Author: Tom Anderson | thecanary.co | 24 May 2019
Pikpa is an independent, grassroots refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. The camp provides an example of how refugees can be welcomed to Europe with solidarity. The community environment provided by Pikpa stands in stark contrast to the state-run and EU-financed Moria detention camp, which has often been called “the worst refugee camp on Earth”.
Pikpa camp is run by grassroots NGO Lesvos Solidarity. And right now, Lesvos Solidarity is calling for funds to keep the project going:
A place of refuge
Lesbos is an island in the northern Aegean Sea. It lies just off the coast of Turkey. And it has always been a place of migration into Europe. Armenian and Greek people, for example, took refugee there after the First World War during the genocides that accompanied the formation of the Turkish state.
Lesbos became a place of refuge on a mass scale again in the early 2000s, as the chaos unleashed by the West’s neo-colonial policies in the Middle East drove people out of their homes.