silvyne believes, is that "no one wants to end up trapped in the new jail that Greece is preparing on Lesbos. Many are trying to get out of here before it is too late."
By contrast, Athens defends as a milestone having obtained 276 million euros from the European Commission
to build a series of facilities for refugees in Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos
. The one in Samos, inaugurated last September, has a better infrastructure for the accommodation of people, but also with a reverse: gates and barbed wire everywhere. The one on Lesbos is rising in a remote part of the island, more than 40 km from the capital.
"We believe that it is important that people have a good accommodation, a better place to sleep and that they are safe. Our concern has to do with the development of isolated places, that maintain distances between the newcomers and the local community. They do
not promote the integration, but isolation
", says Spiliopolou, from Cáritas, who emphasizes the psychological damage for the asylum-seeking population, in many cases people fleeing the horror of war, continue to suffer at the very gates of Europe.
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