Greek authorities evacuate refugees, migrants from Athens old airport

Source: Xinhua| 2017-06-02 23:33:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan
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by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, June 2 (Xinhua) -- A Greek police operation, evacuating hundreds of refugees and migrants from the Athens old airport of Hellenikon, ended peacefully on Friday, Greek authorities announced.

By midday, some 200 people had boarded buses hired by the International Organization of Migration and were transferred from the abandoned airport's arrivals hall to organized structures near the Greek capital.

A total of 500 refugees and migrants had remained until this week at the makeshift camp set up a year ago at the rundown airport hall and abandoned venues built for the baseball and hockey games for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Over the past two weeks, officials of Greece's migration ministry had been briefing the remaining residents of the camp on the new state-run facilities where they will be hosted and persuaded them it was time to move on.

On Friday, entire families of refugees and migrants were bused to shelters at Oinofyta, Theves and Derveni, some 60-150 km from Athens.

More than 2,000 people had sought shelter at Hellenikon in the spring of 2016, after the closure of the Balkan route to central Europe.

Many gradually moved over the past year to state-run accommodation centers elsewhere, but despite the poor living conditions which fuelled tensions inside the makeshift camp, some refugees and migrants were reluctant to leave the site.

Victoria Christensen Lopez, field coordinator with Doctors Without Borders in Athens, told Xinhua that it was reasonable for people suffering from depression to feel more anxious about the future despite assurances that they are transferred to better structures.

The organization had been offering mainly medical assistance to the residents of Hellenikon camp over the past year, she said, but in the last two weeks upon a request by authorities in preparation for the operation NGOs were requested to stop going inside. On Friday the site was sealed off by police.

"All I can say is that as a medical actor we have been present at Hellenikon for over a year now, since last April. In that time we have done over a thousand mental health consultations. We are basically concerned about the continuity of care of this vulnerable population," Lopez said.

"We see a lot of anxiety and depression among this population due to the journey they have had, conditions they have lived in, what they fled from, and very importantly the uncertainty about the future," she said.

Approximately 62,000 refugees and migrants currently remain stranded throughout Greece, according to the latest official count of the Greek Migration Policy ministry.

The debt-laden country had been heavily criticized by NGOs initially for failure to provide adequate aid to the more than one million refugees who landed on Greek shores since 2015.

In the first year, thousands of people were living out in the open under the hot sun or during freezing temperatures during the winter with little food and support.

In recent months with the increased assistance of other European partners, state-run facilities have expanded and living conditions have improved.

Athens has repeatedly called on other EU member states to meet their pledges and receive more refugees under the EU relocation program agreed in 2015.

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