ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece should not be burdened with the task of managing migration for the European Union, or be accused of not saving people at sea, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday, a month after a deadly shipwreck.
The Greek coast guard rescued 104 people but hundreds of migrants drowned after an overloaded boat capsized and sank in international waters off Greece’s Pylos on June 14, in one of Europe’s deadliest shipping disasters in recent years.
The causes of the shipwreck are still being investigated. Survivors have said that the ship capsized after a disastrous towing attempt by the Greek coast guard, which Greece denies.
Mitsotakis, who won an election on June 25, said on Monday that his country sits on the external border of the “very dangerous” Mediterranean crossing, a route migrants and refugees increasingly use to enter the EU.
He said the EU’s recent deal on migration was a positive step but it was not the only solution to the issue, which he said was “fundamentally a European problem” and the EU bloc had to work hard to come up with a comprehensive solution.
“It is very unfair for countries such as Greece … to be burdened with the task of managing this problem or be accused of actually not saving people at sea when this is what our coast guard does every day,” Mitsotakis said from Riga, after meeting his Latvian counterpart.
“We should be placing the blame squarely on the smugglers and those who facilitate them. They are the ones who at the end of the day who are responsible for whatever tragedy takes place in the Mediterranean,” he said.
Greece is one of the main routes into the European Union for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Nearly 1 million refugees and migrants crossed from Turkey to Greece’s islands in 2015, but inflows have been significantly reduced since an EU-Turkey pact in March 2016.
Mitsotakis is expected to meet re-elected Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of a NATO Summit this week.
(Reporting by Renee Maltezou and Lefteris Papadimas; Editing by Christina Fincher)
