SAMOS, Greece — Greece on
Monday moved asylum seekers to the first of new EU-funded "closed"
facilities on its islands, built to replace chaotic and crime-ridden informal
camps but raising hackles of activists who say that controls on access make
them into prisons.
اضافة اعلان
Two rows of barbed-wire fence
surround the new Zervou camp on the Aegean island of Samos, designed to house
3,000 people and which also has surveillance cameras, X-ray scanners, and
magnetic doors.
The new facility opens just over a
year after fire destroyed the notoriously overcrowded Moria camp on Lesbos,
then Europe's biggest migrant settlement.
The blaze sparked a chaotic exodus
of more than 12,000 people, drawing global attention to Athens' struggle to
cope with the massive wave of migrants fleeing war and hunger, as well as the
tensions this created on islands that are a major jumping-off point for those
seeking refuge in Europe.
"We are worried about a new
wave, either from Afghanistan or from the four million migrants that Turkey
holds," East Samos Mayor Georgios Stantzos told AFP.
While the scale of the new camp was
"frightening,” he said, it was a "lesser evil" compared with the
uncontrolled and overwhelmed system in place now.
Greece says the new camps on Samos,
Leros, Lesbos, Kos, and Chios aim to tackle overcrowding, unsanitary
conditions, rats, and crime that plague some existing facilities.
Critics charge the controls — which
include night-time curfews and a detention center — turn camps into prisons for
some of the world's most vulnerable people and reflect a government hostile to
asylum seekers.
At the entrance of the new camp,
police lined up residents in front of the magnetic steel gates, checking for
weapons or other dangerous items.
Migrants were handed clean
bedsheets, and shown how to use the magnetic cards and fingerprint readers to
get in and out.
Afghans Aadela and her husband Ahmad
Rezaei were among the dozens boarding buses on Monday to move to Zervou, hours
after a fire torched a part of the Vathy camp where they had been living for
two years — in reality a slum outside the town of that name in Samos.
"We have no luck," said
Aadela, straining under a large sack.
"The new camp is (a) problem,
it’s very far away from the city, I don't like it there,” said her husband.
Some asylum seekers held boxes
containing cats from the old camp, where rats were an ever-present menace.
Of about 400 people at Vathy, 270
have said they want to move to Zervou, Manos Logothetis, general secretary for
asylum at the Greek migration ministry, told AFP.
As many as 200 people would be moved
on Monday, with the remainder the following day, Logothetis said.
Pilot project
The Samos camp will serve as a pilot
for the other so-called closed and controlled access facilities.
It includes a detention center for
migrants who break the rules, or whose asylum claims have been rejected and are
to be deported.
Occupants will only be able to enter
via fingerprint scanners and electronic badges.
Gates will remain closed at night
and disciplinary measures await those who return after 8 pm.
The EU has committed 276 million
euros for the new camps on islands that receive most of the migrants coming by
sea from neighboring Turkey.
The local community, which had for
years demanded the relocation of all the migrants to mainland Greece and
Europe, has also opposed the construction of the new Zervou camp.
The Vathy camp on Samos was
originally designed to hold about 680 people but at some point, it ballooned to
more than 7,000.
The new camp offers "safety and
humanitarian values", Logothetis said.
Some people "think that it’s
prison, but I don’t," said Didier Tcakonmer, 28, from Cameroon, who has
spent the past two-and-a-half years in Samos.
"It will be better than here
— no mosquitoes, no rats," he said.
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