Avaaz greenwashes Paris climate agreement

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

The betrayals and breakdown of the Copenhagen summit strengthened the climate justice movement because it demonstrated so clearly that salvation was not coming from above. We came to Paris with our eyes wide open, looking to each other instead of the summit, bracing ourselves for a weak deal and planning for the future.

This shameful agreement fell below even our expectations. But you wouldn’t know it listening to the corporations and their politicians – or to Avaaz, which is singing the same tune. World leaders, they write, have set a “landmark goal that can save everything we love.” They call the accord “a brilliant and massive turning point in human history… This is what we marched for.”

Green-washing & White-washing

It’s not what we marched for. As New Internationalist explains, it fails on every front: on emissions reduction, on reparations for the global South, on the rights indigenous communities and working people the world over. Under this deal, we’re looking at 3-4 degrees of warming, and that is catastrophic.

Avaaz was a driving force behind this year’s massive climate marches, but this movement’s centre-ground is riven with contradictions. WWF partners with Coca-Cola to ‘save the polar bears’ in the Arctic while it steals drinking water from India’s poor and hires thugs to murder union activists in Latin America. And along with Avaaz, they invite mega-corporations like Unilever, a leading food monopoly with an atrocious labour and environmental record, to back its ‘People’s’ Climate March.

It’s worth noting the mobilisation was supported by the Climate Group – a green-washing front for big bad wolves like BP, Dow Chemicals, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan – and Avaaz’s founder used to work for the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations.

That helps explain why $220,000 went on glossy posters inviting Wall Street bankers to join the demo. It’s a sound investment if you believe the 1 per cent are the real agents of change. That’s not the attitude you’d expect from a ‘campaigning community’ for ‘people-powered politics,’ but it would also explain why they didn’t want the Global South bloc, Wretched of the Earth, leading the climate march on 29^th November. Black people shouting about economic colonialism are not who bankers want to see leading a march of thousands.

But the agreement fails even by Avaaz’s own standards. They campaigned for a concrete and dated commitment to 100 per cent clean energy. What we got was a heavily padded commitment to ‘net-zero’ with exactly the kind of policies that have failed us so far. And it’s not even binding.

The Apartheid Analogy

But what really left us speechless was the apartheid analogy. “Like our brothers and sisters in South Africa who won legal equality… we are on the brink of that new, sweet wind,” writes Avaaz. It’s revealing that in referencing to this movement, they echo not Mandela, but British Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who famously spoke of the “wind of change sweeping through Africa… whether we like it or not.” (He did not.)

‘Murder at Sharpeville’ painting to commemorate the Sharpeville Massacre, 21st March 1960 – courtesy, Wikicommons

In one sense, this is deeply ironic and insulting. Avaaz may take pride in its marches and petitions, but it hardly compares to decades of mass-resistance in the face of brutal state repression. Thousands of black men and women were brutalised and killed in their struggle against racist oppression and segregation. And it is indigenous and black communities that the Paris Accord failed more than anyone.

As Naomi Klein writes, “so much of what we are fighting for is based on the principle that black lives matter… The way our governments are behaving in the face of the climate crisis actively discounts black and brown lives over white lives. It is an actively racist response to climate change that we should expose.”

However there is an unintended sense in which the analogy is entirely appropriate. In 1955 the African National Congress’ (ANC) sent 50,000 volunteers into the townships and rural villages to collect ‘freedom demands’ from the people. The result was a powerful and radical call not just for the end of segregation – the most institutionalised manifestation of white exploitation and oppression – but for true, economic equality. Black South Africans didn’t rise up and risk everything because wanted to share busses with white people; they wanted social justice.

Despite Avaaz’s assertion that “the fall of Apartheid led South Africa to the single most bold and progressive constitution in the world,” it was in truth a huge step back from the Freedom Charter, which had been the political heart of South African resistance.

Compromising Freedom: a Cautionary Tale

In 1960, as the ‘winds of change’ reached gale-force and national independence seemed only a matter of time, Britain was under pressure from the USA to de-colonise. America wanted access to South African markets and feared a radical left-swing in South Africa unless it was granted independence. “It is our earnest desire to give South Africa our support and encouragement,” said Macmillan, “but… [frankly] there are some aspects of your policies which make it impossible.”

It doesn’t take a genius to work out which aspects he was talking about: the Freedom Charter’s calls for free education and decent housing; living wages and shorter work hours; land for the landless and the restoration of the national wealth to the people. All the things apartheid kept cordoned off from the black majority; the things the climate crisis gives us a ‘once in a century’ chance achieve.

Nelson Mandela once described a change in the ANC’s position on economic democracy was ‘inconceivable.’ But as John Pilger writes, following his release in 1990, reassuring the white establishment and foreign investors, “the very orthodoxy and cronyism that had built, maintained and reinforced fascist apartheid, became the political agenda of the ‘new’ South Africa.”

Even before Mandela was released, the ANC was cutting secret deals with the Anglo-American Corporation and the Afrikaner elite. Winnie Mandela, herself a leading figure in the anti-apartheid movement and ANC government, said in 2010: “Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded.”

Since the ANC took power, the number of black South Africans living on $1 per day has doubled and average life expectancy has dropped by thirteen years. Homelessness has risen and by 2004 over a million people had been evicted from their farms. Protesting workers are murdered by police and small-scale farmers are on the frontlines fighting pollution and industrial agriculture. The gap between rich and poor greater now than under the apartheid regime; in fact along with the Seychelles, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world.

So, modern South Africa is about as progressive as COP21, which LDC Watch eloquently describes as ‘a nail in the coffin for justice for the least developed countries’. And the struggle against climate apartheid is only beginning.

What The Freedom Charter once called for are all the things the climate justice movement wants for the world today. And they are the very principles COP21 has turned its back on.

Photo taken at the Palace of Justice (S Wierda) 1902 Church Square Pretoria – Courtesy, Wikicommons

Shorter version published by New Internationalist with Samir Dathi

La Via Campesina: One Way Forward from Paris

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

In 2007, a man named Keno was killed with two bullets to the chest at point blank range near the Iguagu National Park in Brazil. He was one of many farmers peacefully occupying a GMO research plant to protest the imposition of an industrial agricultural system that had no place for them. The men who murdered him were part of a private militia working for the Syngenta biotech corporation. They perpetrated what the courts would later describe as an attempted ‘massacre’ to, in Syngenta’s chilling words: ‘propagate the idea that every action results in a reaction.’

As any physicist (or farmer) can tell you, this is a basic law of the universe. But it also applies the actions of big agribusiness, whose land grabs, pollution and exploitation have reaped their own reactions from peasant farmers across the world. They are organizing, across communities, sectors and borders, and now they made themselves heard here in Paris.

‘They are destroying our homes, our livelihoods and poisoning the food in people’s mouths.’ Maria, another Brazilian farmer and spokesperson for La Via Campesina, had tears in her eyes as she finished telling me about the relentless destruction of indigenous and farming communities back home. But she held her microphone tight like a weapon. ‘This pollution is worse than death. If we have to give our lives to fight these transnationals, then that is what we should do.’

The Peasant’s Way

The essence of ‘the peasant’s way’ is agro-ecology and food sovereignty: simply put, protecting our farms and our farmers. It was La Via Campesina that first coined the term ‘food sovereignty’. For frontline communities in the South, this idea deeply rooted not only in an ecological culture, but also a deep consciousness of colonial history; an unwillingness forged by history, to rely on this government or that trade treaty to keep feeding you.

As one African famer – and mother – explained: ‘We were told our way of farming, natural farming, was wrong. We have to use the machines. Now, we are starving.’ She raised her fist. ‘Food security is not enough. It only talks about the food on the table. It doesn’t care who produces that food and how. Food sovereignty and agro-ecology is the only way.’

La Via Campesina means ‘the peasant’s way.’ Founded in 1993, this coalition of 150 organizations represents more than 200 million small-scale, indigenous and migrant farmers. Active in more than 70 countries, it campaigns to defend farmer’s rights and our food system.

For Via Campesina spokesperson Adam Payne, this means a constant struggle against industrial agriculture. Far from being a nation removed from the impact of a changing climate, he described how British farmers have been affected by hotter summers, wetter winters, droughts and floods.

‘The industrial food system’s failed us in every way,’ he said. ‘It’s brought more hunger, more obesity, land grabs forcing small farmers off the land, forcing us to compete in markets dominated by free trade agreements, and all while producing 50 per cent of global emissions.

Food Sovereignty

In a report produced with GRAIN, winner of the 2011 Right Livelihood Award (the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’), La Via Campesina break food sovereignty down into five steps. First, taking care of the soil. They estimate that in just 50 years, restoring the practices of small-scale organic farmers could regenerate soil nutrients to pre-industrial levels. This would offset as much as 30 per cent of global Co2 emissions. Second, farming without the agro-toxic chemicals. Instead, traditional farming methods such as crop integration and diversification would improve soil fertility and protect biodiversity without threatening our health and our ecosystems.

The global food trade accounts for most of agriculture’s excess emissions. So, step three is the localization of production and consumption. While strengthening local economies, this would take a big bite out of global emissions. Industrial agriculture’s drive to maximize profit by exploiting cheap labour has super-charged the food market. Crops may be grown in Argentina to feed chickens in Chile which are exported all the way to China for processing and then shipped all the way back to the US for sale. These practices account for up to 6 per cent of all greenhouse emissions and serve no rational purpose. Organic, local produce would also mean more fresh food and fewer preservatives, so it’s healthier for us as well as the planet, which would cool and renew itself.

Next is a radical and vital demand: give the land back to the people who farm it. Because small-scale farms work more efficiently and more ecologically, and because it is their inalienable human right, La Via Campesina calls for a worldwide redistribution of land to rural family and indigenous farmers. Along with policies to support local markets, this could half global greenhouse emissions ‘within a few decades.’

Peasants in Paris

The final step is one that must start now, in the wake of COP21, because every day we do not take it the restraints our farmers grow tighter and the precious resources left to us are squandered and destroyed. It is the rejection of false solutions, the free-market fixes championed by big agribusiness and the politicians whose interests they represent.

Indigenous and rural farming communities are on the frontline in this fight. Despite having lost 70 per cent their farmland to big agribusiness over the past 50 years or so, small-scale farmers still manage to grow 70 per cent of the world’s food. But for nearly five decades they have been under attack from big agribusiness. Water systems are polluted and land grabbed from beneath their feet as indigenous families are forced from their homes.

On Tuesday, La Via Campesina activists in Paris held a flash-action in defiance of the protest ban. They painted the entrance of Danone’s headquarters red to protest the lives lost by the corporation’s water privatization and land grabs in Asia, and the lives threatened by Danone’s promotion of so-called ‘climate smart agriculture’.

The following day, activists celebrated their Peasant Agriculture and Food Sovereignty day with a series of public events, welcoming speakers from across Europe, North America and the global South. The final forum, co-hosted with Confederation Paysanne, was flooded with hundreds of guests and had to spill out into the main space. The atmosphere was electric.

Farmers from across the world shared stories of exploitation and dispossession matched only by the solidarity they showed one another. A fisherman from South Africa re-counted their long fight against the criminalization of small-scale fisheries. For him, no law passed by a corrupt government in the interest of foreign corporations is legitimate. Yet even after an arduous and successful legal battle won over many years, his colleagues are still being arrested for trying to feed their families from their own ancestral waters.

‘We have decided we will be arrested again and again until they change the laws.’ His pledge was met with heartfelt applause. ‘When the government brings the army the women form a human chain around us and they protect us with their solidarity and their bodies.’

Listening to their stories, three things became very clear. First, a deep love for their way of life, their commitment to the fight for it and the great pride they took in this most essential of professions: feeding people. ‘It is noble,’ one said with dignity, ‘the first noble profession.’

Second, this is so much more than an environmental campaign or a section of the labour force organizing for its interests: it’s an independence movement, in the truest sense of the word. I was reminded of Mandela’s Freedom Charter. One of its most significant and indeed radical demands was that ‘land be given to all the landless people’. Really, it was the moral and economic heart of the anti-apartheid movement; one that was ultimately sacrificed by the African National Congress in exchange for a far less tangible and ultimately limited form of freedom for black South Africans.

In exchange for national independence they sacrificed economic autonomy: a contradiction in terms, as South Africa – with the rest of the global South – would come to learn. But in this movement, the reclamation of the land takes on such enormous significance, and the environmental case for it is made with such clarity, it is hard to imagine it being sacrificed a second time.

Finally, we all heard loud and clear the necessity – and an embryonic culture of – a very deep internationalism. You could see it on people’s faces as they listened to a farmer from Mali speak: ‘[The agribusiness corporations] destroyed billions of hectares that are being occupied. They chase people from the villages. We are victims of mass evictions. And the governments are accomplices to the global corporations, they are protected even by police we pay for with our taxes… People are beaten up, peasants are in jail in their thousands, how can we resist this? There is a strong movement of resistance but at all times we will be too small. So we need to converge and fight together.’

As one fisherwoman put it: ‘We need more than solidarity. We must put our anchors deep.’ This kind of sentiment is more than a political strategy; more than the assertion that the more of us unite, the more we can win. It’s an old and intuitive recognition of the absolutely scientific interconnectedness of all life. And that’s a very strong foundation for the building of a better world, as well as an excellent reason to fight for it.

Written for New Internationalist

A brief history of really bad ideas

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

The climate justice movement offers a wealth of solutions that never get a fair hearing. Every cornerstone of a just, sustainable future, from community-owned energy in the sky to organic agriculture in the earth, is consistently swept aside as utopian thinking.

This is particularly irritating given the spectrum of fantastical and occasionally genocidal schemes that do manage to find traction among power-hungry politicians, profiteering corporations and some truly eccentric scientists. To remind climate justice activists the world over that we are the ones with our feet on the ground, let’s take a look back at some of the worst.

1) Carbon pricing

Carbon pricing and trading emerged from the failure of the Kyoto Protocol to establish a proper cap on emissions in 1992. It has been the flagship free-market climate policy ever since, taxing emissions and issuing tradable pollution permits to businesses and institutions. Often, low-carbon institutions like hospitals and universities are obliged to buy extra credits while the corporations cash in.

Big Polluters have made a killing by speculating, cutting corners and generally defrauding the system, sometimes deliberately producing more emissions just so they can get paid to dispose of them. Like all free-market fixes, it’s extremely lucrative; between 2005 and 2010 the global carbon market turned a $500 billion profit.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates carbon taxes are five times too low to discourage the Big Polluters (which, given their more than $5 trillion of annual subsidies, they can afford.) But they are high enough to put a heavy burden on working people, to whom energy companies pass on extra costs. More than 1 in 10 Europeans are blighted by energy poverty, which is forecast to kill 40,000 people this winter in Britain alone. This also contributes to creating the apparent conflict of interest between the planet and the poor.

Lastly, the scheme has completely failed to halt rising emissions. That the EU’s own watchdog admits the scheme is ‘almost never enforced’ gives some indication of how seriously our leaders really take the climate threat, whatever their rhetoric. No wonder, then, that instead of falling, emissions have been rising at their fastest rate in 30 years. Really bad idea.

2) Privatising the planet

Whatever the problem, selling it off is the only solution the market ever has to offer. And since the crash of 2008, politicians have been selling off public services faster than ever. The resulting devastation of our education, healthcare and welfare systems hasn’t put them off – now they want to apply the austerity model to the fight against climate change by privatizing the planet itself.

Nature is reduced to ‘natural capital’; our forests, rivers and fields become ‘green infrastructure’. And the results are utter nonsense. The UK’s Natural Capital Committee has established a price for the aesthetic value of Britain’s lakes and rivers (at about $1 billion.) But you can’t quantify beauty, measure happiness or put a price on what is priceless.

The conviction that we need to is rooted in the belief that people only value something if you slap a price tag on it. That might be true for the CEOs lining up to buy our planet but the research suggests most people deserve a bit more credit. Unfortunately, some sections of the environmental movement have adopted this language of ‘natural capital’.

As Guardian columnist George Monbiot and others have argued, in committing themselves to an ultimately doomed attempt to make big business care about the earth, these ‘mainstream environmentalists’ have destroyed their own moral authority and in doing so, undermined their ability to mobilize the grassroots. Really bad idea.

3) Crazy crops

Biofuels have long been pushed by big business as a magical alternative to oil and gas – even though they are inefficient, expensive and enormously destructive. In fact, the production of biofuels often emits more greenhouse gases than conventional fuels, not to mention the fact it’s become a leading driver of deforestation, reducing vast tracts of ancient, irreplaceable forest to dead land. It also gobbles up enormous amounts of water, which is exactly what we don’t want as droughts and pollution diminish this most precious resource, on which all life depends. Biofuel production has also driven up the price of grain, threatening hunger, instability and conflict.

And this is just a small part of the unspeakable havoc wreaked on food security by the globalization of industrial agriculture, which has exhausted our once-abundant planet. For example, despite controlling three-quarters of all farmland and enjoying massive government subsidies, industrial farming produces only 30 per cent of our food. In just 40 years, its senseless intensity (almost half the food produced is wasted,) has destroyed a third of the world’s arable land while somehow still managing to leave 800 million people hungry.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) have been trumpeted as another ‘big fix’ for hunger and climate change, despite widespread health concerns and the fact they fail the most elementary standard for sustainability: they are non-renewable. Corporations in the climate negotiations are pushing heat-resistant GMOs and ‘smart-fertilisers’. From an environmental perspective, these methods not only worsen the climate crisis, being both water and fossil-fuel intensive, but heighten vulnerability. Most GMOs are more susceptible to drought, floods and disease and so require intensive mechanical and chemical treatment to survive – which means big bucks for the agribusiness corporations that sell them. It also means peasant farmers are priced off their lands or buried beneath mountains of debt, contributing to almost 300,000 farmer suicides in India over the past decade in what has become known as the ‘GM genocide’. Really bad idea.

4) Geo-engineering

Like nuclear power, the science of ‘weather management’ started off in weapons development at the heart of the military-industrial complex. But since the breakdown of the COP15 negotiations in 2009, Solar Radiation Management (SRM) has resurfaced as a ‘last line of defence’ for the planet; a substitute for (and for some, preferable to) regulating emissions. From filling the stratosphere with sulphate to erecting giant mirror-roofs across the earth to reflect the sun’s rays, SRM proposals range from surreal to plain stupid.

Injecting sulphates into the atmosphere, for example, mimics the sun-blocking effects of volcanic eruptions: widely considered the most life threatening of all natural disasters due to their long-lasting and unpredictable disruption of natural weather patterns. Putting aside the question of who’d be in charge of the thermostat, we really have no idea what the side-effects might be and no way to test, since the only appropriate laboratory is the planet we’re living on.

Most SRM proposals are ‘lock-in’ strategies, meaning we start pumping out one kind of pollution to deal with another kind of pollution with no idea how to stop without frying everything to a crisp. And even optimistic projections predict SRM would fry swathes of the global South to a crisp anyway, disrupting the monsoon and ‘completely drying out’ the Sahel region of Africa, threatening 4.1 billion people. Really bad – and slightly genocidal – idea.

5) Letting Big Polluters sponsor COP21

There is no business bigger than the fossil fuel business. This is an industry with friends in all the high places, subsidized to the tune of $10 million every minute of every day and making annual profits equivalent to the GDP of France. They have 20 trillion reasons to extract every last bit of oil, coal and gas: all of them dollars.

They are not our allies. As Friends of the Earth’s Asad Rehman put it here in Paris: ‘Putting corporates in the driving seat for climate negotiations is like putting Dracula in a blood bank.’ Yet that’s exactly where they are.

Corporate Accountability International notes in its report, Fuelling the Fire: the Big Polluters Bankrolling Cop 21 that these corporations have a long history of political interference with environmental policy making. On one hand, they routinely engage in sophisticated campaigns of misinformation about climate change; on the other, clean up their image by funding COPs and joining climate marches.

Pierre-Henry Guignard, Secretary-General of the UN summit, promised this year to build ‘a very business-friendly COP.’ This is a contradiction in terms. Pretending it’s not, hides the root of the problem from the public and leads us down a twenty-first dead end. It is the mother of all bad ideas.

The power of good ideas

Within the market system, all proposals are viewed through the lens of commercial viability. We see this battle between cost efficiency and actual efficiency being played everywhere in the market’s warped attempts to tackle global warming. It promotes the proposals which turn a profit over those that might actually help us, every single time.

To quote Monbiot: ‘What we are talking about is giving the natural world to the City of London, the financial centre, to look after. What could possibly go wrong? Here we have a sector whose wealth is built on the creation of debt. That’s how it works, on stacking up future liabilities. Shafting the future in order to serve the present: that is the model.’ It’s the model that got us into this mess and it’s not going to get us out of it.

It’s fantastical, fictitious, pie-in-the-sky fundamentalism, and our job is to expose it as such, not adopt its language and values as our own. So we need to reclaim realism, assert our own values as boldly as our adversaries, and mobilize around the principle that life – all life – is more precious than profit. The big polluters will never want to pay; so it’s time for them to get out of our way.

Written for New Internationalist

Odyssey Entry VI: Crossing No More

Posted on December 7, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

‘The Monument for Refugees?’ the bar woman frowned. ‘Sorry, I do not know this place.’ Apparently none of the locals did, and it wasn’t on the town map. We had just crossed the border from Turkey and arrived in Orestiada, a small Greek border town founded by Turkish refugees in 1923. The Monument for Refugees commemorates those families who left Turkey for Greece—often under duress—as part of the population exchange between the two countries.

Greece and Turkey are divided by the mighty Evros river, a fierce natural barrier for those seeking to cross the border. But northeast of Orestiada, where the Evros bends, 12.5km of that border is dry land. Since time immemorial, this ‘gap’ in the river has provided safe passage for refugees through Turkey into Europe.

In recent years it’s been trodden by 100,000s refugees, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. They pass through in search of asylum from countries wrecked by war, poverty and climate change. But that’s all over now. Greece has raised the drawbridge and Orestiada has become a bastion of Fortress Europe.

The Evros fence

The fence was built by the right-wing Samaras administration in 2012. 12.5km of 13ft tall razor wire fencing complete with heat sensors now block this entry point, and over a thousand special police officers have been deployed to guard the Evros border. Clearly the austerity regime spares no expense when the threat of immigration is concerned. The land on both sides is designated a ‘controlled military zone’ and when we visited we were under constant scrutiny by our police escort and two stern-faced soldiers.

Whilst the militarisation of the border has achieved a sharp reduction in ‘irregular crossings’ here, it has forced more refugees to cross the perilous Aegean Sea, where soaring numbers of people are drowning in their quest for asylum. As one young Kurdish refugee told us, ‘no one endangers their children’s lives unless they have to. We have to. To stay is death or slavery.’

Boats have been going down in the Aegean and claiming double-figure casualties since 2012. From September of this year there has been an astronomical surge in sea crossings and the death toll is rising sharply. 20 October set a new record, with over 10,000 arrivals in a single day. The following week, as over 50,000 people attempted the crossing, at least 50 people drowned in just 72 hours. 17 were infants. Another 6 infants drowned along with five others when their boat sank on Sunday 1 November. Many more have drowned since.

We put this to Orestiada’s police chief, Pashalis Syritoudis. He has played a leading role in border control in the Evros region. He is an officious looking man, impeccably smart, with neat grey hair and a humourless face. ‘This operation has had very impressive results’ he told us proudly. He went through the stats: 28,000 were arrested in 2011, and 23,000 in 2012. But with the fence, 2013 saw just 492 arrests. To him this was a clear barometer of success: fewer arrests mean fewer refugees attempting to cross his border.

Child detained at Fylakio

We pointed out that following his operations, drownings have increased in the Aegean. Syritoudis was un-phased: ‘We are obligated to protect the borders of the EU. So this is what we do.’ He then added as an afterthought, ‘Of course we don’t like what’s going on in the islands and we hope for a political solution.’ When we asked him what that solution might look like, he became irritated: ‘I cannot answer a political matter. I do whatever the headquarters tell me.’

We then questioned him on the widespread reports of illegal pushbacks in the Evros. Tales of the pushbacks are commonplace in the camps, which might have something to do with why journalists are forbidden to interview refugees there. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recently published reports of refugees who managed to cross the Evros being robbed, beaten and forced back into Turkey by unidentified men in violation of international law.

Syritoudis was dismissive at first. ‘The Greek police doesn’t approve and doesn’t use these methods… these claims about push backs are part of a general plan to unfairly accuse the police.’ When we asked if anyone else might be responsible for these abuses, he was categorical: No. If that were happening in his jurisdiction, he’d know about it.

Fylakio detention and ‘first reception’ centres

The First Reception Centre

Despite these operations, some refugees do manage to cross the Evros river into Greece where they are arrested and detained at the First Reception Centre on the outskirts of a nearby village, Fylakio. The centre was established in 2013 to hold people during their asylum applications. It was supposed to get the refugees out of prison and into a more humane facility providing medical, legal and psychosocial support.

We visited the Frist Reception Centre and interviewed its Director, Christos Christakoudis. We had read damning reports from 2014 that criticised its inhumane and degrading conditions. And for a reception centre designed to eliminate the need for prisons, it looks an awful lot like the detention centre next door. The perimeter bristles with razor wire, studded with armed guards and angry dogs.

Christos

Christos greeted us warmly, dressed casually in jeans and T-shirt. We immediately asked if we could see where the refugees live, but their huts were fenced off in a separate section of the facility. They were unable to leave their caged area, and we were not allowed in. All we could do was observe them on the other side of the fence. As the refugees saw us approach, they excitedly huddled to the fence to talk to us, clearly not used to visitors. ‘Reporter? BBC?’ asked one man, eager to tell us his story. We mimed to him that we were not allowed to speak. Another inmate beseeched us repeatedly: ‘It is no good here. Like a prison’ and ‘Police bad! Where is UN?’ One young boy told us quietly ‘I want to run away.’

We later learnt these particular refugees were Yazidi, a group that has suffered extreme brutality at the hands of ISIS in northern Iraq. Now they find themselves imprisoned in the place where democracy was born.

We asked Christos why the refugees had to be locked up. Was this appropriate for victims of war and torture, for women and children? Christos explained it was in their best interests. ‘Where will those people stay? Who will manage their food if you have an open place? … If those people are in the open air, you cannot provide for them.’

We were unconvinced and pressed the matter; Greek law demands detention be a last resort. His next argument was lack of resources: ‘If we were well organised as a state, as a country, if we had the funding to support open reception centres, of course. But according to my experience, I don’t think it is something that can happen.’

Safe Passage Now

Greek officials have previously admitted to deliberately and systematically subjecting refugees to degrading conditions as a disincentive; part of the brutal logic of border control. Perhaps this is the real reason the First Reception Centre is set up like a prison.

As for Christos himself, he is clearly a well-intentioned man. But like many in authority, he works with a deeply ingrained sense of paternalism: it is not only his duty, but his right to decide what’s in the refugees’ best interests. If it was European citizens in there, we’d all be calling it a breach of human rights and civil liberties. For them, it’s called the ‘asylum service.’

In opposition, Syriza condemned the fence. In power, it has so far failed to bring it down. In the face of so many deaths at sea, the possibility has finally been raised – but that was dependent on a wider EU deal and before the Paris bombings. Now, France is demanding the deployment of ‘rapid response teams’ of border guards to the Greek-Turkish frontier and the screening of all refugees entering from Turkey for terrorist links.

While world leaders ramp up the War on Terror rhetoric, countless refugees, deprived of safe passage, will keep drowning in Evros and the Agean, to be buried in unnamed and overcrowded graves. We did eventually manage to track down the Monument for Refugees in Orestiada. It stands hidden in a dilapidated, backstreet crossroads. A lonely symbol of the town’s forgotten past.

Written with Samir Dathi & published by Red Pepper

Odyssey Entry V: Learning from the United Ba’alam

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

My five weeks volunteering on the Greek island of Lesvos had felt more like five months; to borrow from Dickens, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In the thick of a humanitarian crisis you bond quickly with people and see extraordinary things. But I don’t mind confessing, I was tired. The bigotry, violence, and corruption I’d been confronted with, not to mention the bone-deep apathy of many senior aid workers, had worn me down. And the Nameless had sunk that week. I was struggling to stay focused on the extraordinary.

The silhouettes of the refugees lined the deck of the ferry in the soft evening light. As I stared up at the towering ship, it felt like an early scene from Titanic: all smiles and waves and anticipation for the start of a new life in a new world. The big secret, of course, is that for many of them there is no new world—at least, not like the one they imagine, the image of freedom and equality we project for the people of the global South. But it’s hard to be the one to tell them that, after everything they’ve been through to get on that ferry to Athens.

Imagine leaving whatever’s left of your home, saying goodbye to everyone you ever knew; fleeing across a war-torn country to the mass camps in Lebanon, tent cities of squalor that stretch as far as the eye can see; the agonizing wait in Turkey, being spat at in the street; risking the deadly Aegean crossing at night, rather than be spotted by masked men who at best will send you back and at worst, sink you right there in the sea; being churned through Lesvos’ registration system, the endless queuing in heat, hunger, and the cold, and then finally, finally, the ferry to Athens.

Welcome to Sparta

I don’t know why I thought the ferry would be different from the camps, but it wasn’t. They are run like floating apartheid states. Families that could afford one got a cushioned seat to sleep on with their children and the floor of one large hall was reserved for women and children, but many were either crowded out or too afraid or resentful of the staff to go inside, so they slept on deck in the biting wind. From what I saw, one volunteer (me), about eight Greeks and four tourists populated the entire ‘VIP section’ of this colossal cruise liner.

Every time someone tried to leave the ‘refugee hall’, the door guard would put a hand in his face. Sometimes he’d ask to see their ticket, conjuring images of the riot police back at the camp screaming “NO! GO!” in peoples’ faces; but often they didn’t ask anything at all. I had to negotiate permission for them to charge their phones for five minutes in the socket by my chair. For some it was their first chance to tell their families they’d survived the crossing.

I got a pretty clear sense of the situation the moment I boarded, handing my ticket over to one of two Greek attendants at the door. He complained this was too many people for them to manage alone. I agreed, and hurriedly took it back from him, conscious of the hundreds of people still waiting behind me. I was about to pick up my bags when the other guard, a soft-spoken Greek in his early-twenties, flashed me a smile. “It’s like Sparta!” he said proudly. I paused. “It’s too big a challenge for just two of you,” I agreed, “but it’s not like Sparta. The Spartans were fighting other soldiers, these are civilians.” I deliberately made no gesture towards them, as though the racism of Greece’s far-right were some sort of secret that could be kept; like the refugees didn’t know it better than me by now, after coming through Camp Moria.

“But they’re black,” he said flatly. My jaw practically hit the deck but he kept talking. “So they’re like soldiers. It’s a black army.”

“Look, how many women and children you can see.” I was getting angry now. I had no patience left for this. “This is not the war,” I snapped. “You ask these people about war. They can tell you some stories, it destroyed their homes and killed their families, that’s war!” His colleague was between us now, a hand on each of our shoulders, and I let him shepherd me towards the escalator. I wish I’d gotten the guy’s name, but the reality is if you complained about every individual that treats refugees like animals, you’d never be off the phone.

The floating camp

When I went to collect the key to my cabin, a staff member escorted me to the room and when he opened the door, we found two young Afghan mothers with two babies and grandma sitting cross-legged on the floor. They rushed to cover their hair, and so began a quite distressing exchange. They spoke Dari, he spoke Greek, and I speak barely any of either but somehow managed to get him out of the room and them to stay.

Turns out one of them had paid for ‘cabin ticket’ and the rest had to be kicked out, not because anyone else had booked the beds but because the sacred principle of private property is worth making an infant and an old lady sleep on the floor. So important was this principle that I, a woman travelling alone on a ship full of men, would not be allowed to keep the key to lock my own door.

I protested, and was taken to the Chief of Staff, who did his best to horrify me with tales of these barbarians who didn’t know how to queue properly (sure they do, they’ve just been at it for weeks in the camps,) peed on the toilet floor (there’s always one…) and once tried to light a fire in a cabin (once during freshers week at my uni, a British law student put plastic in the microwave. This is not a race thing.) I kept my cool this time. I sympathised. I said they were just changing the babies and then I’d get rid of them myself. And then I stole the key.

It was the small victory I needed to put a smile back on my face. On the way back I stopped by the café to pick us up some well-earned chocolate cake and even helped the café staff form a line by teaching them how to say it in Arabic (while amusing all the customers with my camp impressions) and encouraging them to smile. I told them what the lines had been like at Moria and they were horrified. I think it put the whole thing into perspective for them.

It’s amazing how much you can communicate when you have cake. Within fifteen minutes I had them smiling and laughing instead of hiding in the toilet. I showed them the key, we established that I could lock them in and would come back later to sleep. I was as grateful to them as they were to me, for giving me the chance to help put a proper roof over someone’s head after days of handing out bin bags to mothers and babies at Moria in the pouring rain. It was like coming back to life.

That gave me the energy to go and distribute some takeaway food from the ship restaurant where the waiter, to his credit, clearly cottoned onto my intentions and gave me obscenely large portions of everything. I emerged on deck to distribute it to some of the families sleeping outside, and recognised Abdul Majid, a Syrian man I’d been speaking to earlier. He spoke perfect English and was as keen to tell his story as I always am to listen.

The night the Nameless went down I had been desperate for a good story. A single human experience I could witness and record that offered hope. That night there was only grief. But my story of hope had finally found me.

The tale of the United Ba’alam

“We were strangers in Turkey but now we are a family,” Abdul Majid began. “We will stay together, protect each other, feed each other. We are brothers and sisters now. This is above politics.”

The 35 Syrians met on a dinghy (‘ba’alam’) from Turkey to Lesvos. 32 are Muslim, three Christian. Five are women and five are children. Some were pro-government soldiers; others were anti-government protesters.

“It’s the same, like you say happened in Greece,” Anas told me in hushed tones. His family was back in Turkey, waiting for a chance to come across safely. “When a politician is coming with media, they change everything, make the camps look nice. This is the system they have to hide the situation from the European people.” The daily reality they reported was worlds away from what the public has seen: hunger, deprivation, and exploitation, even organ trafficking. “I knew one guy, he was injured and got ‘medical treatment’ in the camp. Then when he got to Europe he was still having problems, so he went to another hospital and they told him: ‘do you know you only have one kidney?’”

With their $1,000 tickets from the smugglers, they were “packed like pickles” in the back of a truck and taken to Izmir, near the coast. “We could not move, but there was a hole for air,” Abdul said comfortingly. “It wasn’t like that freezer truck with the dead people. Our smugglers were actually quite good. They said they’d only put 35 of us in a boat and not send us out in bad weather. ‘We don’t send people out to die, it’s bad for business,’ is what they said. So, we were lucky.”

The United Ba’alam crossing from Turkey to Lesvos

My companions grimaced as they recalled their painfully long wait on a Turkish beach for the chance to set off. They had to go at night, for fear of being stopped, beaten, or even drowned by the masked men that patrol this stretch of the Aegean, both in Greek and Turkish waters. The first night, the water was too rough to risk a crossing. On the second, they had gotten the boat into the water when someone spotted the Turkish coast guard. Terrified, the women and children scrambled out while the men lifted the boat above their heads and ran for the treeline. They escaped, and on the third night made it to sea—but some way into Greek waters, the boat started to slow.

Abdul called the Greek coast guard and asked for a rescue, but the man who answered was dismissive: the weather was calm. Abdul insisted the boat wasn’t safe, that it was taking on water and the children were frightened.

There was a pause. “If it’s not safe, why did you get on the boat?”

“Please sir, we are from Syria!”

The coastguard told him they should have stayed in Turkey and asked for their location, but became angry when Abdul tried to ascertain it in Arabic. He was ordered to speak English, turn on the GPS, and give his full name. Frightened now, Abdul hung up and explained to his fellow passengers he did not think help would come.

It was then, Abdul told me, that they realized they would have to rely on each other and organize themselves if they were going to make it safely to Greece and beyond. So they went from being 35 strangers to a United Ba’alam.

Looking back on Syria

Abdul and Bassel were sitting side by side as we talked. “Here we are great friends,” they agreed. “But at home, we would be trying to kill each other.”

Abdul is a Sunni Muslim from Daraa, which remains under military control despite heavy resistance from the Free Syrian Army. Though he never fired a weapon, Abdul was a pro-democracy protester and supported the Free Syrian Army. “They are not all good, though,” he admitted. “The problem is there are people on all sides who want this war.”

Bassel is from Bloudan, an isolated Christian town. He fought in the army and supports Assad, but became disillusioned during his service. He remembers bitterly how the government supplied his village with weapons they said they would need and then, having promised to stay, pulled out of the village, leaving the Christians to fend for themselves in a conflict made inevitable by what looked from the outside like Christian aggression. A devout Christian himself, he also blames the West’s wars and Islamophobic media for the growth of Islamic State. “It gives the Christian world a bad name,” he said desperately, “like we haven’t moved on since the Crusades. They tell such lies about Islam; it drives people to violence.”

“There are enough weapons in Syria for all the world to fight,” Abdul told me.

“I’ve seen the weapons warehouses,” Bassel murmured. “You cannot see the end of them. It’s like a tsunami.”

Everyone agreed that cracking down on the private arms industry was crucial to ending the war. They reported personally witnessing British, French and Americans selling weapons to both sides of the conflict and also to Islamic State militants: an ugly reality that is just now making its way into media reports of an $18bn Middle Eastern arms race the USA looks set to win.

Abdul holds Assad and foreign economic interests responsible for stoking bitter sectarianism in a nation where, for centuries, different ethnic and religious groups lived side by side in relative harmony. “The West doesn’t hate Assad as much as they pretend, he has been a puppet for them,” he speculated. “They always say they hate their dictator when they want to break the country apart. Just like Saddam and Gaddafi.”

When it came to the question of Western intervention, there was heated but respectful debate between the pro and anti-government crew. Ultimately though, they all agreed that military intervention by foreign nations was the problem, not the solution.

“Western bombing will destroy the entire country, like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Anas warned. “Look how many refugees are fleeing with us from those countries now, ten years after Western liberation!”

Anas, Abdul and Bassel all agreed: “NATO’s just after the petrol, same as always, and Russia wants to stop the gas pipe… They don’t care what happens to the people.” Everyone recognized that ultimately, the conflict would require political compromise, but its chances were dimmed by the sheer number of competing international forces at work now.

The youngest of the group, Salem, had been silently listening to the debate. Abdul told me that Salem had left his wife and children at home in Damascus for the moment because, in the absence of safe passage to Greece, they were too afraid of “the death boats.”

Now, he spoke. “All the world hates Syrians. Europe just needs us to die, to run from our country and die in the sea if we don’t die on the land before we get there.”

Those words stung. I felt ashamed of my country, that we could project such inhumanity. I told him this wasn’t true of the European public, but that it was in the interests of those in power to divide and rule in Europe—just like in Syria. What, then, was the solution, he wanted to know? I told him I believed that if that the media did a better job of educating the public, and people understood who you are, what you’ve suffered, and what you hope for, progressive political change might follow.

He looked disdainful, and told me that foreign coverage “bears no resemblance” to what is actually going on at home; his friends nodded their agreement.

“What good is the media? Maybe you are different, but the ones we see on international TV, they explain nothing, they ask no questions, bring no hope, give us no power as a people. They’re just counting the punches as Syria is beaten to death.”

I remembered the media’s obsessive counting of the “migrant dead” after the Nameless went down, and I could see where he was coming from. It might be at odds with the free market model, but reporters have a moral obligation to convey nuance, not bulldoze it; to tell the stories that matter instead of sensationalizing the ones that don’t; and to give people a chance to speak for themselves in more than sound bites.

It means recognising heroism and courage where we find it, not reducing a whole nation to infighting victims. It means telling and learning from stories like the United Ba’alam.

When I described my own frustrations as a human rights and peace activist in Britain, Salem’s tone changed again. He hoped, he said, that I would not lose faith. “Not when I meet people like you guys,” I said. I was so moved that this man, pushed to cynicism by such extraordinary suffering, was now able to give me that gift.

“This is how all people should be,” Abdul smiled. “See now, how we are sitting and talking together. This is what Syria needs to do. This is what East and West needs to do. It is the only thing that gives any of us hope one day to go home to a land free and peaceful and shared by all.”

Abdul Majid is right. Those 35 strangers cast adrift and alone in a great, dark sea overcame their differences and found solidarity. From one end of Europe to another, they stayed united and survived. And from the broken aid system on Lesvos to the halls of power in Fortress Europe and at the Pentagon, we all have much to learn from the United Ba’alam.

***

The next day, as I hauled my sleep-deprived body up for the coffee necessary to power me off the boat, I met Christos, an old Greek man from the island of Chios who spoke about six words in English. “Refugee helper?” he asked. I nodded. He squinted at my Greece Solidarity Campaign badge—which reads ‘solidarity’ in Greek—and became irrepressibly enthusiastic.

He met my eye and raised one hand. “Greece,” he said. He raised the other. “Syria.” He put his hands together and said: “Same.”

Then he swept his hands across the crowded deck. “Love, love, love!” he sang.

***

The United Ba’alam crew made it to Germany, where most reunited with family. Eight members continued on to Norway, where Bassel and one other man will apply for asylum. The remaining six returned to Sweden, where all but one chose to register. Now that he has seen his crew safely to their final destinations, Captain Abdul Majid is returning to Germany to meet his brother and seek asylum there, and hopes one day to bring his wife and children. His elderly parents, he says, “will die before they leave Syria.”

Originally written for The Leap

Aid Agencies Keeping Feet Dry on Lesvos

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

I didn’t come to Lesvos as a volunteer. I came as a journalist, to report truthfully what I saw there. But in those crucial, urgent moments – when a few people struggle to feed 2,000 or screaming women hold their infants out to you from a storm-battered boat and there is simply no one else to put out their hands and help, you can’t just stand there and ask for an interview. At least, I couldn’t. So my five days on the island became five weeks. And it was in the act of volunteering whatever support was needed that I found the real story of the refugees: the story of how apathy and mismanagement turned a crisis into a tragedy.

It begins at the beaches. We all know boats are sinking – more than 3,000 lives have been lost this year in the Mediterranean crossing. Just the other day, a boat with 300 people went down. Apart from limited rescue operations by an overstretched Greek coastguard, what I call ‘the Independents’ – small bands of volunteers from Lesvos and around the world – are often all that stand between the refugees and that ugly, growing number.

On my first day on the beaches I was swimming buoyancy aids out to refugees jumping from waterlogged dinghies. That was the day I first used CPR and later, watched as the government registration rules kept a mother from holding her dying child. All this as representatives of a major aid agency stood with dry shoes on the beach taking photos with their phones. The rule, to which I am sure there are exceptions, seems to be that after a day on the beach you can tell the aid workers from the volunteers on the basis of who has wet feet.

At the island’s makeshift refugee camps, everyone has wet feet. Trench foot and flu were rampant during last week’s storms, and in the absence of adequate shelter construction or even tarpaulin provision, we volunteers handing out bin liners created a frenzy. For weeks, police had been using violence and teargas almost daily. Food shortages have been constant and the near-total absence of translators aggravates regular episodes of panic and violence during the agonising and ineffectual registration system.

Nights are the worst. Once the aid agencies ‘clock off’, there is no one to help the lost child, the bleeding mother-to-be, the ailing grandfather. And in the face of every kind of deprivation you could name, comes a chorus from every corner: “It’s not our jurisdiction.” So the volunteers make it theirs, and even when the world is watching, this is the reality it never sees.

The aid system in Lesvos can and must be reformed. For me, there are three vital elements missing: honesty, humility and humanity.

Honesty

The crisis sweeping Europe is not going away any time soon. Refugee numbers are on the rise and winter is on the way. Without radical reform, thousands of men, women and children are going to die needlessly on European soil.

Neither frontline governments nor NGOs can possibly prepare for this unless they are prepared to tell this simple truth.

Perhaps if this were not a debt-ridden nation in the midst of its own crisis, there would be a “gigantic humanitarian effort” under way in Greece, but for the record, there is not. And Camp Moria has not been a place where children get PlayStations and have their faces painted. The racist violence, corruption, police impunity and legal failures criticised in the past are very much still part of the picture. As worrying as this is, the fact is: only the Independents seem willing to speak about them.

Humility

What frustrates the Independents more than anything is the apparent territorialism of the big aid agencies. In one particularly revealing incident, a woman whose infant had drowned on the crossing was literally fought over on the beach by employees of rival charities keen to represent her case and the media attention it would garner. Bartering in this kind of ‘poverty porn’ alienates the refugee community from those who are meant to be supporting them.

Many Independents come with vital skills: lifeguards from Denmark, coastguards from Spain, paramedics from Norway. The list goes on. But often, it’s the basic contributions that are most needed: small-scale fundraising, cooking and cleaning, building shelters and perhaps the most precious commodity of all: time. “You guys are the only ones that make us feel heard,” one refugee told me. Independents also enjoy a degree of freedom that allows them to respond more efficiently to rapidly changing circumstances and endless red tape. We’re prepared to drive hypothermic children to shelter without waiting for police permission, for example. And we are present at all hours in places formal agencies have abandoned.

Most Independents understand that those working for formal organisations, while empowered in some ways, are restricted in others. But when overstretched, the only answer is to collaborate with Independents as autonomous, equal partners in the provision of a lifesaving service; to share resources where possible and maintain a dialogue always.

The same goes for refugees themselves. Many have urgently needed skills – from construction to translation. A formalised and mutually beneficial system to utilise these skills could transform the camps.

Lack of coordination and support leaves untrained Independents working night and day, not getting what they need, while aid agencies seem to have storehouses full of resources and lack the personnel to distribute them. If only an efficient, dynamic relationship could be built between these two sides, we might start to see some of the infrastructure needed to cope with what is surely still to come.

Humanity

Last week, when I needed to get papers fast-tracked for a bereaved mother whose infant was hospitalised and on the brink of death, I asked a UNHCR (UN refugee agency) staff member what could be done for her. He just stared at me. “Please, can you take her name at least? We can have someone look for her tomorrow, make sure she gets where she needs to go,” I implored. He shook his head: “Registration is the police’s responsibility.” I asked him exactly what his responsibility was. He ignored me.

Independent volunteers distributing bin bags at Moria

I got my degree in Politics and International Development from SOAS, University of London. When I started, I was aspiring to work for UNHCR myself. What I learned at university made me more critical of the structures in which they operate, but after my experience in Lesvos I really don’t think I ever could. Time and again I’ve been shocked by the apathy and detachment displayed by the professional aid workers. There’s also the question of how Syrians are treated so much better than anyone else, something the aid system doesn’t seem to be contesting nearly enough.

In a crisis situation when most suffer without even the basics, some will always try to cheat the system. It’s not like there would be a level playing field even if they didn’t – the survival game is rigged and competition is brutal. But that doesn’t give anyone, from a position of power and privilege, the right to make generalised assumptions that every starving, dehydrated woman that faints in the queue is faking it or just “hysterical” (a favourite camp term). Once you start making generalised assumptions like that, dehumanising the ones you’re meant to help, you’re no longer qualified to be of help.

***

On the ferry to Athens recently, I hid two Afghan mothers with infants in my cabin so they’d have somewhere to sleep out of the oceanic wind, and spent my evening on deck with some of my new-found Syrian friends. As we talked the night away, we found ourselves cracking jokes about all this, doing impressions, demanding “PAPERS!” from each other whenever someone needed the toilet.

But like me, I think they laugh to keep from crying. Their endurance, their dignity, their courage to carry on, is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. They’re not victims, they’re survivors. And if my critique of the aid system here seems idealistic, it is only because I hold it to the standards they deserve. The people I have met and the stories they have told me are all the evidence we need: we can do better than this.

Originally written for IRIN Global

Odyssey Entry III: Crete & the Myth of the Economic Migrant

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

Crete is a remarkable island of outstanding natural beauty and vibrant traditional culture. I arrived there at the end of the tourist season, as the tavernas and hotels were preparing for hibernation. In Chania, a beautiful coastal town drenched in romantic colonial charm, a great black banner reading “Refugees Welcome” hung from the old Venetian castle overlooking the harbour. But none could be seen amidst the tapestry of designer shops and coffee bars. Still, their ghosts seemed to fill the streets and a sense of foreboding quickly entered most conversations on the topic.

When I told people my next stop was the island of Lesvos, eyebrows typically rose above hairlines. Many business owners said they feared tourists getting the “wrong impression” about Greece. When assured that I thought highly of their country and knew what to expect on the island, eyebrows fell off the backs of heads. Then, why would I go? Don’t I know how dangerous it is, “a white woman alone at the camps”?

One hotel manager described the refugees in medieval terms, as “Muslim invaders.” I reminded him that they were not soldiers but civilians, many of them women and children. He was dismissive. “They are single men looking for an easy life. They should stay and fight for their country, like we did,” he replied, referring to the Greek civil war of 1946-49. “They have no respect for our culture,” one hotel owner complained, repeating the now widespread myth about refugees defecating in Greek churches (which turned out to be a lie cooked up by supporters of the fascist Golden Dawn party on Twitter).

Since the financial crash, many progressives have looked with envy at the spirit of resistance that has fueled Greece’s mass strikes and civil disobedience and swept Syriza into power. But those days may be coming to an end. The day I arrived in Crete there was (another) general election; Tsipras was running for a renewed mandate after bowing to the austerity memorandum that a clear majority of Greeks had bravely voted against in his referendum.

I was sitting with the staff at an empty tavern watching the results come in on TV. They were all socialists and Syriza supporters, but none had bothered to vote, considering the outcome both a foregone and ultimately meaningless conclusion. “He betrayed us after the referendum,” growled the elderly chef, stubbing his cigarette out for emphasis. “We vote and we vote and nothing changes.”

It brought to mind Emma Goldman’s famous adage that if voting changed anything, it would be illegal. Tsipras held onto power, but voter turnout plummeted to 56.65%, the lowest ever recorded in Greece since the restoration of democracy in 1974, and Golden Dawn received 100,000 votes. In the islands of Kos and Lesvos, which have been overwhelmed by refugee numbers, support for the neo-Nazi party has doubled.

Many progressive Greeks are suffering a crisis of faith. Tsipras’ pyrrhic victory has cost him the confidence of a disillusioned country. Basilis, a tall, eloquent man in his early forties who would seem more at home lecturing at a university than working at a taverna, told me that, though passionate, he felt too old and too tired to continue the political struggle. Instead, he would go back to his family farm for the harvest.

The island’s iconic rolling orchards of olives and oranges are part of the fabric of life here. December’s olive harvest is an annual event of immense cultural (if not economic) significance to Crete, where small-scale organic agriculture is still an intrinsic part of community life. Young and old, rich and poor, in the orchards or just in the garden, most Cretans still maintain a close connection to the land. And they work without pesticides, using Indigenous methods like limewash to protect their crops. When I told Basilis how much we pay for organic tomatoes in the UK, I had to Google it before he’d believe me.

This culture—and the reduced stress levels, high life-expectancy, and sumptuous food that come with it—is a big draw for tourists, oblivious to the fact their banks and governments at home are threatening it with extinction. During a visit to Crete’s blue lagoon, one local had explained to me that areas of outstanding natural beauty in Greece are marked as “zones protected from the EU.” But the vast bulk of Greece’s agricultural land has no such defence. Under the terms of the austerity memorandum signed by Tsipras, taxes on Greek farms will double, forcing many organic family farms out of business. In this economic climate, only big agribusiness can thrive by compromising the environment, food quality, and wages.

“The banks are pressuring families to sell off land to pay their debts,” Basilis told me. “I keep telling people, don’t you see, you’ll sell a bit, your children will sell a bit, and your grandchildren will have no land. Monsanto will come in with its pesticides and chemicals and rape the land. To have no money is bad but at least with land we can still feed ourselves properly. But not for long.”

What I witnessed in Crete—the growing xenophobia and corporate enclosure of the farmlands, the social breakdown and erosion of hope—seemed particularly poignant given the island’s venerable history. Four thousand years ago, it was from this island that the ancient Minoans built an astonishingly advanced civilization, with its pioneering literature, theatre, and seafaring, and established a society marked by remarkable sexual and social equality. Where property was held in common, today selling off land and services to private interests is, for many, the only way to survive.

Many Greeks have opened their hearts and homes to the refugees. But for others, the economic crisis makes exclusion not only justifiable, but essential. “We must stop building camps to encourage them, they need to go,” one small business owner told me in Crete. “We have no resources to care for our own people.” With war veterans eating out of rubbish bins in Athens and the suicide rate soaring, that much is true. In a way, it’s also ironic. As youth unemployment hovers around 50 per cent, Greece is already producing its own “economic migrants”: educated young men and women whose talents the Greek economy can’t use, and who now dream of doing meaningful work for a decent wage abroad.

Originally written for The Leap

Entry IV: The Sinking of the Nameless: Recollections of a Volunteer/Journalist

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

Great tragedies have names. The Titanic, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbour. Their heroes grow taller now than when they walked on earth and their dead live forever in story.

This is not a great tragedy. This is just a boat of migrants that went down in the Aegean, another number, another regrettable spat of collateral damage in the border war of Fortress Europe.

Lesvos, 2015

Content warning: distressing scenes, death of a child by drowning.

⥈

Son

I acclimate to the volunteer life on Lesvos. I acclimate to the segregation in the camps, packed tents of Syrians looking like dignity compared to the Iraqi, Afghan and miscellaneous African people left sleeping in dirt. I acclimate to screaming babies being thrown at me from dinghies and the brutality of the Greek police. I acclimate to aid workers eating in good restaurants while the children they’re here to help eat from the dustbins outside. I acclimate to the numbness that spreads right out to your fingers and toes to keep you from breaking. My friend Ashley convinces me it’s time for a day off. We don’t work by shifts for a charity, we just do what needs doing and that shift is endless. We plan to drive from Anaxos to Molyvos for a dinner that isn’t rice and beans or eaten standing up. It’s a half hour drive down the coastline but you’d have to be a sociopath to make it in that time today. The sky is bright but the sea is furious and the wind bites. Even so, boats approach the island endlessly. Every few hundred metres along the beach is another dinghy coming in without anyone to meet it, another boat wrecked at terrifying angles on the sand with broken windows and emergency blankets fluttering from the rails like trapped angels. We stop and stop and stop again. Freezing children bundled into cars, battles for seats on the rescue bus, phantom ambulances chased for the sick and injured. Breakfast and lunch come and go and we’ve given all our food away, so by the time we reach Molyvos, we’re starving. We talk quietly as we each wrestle our own guilt. After weeks not really using it, our privilege of being able to step out of this cataclysm feels grotesque. The simple act of sitting down to bread and wine has become bizarre. My eyes sweep the harbour, painted late afternoon pink. The restaurants are all open, all empty. Waiters recline in patron’s chairs, smoking and chatting. Inland, hazy indigo peaks reach into the sky. It strikes me as vaguely odd that I can’t unclench my teeth. We’re a few bites into our bread when the sirens start. Rescue workers hurl themselves out of doorways from nowhere. With a synchronicity that only comes to a place where disaster has become routine, tables and chairs are swept away in one smooth motion. Volunteers, locals, journalists and medical teams are converging on the waterfront. Ten or fifteen children come off that first rescue boat, which heads immediately back to sea. I put my arms out to receive a young boy. He can’t be more than nine years old. He is unconscious. I run for the medical team, transfixed by his face. He looks strangely peaceful, only his skin is grey and his lips are blue. I lie him down beside one of the Red Cross doctors. The doctor is already working on a little girl. He doesn’t even look up. “I’m using both my hands already.” His tone is matter of fact, the way an adult might reassure a child with a serious injury that they have everything under control. “Can you do what I tell you?” “Yes.” My voice sounds far away. I get my first crash course in CPR. I am terrified of hurting him, of doing something wrong. Thirty chest compressions. Hold the nose. Two breaths until the chest rises. His lips like ice on mine. Thirty compressions. Nose. Breathe. Thirty compressions. Nose. Breathe, breathe, breathe. The boy’s eyes fly open and he starts coughing water. I roll him over and rub his little back. Once he’s breathing right we strip off his wet clothes to prevent hypothermia. The medics disappear. I wrap the boy up in my jacket and lift him onto my lap, covering his body with mine. I can see Ashley holding a little girl by her ankles while the medics try to get water from her chest. Every time I see a medic I have them check him. They are overwhelmed. They say he’s okay but he doesn’t look okay to me. I’ve been an atheist all my life. This is when I start praying. I know there is more to do but until someone appears who can take better care of this boy me, I’m not leaving him. I don’t know how long I rock back and forth with him in my arms whispering in a language he doesn’t understand. Now and then he opens his eyes a little but they never focus. I don’t know if he sees me. I choose to believe he can hear my voice, feel warmth, recognise the feeling of being out of the water, being cared for. I’ve never felt love as vast and desperate as I do holding this child in my arms. Together with the horror, it engulfs me. Before I left, a friend of mine warned me that you cannot be a volunteer and a journalist. Journalists do not get involved. I think about that as I hold this boy, who in this moment has only me in the world. Photographers circle like vultures, getting in people’s way, shoving their lenses where any decent human being must surely know they don’t belong. I don’t want to be a journalist anymore.

Daughter

Finally, the ambulances come. The paramedic has to pry my arms straight out from under the boy. I don’t want to let him go. I’ll never know what happens to him. A second siren announces the return of the coastguard. Somehow, my legs carry me over. I put my arms out to an Afghan woman who grips them like she’s still drowning. “My mother, my brother!” she shouts in English. I try not to think of my own mother drowning. “Boats are still coming,” I tell her. She does not respond. “We have to care for you now. If you don’t get dry, you’ll get sick.” At first she won’t let me, so I just blanket her shaking body, speaking softly and waiting with dry clothes until she’s ready to be touched. “Please, please, my mother is a good woman.” A flare of fury that in this moment of all moments, she feels the need to assure me that her mother deserves to be rescued. Her name is Sultana. She is alone now, she keeps saying. I help her change, shaking and crying. Feeding her water feels like the most important thing I have ever done. The priest opens the church to provide shelter, so I help her inside and encourage her into the recovery position as she coughs up the last of the sea water. I take her name and promise I’ll look for her family and come back. She kisses me and kisses me and kisses me. Twenty minutes later when I return with more supplies, she’s gone.

Grandchild

There is one more boat after that and fewer people this time. The coastguard has given up the search. The tavernas have reopened to offer shelter and tea. Elderly local women rock motherless babies. One catches my eye. She cocoons a little girl in a blanket as expertly as if she were her own. Her dark eyes brim with an angry love. I want to reach out to her but she seems far away and I don’t want to be the one to bring her back here. People weep on the floor, staggering from group to group, crying out for their loved ones; women call for their children, men ask after their wives. I work with a multilingual Syrian man to compile a list of names. The mothers are relieved just to have someone asking after their children. They stay calm while they spell each name and give the age of each child with any distinguishing features. Then when the helplessness sets in, they break down. I hold some as they cry. I am useless, wooden. A softly spoken woman called Named Shorooq who I’d helped from the rescue boat has lost her husband and all three children. When the translator has to leave, I hide in an alleyway to cry. Five or six hours in and it’s dark. I haven’t stopped for food or water or breath and I have no idea where Ashley is. A low, alien sound rises up from the back of my throat. There is a unique kind of crying for when you’ve seen a dead child for the first time; a child who, without the right passport, died to make a journey that you could make whenever you like for about ten euros. I sway, wordless. Another volunteer finds me, asking for help with a young mother. She is sitting in a doorway soaking wet, refusing all help until we find her baby. Unblinking, she watches the sea for a boat we know isn’t coming.

Mum

“How do we get her to drink?” asks the young American. “She told us,” I reply. “We find the baby.” I don’t know what the best use of my time is at this point but doing almost anything seems less futile than allowing myself to feel this grief that isn’t mine but which nonetheless threatens to swallow me. Once she recognises me as ‘the person on the phone about the baby’, her eyes start to follow wherever I go. Every time I take a call, there is hope. I start gesturing ‘no news’ as quickly as possible because I can’t bear it. Eventually, a local doctor reports two infants had been rushed from the first rescue boat straight into hospital. It doesn’t look like they are going to make it and we can’t bring the mother to the hospital because the police aren’t letting anyone leave. It is the first moment I become aware that the police are even here because they aren’t running around like the rest of us, just standing in clusters on the edge of chaos. I make a beeline for the nearest officer. I explain that she’s at risk of hypothermia but won’t accept care until she sees her baby. I beg him to help me find a way to get her to the hospital. The officer towers above me in his riot gear – like anyone here has the energy to start a riot. “Like I told the doctor, she was rescued at sea.” He won’t even look at me. “That means she is formally detained until she gets her registration papers. No papers, no hospital.” “It takes days to get papers. Her baby could be gone by then, can’t you just escort her?” “No papers, no hospital, you get it?” he repeats. I am haunted by the notion that the presence of its mother might make the difference between life or death for that baby. At the least, she is being robbed of her chance to say goodbye. The rage is unspeakable.

Dad

Like an alien from another planet, good news: ‘Shorooq family found.’ I grab a translator and head straight to where I’d left Named. She starts crying again, kissing my hands, clinging. I wait with her, as much for my sake as for hers. I need to know I am still living in a world where good things can happen. We hold each other as we wait and I listen to her pray. Every time a van passes, her nose is pressed against the window. From the third van steps her husband. She calls his name, yanking me with her through the door. In his arms, he cradles their youngest child, two year old Razan. I recognise his name from the list we made. There are no other children. Named falls to her knees before her husband, howling. She thumps his legs with one fist, still gripping my hand with the other. This isn’t what we’ve been waiting for. It’s almost worse than nothing, as though in the presence of this little boy all she can see is the absence of the other two. Her husband stands like a statue, holding his son. His eyes brim with shame as he accepts her blows in silence. I tell her there are children in the hospital. It’s possible they are alive. I don’t really believe it and she knows it. Her daughter, Maram, is six. Her other son, Malak, aged three. Eventually, Named takes her baby in her arms like she will never let go. I leave them grieving together and return to give the other mother some answers. Her brother translates as I explain there are two babies at the hospital receiving intensive care. We don’t know if one is hers. We cannot take her to them. I find myself quoting the police. “You are being detained. You cannot leave until you get your papers.” I tell her I am deeply sorry and the words taste loathsome. She looks at me with an expression of absolute incomprehension. I have a human right to seek asylum from war. The whole world knows what is happening in Syria. I am not a criminal, so why am I a prisoner? Even a criminal deserves to hold their baby before they die. Her brother’s heartfelt thanks make me feel even worse. At the very least, I resolve to try and get her into the Syrians-only camp where she can be fast-tracked for her registration papers. The only place to go for that is the man with the clipboard and a cap that informs the world he works for the UN High Commission for Refugees. I argued with him earlier about getting access to the hospital and he doesn’t look pleased to see me again. Bitterly, I concede there is nothing to be done for her tonight but please could we just talk about what will happen tomorrow. “Registration is the police’s responsibility.” I ask him exactly what his responsibility is. He ignores me. “You know the police won’t do anything,” I argue. “Please, can we just try to figure out how to do our best for her?” He walks away. I wonder if at some point, just to keep doing his job, he’s had to reach deep inside himself and smother something essential. Eventually, I find someone else to have the woman and her brother collected in the morning and fast-tracked together, so she doesn’t have to go to the hospital alone to identify her baby’s body. Their gratitude is jarring.

Orphan

Ashley finds me smoking with my legs dangling over the water, staring down at the debris. Emergency blankets gleam like buried treasure from beneath the bobbing water bottles and a cluster of empty life jackets that cling to each other. “You ok?” I ask, absurdly. She sits down heavily next to me. My voice still sounds far away. “I don’t think I can take much more of this.” Her voice breaks. “It’s time to go home soon or we’re really going to fuck ourselves up.” “We’re already fucked up.” I drop my cigarette butt into the Aegean because nothing seems beautiful or salvageable at this point. “We were fucked up before we came, we just didn’t know how badly.” Ashley is silent. In a waterfront café, I get a few people fed while Ashley uses her phone to help them contact home. Across the table, a Norwegian volunteer comforts a teenage girl named Sara whose entire family is presumed drowned. When the survivors start talking and we learn that three hundred people had been packed onto a rotten little two-storey tour boat, the kind that started appearing on the beaches after last week’s storm. It’s the families with babies, disabled and elderly relatives who pay extra for the wooden boats because they’re meant to be safer. The boat’s top floor crashed onto the bottom and it sank in less than a minute, leaving a pool of orange life preservers shining in a great expanse of blue. From the ceiling, a television screen shines down a basketball game, adverts for cosmetics and gambling apps and cleaning products that kill 99.9 percent of bacteria. The local news comes on and we blankly watch images of ourselves from the hours before. Ashley is in no condition to drive so we stay in an empty hotel nearby. We talk a little, just to hear each other’s voices. Once she’s sleeping, I go up to the roof to watch the sunrise with my back to the sea.

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The next day, I scan the media coverage for names I recognise, but there are no names. That’s why the makeshift headstones in Greece’s mass graves just have numbers on them. When we go back to the harbour, it is calm. The debris is gone and the tavernas are serving again. A new batch of fresh faced volunteers dish out rice and beans from the back of a van. We meet one of the doctors we’d worked with the night before, a stoic south Londoner called Zakia. I ask about the children and she tells me that after so long in the water, they never really had much of a chance. “Island hospitals just aren’t equipped to deal with this kind of catastrophe,” she explains. “When they’ve taken in that much water, even if you can get the heart beating, often the best thing you can do is just hold them.” I did that, I think. It means something but not enough. On the road that snakes from the harbour up past the olive groves, a procession of newly-arrived refugees is setting out on the twenty-four mile walk to the camps.

Odyssey Entry II: Lesvos’ Hidden Humanitarian Disaster

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

12th October 2015 – Police beatings, tear gas, hunger and chaos. It sounds more like the repression of the Arab Spring than UN staffed registration centre for refugees. But at Camp Moria on the Greek island of Lesvos, this is the shameful reality.

Registration Queue Clash at Moria Copywright: Ruby Brookman Prins

Riot police clash with refugees at Moria

Lesvos has long been on the front line of Europe’s refugee crisis, with almost 200,000 arriving this year. The vast majority are fleeing government persecution and ISIS forces in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. They come to Lesvos from Turkey on what they call ‘the death boats’, the lack of legal channels having created an unregulated market for people smuggling, with drowning common due to overcrowding. The lucky ones are met on the beach by local and international volunteers; the rest by paramilitary coastguards and riot police.

Arriving on the island, I worked with volunteers from the PIKPA camp – the only truly humanitarian camp I’ve seen, run entirely by volunteers and donations – distributing food at Camp Karatepe. One staff member from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) told me he had only 13 colleagues on the entire island. Syrian families huddled in scarce spots of shade and squalid conditions. Yet it did nothing to prepare me for what I saw at Camp Moria that night.

‘The Hell Hole’

Registration queue crush at Moria

Moria, described to me as a ‘hell hole for non-Syrians’, is Lesvos’ main camp and where all migrants and refugees must register. The police prohibit journalists from visiting without an escort, and speaking to the refugees or photographing the facilities is forbidden. When I arrived, aid workers were outnumbered by riot police. At night there were none at all, leaving a handful of young international volunteers to fill the gulf left by the international agencies. They had no medical staff and only what basic food and pharmaceutical supplies they could scrape together themselves.

Many people sleep exposed to the cold at night, without tents, sleeping bags or warm clothing. Volunteers save their blankets for children and those who arrive soaked in sea water. The ‘toilets’ consist of a few portapotties and concrete rooms floored with swamps of human waste. Between two locked and fenced off ‘reception centres’ bristling with razor wire, a steep slope leads to the registration office where everyone must register to proceed to Athens or anywhere else. When I arrived there were hundreds queuing through blistering heat and cold of night while riot police loomed over the line. Women and children, sick and injured, are all subject to the same degrading conditions.

One volunteer, who complained to UN staff that surplus food at Karatepe should be feeding Moria’s hungry, was told that it was too dangerous and to ‘leave Moria to the police.’ The consequences of this policy have been dire and instructive. These people are traumatised, hungry, thirsty, exhausted. Waves of panic and frustration are commonplace. Refugees and volunteers widely report that the police, lacking any proper training, often respond with violence. Families commonly queue for days and each time the line is disrupted they must begin the ordeal from the beginning.

Two young volunteers from the UK, Annie Risner and Ruby Prins, recalled how tensions escalated in the early hours of Tuesday last week: ‘A diabetic man had collapsed for want of insulin. An Afghan woman recovering from heart surgery collapsed unconscious in the queue. The police wouldn’t help. We called an ambulance, then the violence started. Police were beating men and women alike. When they throw the teargas people really start to panic because there are families in the line. Kids get crushed, joints get dislocated and bones get broken in the stampede.’ The Hellenic police declined to comment. UNHCR writes: ‘Any difficulties that may arise in relation to crowd management due to high numbers of new arrivals [do] not constitute an excuse for the use of violence or any kind’.

Taken by a refugee at Moria

A New Moria

The following day brought something new to this island: the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras and Austrian chancellor, Werner Feymann. Their visit lasted a grand total of three hours. Much more time was spent sweeping refugees under the carpet prior to their arrival. According to local media, over 45,000 were removed from Lesvos in the past fortnight. Journalist Sofia Christoforidou reported extra ships being brought in to take refugees off the island and block new boats from coming in.

Volunteers and refugees feared that seeing the full extent of the crisis might prompt Tsipras to shut the border and trap countless numbers in Turkey, where conditions and police brutality are even worse than in Moria. Still, the volunteers I spoke to all wanted to get the truth out, not cover it up. At Moria however, the authorities opted for a more unorthodox approach: they hid the real Moria and built a fake one.

One volunteer sent this statement, on condition of anonymity: ‘The authorities set up a fake camp, did a bit of gardening and brought in a few Syrian families… Volunteers do what they can but the UN has been totally absent, MSF [Medicines Sans Frontiers] working only a few hours, a few tents but most sleeping in the dirt. There has been regular tear gassing and assaults by police. Shame on the Greek government, the UN and the organisations that allowed this to happen.‘

Many others repeated the same bizarre story: buses brought in to obscure the main camp and on the outside, the filth hidden under fresh concrete, and food and chairs put out. Meanwhile, the sick and injured from the previous night went unattended. UNHCR consultant Ron Remond told me this was in the interests of the Prime Minister’s safety. His visit lasted twenty minutes: time for a selfie with newly materialised UN staff and one quick peak behind the bus. Then he was gone and that night Moria descended once more into chaos.

Annie and Ruby reported rioting, refugees forming human shields to protect the vulnerable and threatening a walk out. ‘We were being treated like animals,’ explained 19-year-old Ali from Afghanistan. ‘We’ve had no shelter, no food, no answers, just beatings. We said we would walk out of the camp, a thousand of us, all together.’

But when I visited the camp again on Saturday, it was unrecognisable. A new fast track system had been able to register thousands in 24 hours. UNHCR was bringing in more people, the camp had been cleared of rubbish, bottled water had gone out and kids played together in the Save the Children camp.

By the next day, however, things were going back to normal: fast-track registration was terminated, people queued all day without moving and were told the ID numbers they’d queued for all the previous day were null and void. However, following my report for Al Jazeera, the Hellenic Police issued a statement saying they had ordered an ‘urgent investigation’ into brutality at Moria. All this shows what can happen when the world is watching. But Old Moria is what happens the moment we turn away.

Turning the Tide

Following his visit to the capital of Lesvos, Mytilini, Tsipras called again on Europe to help resolve the humanitarian disaster Greece has neither the financial resources nor the moral obligation to face alone. But his calls for ‘greater collaboration with Turkey’ caused alarm. They foreshadowed this week’s negotiations between Turkey and the EU, which proposes to pay President Edrogan $1billion to expand the Turkish camps and shut the Greek-Turkish border in collaboration with Europe’s corporate border guard, Frontex.

The inconvenient truth for EU leaders is that refugees say they are not safe in Turkey. Sana, a 29 year old Kurdish teacher, told me the Turkish camps ‘were very bad. They beat us and insult us, they say if we did not deserve exile then we would not be here. They won’t even give milk to the babies. They hate us.’ Others report being robbed, tortured, and even witnessing Turkish soldiers aiding ISIS. Many also fear that Edrogan might quietly push thousands back into Syria and Iraq, trapped with ISIS behind them and the steel walls of Europe in front.

The EU has long been allocating billions for border control, with precious little left to fund lifesaving humanitarian work in disaster zones like Lesvos. As security tightens, refugees move on to find another way, leaving aid agencies scrambling to keep up. I asked one Kurdish father if harsher security measures would dissuade him. ’41 members of my family are dead. My daughters, 10 and 12, were kidnapped and killed themselves rather than be sold as slaves,’ he said with tears in his eyes. ‘I have to get my wife and son out, do you understand? What do I have to fear from fences?’

For now, refugees are still arriving in Lesvos in their thousands. On Thursday night 56 people were saved from drowning and one toddler lost his life. The very next night the lack of safe, legal channels for the crossing cost another life: a baby hidden in a bag and mistaken for baggage, tossed overboard to stop another ‘death boat’ sinking.

UNHCR’s Ron Redmond highlights the need to legalise passage and calls for EU funds earmarked for humanitarian work. But he also said that European states have every right to control their own borders and in truth, there is a growing contradiction there. With the spread of such incredible violence throughout the region, the EU will have to make a choice: to open the gate, or let countless numbers of people die on the other side.

Originally reported by Al Jazeera

Full story run by Red Pepper Online

Odyssey Entry I: There Is No Migrant Crisis

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Marienna Pope-Weidemann

The vast majority of the men, women and children crossing into Europe from the south refugees from war and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. But there are no migrants anymore. Not in this crisis. The three furies of conflict, climate change and chronic poverty have wrought instability throughout the global South. It’s usually some combination of these factors that drive people to risk their freedom and their lives in illegal border crossings. They take that risk for the same reason any of us would: they have nothing left to lose; their freedom is already lost, their lives already in danger. And that is precisely what makes a refugee.

The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone with well-founded fear of persecution in their home country “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Those in power tend to interpret this in the narrowest possible terms, curtailing the numbers owed meaningful protection for their human rights. But the moment we recognise the poor as ‘a particular social group’, an entire spectrum of structural persecution reveals itself. Well beyond the most obvious forms of persecution – the torture, murder and violence sweeping its way across the Middle East and parts of Africa and Latin America – we find a broad and systemic denial of the right to food, water and shelter; the right to work and fair wage; to healthcare, education and social security, all of which are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Such persecution reveals itself not only in the home countries but also in the ‘developed nations’ where these people hope to re-build their lives. The UK is an excellent example of this, where basic welfare and even civil rights are increasingly conditional when applied to asylum seekers and – to put it as bluntly as political correctness allows – ‘low income earners from non-Caucasian backgrounds.’

As lawyer Frances Webber writes in her ground-breaking book, Borderline Justice, one way or another most ‘illegal migrants’ are in truth “refugees from globalisation, from a poor world getting poorer as it is shaped to serve the interests, appetites and whims of the rich world, a world where our astonishing standard of living, our freedoms, the absurd array of consumer novelties, fashions and foods available to us, and thrown away by us, are bought at the cost of the health, freedoms and lives of others.”

It’s a reflection of the depths and endurance of racial prejudice in Europe today that term ‘economic migrant’ is being bandied about at all in the midst of the greatest refugee crisis since World War Two. This is not to mention the array of brazenly derogatory language, from ‘welfare tourist’ to near-genocidal cockroach comparisons and ominous references to ‘swarms’ at our borders. This rhetoric reflects a deeply rooted culture of disbelief: from a position of extraordinary privilege, it makes deplorable assumptions about the character of human beings based on nothing more than their class, their birthplace and yes, the colour of their skin.

To understand this crisis – its causes and consequences – we need to look at the big picture.

‘The War on Terror’

Abuse at Abu Ghraib: prisoner had electric wires attached to his hands and genitals, and was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box

For almost fifteen years now we have watched our governments fight their War on Terror with incredible military and social violence. The rise of ISIS and the steady disintegration of stability in the Middle East is testament to their failure, or their success depending on how cynically you want to look at it.

Now, with what they disparagingly call ‘the migrant crisis’ (as though the problem is this mass exodus of civilians rather than the war itself,) there can be no more pretending they are just after this or that dictator, like drug addicts promising each fix will be the last. “But you must understand, this next guy’s really bad, if we can just take him out, we’ll have peace.” That sort of rhetoric is laid bare now it’s the persecuted and pro-democracy dissidents being imprisoned, beaten and gassed on European soil. This is total war not on terror, but on the poor.

Of the hundreds of thousands risking their lives to reach Europe this year, the vast majority are refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – two of which NATO has already invaded and occupied. Furthermore, it’s no coincidence this crisis unfolded following NATO’s bombing of Libya to oust Muammar Gaddafi, a long-time ally whose dissidents and refugees Britain had been detaining without trial and deporting straight back to him up for years. (Thank you Wikileaks, for telling the world.) Even so, once they decided ‘Gaddafi had to go’, to that end the US, UK and France were willing to shower with weapons the very terrorists they had sworn to oppose. Now they are in ISIS hands and pointed at innocent people. So, fighting terror with war has proven about as strategic as fighting fire with petroleum.

The War on Earth

We might also do well to note also that the same corporations that cashed in big on oil profits after the attacks on Iraq and Libya are now waging a titanic battle against climate action. Their lobbying efforts threaten to force us off the cliff into the abyss of unstoppable warming.

Leading scientists are warning that without radical change, we can expect a temperature increase of 6°C, meaning catastrophic implications for our species. Cities and islands will be swallowed by the sea, entire communities will drown in tsunamis and mega-storms, extreme drought and poisonous pollution will make great swathes of the planet uninhabitable. That will tear societies apart, trigger new wars and create millions of environmental refugees.

So when you look at the big picture, these stories are intimately linked. Climate change is on track to become the biggest driver of forced migration, dwarfing the historic 56 million people already displaced by conflict. Not to mention the fact that war and climate change are intrinsically connected, and not just in terms of the role oil interests play in foreign policy. A growing body of research highlights the significance of severe drought in sparking conflict in Syria and throughout the Middle East. Environmental factors were also been critical in the Rwandan genocide more than a decade ago, so it’s nothing new – but it is getting worse.

Globally, natural disasters have increased fivefold in the past forty years, with floods and storms claiming 1.45 million lives. Between disasters, the steady warming of the planet puts poor societies under incredible strain, spreading hunger, conflict and disease. The warming of the Indian Ocean has irreversibly altered the continent’s weather patterns and the scorching of East Africa has begun. Environmental legislation and a rapid transition from fossil fuels would be the single most effective and humane method of border control. To quote Ellie Mae O’Hagan: “mass migration is no crisis: it’s the new normal as the climate changes.” Her observation will prove prophetic as long as powerful interests are able to obscure this obvious connection.

War on the Poor

And then there’s austerity. This too is an ironic tragedy fit for the old Greek epics. For much of Europe, austerity is a post-crisis nightmare. But of the global South, it has long been the law laid down by a united West. The theft of public wealth and welfare being carried out by the Troika in Greece elsewhere in Europe, for all its horrors, is really just a more cautious version of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies tested in developing countries the world over. For forty years they have made vital aid and loans conditional on the neoliberalisation of Southern economies and the deliberate strangling of public healthcare, education and industry. And in the event of uprisings like the Arab Spring, the governments which dominate those development institutions are at the front of the queue to sell the weapons and information technology necessary for effective repression.

Ostensibly, this is all in the name of mutually beneficial economic growth: the consistent neoliberal solution to conflict, climate change, economic crisis and just about any other chronic social issue. But this is a growth model that in promoting conflict, inequality and environmental degredation, fundamentally contradicts the kind of economic development that can improve wellbeing. What it does do, is serve another well-documented if not well-publicised agenda. As US strategic planner George Kennan said of the USA back in 1948: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 of its population. [Our] real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with… vague — and for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.”

Capitalism has always had its sacrifice zones: the places and people whose extinction and exploitation are deemed acceptable in the name of growth. But what the bank bailouts and Great Recession have facilitated, and what austerity reflects, is an unprecedented expansion of those zones northward, into the industrial countries once protected by a social democratic consensus. As competition for public services, housing, and jobs is artificially intensified by spending cuts, it becomes that much harder for progressive parts of society to argue for a humane response to the refugee crisis.

In a better world, this would highlight the common interests between the poor and persecuted in all nations and promote solidarity; but the great tragedy of our times is that it’s threatening to drive millions of refugees to the North at precisely the moment it is least able and willing to receive them. As Tsveta Dobreva writes: “In times of crisis, people search for an explanation for their sudden difficulties. Ultimately, immigrants, both regular and irregular, have become this crisis’ scapegoats.”

To defend itself against an enemy it sees everywhere, Europe is building walls. Concrete barricades are springing up across the south, bristling with barbed wire and armed guards. Over the coming months, I’ll be traveling across Europe to report on the refugee crisis and the broken system that created it. I’ll be relaying stories directly from refugees themselves and joining the dots between the wars, warming and austerity that drive them from their homes. And, I’ll be meeting some of the remarkable people raising their voices to say that migrant lives matter, and fighting back against the powerful interests that drive corruption, conflict and climate change all over the world.

Solidarity with Refugees March in London, 2015 – Marienna Pope-Weidemann –

Originally written for The Leap

MARIENNA POPE-WEIDEMANN

Writer, storyteller, movement builder

Category Archives: Articles

Avaaz greenwashes Paris climate agreement

La Via Campesina: One Way Forward from Paris

A brief history of really bad ideas

Odyssey Entry VI: Crossing No More

Odyssey Entry V: Learning from the United Ba’alam

Aid Agencies Keeping Feet Dry on Lesvos

Odyssey Entry III: Crete & the Myth of the Economic Migrant

Entry IV: The Sinking of the Nameless: Recollections of a Volunteer/Journalist

Odyssey Entry II: Lesvos’ Hidden Humanitarian Disaster

Odyssey Entry I: There Is No Migrant Crisis