A teenage girl being hosted in 2019 at the notorious Moria refugee/ migrant “hotspot” on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos at one point faced a death by stoning at the camp because she refused to marry a man selected for her by her family, Deputy Health Minister Eirini Agapidaki recalled in an interview this week.
Agapidaki, a psychologist by training, recounted the dire conditions she faced the summer of 2019 when she was appointed as the special secretary for the protection of unaccompanied minors in the then newly elected Mitsotakis government. Moria generated international headlines for its squalid and dangerous conditions after the unprecedented migrant crisis in 2015 saw more than one million foreign nationals – mostly from the Middle East and particularly Syria – land on a handful of eastern Aegean islands after being ferried from the opposite Turkish coast to seek asylum and travel to other EU destinations.
The crisis and its subsequent handling by the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government headed up by leftist PM Alexis Tsipras were repeatedly vilified by the opposition and much of the media in Greece and abroad.
Speaking on the Mega Channel program Face2Face, Agapidaki described her experience leading the special secretariat unit and what she billed as a transition “from chaos to a more organized system” of protection and care.
Agapidaki said that when she assumed her duties, there was no accurate data on the number of unaccompanied minors that had entered Greece as undocumented migrants or asylum seekers.
In recalling the shocking experience, she said:
“Various things were happening there (Moria), including drug trafficking… There were also cases that amounted essentially to human trafficking. The Hazara population from Afghanistan, you know, those very beautiful girls with green eyes that we’d seen in National Geographic and on magazine covers, these children rarely managed to survive. They would fall into the hands of human trafficking networks.
“It was during the chaos of the migrant crisis, and especially in Moria, that a mother had agreed to marry off her 17-year-old daughter to someone there, and because the girl resisted, the community had organized a stoning.”
Agapidaki said the teen was removed from the closed facility at Moria and relocated out of harm’s way to a shelter for unaccompanied minors, where she later learned that the former was doing very well in school.
Refugees and undocumented migrants entering a new camp at Kara Tepe area, seven days after the catastrophic fire in the Moria camp, Lesvos, Greece on September 14, 2020.
