Two years have elapsed since the huge Moria fire gutted what became known as Europe’s most notorious refugee camp. Squalid, gargantuan and rat-infested, the barbed wire-enclosed facility was established in a former military base below a hilltop village on the Greek island of Lesbos at the height of the migrant crisis.
By the night of 8 September 2020, when the first of a series of blazes tore through the camp, it was housing more than 12,000 men, women and children – three times its capacity – and had become a stain on the conscience of a continent keen to flaunt its democratic credentials.
Twenty-four months later, Aria Tajik, an Afghan refugee, remembers the chaos after the blaze was allegedly started by inmates now facing arson charges.
“The fire swept through the camp very quickly,” she says, as her toddler daughter, Aveesta, cries in the background. “People were panicked, they were in tents shouting and screaming.”
For two weeks Tajik, her husband, Hamit, and their then four-month-old child had to fend for themselves along with thousands of others in the camp.
“It smelled awful. It was horribly overcrowded. If you were a woman you were afraid to sleep at night but at least [it provided] shelter,” recalls Tajik, who had previously held a government post as a ministerial adviser in Kabul.
“After the fire we spent weeks roaming the streets. We slept outside and for several days there was no food or water,” says the 29-year-old, describing officials on the Aegean island as being overwhelmed. “When we finally did get something to eat, we gave it to the children.”
Tajik remains on Lesbos, housed in what authorities hoped would be a temporary camp. Built on the site of a military firing range as a stopgap solution for Moria’s displaced inmates, it is on an exposed location on the coast and is blasted by icy winds in winter and searing heat in summer. Earlier this year it was home to about 1,700 men, women and children – as the Greek authorities continue to move people to camps on the mainland.
But for Tajik, as with so many others, it is as if time has stood still. “There are containers instead of tents but it is still like a jail. Checks and controls everywhere,” she says, explaining that her family’s asylum request had been rejected three times until they received a positive response in the spring.
“They kept saying we weren’t in need of asylum because of our former [high-level] jobs, despite the Taliban [takeover],” she says. “Our application has finally been accepted but we have spent months waiting for the fingerprint process [to happen] so we can get travel documents to leave Greece.
“All this waiting has made us sick. I’m on antidepressants; my husband is on antidepressants. The Europeans talk a lot about solidarity but really this camp is a big shame, a shame for Europe.”
EU containment policies have not only been blamed for trapping refugees on frontline islands such as Lesbos, but creating a mental health crisis that has led to a sharp rise in attempted suicides and cases of self-harm. The establishment of EU-funded “closed controlled-access centres” in remote areas on the islands has sparked further criticism of the treatment of refugees on Europe’s external borders.
But for Stratis Kitilis, mayor of Mytilene, Lesbos’s main port, Moria’s destruction elicits only relief.
The camp, he says, had achieved global notoriety and brought disrepute to Lesbos, which the island did not need. “It’s a huge relief, a nightmare that we have left behind,” he says. “We are very pleased that the borders, which are EU external borders, are now being properly patrolled.
“By the end of this year, a new closed controlled camp will be completed 50 miles north of Mytilene. The conditions will be much better – it will be the end of this terrible chapter.”
A music school is expected to be built on part of the site where the camp once stood. “Studies are under way,” says Kitilis. “The University of the Aegean will take over the rest.”
However, Moria is not easily forgotten – even by refugees who go on to successfully rebuild their lives. Ahmad Ebrahimi, who worked in Afghanistan’s film industry before spending six months in the camp, used his time there to create Citizen of Moria, a documentary that led to him finding film work in Athens, where he caught the attention of Talent Beyond Boundaries, a global organisation that finds opportunities for refugees and which has since helped him resettle in Australia.
Next week, the 34-year-old will move into a new house in Melbourne with his wife, Nagiz, and three children to start a new life that once must have seemed unimaginable.
“I will never forget that camp, or the rain coming into my tent because my tarp was broken, and all the rats,” he says. “It was a place where absolutely anything and everything was possible. I’m not surprised it went up in flames.”
But it was not all bad. There were volunteers – “lovely people from around the world” – who helped. “I found that beautiful, it gave me hope for humanity,” he says.
“The memory of Moria doesn’t disturb me, it is just a part of me now, so much so that I have a tattoo of my tent there, done by a refugee tattoo artist on my right arm.”
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