In the early hours of 25 February 2020 hundreds of seaborne riot police arrived at the sleepy port of Mesta on the west side of the Greek island of Chios, on the EU-Turkey border. Their disembarkation was like an invading army, the police columns emerging in full riot gear out of specially chartered boats. There was a grotesque hint of a Star Wars scene in this otherwise forgotten corner of Europe’s war against refugees.
In the early hours of the same morning similar scenes unfolded in the neighbouring island of Lesbos. The police mission was to protect the big public works contractors that are due to start building the new refugee detention camps in Chios, Lesvos and Samos, just across from the Turkish coast.
Yet, the islanders say no to new camps and demand that the current camps be gradually evacuated towards the mainland and other European countries. So in both Chios and in Lesbos the riot police met a massive wave of civil disobedience and counter-violence, leading to night-long fighting. Next morning the government brought more riot police as reinforcements to Lesbos, this time by air. But the islanders were not deterred by the government’s ‘shock and awe’ approach. A general strike was declared, all schools were closed down, local unions and associations called on people to protest and to fight back. In Lesbos riot police units were forced to seek refuge at the local army barracks. In Chios policemen were attacked in their hotel bedrooms and their clothes and luggage thrown out of the windows. A few hours later their union demanded the riot police’s return to the mainland. Less than 48 hours after sending the units to the islands the government announced it was recalling them.
The islands and the camps
The choice of the location for the new camp in Chios is extraordinary for its inhumanity. It is a lunar landscape, at the very top of mountain Aipos that is known for its near total lack of vegetation. As locals say, not even goats live there in winter.
Refugees in the planned new camp will suffer in extreme weather conditions. The other feature of the location is that it is far away from any human community. It is truly in the middle of nowhere. There are few worse places one can build a camp in. A similar logic has been followed on all the other islands, in picking the locations of the new camps.
But the islanders will have none of it. Opposition has come from many different streams. Some oppose the turning of their islands into a large camp, the destruction of the landscape and the damage that all these conditions inflict on tourism. Some are fighting in solidarity with the refugees. Many are just opposed to the irrationality of the whole project and to state authoritarianism. What unites them is their fury with the undemocratic and unjust way they have been treated by the central government and European authorities for 5 years now.
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Dimitris Dalakoglou Eugene Michail | Radio Free (2020-02-27T20:44:47+00:00) Fortress Europe as infrastructure. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/27/fortress-europe-as-infrastructure/
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