The fire in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos has revealed the full hypocrisy of the European Union’s refugee policy. Pressure is growing to finally take action. Shahrzad made it. She managed to escape the flames that transformed Moria, Europe’s largest refugee camp, into a wasteland of scorched earth. But now she doesn’t know where to go next. A shy 25-year-old from Afghanistan with delicate features, Shahrzad is sitting in front of the burned-out camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Wednesday evening with her husband and two small children. What next? “We don’t know,” she says. They have their documents with them, she says, but little else. “We have hardly anything to eat, just a bit of water. Nobody tells us anything.” The family had been living in Moria for eight months when the fire broke out on Tuesday night, and they were sleeping in their container in the camp. “It was cold. We were wrapped up in our blankets,” Shahrzad says. Then, she smelled smoke. And she knew immediately that something was wrong. “We woke up. When we saw the flames and heard people yelling, we packed up the kids and ran out into the darkness up the hill.” They watched the flames in disbelief. Once again, their lives were being dissolved into nothingness. (…) The EU sees itself not only as an economic and political power, but also as a moral power. But on Lesbos, the bloc has forfeited whatever might have been left of its moral authority. It is no accident, no act of negligence, that asylum-seekers have been locked up and humiliated in Moria. It is an element of EU migration policy. A walk through Moria before the fire revealed one of the filthiest, most dangerous places in all of Europe. The people here lived crammed together beneath tarps, with rotting garbage strewn everywhere and streams blocked by dams of plastic waste. The situation on the island had only grown worse in recent weeks due to the corona crisis. Long before that, though, and long before the fire, Moria had already become a symbol of European bigotry. Berlin-based political adviser Gerald Knaus has referred to the camp as a “Guantanamo for refugees.”
via spiegel: Europe’s Shame The Moria Catastrophe and the EU’s Hypocritical Refugee Policy
