What is going on in Moria refugee camp?
Thousands of refugees have been languishing in an overcrowded camp in Greece for nearly two years
By Erik Kirschbaum
The stench of human waste, rotting food and dirty, sweat-drenched clothes mixes with the swirling smoke from makeshift campfires. It is lunchtime at the Moria refugee camp, where desperate hopes for a better life have come to this.
More than 3,500 people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia have been stranded in this overcrowded camp on the Greek island of Lesbos for up to 18 months — after surviving perilous Aegean Sea crossings in rickety boats from Turkey, about four nautical miles away.
Here, the dream of quick passage into the European Union has turned into a dead end on the EU’s far southeastern fringe. Those living in the squalor of the Moria camp are the all-but-forgotten flotsam of a refugee crisis that saw more than a million people flood into wealthier EU countries such as Germany, Sweden and Austria before the door was shut in 2016.
Refugees and other migrants have continued to trickle into Europe through Italy and other points, but the Lesbos gateway — which once led through the Balkans to Central Europe — ends here, amid the smoke and squalor.