The event took place on Monday morning in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. As a result of the accident, a six-year-old boy has died, who has been taken to Donostia Hospital.

The cause of the fire is unknown, but in terms of the safety of the people living on the site, the conditions of the camp are not favourable. Journalist Irene Redondo told El Salto that people turn on fires to cope with the cold. Thus, “and depending on the state of the electrical installation, something like this could be expected to occur.” The Moria camp, which has a capacity of 3,000 people, has long overtaken the capacity, and currently has over 19,400 refugees.

This Monday is not the first fire in a refugee camp. In the same Morian there was another fire in September and a third fire in December in the Kara Tepe camp, in each of which a woman died.

Need to evacuate camps

The institutions have once again stressed the need to evict refugee camps for various reasons, according to Interior.

On the one hand, the conditions of the camp are miserable; refugees are overcrowded, and the situation is aggravated when the Greek Government has suspended the right to seek asylum for refugees after the opening of its borders.

To that must be added the violence being suffered by refugees – including NGOs and journalists – by fascists in recent weeks. Following the opening of Turkey’s borders, groups of fascists are also closing the country’s borders and are conducting attacks on refugees, journalists and NGOs, among others.

To all this, we must add the threat of the coronavirus. The first case detected last week on the island is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) that there are no plans to cope with the spread of the virus in the displaced camps. In a statement, he said that “the risk of spreading the virus among the camp’s neighbours is extremely high, due to the lack of adequate sanitation services and the limitation of medical care.” The urgent need to evacuate the camp was thus noted.