Days after fire destroyed the overcrowded camp, six inmates were charged with arson. Greece is now opening ‘prison-like’ secure camps in the Aegean islands as part of a growing tendency to criminalise refugees
About 11pm on the night of 8 September 2020, residents of the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos were roused from sleep by the smell of smoke and the sound of urgent voices. Sedique, a 16-year-old from Afghanistan, remembers her neighbours bellowing: “Run, run, run!” She poked her head outside her tent and saw fire burning below them on the hillside a few hundred metres away. Along with her parents and two younger siblings, she gathered documents, grabbed an armful of clothing and ran.
The first blaze had caught hold in the official camp, then spread among the clusters of tents outside its walls. At that time, an estimated 12,000 people were living in Moria, most of them in tents packed together so tightly on the steep hillsides above the main camp that there was barely room to walk between them. The flames leaped from one makeshift shelter to the next, making easy work of the plastic tarps and rickety shacks. The olive trees, too, caught fire. Embers blown on the wind caught on people’s shirts and headscarves, and on the trees and brittle grasses, as rats skittered about.
