Sweden turns to Caribbean cruise ship to house refugees
Source: telegraph.co.uk
A luxury cruise ship which spent decades crossing the sun-drenched waters of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean could be en route for Sweden’s chilly Baltic coast to be converted into an asylum centre.
Sweden’s Migration Agency is close to signing a deal with charter company US Shipmanagers to bring the 1,790-passenger Ocean Gala to Sweden, planning to berth it in Harnosand, a small port 270 miles north of Stockholm.
“I am extremely pleased. This means that we are prepared, so that we’re not going to end up in a situation where we can’t offer a roof over people’s heads,” Willis Åberg, accommodation chief at Sweden’s Migration Agency, told the Aftonbladet newspaper.
The agency is engaged a desperate race to find new beds before spring, when off-season winter contracts to house asylum seekers signed with hundreds of hotels and campsites are due to expire.
The agency also fears that the influx of asylum seekers, now down to a manageable 700 a week from unprecedented rates of 10,000 a week in November, will pick up again in the coming months as warm weather returns to Greece and Italy and tens of thousands of Syrians are forced from their homes.
When Ocean Gala was first launched as M/S Scandinavia in 1982 it was one of the world’s largest cruise ships, spending its days cruising between New York and the Bahamas.
Since 2002, renamed Island Escape, it has spent the summer in the Mediterranean and the winter cruising around South America.
Its cruising days came to an end last December when it was renamed Ocean Gala and taken to Brest, France, to be rented out as a floating hotel.
According to the local Allehanda newspaper, the charter agency’s applications to berth the ship at of Harnosand’s two deep water harbours has met strong resistance from local politicians.
“A ship cannot berth as an accommodation facility for one year at the dock unless a building permit has been granted and an environmental assessment done,” Fred Nilsson, chairman of the local municipal council told the newspaper. “Rarely has the municipal and county administrative authority felt as justified as in this case.”
Mr Åberg told Aftonbladet that it was up to the charter company to find a willing municipality.
“We don’t have any opinions about where it is. It’s all about finding a suitable harbour,” he said.
The contract will be annulled if a berth cannot be secured within two months.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
