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Crisis as appearance

Crisis As Appearance

Some journalist are claiming that the 2015 European refugee crisis is one of the most photographed crisis in human history. Yet, it is important to understand what kind of messages these representations convey and how they reproduce the hegemonic narrative of this crisis. When one attempts a google search using the term ‘refugee crisis’ the first image that comes up is this one from Massimo Setsini. An image shot from above picturing a boat packed with human bodies in the midst of the sea. One of the main hegemonic claims of the 2015 refugee crisis is that it began with the appearance of certain bodies on the shores of Europe. This is a very problematic notion, not only because it basically equates the presence of these bodies as the starting point of the crisis and, therefore, directly implying that these human bodies are the ‘problem’. But mainly because it forecloses, and thus keeps hidden and invisible the reasons of this appearance: war, genocide, and unbearable oppression these bodies experience in their countries of origin. Conditions that, for example, could be related to the US, the UK, and France invading and bombing Syria. In other words, the starting point of the 2015 European refugee crisis should be traced and portrayed differently, exposing the reasons of the appearance of certain bodies of the shores of Lesvos. But, this would be a story not so genteel for the European values that are supposedly threatened so much by the presence of these bodies. A story that would have to narrate Europe’s colonial histories, a story that would not easily result in the construction of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The appearance of whose body and where can be seen as the beginning of a crisis? Which crises are declared and why and which remain undeclared, invisible, hidden and thus not recognised as humanitarian disasters that lead to international protection? The disappearance of whose bodies constitutes a crisis? 

Looking at Setsini’s image I cannot stop thinking that the viewer is looking down to a boat packed with people, the gaze comes from above. This is the state’s gaze, using drones and other technologies of surveillance to generate visual testimonies of the others, always the others. This is a gaze that places the viewer outside of this boat, what would be like to have an image shot from inside this boat, at this same moment as a visual example of Europe’s refugee crisis? 

I can’t help but remembering Susan Sontag’s claim that the function of the camera is similar to that of a gun, we ‘aim’ and we ‘shoot’ an image. ‘Just as the camera is a sublimination of a gun, to photograph someone is a subliminated murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time’ (1979: 15).

Myrto Tsilimpounidi
December 2019

 

An image shot from above picturing a boat packed with human bodies in the midst of the sea.
Photo by Massimo Setsini, 2014
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Moria = Murder

Conditions in the detention centre in Moria outside Mytilene, dubbed the “Guantánamo Bay of Europe” and “the worst refugee camp on earth”; an illegal de facto regime of indefinite, arbitrary incarceration of people in Moria or on the island.

The characterization “Guantánamo Bay of Europe” draws a parallel to the notorious offshore US military prison in the Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba (captured during the Spanish-American War in 1898 and “leased” to the US in 1903 with no expiration date, an “agreement” that Cubans regard as an instance of US imperialism). It is based on a statement made by Dimitris Avramopoulos, EU Migration Commissioner, reacting to the proposal of European Council President Donald Tusk, inspired by an earlier suggestion by Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, that the EU create “regional disembarkation platforms” outside the EU, where agencies collaborating with UNHCR and IOM would sort so-called legitimate asylum seekers from economic migrants, before they reach EU borders. Avramopoulos’ protestations that such a proposal goes against “European values”. In fact, evincing the tendentiousness of the offshore/onshore distinction, here, a number of journalistic articles have, before and since Avramopoulos’ declarations, referred to Lesvos/Moria as the “Guantánamo Bay of Europe,” quoting conservative Lesvos Mayor Spyros Gallinos, and indicating the scenario officials variously propose or reject is already a reality under the current European Agenda on Migration. 

A reference to Moria as the worst refugee camp on earth is the title of a documentary aired on BBC produced by reporter Catrin Nye, who “went inside” Moria during a media blackout enforced by the Greek military, who have authority over the prison camp. The characterisation is based on a statement by Luca Fontana, Médicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) Coordinator in Lesvos, who says “Lesvos is the worst place I’ve been, in my whole life, and in my whole MSF experience; and I’ve been working in several countries, war zones; I’ve been working in refugee camps in Central African Republic, in Congo; in the biggest Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in 2014-15. But I’ve never seen—ever—the level of suffering we are witnessing here, everyday.”  MSF operates a clinic just outside the camp since 2016, when along with most INGOs and UNHCR withdrew from Moria and the other hotspot camps in protest, as they were turned into detention centres after the implementation of the EU-Turkey deal. “We took the extremely difficult decision to end our activities in Moria because continuing to work inside would make us complicit in a system we consider to be both unfair and inhumane … We will not allow our assistance to be instrumentalized for a mass expulsion operation and we refuse to be part of a system that has no regard for the humanitarian or protection needs of asylum seekers and migrants,” said Marie Elisabeth Ingres, MSF Head of Mission in Greece, cited in The Press Project, “UNHCR and NGO’s withdraw from Greek islands, tension is rising in Idomeni.” 

Moria refugee camp was originally intended to hold 3,000 people and in 2019 it has grown to become a shanty town of 19,000, from which according to journalist Harriet Grant 40% of whom are under 18. Around 13,000 of those are living in a filthy unofficial camp of tarpaulin tents and makeshift huts made of pallets, in an olive grove surrounding the main site. There is no electricity, not enough water and rivers of mud and rubbish run through the tents. To incarcerate someone in Moria in these conditions equals murder.

Myrto Tsilimpounidi
December 2019

 

‘Moria = murder’ wall writing in Mytilene, December 2019
Photo by Anna Carastathis
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Stealing from Migrants

Different evocations of “crisis” create distinct categories that in turn evoke certain social reactions. Post-2008, Greece became the epicentre of the “financial crisis”; simultaneously, since 2015 with the advent of the “refugee crisis,” it became the “hotspot of Europe.” As Anna Carastathis explains by the end of the summer of 2015, Greece was experiencing the schema of ‘nesting crises’. By ‘nesting crises’ Carastathis is referring to the dominant state discourse of a crisis within a crisis given temporal and spatial priority to the “sovereign debt crisis” while the refugee crisis is constructed as a sudden problem first emerging in the summer of 2015. This renders invisible its prehistory, namely the criminalised migration of people into the Greek territory and the relegation of long-standing migrant and refugee communities in Greece to the socio-legal margins of the society. Intersecting the discursive constructs of the financial crisis and the refugee crisis, we are able to see how they are constituted through a process of mutual exclusion and prototypically: the prototypical subject of the financial crisis is the Greek citizen, while that of the refugee crisis is the displaced Syrian family who deserve international protection.

Photo 1: Hey boss, I am stealing from Migrants, Mytilene, 2017
Photo 2: …Migrants, Mytilene, 2019

 

In this era of the nesting crises, Lesvos has witnessed its economy flourishing. From the many stories and testimonies of charging 5 euros to migrants and refugees for a bottle of water which price is set at 50cents in Greece, to locals keeping the boats in which the refugees arrived on the shores in exchange for dry clothes and a blanket, this growing economy is build on human suffering. Sebastian Leape informs us that European funding alone in 2017 worked out at 7,000 euros for every refugee living in Greece. If we add to that works of the NGOs, solidarians, journalists, researchers, and photographers arriving in Lesvos to document the ‘refugee crisis’ we have only a partial understanding of how the crisis boosted the local economy, rapidly increased housing prices in Mytilene, supported the local stores, and provided a new life for the island. Image 1 was shot in 2017 at a central location in the city of Mytilene and the tag reads ‘Hey boss, I am stealing from migrants’. Image 2 was shot at exactly the same place in 2019, the wall is now painted over and the remaining tag reads ‘migrants’.

 

Myrto Tsilimpounidi
December 2019

References:


Carastathis, Anna (2018) “Nesting Crises.” Women’s Studies International Forum 68: 142-148.

Carastathis, Anna – Spathopoulou, Aila –  Tsilimpounidi, Myrto (2018) ‘Crisis, what crisis? Immigrants, Refugees, and Invisible Struggles’, Refugee: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. Vol. 34 (1): 29-38. 

Leape, Sebastian (2018) ‘Greece has the means to helo refugees on Lesbos – but does it have the will?’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/sep/13/greece-refugees-lesbos-moria-camp-funding-will

Photos by Myrto Tsilimpounidi
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Heteronormative Necropolitics

Heteronormative Necropolitics

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe (2019), speaks about a world always already invaded by inequality, precarity, and militarisation in a climate of ever-increasing resurgence of racist, homophobic, nationalists, and fascists discourses.  He outlines an alarming picture for Europe as a continent eaten up by the desire of ‘apartheid’ and always in the search of an enemy, whether external or internal. For Mbembe, this is how democracy embraces its dark side, what he terms as the ‘nocturnal body’, which erodes rights, values, and freedoms that were previously constituted. At a nutshell, the notion of necropolitics refers to the use of social and political power that dictates how some people may live and how some others must die. If we apply Mbembe’s thought on how certain people should live and others must die in the case of the 2015 European refugee crisis, we realise that we are talking about the heteronormalisation of necropolitics. By this, I mean that the ideal figure of the refugee has been constructed as the Syrian family. Even in the solidarity movement of ‘Refugees Welcome’ the image underneath the sing portrays a man, holding a woman who holds a female child. These very problematic representations in a way dictate whose sexuality and reproductive abilities dictate survival.

I juxtapose these thoughts with the story of Suma, a trans refugee fro Cairo travelling in a boat from Turkey to Greece in 2016:

We arrived in Chios by boat having each paid 700 euro. All four of us LGBT people who had boarded the boat were for the entirety of the journey very discreet; in fact, I had covered myself almost completely in a niqab – it seems funny but I was afraid to meet the same fate as another trans refugee; once her travelling companions realised she was trans, they threw her in the sea. Hours later the Turkish coastguard collected her, but this whole torment, I learned later, made her go mad.

Myrto Tsilimpounidi
December 2019

References: 

Mbembe, Achille (2019) Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Souma, trans woman refugee from Cairo, 2016 (Source: Interview with Theodoris Antonopoulos, www.lifo.gr/articles/lgbt_articles/120527

The image is part of the Facing Crisis photography workshop held in Athens (Greece) in July 2017 by Myrto Tsilimpounidi & Anna Carastathis in collaboration with LGBTQI+ refugees.
Photo by Myrto Tsilimpounidi, 2017
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‘Our problem is not economical’

Eidomeni, November 2015. Since the summer, the camp that had formed in Idomeni was daily in the international news. Thousands of people of various nationalities gathered there in order to cross to North Macedonia in groups. However, accessing the borders became more and more difficult. The earlier flexibility of access toward the North was becoming severely controlled; the borders were now guarded. Gradually, with few exceptions, no one was allowed to cross.

In those days, to protest this outcome, groups of people from Iran went on hunger strike. They lay on the train tracks at precisely the limit separating the two states, at the feet of the armed forces of repression of the northern side. Further back, still on the train tracks, a person from Iran–wearing signature sunglasses and a scarf–is reciting and singing. The banner behind him writes ‘Our problem is not economical.’ In this case, even if he was referring to his own ethnic group, the first person plural ascribed to common experience a collective character. Indeed, each one of all those who had arrived there from their places of origin, had attempted to escape bombings, civil war, violence, or political persecution. The declaration spray-painted on the banner offers itself up to further interpretations: On the one hand, it may constitute a response to the frequent distinction made between refugees and migrants, whereby the former ‘are entitled’ to move, while the latter do not, since they are not fleeing from a state of war. In cases where reasons are not fleeing war, they are often presented in public discourse as ‘economic causes,’ so, for ‘employment reasons.’ Thus, they are deemed to be undesirable, since, in this way, the jobs of local populations are thought to be more precarious. On a deeper reading, however (nevertheless very unlikely to be the desired meaning of the banner’s creators), the message could be addressed to all those who had experienced or were still experiencing the consequences of the ongoing Greek financial crisis–indeed, many of whom had already been forced to emigrate in search for work–that is, for ‘financial reasons.’ This would, in a way, be a fairly convincing argument for those who defend the right to migrate to Greece vis-à-vis those holding the opposing view.

Several cameras–photojournalists and filmmakers–capture the action, which a multiracial audience seems to enjoy. Meanwhile, their gazes turn to the background: a person succeeds in passing through the barbed wire fence and is running to escape from the police officers who are chasing him. The crowd applauds and smiles; some are celebrating. A little later, the fugitive returns with an escort, as his flight ended abruptly at the next checkpoint. A little bit further down, feelings of injustice,  anticipation, and anxiety turned to rage; spontaneously, small episodes broke out.

Approximately ten days had passed since the prohibition of access to the mudflat of Idomeni. Despite the rains, the unseasonably mild weather contributed to maintaining morale. Despite the miserable living conditions, people’s eyes were still hopeful. A few weeks later, the camp was destroyed; even the approach from Thessaloniki to the border was strictly controlled. In the months that followed, most of those who managed to cross the sea to Greece remained trapped in the hotspots of the Aegean islands.

Orestis Pangalos
December 2019

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