This evening Amber and I took a walk to the old Vathy camp on Samos island. She showed me where the tents used to be, the registration areas, the washrooms. Little effort has been made to clean up the area that used to house 9000 people at its peak. There are scattered toys, plastic bottles, clothes, blankets, bits of old tent, barbed wire and half broken concrete structures scattered across the old camp on the hill. It’s residents have been moved far away, into EU-funded, high-surveillance ‘closed controlled access centres’.
As I walked around a strange feeling befell me. It was a feeling I felt when visiting a stasi prison in Berlin, Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, and Auschwitz on a school trip.
It was the feeling of a place that held enormous human suffering. I know some people will find this far fetched, there are no gas chambers or torture chambers, but make no mistake: the purposeful negligence and dehumanising conditions of these camps are intentionally designed to inflict suffering on the people that have come here seeking safety. They are without a doubt, psychological and physical torture camps. Fortress Europe remains deadly. Just one week ago, 2 teenage girls and 2 young women drowned whilst crossing the Aegean in search of safety on Samos, and an unknown number of people are still missing. Many more thousands, who’s names we will never even know, have died crossing. Push backs are still rampant, border violence still rife and all of its culprits go unpunished and unchallenged by the EU.
I wonder if, in a 100 years time, others will walk among the remains of Vathy camp, and the smouldering bones of camp Moria, and if those people too might ask: how did people ever allow this to happen? How did the majority of people vote in extremist governments, so hateful, so segregative and so deadly? And we must seriously ask ourselves the question: if Europe claims everybody is equal, but fails to safeguard the most vulnerable people on this planet, how can we trust them to govern their own citizens?
Thankfully, there are still people who resist. We have spent the week in awe of all the amazing people running amazing projects all over Greece.
Join our movement for equality for all and against dehumanisation by joining our forRefugees family. Let’s make sure that refugees do not stand alone.
