Don't exploit migrants for politics, pope says on refugee island-[REPORT]

Pope Francis condemned the exploitation of refugees for political propaganda on Sunday (December 5) as he paid his second visit to a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, a main entry point for migrants that has become a symbol of the plight of refugees.

Francis, who first visited Lesbos in 2016 and took 12 Syrian refugees back to Italy with him, returned briefly as part of his five-day trip to Cyprus and Greece to meet with refugees at the Mavrovouni camp, which holds about 2,300 people.

As he entered the camp, Francis greeted and shook hands with dozens of asylum-seekers, including young children, who lined up to see him.

"I am here to see your faces and look into your eyes. Eyes full of fear and expectancy, eyes that have seen violence and poverty, eyes streaked by too many tears," he said.

Francis for the second straight day chided those who use the migration crisis for political ends.

"It is easy to stir up public opinion by instilling fear of others," he said, adding that people who are anti-immigrant "fail to speak with equal vehemence" about the exploitation of the poor, wars, and the arms industry. "The remote causes should be attacked, not the poor people who pay the consequences and are even used for political propaganda," he said.

He lamented that "little has changed with regard to the issue of migration" since his last visit.

"Let us not hastily turn away from the shocking pictures of their tiny bodies lying lifeless on the beaches. The Mediterranean, which for millennia has brought different peoples and distant lands together, is now becoming a grim cemetery without tombstones…Let us not let our sea be transformed into a desolate sea of death, " he said.

The camp, set up in an old army firing range, is made up of dozens of prefabricated structures, some similar to shipping containers and other, smaller ones made of plastic. The spaces between the structures are like streets of a bleak village where people live in limbo. Baby carriages and children's tricycles leaned on the home of one Afghan couple.

Sitting on a chair under a tent with the sea behind him, the pope listened to Christian Tango Mukaya, a 30-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo who has been at the camp with two of his children for a year. He has not had contact with his wife and another child since he arrived.

"I'd like to thank you for the solidarity and the humanity that you showed to us, your children, migrants, refugees who are in Lesbos, in Greece and elsewhere in the whole world. May God acknowledge your actions," said Mukaya.

Francis said it was "distressing" to hear that some European leaders wanted to use common funds to build a wall and put up barbed wire to keep immigrants out.

As grim and bleak as Mavrovouni is, it is a marked improvement over Moria, which human rights groups decried for its squalid and overcrowded conditions.

Greece has long been the main entry point into the European Union for migrants and refugees fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people arrived on Lesbos's beaches in 2015 after crossing on boats from Turkey.

"All these years Greece lifted an unequal burden from the migrants and refugees crisis that is testing all of the Mediterranean, the sea that unites us, " said Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou. " But dealing with it surpasses its national borders, it constitutes a common responsibility of Europe."

 

 

 

 

REUTERS