Greece clears migrants' tent city in Athens park

1Two migrant boys play at a newly-built reception centre after being transferred from a park in Athens, Greece, on Sunday.
2Greek authorities said Sunday they have started resettling migrants living in tents in a park in the capital Athens - but many were wary and had moved out ahead of the operation.
3Fire brigade buses moved the migrants, most of them from Afghanistan, to a settlement of 90 containers in the Athens district of Votanikos.
4Each container can house six to eight people and has air conditioning, running water and a toilet.
5The government has said the place is not a detention centre and that everyone is free to come and go.
6However, police estimated that about a third of the park's almost 300 tent residents, wary of such promises, packed their belongings and left the park earlier.
7Another 30 have refused to budge.
8Police say a total of 171 were resettled Sunday, but many more live in other public spaces in Athens.
9More than 130,000 migrants have reached Greece so far in 2015, straining the country's resources.
10"I am afraid that they are going to send us back to Afghanistan, I'm scared of being sent to a fenced place where I won't be able to go anywhere," Zahra Mohseni, an Afghan migrant, said.
11Others found the new settlement a welcome change from conditions in the park.
12"It is so much better. The people who walk into their rooms are very pleased. There is a happy atmosphere, everything is beautiful and there are special places for little children to play or hang around, like small parks. There is enough room for about 700 people," said Arash Himati, another Afghan migrant who inspected the settlement.
13The settlement is far from other residences, but some feared that locals in Votanikos would object to the migrants in their midst, and the Greek media have played up the "locals protest" angle.
14About a dozen people turned up to protest and were kept at bay by police.