November 25, 2016 — Responding to the deaths of a woman in her sixties and a six year old boy in a fire at the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Panos Navrozidis, IRC’s country director in Greece said:
"The loss of innocent lives last night at Moria, the overcrowded facility on the Greek island of Lesbos, is a damning indictment of the ineptitude of European leaders’ response to the refugee crisis. Earlier this week the IRC warned that unless immediate steps are taken to improve the response for refugees stranded in Greece, lives would be lost. It gives us absolutely no pleasure to be shown correct.
"Humanitarian actors have been raising the alarm on conditions at Moria for several months now. It is a facility with the estimated capacity to accommodate 1,200 and which has been increasingly overcrowded since the implementation of the EU-Turkey deal. There are currently an estimated 2,700 people living at the site; the conditions in which they are expected to live are only exacerbated by the onset of winter.
"As a humanitarian, it is soul crushing to see events like this happen within the European Union. It is an abdication of our responsibility as global leaders that we, in Europe, refuse to do better for some of the world’s most vulnerable.”
The IRC has sent a team to Moria to assist with the rebuilding of tents which were damaged in last night’s fires. The IRC is also supplying an additional 100 tents to replace some of those which were destroyed. The IRC would like to see commitments from all parties involved in this response to dramatically improve conditions at Moria.
For more on what needs to be done to help the 60,000 people now stranded in Greece, read this report More than Six Months Stranded – What Now? which was prepared jointly by 12 national and international organizations operational in Greece.