Bulgaria Sacks Refugee Agency Chief amid Syrian Influx
Bulgaria sacked the head of its refugee agency for mismanagement on Wednesday, as the EU's poorest country continued to struggle with an ever-growing number of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war.
"Nikola Kazakov was dismissed for inadequate organization of the process for granting refugee status, which created conditions for overcrowding at the accommodation facilities," Interior Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev said.
He also criticized Kazakov's poor management of the accommodation facilities themselves and inadequate cooperation with European refugee aid institutions.
The human rights group Bulgarian Helsinki Committee had criticized the national refugee agency's inability to cope with the growing number of immigrants on Tuesday.
The agency has received European aid over the past several years to improve its preparedness and capacity to receive refugees, without any proportionate increase in the productivity, the committee said.
To date, 5,815 illegal immigrants -- mostly Syrian -- have been intercepted at Bulgaria's borders this year, seven times more than during the same period in 2012, Yovchev said.
In September alone, 2,377 migrants were detained, he added.
Bulgaria has seen an influx of Syrian refugees struggling with overcrowding in neighboring Turkey, itself the first port of call for many fleeing war-torn Syria.
Most of these people have sought refugee status in Bulgaria but lengthy procedures were still keeping them inside three crammed refugee centers and two detention facilities used by the authorities to shelter immigrants.
"To date, we have exceeded our accommodation capacities by 222 places despite the opening of an additional 1,300 places for immigrants," Yovchev said, promising 1,500 more beds in the shelters within a month.
"Bulgaria is confronted with one of its worst modern-day humanitarian crises," Bulgarian Red Cross chief Hristo Grigorov said on Monday.
Boris Cheshirkov, spokesman for the U.N. Refugee Agency in Bulgaria, has also warned about food shortages in the shelters. In an accommodation center near Sofia, one blanket had to be shared between three people, he said.
More than two million people have fled Syria since the war broke out there in 2011, mostly to neighboring Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq.
Source: Agence France Presse
| Copyright © 2012 Naharnet.com. All Rights Reserved. | https://cdn.naharnet.com/stories/en/100567 |