“Immediate response to the refugee-immigrant crisis providing shelter and refuge, food, healthcare, transportation to an open hospitality center in order to secure healthy and secure conditions of living for the [Group-Stochos]”
Announcement outside Malakasa’s camp under the auspices of the Ministry of National Defense and the European Union
We visited the “open” Malakasa’s camp in Thursday the 1st of October, where more than 2000 persons live imprisoned.
Our first goal was to learn more about the recent death of a refugee “due to Covid-19”, who was living in the camp and about whom we learned from the News. What was his name? How was his life? How is his family now, after their decision to participate along with [other] immigrants in the demonstration outside the camp in order to react to his death?”
We went there to demand that the lives and existence of imprisoned immigrants be visible.
Our second goal was to give away goods that we collected at a previous event organized to support the camps, about first aid collection of goods. Because we wanted to challenge in practice the “sanitary exclusion” of immigrants in the camps, an exclusion which is anything else but sanitary; on the contrary, a criminal and deadly exclusion.
We attempted, so, to give away first aid goods, medicine, baby product etc., to the immigrants not just to cover all of their needs, which in these conditions of unfair imprisonment raise in magnitude, but to prove in practice that we want to communicate with them, we want to break the borders that separate us, we want to live and fight together.
Since the past few weeks, Malakasa’s camp is in a state of absolute “sanitary” exclusion, as also the rest of the camps of Greece. Let’s put it simply: the Greek state, by using Covid-19 as excuse, imposes a general ban on exit from the camp to the immigrants who stay imprisoned, irrespective of whether they are wearing a mask or not, of whether they have Covid-19 or not, while at the same time, entry is additionally forbidden and no “visiting hours” for those who stand in solidarity is possible (as it is customary at least for prison). Officially, they do not even allow medicine and food distribution from people who stand in solidarity. It is more than obvious, that by using Covid-19 as excuse, the Greek state and the European Union escalate their offense to the “immigrant flows” by excluding, imprisoning and devaluating the labor of the immigrants through their illegalization.
The initial response upon our arrival by the gate officers was the following: “you don’t have any right to do this, come with me, let’s go to the police”. By time, police forces increased in numbers while at the same time immigrants started to make a crowd at the gates. Behind the bars that separated us we were speaking with them [immigrants], while the cops were yelling that “you are not allowed to do this”.
After the intense pressure of the immigrants and some effort spent in communicating with the officers at the gate, someone decided that we could at last give away some things and opened the gate allowing the immigrants to take some things they needed. At that moment, we felt that the pressure from both sides of the borders could achieve something. Not because we gave away some goods, but because we spoke for the real conditions of oppression and imprisonment, trying to break at least for a moment what separate us.
Besides the above exposition, the immigrants let us know more of their problems.
According to their testimonies, there is only one doctor in the camp, who in fact does not even make diagnostic tests. He does not prescribe the recipes for the necessary medicine. The imprisoned must find the way to buy the medicine with their own money, even though exit from the camp is forbidden. The food they receive is of the worst quality. They cannot provide for themselves but in really high prices, being imprisoned in the camp. Additionally, first aid goods inside the camp are non-existent. Soaps, shampoo etc. are nowhere to be found. Any utility allegedly provided by the lockdown is again, a joke. The need for clothing because of the upcoming winter becomes by each day even more urgent. There is a huge need for baby products, something very common for the camps in Greece. Also, there is no ATM near or inside the camp to withdraw money. Finally, according to a recent law of the Greek state, a lot of immigrants do not receive the cash allowance.
The criminal anti-immigration policy of the Greek state and the European Union is not particularly situated in Moria. Anti-immigration policy is the wars inside and outside the borders that conduct the European states and their corporations, the exclusion from papers and basic welfare structures that benefits the capitalist economies of war and the labor devaluation, the whole system of concentration camps and imprisonment.
The Greek state, along with the European Union, are doing everything in their powers to perpetuate the situation. They close the borders, accelerate the procedures of declining asylum applications in order to initiate deportations, they extend the structures of imprisonment of immigrants, they announce policies of extreme devaluation of labor power of the immigrants, they protect the racism and fascism as constitutive elements of police and military mechanisms of repression of the most oppressed and poor parts of our society.
We fight for common struggles of native-immigrants, aside all the rest of the social struggles for a better life.
We demand
―An end to the Greek State’s and the EU’s war on migrants, and a stop to all the military expeditions abroad.
―Shut down all the concentration camps, ‘’hot-spots’’ and replace them with truly open social structures within the cities for the homeless and marginalized locals and migrants.
―Legal documents, health services, benefits, housing, equal working rights and education for everyone.