Another Greek Tragedy

Moria, a former Greek military base, is a filthy overcrowded migrant camp on the island of Lesbos where fights over food are common and violence is rife. Migrants speak of rain, cold and illness, lack of food and safety, dirty toilets and water shortages. Women have told humanitarian organisations they feel unsafe at night and sanitary conditions have been described by aid groups "horrendous," with over 100 people sharing one toilet. More than 12,000 people - mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq - four times its capacity. Moria camp is buckling under the pressure of thousands of migrants, so much so that the camp has spilled out of its gates onto the surrounding fields. Since the European Union struck a deal with Ankara in 2016 to cut off refugee and migrant flows to Greece from Turkey, asylum seekers have been barred from leaving any of the Greek island camps set up to process them until their claims are assessed. Four other island camps near Turkey are also holding thousands of people.

Jan Ali Razaiem said he made the long journey from his home in Afghanistan to Greece for a better future for his two sons. "If I had known what it was like here, we wouldn't have come here; death would have been better that this," he told Reuters. 

Hundreds of asylum seekers protested conditions at Greece's biggest migrant camp on Lesbos on Tuesday after a woman was killed in a fire there, marching towards the island's capital before being halted by police. Holding signs reading "Moria is hell" and "We want security and freedom", the protesters were prevented from marching farther than a few hundred metres from the camp's gates by around two dozen riot police.The woman's death on Sunday was the third there in two months. An Afghan teenager was killed in a fight in August and a five-year-old Afghan boy was accidentally run over by a truck while playing in a cardboard box outside the camp in September.

"Keeping people on the islands in these inadequate and insecure conditions is inhumane and must come to an end," said a spokeswoman for United Nations refugee agency UNHCR