The tense
situation on the islands of the northern and eastern Aegean, now home
to tens of thousands of refugees, mainly from predominantly Muslim
countries, is like a “time bomb ready to blow,” reports the Orthodoxia News Agency.
The locals have reached their limits and are in a constant state of
anger and sorrow as the refugees repeatedly attack and desecrate
their Orthodox holy sites.
In
particular, residents of Moria, Lesvos complain that groups of
illegal Muslim immigrants have repeatedly vandalized
churches in the area and made direct threats against the Orthodox
faith. The Church of St. Catherine is now locked, as residents
try to block the entrance and protect it from being desecrated
again.
The
windows of the church have been broken, the holy cross has been thrown
down, and the icons have been overturned. Refugees have also damaged
the chapel of Taxiarchis (the Archangel Michael), the patron saint of
Mytilini, the capital of Lesvos, breaking in to sleep there.
With the help of the police, local residents managed to kick the
refugees out of the Taxiarchis chapel, “but the picture inside the
church was tragic.”
According to a recent report from the Guardian,
there are more than 42,000 immigrants on Lesvos and a handful of
other islands, who are “unable to leave because of a
containment policy determined by the EU, they are forced to remain
on the islands until their asylum requests are processed by a
system both understaffed and overstretched.”
Police on Lesvos clashed with some 2,000 Afghani migrants and
refugees who were participating in a protest rally from the Moria camp
to Mytilini last Monday to demand better living conditions and a acceleration of asylum procedures.
The conditions at the Moira camp are widely recognized to be extremely poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment