‘European refugee camps are concentration camps’, pope says

This video says about itself:

Pope likens migrant holding centers to ‘concentration camps’

22 April 2017

Pope Francis urged governments on Saturday to get migrants and refugees out of holding centers, saying many had become “concentration camps”.

During a visit to a Rome basilica, where he met migrants, Francis told of his trip to a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos last year.

He met a Muslim refugee from the Middle East there who told him how “terrorists came to our country”. Islamists had slit the throat of the man’s Christian wife because she refused to throw her crucifix on the ground.

“I don’t know if he managed to leave that concentration camp, because refugee camps, many of them, are of concentration (type) because of the great number of people left there inside them,” the pope said. …

Francis praised countries helping refugees and thanked them for “bearing this extra burden, because it seems that international accords are more important than human rights”.

He did not elaborate but appeared to be referring to agreements that keep migrants from crossing borders, such as deals between the European Union (EU) and Libya and the EU and Turkey. Humanitarian groups have criticized both deals.

The pope urged people in northern Italy, home to an anti-immigrant party, to take more migrants, hoping that the generosity of southern Italy could “infect the north a bit”.

Noting that Italy had one of the world’s lowest birth rates, he said: “If we also close the door to migrants, this is called suicide.”

The basilica of St Bartholomew is a shine to Christians killed for their faith in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The European Union bosses not only blackmail the Greek leftist Syriza government into breaking their promises to the Greek voters of stopping the disastrous austerity policies.

They also pressure Greece, and other European Union member governments, into treating refugees more harshly.

Another video which used to be on YouTube used to say about itself:

Greek minister slams conditions at Idomeni refugee camp

18 March 2016

Greek Interior Minister Panagiotis Kouroumplis compared the Idomeni refugee site on the border between Greece and Macedonia to the infamous Dachau concentration camp while on a visit.

“I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this is a modern Dachau,” Kouroumplis said during his visit to the camp where thousands of people live in improvised tents, deprived of basic necessities, on Friday.

Idomeni “is a logical result of closed borders,” he said, adding that Greece “believes in Europe without borders.” Two improvised camps, hosting over 15,000 migrants, sprung up near the Idomeni crossing in late February after the Macedonian authorities closed its borders amid a massive refugee crisis in the EU.

Kouroumplis expressed regret over “the awakening of a kind of nationalism against the persecuted people” in Europe. He acknowledged that accepting 1.5 million migrants in no easy task, but said that the people stuck at Idomeni “didn’t leave their countries by choice, but were forced to flee by wars, in which Europe also participated.”

Kouroumplis is hardly the only one comparing the present refugee camps to Adolf Hitler’s camps, as we can see about Pope Francis.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV, 22 April 2017:

The situation in the Greek islands is very bad according to human rights organizations. … Migrants sleep in unheated tents, many refugees are ill and there are too few resources on the islands to recover health.

Tragedy off Lesvos: Sixteen Migrants Drown in Open Sea. By Katherine Filippeos – Apr 24, 2017: here.

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