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‘A yard turned to a hotspot’

In September 2019 numerous websites announced that  ‘the Thessaloniki Railway Station train yard has turned into a hotspot. The place was full of garbage and the hygiene is terrible’. The fact is that refugees and migrants had found shelter by occupying the abandoned trains –many of them were sleeping cars- that had been parked in the yard more than ten years ago and hadn’t moved ever since. A second fact is that indeed many plastic items such as bottles and food packages had been covering the stones between the wagons and the train tracks. Nevertheless beside those facts underlays another one. It is the informal admittance from the Press that the hot spots are really inhuman places where fundamental rights and any quality of life are absent, neglected dirty places that lack any infrastructure, safety and hygiene. So, this is the norm and again, this is regarded like a fact and like there is nothing we can do to turn them to better places. Paradoxically enough, they also demand the hot spots’ evictions as for example locals ask for Moria. However they ask so primarily not for the actual sensible reasons of the inhuman living conditions but for the locals’ own advantages. Accordingly, the abandoned train inhabitants -suchlike the hot spot inhabitants- are often presented as dangerous and threatening.  

Graffiti artists who were frequently visiting the same place in order to paint those and other trains testified diverse narrations. They became friends with the migrants and exchanged stories from their personal lives. They state that the squatters were not at all harmful to them. Pictures from their encounters show that their look was definitely well cared and clean. According to the artists, the inhabitants had even organised a barber shop in one of the trains’ coupes. 

Finally the train squatters were evicted and the wagons were moved seventy kilometers away after their long stay in the main station train yard.  Now new improved fences are replacing the older ones around the yard to prevent both migrants and graffiti artists to access any other parked trains.

Orestis Pangalos
December 2019

 
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Death and dirt signifiers

In December 2017, the Greek Minister for Immigration Policy stated in an interview that he cannot guarantee that there would be no more dead people in Moria camp. This was even the softened version of what we first read in the news: “this winter there will be dead in Moria camp” or ‘“some refugees may freeze to death in the upcoming winter” just as had happened the previous one. Whatever the actual phrase was, the fact of the statements’ cynicism is the same. It actually admits the incapacity of the authorities to do the obvious: to protect the Moria population from the cold winter. It also accepts the inhumane conditions that led to last year’s deaths, and, worst of all, indicates the unwillingness to do something about it the next years. Such an approach also prepares the public for something that should be expected, is inevitable and, ultimately, is accepted. Or else, what has been widely known as a humanitarian disaster, is now legitimised. These words need no illustration; however, photographs of last winter in the camps come to mind: cold winter, no facilities, tents, snow, children, death.   

In late 2019, about two hundred refugees from Samos’ camps (where the conditions are not much different than in Moria) were transported to Vrasna village in Chalkidiki in order to stay at hotels for a period of six months. The locals did not accept the authorities’ decision; they “welcomed” the buses transporting refugees by throwing stones and thereby breaking some of the windows, finally succeeding to prevent their stay. A large part of the media covering the events spoke about racist behaviour. However, of particular interest is the opinion held by some journalists who suggested that the locals should had let the temporary residents stay there, most importantly because it is the government’s decision. They argued that citizens living anywhere in Greece should obey the government’s decisions and not create trouble—as they have previously done when protesting to prevent “investment plans” (for instance, in the struggle against gold mines in Chalkidiki) or protesting to reverse decisions about locations to dump the garbage produced in large urban areas. In such a narrative, it is not just the humanitarian approach that counts; more significant is the obedience to state laws and decisions. Consequently, the hateful riots of some people in Vrasna are falsely put in the same category as social movement struggles. Even worse, the refugees and migrants are seen as a problem, same as the garbage being dumped. A spatial matter arises too: in either case, the poorest of areas are chosen by the authorities to locate their infrastructures. The same can be said for the Moria settlement on Lesvos island.

A last comment about the Vrasna incident that represents the locals’ deeper rhetorics: an announcement claims that the locals “have been inhabiting the place for 2000 years and they hadn’t mixed with Minor Asia refugees in 1922.” Meaning they were hostile to them too —although considered Greek populations— proving their intolerance to any “invasion.”

Orestis Pangalos
December 2019

 

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Letters to the World from an Olive Tree

Parwana Amiri is a young Afghan woman who spent more than a year migrating from Iran to Turkey and finally to Greece, before arriving to the Moria camp on Lesvos Island in 2019.

 

Since her arrival, Parwana has written a blog she calls ‘Birds of Immigrants’ comprised mostly of her first-person telling of the stories of many different migrants in the camp. She favours the stories of women and children, but uses her “I” voice to speak for all, for every kind of person and stranger, male or female, young or old, migrant or European, also trees.

When Parwana noticed how unbearable the living conditions were, she supported the people with her language skills and started to publicize the stories they had experienced. Parwana’s ‘Letters from Moria’ are published on Welcome to Europe’s blog http://Infomobile.w2eu.net. The letters talk about life in the horrible conditions of a camp made to deter people from reaching a place of safety. She changes perspectives in each of her letters. She writes from the perspective of an old woman, who bakes bread to sell in order to buy medicine for her husband, of a young boy who is afraid to lose himself, of a young woman suffering from the abuse of men all around her and she writes from the perspective of a transgender person. These letters were written mostly at night by torchlight in the tent that Parwana shared with her eight-person family, in the olive grove. She always waited until everyone was asleep, so that she would have the peace of mind to write in the darkness with her torch.

Impressed by the olive trees in the groves surrounding Moria hotspot, where she had to live in a tent, Parwana wrote a story and published her first book ‘The olive tree and the old women’ together with Marily Stroux and the solidarity network, w2eu (“Welcome to Europe”) in Lesvos. The book is based on the real story of one of the many people forced into the Olive Grove of Moria; an imaginary conversation between an old woman and an olive tree.

Shortly before Moria was destroyed by fire in September 2020, Parwana and her family moved from Moria to Ritsona Camp on mainland Greece, where she continues to document the conditions and publish her words.

 

 References:

 

 
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Ashliyori

Once upon a time on the island of Lesvos, out pf a hot spring crawled a creature that looked very nearly human, except it was very exceptionally strong, very fast and incredibly intelligent. And it had orange eyes, and long long hair.

This creature immediately started battling with the king of Lesvos. It did not know who it was or where it was from, but decided to name itself Ashliyori. Ashliyori only knew that there was terrible suffering all around and the kings and warriors were killing and enslaving all those around.

Ashliyori killed the king of Lesvos, so the kings of Europe got together and called forth their strongest most talented wizards to battel the creature. The creature nearly prevailed but the it was surrounded by the wards and turned into a small block of stone. A fence was put up to keep the sun, rain and wind from freeing the creature trapped in the stone who had been watching everything that had happened for 2000 years. It had a plan to kill all the kings but although everyone forgot the creature existed the fence remained.

It called to every person who passed: “Break down the fence, free me!”. But people were not very inclined to break down fences or hear strange voices in their heads so they always hurried away.

Until one day a woman full of rage and despair walked by…

 
Narratives