Idomeni:
Greek riot police move in before dawn to clear out refugee camp
Operation
under way to finish relocating around 8,400 people from informal
settlement on Macedonian border to purpose-built camps, say Greek
authorities
Associated Press in
Greece
Tuesday 24 May 2016
05.40 BST
Greek authorities
have begun an operation to evacuate the country’s largest informal
refugee camp of Idomeni.
The operation began
at dawn on Tuesday and journalists were barred from the area.
Government and police officials have said the people in Idomeni will
be moved gradually to newly completed, organised camps.
About 20 riot police
units, comprising a total of about 400 police, were in Idomeni for
the operation.
Idomeni is located
on the Greek-Macedonian border, where more than an estimated 8,400
people have been living for months.
The government’s
spokesman for the refugee crisis, Giorgos Kyritsis, said police would
not use force.
The camp sprang up
on what began as an informal pedestrian border crossing for refugees
and migrants heading north to Europe, is home to an estimated 8,400
people. Greek police and government authorities have said the
residents will be moved gradually to newly completed, organised
camps.
Journalists were
barred from the camp, stopped at a police roadblock a few miles away
on a highway junction leading to the nearby village of Idomeni.
Twenty buses carrying various riot police units were seen heading to
the area while a police helicopter observed from above.
More than 54,000
refugees and migrants have been trapped in financially struggling
Greece since Balkan and European countries shut their land borders to
a massive flow of people escaping war and poverty at home. The vast
majority are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly a million
people have passed through Greece, the vast majority arriving on
islands from the nearby Turkish coast.
The government has
been trying to persuade people staying in Idomeni, who include
hundreds of families with young children, to leave the area and head
to organised camps. This week it said its campaign of voluntary
evacuations was already working, with police reporting that eight
buses carrying about 400 people left Idomeni on Sunday. Others took
taxis heading to the country’s main northern city of Thessaloniki
or a nearby town of Polycastro.
On the eve of the
evacuation operation, few at the camp appeared to welcome the news.
“It’s much
better here than in the camps. That’s what everybody who’s been
there said,” Hind Al Mkawi, a 38-year-old refugee from Damascus,
told the Associated Press on Monday evening.
“I’ve heard [of
the pending evacuation] too. It’s not good … because we’ve
already been here for three months and we’ll have to spend at least
another six in the camps before relocation. It’s a long time. We
don’t have money or work, what will we do?”
Abdo Rajab, a
22-year-old refugee from Raqqa in Syria, has spent the past three
months in Idomeni, and said he was considering paying smugglers to be
taken to Germany clandestinely.
“We hear that
tomorrow we will all go to camps,” he said. “I don’t mind, but
my aim is not reach the camps but to go Germany.”
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