Alternate Minister for Migration Policy Yiannis Mouzalas on Tuesday in an interview with Alpha TV expressed his fears that children may die at Idomeni.

Mr. Mouzalas admitted that, although the state should be 24-hour “present”, this has not been achieved due to his own oversights, too, stressing that Greece has never been called to deal with such a crisis in the past 50 years.

“Our concern is not to let children in the camp of Idomeni die, but this is something that no serious person could guarantee amid such a large refugee crisis,” he noted adding “What I can guarantee is that we will increase our efforts to prevent this from happening.”

Mr. Mouzala also responded to those who accused the government of not taking the necessary measures quickly, while it knew that 1,000,000 people were waiting in Turkey to enter Greece. He said the government should not be blamed for that. It was EU that held a meeting on refugee in June2015, while he admitted that until the end of 2015 about 750,000 refugees and immigrants entered Greece.

He also revealed that  the government did not expect that the refugee issue would escalate to that extent, and put the blame on EU. “We should have expected that. We were not prepared” he said stressing that EU decided to address the refugee issue in June 2015.