‘Where’s the water? And the food?’, asylum seekers ask a Red Cross employee on Thursday morning, who drives past the registration and asylum seekers center of the Central Asylum Reception Organ (COA) in Ter Apel.
Since the beginning of this week, fifty white Red Cross tents have been set up in the employee parking lot. The organization normally uses the tents to provide emergency aid after an earthquake, for example, but in recent days about 200 asylum seekers have been sleeping under the white tent canvas. There is no room for them in the application center.
Ter Apel not only lacks space, the Red Cross employee noted on Thursday morning. The asylum seekers have been without food and water since Wednesday evening. There are bread packages in the asylum seekers’ center, but there is not enough food for everyone.
Limit reached
‘When our colleague sounded the alarm, we immediately tried to reach everyone at COA’, says Susan van Geijn (35), coordinator of the assistance of the Red Cross in Groningen. “They told us they couldn’t bring food and water. Their limit had been reached.’
According to those involved, the situation of the past week is a new low for the only registration center in the Netherlands. ‘We have really fallen through a lower limit’, Andrea Vonkeman, head of UNHCR Netherlands, reflects on the reception in Ter Apel.
The Red Cross speaks of an ‘inhuman’ situation. On Thursday morning, employees see camp beds being stolen from tents and small disturbances taking place in the parking lot. ‘These people have fled and are in constant uncertainty,’ says Van Geijn. ‘The fact that they don’t get any food and drink only reinforces that feeling.’
The Red Cross decides to step in. At 1 o’clock in the afternoon, after waiting for thirteen hours, volunteers hand out water and bread packages. Also in the evenings, the Red Cross takes over the responsibility for providing food from the overloaded COA employees.
Vulnerable asylum seekers
But before dinner can be served, the most vulnerable asylum seekers must be transported from the tents to nearby night shelters, where an actual roof over their heads awaits them. ‘Unfortunately, that took a while, so that the macaroni had cooled down’, says Van Geijn. ‘So we handed out bread packages again on Thursday evening.’
The help of the Red Cross is not sustainable, the organization emphasizes. ‘We are an emergency aid organization, the authorities must take responsibility for this.’
The fact that it can no longer be done like this also penetrated politics in The Hague on Friday afternoon. There, the cabinet is promoting the increasingly pressing asylum issue to an official crisis. The National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) will lead the search for quick solutions from now on.
The decision means that a crisis team will now consider housing, care and other issues that the arrival of new asylum seekers entails. Very intensive consultations will take place between the ministers involved and the mayors of the 25 security regions into which the Netherlands is divided.