With widespread tension caused by the recent upsurge in migrant arrivals on Greece's Aegean Islands, Lesbos' mayor, Spyros Galinos, has made an urgent plea to the government to take action in order to avoid an "explosive situation."
The mayor of Lesbos, Spyros Galinos, has sent a damning open letter on Tuesday, to the Greek government's migration Minister, Giannis Mouzalas. He says that the recent increase in migrant arrivals is pushing the island to breaking point.
Around 2,300 undocumented migrants have arrived from neighboring Turkey in the past two weeks alone, and camps on Lesbos are massively overcrowded, with over 6,000 people currently being accomodated.
Read more: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/4224/more-migrants-land-in-greece
"The number of people staying in refugee and migrant reception structures has surpassed 6,000, far outstripping the maximum number of people they can accommodate. This is happening because of an increase in arrivals, coupled with the fact that there are no centralized efforts to help with relocating people to mainland Greece or elsewhere." "Lesbos cannot take in any more people."
Galinos deplores the Greek government's plan to create a new, extra reception camp on the island. He is also critical of Athens' Assertion that it the local government's responsibility to deal with the issue.
"The management of migration flows on the island has reached a very difficult and dangerously explosive situation," said Galinos, who also accused the government of holding the island's local government "hostage."
"Lesbos has already carried a huge burden in managing this ongoing humanitarian crisis and we can not take any extra weight," said Galinos."This 'tactic' of waiting until the situation gets worse so that we go into crisis mode will not be tolerated by the local community…and the creation of new structures is by no means a viable solution. In this way we are being held hostage."
Locals are furious at the mess migrants are leaving behind. It remains to be seen what the government's response will be but people are already making their thoughts clearly felt.
The Lesbos online portal, www.lesvosnews.gr, published a selection of photographs, taken by local residents, of the scenes in and around some of the camps where migrants have been staying. Such problems are inflaming the issue, and causing tensions between local residents and the migrants, while the already stretched tensions between rival ethnic rivals groups continues to result in frequent outbreaks of violence.