Finland's
prime minister has reacted to Europe's migrant crisis by offering his spare
home to refugees. Juha Sipila said everyone in Europe should ask themselves
what they can do to help asylum seekers.
Deutsche Welle, 6 Sep 2015
Sipila told
Finnish television on Saturday that he and his wife had decided to make the
house in central Finland available from January. The house has been empty since
the family moved to Helsinki.
Sipila's
offer is likely to cause tensions within his center-right governing coalition
which comprises his own Center Party, the pro-EU conservatives and the
populist, euroskeptic Finns Party, given rising unemployment and recession.
The Finns
Party is the second largest in Finland, with a policy of wanting tougher
immigration laws, although it has distanced itself from Europe's far-right parties.
The
Sipila's spare home is in Kempele, a central Finnish town of 17,000. Details
about the size of the house and how to apply were not immediately available.
Sipila, a
former telecoms executive, made the offer on Finnish MTV television following
complaints over the opening of refugee centers in towns across the sparsely
populated Nordic nation.
"I ask
everybody to stop all hate speech and concentrate on taking care of people that
are fleeing from war zones, so that they feel safe and welcome here in
Finland," Sipila said.
'Genuine
welcome'
"We
all should think what we can do ourselves," he said. "The more
citizen activity we can find to [resolve] this matter, the better."
An asylum
seeker "deserves a human treatment and genuine welcome greeting from us
Finns," he added.
On Friday,
Sipila's government doubled its refugee arrivals estimate for this year up to
30,000. Last year, 3,600 sought asylum in Finland.
The Sipilas
have another house near Helsinki as well as use of a government residence.
Israel Wahlen Isaac Herzog
"Jews cannot be indifferent," said Herzog |
Offer safe
haven: Israeli opposition leader
In parallel
initiative, Israel's opposition leader Isaac Herzog said Israel should take in
Syrian asylum seekers.
"Jews
cannot be indifferent while hundreds of thousands of refugees are seeking a
safe haven," he told the "Haaretz" newspaper.
"I
call on the government of Israel to act towards absorbing refugees from the
fighting in Syria, on top of the humanitarian steps that are already being
done," he added.
Herzog
leads the Labour party, the largest opposition bloc in parliament.
Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas has urged Israel to allow Palestinian refugees fleeing
the war in Syria to travel to the West Bank and Gaza for shelter, instead of
making the risky passage to Europe, according to the Palestinian news agency
WAFA.
Abbas was
apparently referring to Palestinian refugees whose families were expelled when
Israel was founded in 1948 and who have left Syria since the outbreak of its
civil war in 2011.
Israel has
treated many wounded from the Syrian civil war raging next door but has so far
stopped short of opening its border to citizens of its longtime enemy.
This year, Israel's
military has carried out a number of raids and airstrikes on suspected
Hezbollah sites and Syrian army targets on the Syrian side the Golan Heights
after rockets were fired at Israel's Galilee region.
Israel
seized 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of the Golan plateau from
Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it 14 years later. That move has
never been recognized by the international community.
ipj/cmk (AP, Reuters, AFP)
Palestinians in Gaza City put flowers on a sand sculpture of Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, a symbol of the migrant crisis pic.twitter.com/a8XBTW4eLW
— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) 8 september 2015
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