Riot police stand guard as a large fire burns inside the Moria refugee camp on the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, September 19, 2016.Michael Schwarz/Press Association. All rights reserved.Nothing but burnt rubble remains in a
large part of Moria on the island of Lesbos. The infamous EU hotspot – aka
detention centre – that so many had hoped to see vanish from the discourse of
migration, has now ended up physically going up in flames instead.
Our own experience from our research on
the island echoes the warnings of several human rights NGOs and activists on
the ground, about the inevitable escalation of episodes of violence and smaller
scale rioting. The more migrants were kept over ever-longer periods, in
overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, with scarce food and no hope, the more
often Moria would become a breeding ground for riots and violent police
repression, while inter-ethnic conflict and the rampant discrimination inherent
in the EU’s migration management approach would spark animosity and violent
outbursts among detainees.
It is still unclear what exactly
happened in and around Moria last Tuesday, on September 20, 2016: did
ultra-nationalist locals burn down the hotspot, was it the migrants themselves
who did it or was it the result of agent provocateur actions?
Although it is unlikely that the truth
about it will ever surface, the fire has already left its mark on the country’s
public discourse on migration. Up until this moment it seems most likely that
it was migrants themselves, in an act of rage, who burnt the camp – as opposed
to as a result of an arson attack by right wing extremists. According to most
accounts, a rumour started circulating on Monday evening that the Greek
authorities were preparing blanket removals. This was the straw that broke the
camel's back for those inside the hotspot (staying there, remember, either as
detainees or because they have nowhere else to go): they put up with the
appalling living conditions in there, the meager and barely edible food,
complying because they hope for something to change for the better. So it
shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when hope is obliterated, docility goes out
of the window.
So the important question here is: why
is it so difficult to recognise this event as an act of resistance and agency?
In other words, how can we ever lift the dark, poisonous blanket that EU
deterrence policies have spread over us if we do not ever acknowledge the
existence of lives that are not only despairing and hating but also fighting
against this imposition? Otherwise, the emphasis is removed from the original
repugnant condition of imprisonment and is instead directed towards the
subject, who is axiomatically placed in a position of victimhood. The task then
for us is to remove such representations and replace them in our own
imaginaries with ones that reflect a more realistic image.
When the counting of unaccompanied
minors, who finally found somewhere to sleep that night, puts us at ease, we
forget that these same minors have been sleeping in much more dire and
dangerous conditions than one can ever encounter under an olive tree in Lesbos.
Their crossing of borders is itself an act of defiance; their very presence
here is a political – subversive even – act, as they challenge the global
border regime daily (Jones, 2016).
We can therefore treat this event as an
actual uprising of calculated agency, set in a background of highly politicized
discourses and events on the island, following the recent escalation of tension both between locals
(ultra-nationalists attacked an anarchist demo just days after attacking two
activist women, sending one to hospital) but also between (reactionary) locals
and migrants.
It is said, for example, that a mob of
ultra-nationalists made their way to Moria while the fire was raging, armed
with knives and sticks, attacking migrants running away from the flames. This
polarisation within the local society can be understood as a result of the
growing frustration of part of the local population with political pressures to
sustain incoming migrants within the island while not allowing them to travel
to mainland Greece.
It is also a result of the slow death of
last years’ humanitarian emergency spectacle. This brought income to a
great many, but came to a halt as migrants are now locked up and can no longer
consume goods or services. On the other hand, it has caused the island’s tourist industry to nosedive:
once the island of migrant-saving heroes, now the island of a hotspot prison, a
prison spilling over beyond the smoky and fenced grounds of Moria.
We suggest that the burning down of
Moria reveals our own limitations not only in imagining resistance and agency
but even in recognising it when we see it. Migrants trapped in Greece for all
this time became visible once again last Tuesday, through their agency and
resistance. However, in the public eye, migrants keep on being relegating to
victims, turning the burning of a prison into a humanitarian disaster: “where
will people sleep now?” is the most frequently uttered question following
these events.
As if we knew (or even cared) where they
had been sleeping up to today; under what conditions; what they had been
eating; where they had been showering. Answers to these questions could make us
toss and turn with uneasiness – or at least, it should.
Less than a year ago the island was
declared to be in humanitarian emergency, as over 600,000 new arrivals settled
in temporarily, bringing existing infrastructure and services to a halt. The
perpetual fear of lack of control due to a seemingly unmanageable flow of
incoming populations, cultivated so carefully by the state and the humanitarian
industry that flourished in Lesbos this past year, is slowly winning over
larger parts of the island’s local population.
[1] For a full account on what happened
see “A rough night: Protests for freedom, Moria on fire and fascist attacks” by No border kitchen Lesvos