For the second time, Stadskanaal is receiving asylum seekers in crisis emergency tents on Manegelaan. Ter Apel flows back and forth, municipalities hide behind support base nationally. In Stadskanaal, administrators are continuing. Sometimes you just have to help.
A maximum of 200 asylum seekers from Ter Apel will be accommodated on the soaking wet field, a few hundred meters from the center of Stadskanaal, until the end of January. It is night shelter, they are only allowed to sleep there, during the day they are in the registration center for their asylum procedure. The large, white event tents are separated by walls between the tents, so that women and children can sleep separately from the men.
It’s not luxury. Bunk beds are half a meter apart, but the tent is heated. Earplugs have been ordered for loud snorers. The refugees can receive a meal in a dining room. There are showers and clean sanitary facilities. They eat, shower and sleep there. Before the crack of dawn the tent camp is empty again. According to the municipality, 52 people spent the night in the emergency tents on the night from Sunday to Monday.
Stadskanaal has lent a helping hand before. What do residents think about the fact that relief from pressure should once again come from their municipality?
Divide fairly
If Joke Schuiling looks out of her bedroom window, she would see security guards sweeping mud from road plates. “Other municipalities turn a blind eye. We are doing it again now, because it is too sad for words how they are otherwise received. Action simply has to be taken,” says Schuiling. If someone else doesn’t do it, Stadskanaal should step into the breach again, she says. “It should be distributed more fairly.”
Schuiling knew that the crisis tents were coming before the letter from the municipality arrived. “They had already started building.” Not exactly neat, but the neighborhood accepts it. It’s a crisis. Then it cannot always be done perfectly according to the procedures you would like.
Where other municipalities hide behind the argument that there is no ‘support’ among residents, Stadskanaal has acted. It then turns out that the soup is not eaten as hot as drivers sometimes fear. A Facebook post by Mayor Klaas Sloots showing a nighttime photo of the tents with the brief accompanying text ‘The first people are sleeping…’ is followed by a storm of expressions of support from residents and more than two hundred thumbs and hearts.
‘In the Netherlands, everyone should be able to sleep in a bed, right?’
“You also see angry reactions from people on Facebook,” says another local resident. “But if you click on their name, it turns out that they come all the way from Borger-Odoorn. “What do you have to do with it?” I think.”
On the Dreef, near the tents, a man smokes a cigarette butt in his doorway. The tents also came as a surprise to him. He thinks it’s a good thing. “It doesn’t bother me at all. You don’t even notice it.” That was the case last time too. And what if it had been a regular asylum seekers’ center? He takes a drag and shrugs: “As long as it doesn’t bother me. In the Netherlands, everyone should be able to sleep in a bed, right?”
Not every refugee in Ter Apel had a bed, Jeroen van Broekhoven knows. He organizes everything around the tent camp. “A woman had been sharing an office chair with her children for days.” They slept on that too. The tents are not a five-star hotel, but the current situation in Ter Apel is a lot better. “When I see a mother with a stroller with two children in it, about two and four years old, what must they have gone through to get here?”
Measures?
Not everyone on the street is happy with the influx of asylum seekers. Last week, 1,200 people applied for asylum, compared to 300 fewer in the same period last year. The shortage on the housing market is already very great, says a woman walking her dog. “They will all get a house soon. But these people are already here. You have to do something at the European border,” says the woman. “Those tents don’t bother me.”
Some irritation among local residents. Namely that it is Stadskanaal that is forced to step in again. Stadskanaal already accommodates more than 400 asylum seekers in Musselkanaal and more than 200 Ukrainians spread across Stadskanaal. In the long term, there should be two new, smaller asylum centers that will replace the current outdated asylum centre. The rest of the country does not seem to want to move towards a solution, says a neighbor of Schuiling. “There are really enough empty buildings, such as old offices, where space can be made.”
Anger, sadness and shame
“The request initially evoked all kinds of emotions from the Stadskanaal council,” said D66 member Klaas Pals on Monday evening during an emergency debate. “From anger, to sadness and shame. That it had come to that again with our neighbors.”
“Anger that this shelter cannot be resolved properly nationally. Sadness about the situation and the position in which vulnerable people are placed by, in our view, an unwelcoming country in which we believe it is unbelievable that there are municipalities that do not want or dare not do their part.”
The politicians felt compelled to do something themselves, despite the fact that the province of Groningen is the only one to have made administrative agreements with the government about the number of asylum seekers it receives. “The council has adopted the attitude that if something needs to be arranged, we will simply arrange it. We stand for it and we do what we can.”
The full council of Stadskanaal therefore calls on other municipalities to do their part. And also calls on the Senate to deal with the Spread Act quickly. 70 pages of questions were asked about this; “and now there are parties who feel like asking questions about this again, which will seriously delay the process and the Spread Act may no longer be discussed before the Christmas recess.”
Pals: “Despite all the anger, frustration and misunderstanding, we hope that we as a council and together with our residents of the municipality of Stadskanaal can give all those people who deserve our support and support the feeling that they are not alone. And that we do not leave all those refugees who are looking for safety and a better life out in the cold. That our society can say that we did what we had to do.”