Government says it will step up transfers to the mainland after unrest at overcrowded camp

This article is more than 11 months old

This article is more than 11 months old

Greek authorities are scrambling to deal with unrest at a heavily overcrowded migrant camp on Lesbos after a fire there left at least one person dead.

Officials said they had found the charred remains of an Afghan woman after the blaze erupted inside a container used to house refugees at the Moria reception centre on Sunday. The fire was eventually extinguished by plane.

More than 13,000 people are now crammed into tents and shipping containers with facilities for just 3,000 at Moria, a disused military barracks outside Mytilene, the island’s capital, where tensions are rising.

“A charred body was found, causing foreign [migrants] to rebel,” said Lefteris Economou, Greece’s deputy minister for citizen protection. “Stones and other objects were hurled, damaging three fire engines and slightly injuring four policemen and a fireman.”

The health ministry said 19 people including four children were injured, most of them in the clashes. There were separate claims that a child died with the Afghan woman.

Greece’s centre-right government said it would immediately step up transfers to the mainland. The camp is four times over capacity. “By the end of Monday 250 people will have been moved,” Economou said.

Like other Aegean isles near the Turkish coast, Lesbos has witnessed a sharp rise in arrivals of asylum seekers desperate to reach Europe in recent months.

“The situation was totally out of control,” said the local police chief, Vasillis Rodopoulos, describing the melee sparked by the fire. “Their behaviour was very aggressive, they wouldn’t let the fire engines pass to put out the blaze, and for the first time they were shouting: kill police.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People flee teargas fired by riot police after a fire at Moria camp on Lesbos. Photograph: Giorgos Moutafis/Reuters

But NGO workers on Lesbos said the chaos reflected growing frustration among the camp’s occupants. There have been several fires at the facility since the EU struck a deal with Turkey in 2016 to stem the flow of migrants. A woman and child died in a similar blaze three years ago.

“No one can call the fire and these deaths an accident,” said Marco Sandrone, a field officer with Médecins Sans Frontières. “This tragedy is the direct result of a brutal policy that is trapping 13,000 people in a camp made for 3,000.

“European and Greek authorities who continue to contain these people in these conditions have a responsibility in the repetition of these dramatic episodes. It is high time to stop the EU-Turkey deal and this inhumane policy of containment. People must be urgently evacuated out of the hell that Moria has become.”

Greece currently hosts around 85,000 refugees, mostly from Syria although recent arrivals have also been from Afghanistan and Africa. Close to 35,000 have arrived this year, outstripping the numbers in Italy and Spain.

It is a critical issue for the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who won office two months ago promising to crack down on migration.

Aid workers warn of catastrophe in Greek refugee camps Read more

Mitsotakis raised the matter with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York last week, and Greece’s migration minister and the head of the coastguard will fly to Turkey for talks this week.

Ministers admit the island camps can no longer deal with the rise in numbers.

Government spokesman Stelios Petsas announced that a cabinet meeting called to debate emergency measures had on Monday decided to radically increase the number of deportations of asylum seekers whose requests are rejected.

“There will be an increase in returns [to Turkey],” he said. “From 1,806 returned in 4.5 years under the previous Syriza government, 10,000 will be returned by the end of 2020.”

Closed detention centres would also be established for those who had illegally entered the EU member state and did not qualify for asylum, he added.

However, Spyros Galinos, until recently the mayor of Lesbos, who held the post when close to a million Syrian refugees landed on the island, told the Guardian: “This is a bomb that will explode. Decongestion efforts aren’t enough. You move more to the mainland and others come. It’s a cycle that will continue repeating itself with devastating effect until the big explosion comes.”