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After the fire in Moria: refugees sleep on the street
Photo: ALKIS KONSTANTINIDIS / REUTERS
Devastating fires have destroyed the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.
The approximately 12,000 people who lived in the camp are in dire need of help.
Now the city leaders of ten large German municipalities have agreed in a joint letter to Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) to accept refugees from the burned down camp.
In the letter they appeal to Merkel and Seehofer to pave the way for this, as the editorial network Germany (RND) reported on Thursday evening.
The letter was signed by the mayors of Bielefeld, Düsseldorf, Freiburg, Gießen, Göttingen, Hanover, Cologne, Krefeld, Oldenburg and Potsdam.
The city leaders reaffirmed their readiness to "make a humanitarian contribution to humane accommodation for those seeking protection in Europe": "We are ready to take in people from Moria in order to defuse the humanitarian catastrophe."
So far, the Federal Ministry of the Interior has refused to accept refugees from Greece alone in Germany.
It calls for a joint European initiative.
Seehofer is therefore under strong domestic political pressure.
The coalition partner SPD assumed that he was blocking.
Merkel announced that she would accept minors
Merkel has since announced that Germany, like France, will take in underage refugees from Moria; the issue is the distribution of around 400 children and young people within the EU.
At an event organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin, the Chancellor said that she had asked the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis "what we can help".
He asked to take in the unaccompanied minor refugees.
French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed at a meeting of the EU-Mediterranean countries in Corsica that he was planning a European initiative with Merkel to take in refugees.
The camp was almost completely destroyed by the fires.
The fires that broke out on Tuesday destroyed the innermost parts of the camp, where around 4,000 people lived.
Another fire on Wednesday also largely destroyed those parts of the camp in which around 8,000 people lived in makeshift barracks and tents, according to the Ministry of Migration in Athens.
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