WELL EVERY BODY HAS THE RIGHT TO BELONG IN ANY RELIGION. THERE IS NO NEED CONVERTING ANY BODY FROM HIS/HER BELIEVE
PHOTO: Guardian News.
One of the documents distributed at the Moria detention camp.
Christian’s workers in Greece’s asylum detention
centre have tried to convert some of the Muslim detainees, who have been held
under the terms of the EU-Turkey migration deal.
According an online publication MSN, aid workers have
distributed conversion forms inside copies of Arabic versions of the St John’s
gospel to people held at the Moria detention camp on Lesvos.
The forms according to the Guardian, invite asylum seekers
to sign a statement declaring the following: “I know I’m a sinner ... I ask
Jesus to forgive my sins and grant me eternal life. My desire is to love and
obey his word.”
Muslim asylum seekers who were given the booklet said
they found the aid workers’ intervention insensitive.
“It’s a big problem because a lot of the people are
Muslim and they have a problem with changing their religion,” said Mohamed, a
detainee from Damascus. “They were trying this during Ramadan, the holiest
Muslim month.”
A second Syrian, Ahmed, said: “We like all religions,
but if you are a Christian, and I give you a Qur’an, how would you feel?”
Detainees alleged that the forms were distributed by
at least two representatives of Euro Relief, a Greek charity that became the
largest aid group active in Moria after other aid organisations pulled out in
protest against the EU-Turkey deal. The camp is overseen by the Greek migration
ministry, but aid groups perform most of the day-to-day management.
Euro Relief said it disapproved of the distribution of
conversion materials, but added it could not rule out the possibility that
individual aid workers had distributed the booklets themselves.
Euro Relief’s director, Stefanos Samiotakis, said: “I
have already taken action, so that our volunteers know very well that they
should not distribute any kind of literature. Our code of conduct … says
clearly that this is something they simply cannot do and if somebody does we
are going as an organization [to] take disciplinary actions.”
Between January 2015 and March 2016, about a million
asylum seekers had been allowed to move onwards through the Balkans after
landing in Greece from Turkey. But in March, Macedonia shut this humanitarian
corridor by closing a crossing point on the Greek-Macedonian border.
A few days later, the EU agreed a deal that could see all those landing in
Greece after 18 March deported back to Turkey.
The moves have stranded up to 57,000 asylum seekers in
Greece. – most of them on the mainland, and a few thousand detained on Greek
islands such as Lesvos, in overcrowded camps like Moria.
EU states are supposed to relocate the vast majority
of those who arrived in Greece prior to the EU-Turkey deal but progress has
been slow, with just a few hundred moved elsewhere in the continent, and aid
groups are preparing for the possibility of most of the 57,000 being stuck in
Greece for the long term.
any body who reads and understand Arabic please help us interpret the copy of the document above.
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