Early on the morning of 2 March 2020, a small vessel full of refugees from across the Middle East arrived at the shores of Lesvos. It was the latest of the over 70 irregular boats documented since the turn of the year. Locals gathered nearby. Videos quickly circulated via social media showing Greek locals attempting to prevent the plastic dinghy from landing. They are heard yelling slogans like ‘pregnant rabbits,’ an obvious racial epithet about the ‘invasion’ of Muslim populations. The shock or fear on the arrivals’ faces is noticeable. In the same harbour area of Thermi, a German photojournalist is dragged to the ground and kicked for reporting this, his cameras thrown into the water. Another is wounded and chased through the streets until escaping to his car. A Greek patrol boat was filmed shooting at a vessel of migrants, the footage soon questioned by Greek nationalists and even the government.
Much of this was highly visible, and widely shared through social media. Some comments showed solidarity for the reporters, though most declared that they had got what they deserved for reporting what were later accounted for as lies, fake news. What was not reported was the presence of groups of men in black ski masks near the Mytlini borderline, attacking a migrant vessel out at sea. First, the engine was destroyed and then, when alerted, the Greek and Turkish coast guards ignored any pleas for help. The migrants instead paddled on with their hands. The NGO Alarm Phone believes this to have been the same boat that was confronted by the locals of Thermi hours later. As on the waters of the Aegean, no police or border officials stepped in to stop the violence filmed at the harbour, though being aware of it happening.
This violence is the border spectacle that has become normalised across the external edges of the European Union. In 2015 it was considered an affront to the myth of a welcoming, humanitarian Europe. At the start of the crisis, mass funerals were held and days of commemoration were discussed to remind Europeans of their shared humanitarian responsibility to those seeking refuge. Through the past five years, the dinghy is just another in a steady diet of images that have sustained a profitable crisis media and drained all but the most devoted voices of sympathy. What began with widespread concern for human life across Europe at the start of the event that became known as the European Migration Crisis, has now entered a new phase. This is the sobering, though perhaps inevitable, end to the narrative arc of crises during Jean-Claude Juncker’s Presidency of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019. The issue of protecting European borders was arguably the most fraught, far above Greek austerity, the division between member states over a migrant distribution quota and Brexit. This tension in the Union was manifest in the drownings off Lampedusa in 2013 and 2015, the construction of fences across Eastern Europe from 2015 onward and the indefinite sprawl of migrant camps parading as official ‘hotspots’ from 2016. It was less visible in the routine (un)official border beatings in the Balkans, the outsourcing of border controls to Turkey and especially Libya, and now again resurgent, thanks to the current angry reception at the Lesvos quay. These last five years could be charted by a power point presentation of Rorscharchian chaos. That is, depending on your racial politics, the violence was an inevitable and reasoned response to another attempted Muslim invasion of Europe, or it merely reveals the inconvenient truth that modern sovereignty is founded upon the state’s monopoly over violence.
The events of 2 March 2020 at the Greece-Turkey border are, I believe, the starting point for the next European crisis that will be dealt with by new Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen. This date – as with all dates of European history – allows the media to be complicit in ignoring the previous trauma of migrants trapped inside Turkey, and the violence and ongoing humiliations experienced for months or years outside the EU. Most of these could have arguably been avoided without the imposition of the border closure at Greece’s external Schengen border in March 2016. Again we are discussing significant events dated from the point which they impact us in the West, the effect rather than the cause. ‘How many EU leaders will react to the images of this Greek border control boat shooting at children?’ asked UN rapporteur Agnès Callamard, after reposting on Twitter the images of a Greek boat shooting at unarmed migrants, steering them further back to the Turkish shore. The visibility was what was most shocking to those in 2020, as much as the events. ‘Pushing them back like plague?’ she mused rhetorically, going on to compare the events to Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
With reports of two deaths in the first day of attempted arrivals to Greece’s shorelines – the first day that Erdoğan demanded the opening of Turkish borders in direct contravention of the EU-Turkey border closure agreement – rumours were met with two main responses from far right-wing and protectionist nationalists. Firstly, conspiracy theorists predictably preached that these deaths were fake news constructed by the open border, Soros-loving globalist cabal. This fake news defence was also used by the Greek government itself. Secondly, for the minority of this first group who believed the footage, so what? They are illegals, and God bless Greece for resisting another invasion. The nationalistic vigilantism that has been a creeping regularity across the Balkan states since 2015 is now one of openly celebrated vigilante bordering. In late April 2020, two migrants were shot, as gunfire was aimed into the borders of the Moria refugee camp. No longer are small ‘boys own adventure’ combat units crouching in forests, waiting to handcuff illegalised Muslim arrivals. This is now accepted European behaviour, through the active neglect of authorities.
How do I know this? Two days after the initial release of migrants from the Turkish side of the external EU border, the European Commission released a promotional video addressed specifically to Greece, European citizens and the international community. It was telling that this cinematic effort was filmed and edited within hours of the new chaos, along with the offer of €700 million to stabilise security at the border, half of which would be available immediately. In contrast, a year earlier under the previous President, the Commission undertook a roadshow across member states to promote its new message that ‘#EUsaveslives.’ This was no doubt intended to tie in with its new chapter, after it declared the previous migrant crisis to be officially over in March of that year. Just one year after this landmark occasion, and its new advertising campaign seems to be a return to #Protectingtheborders.
This time its panicked media response comes complete with the optics of helicopters, camouflage and tanks. The released video declared that the EU was committed to respecting international law, human rights and dignity. On this last word, the camera was oddly cut from an airfield to focus on a barbed wire fence at its edge. Greece was now a shield for Europe, the message was proclaimed, no longer its leaky border, its buffer or its bankrupt neighbour. There was no vision of migrants, no vision of pushbacks or shooting at vessels; there was no mention that the Greek army had been practicing with live ammunition and mobilising these teams at the border posts of Kipoi and Kastanies. Later reports suggest that border officials were also shooting at arriving vessels, and that Turkish and Greek forces were involved in a reverse tug of war with migrant bodies. Turkey’s Interior Minister announced that an extra 1,000 forces were deployed to the Edmin-Kastanies crossing to make sure migrants who had crossed into Greece were not forced back. In the first five days of March, following the official opening of the Turkish border, 34,778 people arrived in Greek territory, of which a seemingly arbitrary 244 were arrested. To repeat, this is now the EU response, and it is quickly descending into a kind of populist pettiness that allows for total disregard of human dignity.
The European Commission President’s social media presence showed von der Leyen arriving in Greece, surrounded by strong men and supported by the military. She also shared photos of her flying above the Greece-Turkey border, with that God-like view which enables the dehumanisation of events as seen on a military map. These were all professional stills taken from the 45 second promotional clip shared across official state media channels. For the new Commission it allowed for the spectacle of the militarised border, without a migrant in sight. This was clearly a long way from 2012, when the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and in receiving it declared that our current era was one where ‘finally lasting peace came to Europe.’
As more images began to circulate of migrants being forced back to Turkey in nothing but their underwear, the promotion of human rights and dignity advertised by the Commission were quickly dismantled. Instead, the leader of the European People’s Party thanked Greece for protecting the EU from an ‘unprovoked Turkish attack,’ to which he added #IStandWithGreece, a slogan that alongside @Greece_under_attack had been quickly co-opted by numerous right wing populist factions on social media. This rhetoric of invasion has racial and religious overtones, further witnessed by a far-right German Identitiarian movement travelling to Greece to help defend its border; the same group who launched a vessel in the Mediterranean in 2019 to physically confront irregular migrants at sea. The pseudo-Christian militarisation of borders had become a key theme over the past five years.
‘Europe shouldn’t be caught unprepared again,’ Giorgos Koumoutsakos, the Greek minister for migration policy, told local media in October 2019. And yet, despite five months of warnings, the government spent most of its social capital reassuring those on its islands that the new migrant centres would be better than the previous overcrowded sites. No plan was made. This resulted in the chaos broadcast around the world in the first week of March. Yet chaos was not new to the European border, it was suddenly present to those who had been wilfully ignorant. The pushbacks and beatings had been a persistent presence along the Balkan Route into Hungary, or at the Bulgarian border, since at least 2014. Reports had detailed at great length what the various countries were trying to keep invisible. While the anaesthetic borders created by the Schengen bureaucracy had long been lauded as a post-Westphalian triumph of openness, the violent aesthetics at the borders throughout the crisis told a different story. This was not the ‘gentrified racism’ of Brexit, but of police vans carrying illegalised migrants back across state border lines whilst inflicting bruises and cuts from fists and gun barrels, electric batons and unleashed police dogs.
Yiannis Baboulias appears to have been right when stating in October 2019 that the next Syrian crisis would be the one to break Europe. While the European Commission ignored the Greek Government’s suspension of all asylum applications for the month of March, it was becoming clear that this illegal activity was as acceptable in the present day as way that of refoulment (returning migrants to an unsafe country). After the ban ended, the possible spread of COVID-19 was used as a reason to continue not processing claims. There were collective pushbacks to Turkey of those seeking asylum who had already been housed in one of the migrant centres provided by the state. The tactics were similar to those that had been undertaken by Greek police along the Evros River in previous years. Beatings, stripping of clothes and valuables, deliberate humiliation and indignity. In 2020, there was no need for these performances to take place at night time, or at a shady bend of the river to avoid the possibility of CCTV footage that could be used as witness, due to a resurgent support among the public and pro-border factors in the European political elite.
So the deaths continue. Muhammad Gulzari was pronounced dead after being shot in the chest, trying to cross the Greece-Turkey border in the very first days of March. He was 43. Muhammad al-Arab, also killed in the same region, was 22. An unnamed woman remains missing, presumed dead. Her husband and children are accounted for. This we know because they were pushed back into Turkey by Greek police, after being stripped of their possessions and loaded onto a boat. It is important to remember that Turkish officials are equally responsible for the deaths and violence at the border; I am not apportioning blame only to Europe. However, as the member state of a Union that promotes universal human rights and has rejected claims of states to join the EU with a history of such actions as these, it is a concern that Greece’s ability to handle migration is still in a state of stalemate, or even collapse. These events became global news for a week, maybe less. As someone who has researched the European border regions since 2015, I was surprised at how little was known of this endemic racial violence throughout south-eastern Europe.
And then came the global border shutdowns due to COVID-19, with attention quickly moving back to the urban centres of Europe and the collapse of economies. Toilet paper was being stocked, schools were sporadically closed, and politicians argued over which country was best prepared to protect its citizens. Greece acted at the end of February, linking COVID-19 to illegal migration, particularly from the Turkish region. In the Eastern Mediterranean during the first three months of 2020, the death rate at sea was the highest ever recorded for this period by the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project, with the sole exception of 2016. Since the middle of 2019, and the resurgence of fighting in Syria, the agency has seen a rapid rise in boats arriving with no survivors on board. In September 2015, photos of Alan Kurdi shocked the world into passionate headlines of temporary empathy for displaced migrants. In March 2020, a child of a similar age drowned within days of the opening of the Turkish border. There are no photos, the child has not been named and governments continue to argue instead over who is to blame. This is the current EU unritual of deaths at the ocean border where violence continues, ignored this time by a pandemic-driven media.
