Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn says the symbolic gesture of
Wednesday's relocation of the first 30 refugees from Greece to his country is
"only a start, but a very, very important start."
He and other EU officials say that the practice of some EU countries to
erect barbed wire fences at their borders trying to keep refugees out was not
in line with European values.
Asselborn says: "Walls, fences and barbed wires cannot be part of the
European Union."
He said that if Europe fails to change such images as well as bouts of
xenophobia, "then the values of the European Union are destroyed in some
way."
The first group of refugees to be relocated from Greece has boarded a plane
in Athens bound for Luxembourg.
They include six families from Syria and Iraq. They form the start of a
program seeking to relocate refugees who have arrived in Greece from nearby
Turkey to other European Union countries without them having to make the
arduous and often dangerous overland journey across the Balkans on foot.
More than 600,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Greece so far this
year, most of them in the last few months.
Hundreds have died as their overloaded and unseaworthy boats and dinghies
overturned or sank in the Aegean.
On Tuesday night, four people, two children and two
men, drowned trying to reach Greece.
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