13. März 2016 · Kommentare deaktiviert für „Greece rules out using force against migrants and refugees“ · Kategorien: Balkanroute, Griechenland · Tags:

Quelle: The Guardian

Athens sets up reception centres to cope with 50,000 people and says it will not use teargas to move 12,000 people stranded on border with Macedonia

The Greek government has announced it will have reception centres with a capacity to host 50,000 people ready next week as figures showed the number of refugees and migrants in the country has passed 42,000.

The country’s leftist-led coalition, racing against the clock to deal with the massive influx, ruled out using force to relocate more than 12,000 men, women and children stranded in increasingly wretched conditions on the Greek-Macedonian border. Instead, it said it hoped the people who are trapped in a waterlogged camp where sanitation facilities have deteriorated and illness has become rife would understand that Europe’s Balkan corridor had been closed and choose to settle in organised shelters.

“We have to persuade them [to move] and we can’t do that using teargas,” said the deputy public order minister, Nikos Toskas. “Half the people there are women and children.”

Authorities handed out fliers urging refugees to leave the sprawling tent city that has sprung up around Idomeni because there “is no hope” they can continue their journey north into Europe following the decision of Macedonia and other Balkan states to seal the route.

Earlier this week, more than 14,000 people – including a baby boy born in a mud-clad tent to a Syrian refugee on Sunday – were caught in limbo as a result of the border closures.

With debt-stricken Greece being tested to its limits by the crisis, the European Union pledged to expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid to the country. Seen as the easiest gateway into the 28-member bloc, Greece has been on the frontline of the emergency since hundreds of thousands of people began seeking refuge on the continent after fleeing conflict and poverty in Syria and elsewhere.

“We have a moral duty as Europeans to offer this help to refugees,” the EU’s leading humanitarian aid policy maker, Christos Stylianides, told reporters after holding talks in Athens with prime minister Alexis Tsipras. “I want to be clear: Greece is not alone in these difficult times.”

Disaster relief of the sort normally distributed to developing nations has been earmarked for the myriad NGOs working out of the country under a €700m (£540m) EU aid programme announced last week. The package is due to be given the green light on Tuesday before being sent to the European parliament for further endorsement.

“The humanitarian crisis that we currently have in Idomeni is not a Greek matter, it is a European matter and we should all face it together,” Tsipras said after the meeting. He said the overstretched state apparatus, which is preparing holding facilities for 10,000 people every week, should receive financial support.

Despite the contours of an agreement being reached with Turkey at an emergency EU summit to stem the flows on Monday, increasing numbers of migrants and refugees are continuing to make the often perilous journey to Greece’s Aegean isles.

By Friday, 42,253 were inside the country, according to Athens, including 864 who landed on Greek shores on Thursday and about 1,600 who reached the Aegean island of Chios on Wednesday.

Announcing that the time had come to focus on the smuggling rings behind the illicit flows, the deputy defence minister Dimitris Vitsa, who is coordinating the Greek government’s response to the crisis, told Star TV: “We have to turn our eyes to traffickers [in Turkey] … because it is they who are selling false hope to people.”

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