An echo focus on refugees described in a Minnesota newspaper

By Uma Venkata published in the Minnesota Daily

Refugees in the Aegean are existing in squalor*.  

"...we overwhelmingly tend to call those who seek safety in our country 'migrants' instead of 'refugees'”, Uma Venkata in the Minnesota Daily.

Greece is across the Aegean Sea from Turkey, and five Greek islands bear about 20,000 refugees and migrants who have escaped conflict zones through Turkey. 

One island is Lesbos, which has a few refugee camps. One of those camps is Moria, a repurposed military facility built for a capacity of 3,100 refugees. Currently, it houses more than 8,500 refugees, most of whom come from Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, but mostly Syria.

Overcrowding on this scale may make the next details easier to expect, but I’m sure we’d never be able to understand the urgency entirely without having seen or smelled it ourselves. The ratio of persons to toilet is about 70:1 and the ratio of persons to shower is about 80:1. Raw sewage and the stench of unwashed bodies is the marker of Moria. Life is spent in line for food: people line up at 4 a.m. for breakfast at 8 a.m., at 9:30 a.m. for lunch at 1 p.m. and so on. Taking this environment and extremely strained medical resources into account, you can infer the causes and effects of going without food.

These are just the tangible problems. Moria was meant to be a way station for refugees to stay in for a few days, between the harrowing journey between their home country and Europe. Refugees come to escape conflict — direct threats to their lives — in their home countries. They now remain in Moria for around 12 months, completely in the dark about their status with migration authorities and the future for themselves and their children. 

There are ethnic clashes, knife attacks, sexual assaults and suicide attempts among adults and children on an astronomical scale — all kinds of terror that living in filth, squalor and insecurity can sow. Paradoxically, many charitable NGOs have left the region in protest.

Clearly, this is a problem that requires all hands on deck. Moria and others present humanitarian crises, for which wealthy hosts are responsible. I can already hear a counterargument: why help them when all they do is hurt each other? Isn’t that barbaric? Didn’t Amy Winehouse say she can’t help you if you won’t help yourself?

She did, and she was right. But that argument and others like it cannot withstand the logic test when they are applied to the refugee crisis. Obviously, not everyone commits these crimes, and it means the people on the receiving end need to be defended and processed even more urgently. The argument doesn’t work monetarily, either: the European Union gave Athens €1.6 billion ($1.8 billion) to fund refugees between 2015 and the end of 2018, and the EU anti-fraud agency is investigating the Greek government for financial mismanagement. Moria could have been in much better shape, had it received its allocated due.

This is shameful for all those who have and had the power to alleviate the pain of refugees, who would not be here if there weren’t something worse at home.

Of course, an American can’t read this and forget our own demons. The same populist, xenophobic wave that sweeps Europe is present in the US, as well, though we overwhelmingly tend to call those who seek safety in our country “migrants” instead of “refugees.” 

Like the Middle Eastern civilians who risk their and their children’s lives on lifeboats across the sea, Central Americans risk their lives on foot to seek asylum here. We have our own Moria in detention centers that separate children from parents and leave refugees stranded, should they be allowed in at all.

Honor comes from what you do with your power for someone less powerful than you. Honor matters.

*Squalor- the state of being extremely dirty and unpleasant, especially as a result of poverty or neglect.

Pople Francis magnificent example- Muslims should follow the example

What strikes me most about the magnificent manner in which Pope Francis reached out to Muslims stranded as refugees in Lesbos, Greece is how his acceptance has risen the bar on the world's Muslims, to match his hospitality. Why is it that the Muslim nations aren't accepting more of these desperate refugees?  

Where is Indonesia? How about the Muslim population in Sri Lanka? God forbid, Singapore would accept refugee immigrants!

Here's an op-ed describing the challenging role Pope Francis has assumed with his outreach to the Syrian refugees:

The Guardian view on Pope Francis in Lesbos: he must change hearts
Pope Francis’s visit to Lesbos, was an extraordinary piece of political theatre. 

Not since John Paul II kissed the soil of his native Poland when he disembarked from a plane on his first visit as pope has there been a gesture so eloquent as Pope Francis taking three Muslim families back to the Vatican for refuge. When he was asked why there were no Christians, he replied that the Christian families that had been considered did not have their paperwork in order. 

Apart from the paperwork, the only criterion, he said, was that the refugees should be children of God. This is a direct and radical challenge to almost all the European countries’ reponses to the migration crisis. For Francis, the problem is suffering, and the immediate duty of a Christian, or of any human being, is to relieve it. This is something that most of the countries of Europe no longer appear to believe.

Since the great uprush of sympathy last year, prompted by the photographs of a dead two-year-old refugee, Alan Kurdi, sentiment has turned decisively against the migrants. 

German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was forced into a humiliating deal with Turkey to try to ensure that only refugees, not economic migrants, can reach Greece. This hasn't pacified her critics on the right, while those on the left are outraged by her decision to allow President Erdoğan to sue a German television satirist under an obsolete law against defaming foreign heads of state. 

Sweden almost entirely closed its door to refugees, and is making absurd and incredible threats to deport hundreds of thousands of them. Denmark and Norway have hardened their tone to the point where there has been talk about imprisoning all new arrivals, or confiscating valuables to pay for their stay. Britain never planned to take any significant numbers, and is entering a slow convulsion of an EU referendum where the danger is that the real subject becomes immigration rather then the niceties of trade arrangements or the bureaucracies of European integration. The largely Catholic countries of eastern Europe are resolutely opposed to the pope’s message. They want no immigrants and especially no Muslim ones. He still sees the sea where Alan Kurdi drowned, as “a cemetery”: that’s what he called it on the plane to Greece. But for the north of Europe, the Mediterranean is now a moat, and the mood is to pull up the drawbridge and hope the walls will hold.

The pope insists that his message is not political but purely humanitarian, just as he insisted that his meeting with Bernie Sanders was nothing more than good manners and that anyone who doubted that “needs a psychiatrist”. This is plain enough but not exactly straightforward. The proper sphere of politics is itself a political question, and it will be a very great political feat if the Catholic church can rebrand a contentious political question like the reception of immigrants into a simple humanitarian imperative binding on everyone, with the political arguments confined to details of implementation. But the prize will be a very great one if he succeeds. 

Whether you believe that refugees should not be allowed to drown because they are children of God, or whether, as most people in Europe would say today, they should not be allowed to drown because they have human rights, a continent that wholeheartedly lived up to those ideals would be very different and very much better.

In the background of all this lurks the very much greater and wider question of relations between Europe and Islam. As so often before, Pope Francis has distanced himself very clearly from the Catholic right, which understands western civilisation, and Christian Europe, as something fundamentally opposed to Islam, and in some sense defined by this opposition. In that mindset there are only two possible responses to the spread of Islam: submission or resistance. This is the reasoning that leads to the belief that these are also the only two possible attitudes towards Muslims, even when they are penniless and desperate refugees. But to renounce the heritage of the crusader is also to refuse that choice.

The problem then becomes one of integration. This is partly a matter of economics, since nothing so disintegrates a society as mass unemployment. It is partly a matter of politics. But it must in any case rest on a shared consciousness of common humanity, and a sense that this is more important than any differences we may have with our neighbours. And in the last analysis, that is where the Pope’s visit to Lesbos was going.

Maine Writer perspective- how will Pope Francis be able to change the hearts of the world's Muslims to accept their own?

Remembering to care for Syrians - the desperation of refugees

It's probably easy for the world too just ignore the plight of refugees. Thankfully, Pople Francis and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Batholomew I will make another effort to keep the world's attentionon on the desperate Syrian people and other refugees. Both religious leaders drew attention to the plight of the migrants and refugees by announcing an important joint visit.

Pope Francis is prepared visit Lesbos with Patriarch Bartholomew I

The heads of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, and the symbolic leader of the Eastern Orthodox, Patriarch Batholomew, churches may go to Greece as early as next week, on a trip that would signal support for migrants and refugees in that country.

Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, announced their proposed trip by church and government officials in Greece, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reported. They said the trip would happen late next week (in April 2016).

But the church leaders said the details are still being worked out. The ecumenical patriarch's website says the two leaders will visit the island of Lesbos "in the near future." The Vatican said "a definitive decision on the trip, the venue and date are yet to be made," Sylvia reports.

Both religious leaders have recently drawn attention to the plight of migrants and refugees.

"The son of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis has spoken out forcefully about the need for Europe to open its doors and heart to people fleeing persecution and poverty," Sylvia says.

The pontiff has been an outspoken critic of a recent deal between the EU and Turkey to deport migrants who arrive in Greece back to Turkey. That agreement went into effect this week, with more than 200 people deported from Greek islands.

The pope washed and kissed the feet of asylum-seeking refugees outside Rome on Holy Thursday, leading up to Easter.

The ecumenical patriarch, known as the "first among equals" among the leaders of the Orthodox church, held a prayer vigil for refugees in Novemberand dedicated his Christmas proclamation in 2015 to the state of refugees. He said that Jesus was a "political refugee" in his time and called those who persecute refugees "modern-day Herods," a reference to the king who, according to the Bible, ordered the death of every male infant in Bethlehem.

Lesbos has been named by the Orthodox church as the destination for the church leaders, and Joanna Kakissis, reporting for NPR from Athens, says it's a logical destination: it's where hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees arrived last year, and where many of those currently facing deportation are located.

God Bless Pope Francis and Patriarch Batholomew I! I pray for America's Christians to pay attention to this high level mission, and to positively respond, by agreeing to accept more refugees, into the US.