PATRA, DEAD LIMBO

view film online

Patra is one of Greece’s main ports on the Adriatic sea; a few hundred kilometres west is the Italian coast. For the last fifteen years, migrants have come to Patra because it is an exit gate, the last port of call for those hoping to carry on their journey to Western Europe.

From Kurdish refugees who began arriving in the late 90’s, taking shelter in abandoned train wagons and containers near the port, to Afghan refugees fleeing the US-UK led war, and refugees from North and West Africa escaping violence and poverty, the number of migrants trying to cross the sea from Patra grew, and a makeshift camp of up to 1,800 people began to form on the northern side of the city. During this time, a number of local activist groups rallied alongside migrants’ struggles, developing political and everyday solidarity with those living in and around the camp. However, in July 2009, the camp was violently evicted by the authorities.

Since the camp’s destruction, the situation for migrants has become increasingly precarious. The state and town authorities’ position is clear : unwilling to give non-European migrants a status within Greek state society, and adhering to the Dublin II Convention which seeks to keep that gate firmly closed, it condemns migrants to a state of limbo. Combined with a vitriolic anti-migrant sentiment put forward by the local media, the result is a cyclical pattern of persecution and violence which aims to drive migrants underground, making them invisible and keeping them out of the sight of residents and tourists who flock the city in the summer months.

“The police beat us, the fascists beat us. We are stuck, unable to go backwards or forwards”.

Whilst the terrace cafés are laid out for the season’s visitors, the wastelands of the town are used as shelters by undocumented people attempting to build a temporary home and avoid persecution. On a daily basis, the streets near the port are patrolled by private and port security forces. Migrants are rounded-up and beaten, and squatted areas are targeted for eviction.

Deemed ‘illegal’ and denied all rights by the state, their ability to resist and fight against these constant attacks is massively restricted. At the same time, residents of the town who are still trying to organise with migrants are faced with the complexities of supporting a transient stream of people whose precarious and vulnerable legal status makes it hard for them to be visible.

Attempts at self-organising and collaboration amongst different groups continue, and it remains to be seen what new routes of resistance will emerge in the face of an increasingly right-wing political and social backdrop.

SECURING EUROPE’S BORDERS: MYTHS AND REALITIES

view film online

In recent years, the south-eastern borders of the European Union have become increasingly militarised. Both on the E.U. side in Greece and Bulgaria as well as on the Turkish side, high-security detention centres and prison-like “reception centres” for migrants have been multiplying, along with an increase in the number of border staff, surveillance towers, new military and biometric technologies, and the presence of FRONTEX, the European Border Agency.

In response to this push towards the criminalisation of migrants, people from different parts of Europe gathered for a protest camp in the Bulgarian village of Siva Reka. A demonstration was held outside the newly-built detention centre of Luybimets.

“It’s a centre that opened at the beginning of this year, and it’s where people caught at the Turkish and Greek border are detained. We are doing this action in solidarity with those inside, and to send a clear message to public opinion and to the locals that we are against the imprisonment of migrants, and especially against the modernisation of this border regime.”

On the other side of the border in the town of Orestiada in Greece, a local group has come together to raise-awareness about the situation faced by migrants in the region.
“It’s a circle, a chain of things, a phenomenon of humanity that has always existed. It’s not something new, but now that it has intensified, it’s a bit like a truth that has come to our door and we want to turn it away. We don’t want to accept it because it’s not in our interest, or it could possibly alter our way of life a little bit”.

The practice of ‘fencing off’ territories also feeds nationalist rhetorics and fears of the ‘other’. The decision of the Greek government to construct a wall along the 12 kilometer land border between Greece and Turkey is a strong symbolic message against immigration, more than an attempt to physically stop people from entering the E.U.

DISPOSABLE LABOUR 

view film online

In the suburbs of Paris, a group of Malian workers are on strike. The boss of the construction business they work for is refusing to give them a contract. Without it, they cannot get the residency permits they require for staying legally in France.

The construction industry in Paris and across France relies on precarious migrant workers as a cheap labour force. Large companies employ a great number of workers with no official contract, barring their access to social security and the opportunity to get residency permits through work.

“It’s the law of the strongest, the system that exists here between bosses and migrant workers without documents. You have nothing, you keep your mouth shut and work.”

The phenomenon of migration in France today can be understood through its colonial past: “We are not here because we don’t like it back home. We like it there! But as we say, we have come to take back, what France has stolen from us since colonial times. What they have stolen from Africa, more specifically in West Africa, its colonies, with Senegal as the exit port. What they stole over there, that’s what we have come to take back, but by working.”

WOMEN ASYLUM SEEKERS TOGETHER

In a climate of growing xenophobia, the media and government in the UK have developed a discourse that distinguishes between those they consider ‘genuine’ and ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, with cases refused unless undocumented migrants can prove they are “genuine” asylum seekers. For those living through the asylum process, sometimes for periods stretching over a number of years, the threats of destitution, detention and deportation are part of every day life.

In Manchester, a group of women asylum seekers travel from all over the Manchester conurbation to meet together every Friday. They organise together and support each other practically and emotionally. As part of the asylum process, many of the women have to report to the Immigration authorities on a regular basis. For Mariam, every visit to the reporting centre means the possibility of being detained and deported back to her country of origin. It’s often at the reporting centre that the women learn their case has been refused, as the immigration van takes them to Yarls’ Wood detention centre. At WAST (Women Asylum Seekers Together) in Manchester, the women organise anti-deportation campaigns, and support those who have been detained and are liable to be deported.

One of the deepest impacts of the asylum process is perhaps less visible. It’s the trauma and hardship of living with the uncertainty of being detained or deported, the atmosphere of monitoring and control created by the UK Border Agency’s asylum policies, and the gruelling wait for the possibility of being granted status in the UK. It’s in a basement room of building on the edge of Manchester City Centre that the women at WAST attempt to combat the isolation, anxiety and worry engendered by the UK’s asylum system. They empower one another and share knowledge, information, skills and experiences.

(Film not available online yet) 

A HISTORY OF STRUGGLE

As in most European countries, Greece’s immigration system is designed to frustrate, brutalise and deter those trying to navigate it.  With only 0.02% of asylum applications being accepted, and the majority of work permits only granted for periods of six months to a year, most migrants’ everyday life is entrapped in confronting a non-sensical bureaucracy.

There is no better place to physically see the absurdity of this system than at Petrou Ralli, Athens’ main immigration office for asylum and work permits. With no official queuing system, no official timetable for what applications will be received and when, no indication of how long application processes will take, many migrants are forced to camp outside the centre for weeks, kept there under a system of police threats and orders.

Although Athens is the administrative centre for Greece’s immigration policy, the story is the same in all of the country’s police-controlled Immigration Institutions.  The process of applying, re-applying, paying fees, translators, solicitors involves a huge amount of money and time spent waiting without legal status.

In 2011, 300 migrant workers from across Greece began the largest strike action by migrants that has ever taken place in the country. Their main demands were for full legalisation and equal access to social and political rights in Greece.

“From 2005 to 2011 there was an accumulation of problems. Most strikers submitted papers for legalisation and got nothing in return. In all this time they couldn’t live properly- work, insurance etc… they were in a really bad situation. With no papers they lacked the freedom to move around, they can’t walk free in the street. They don’t know if they’ll get home in the afternoon because of the police. So these people were ready to fight to make things better.”

Greece’s economic development in recent years has been to a large extent linked to the abundance of uninsured, migrant labour. In a country where obtaining legal papers for migrants is almost impossible, growing industries like tourism, the construction industry, care-work and agriculture have greatly benefited from the existence of undocumented and uninsured people who can act as cheap workforce.

However, in the current climate of crisis and bankruptcy, migrants were the first to be hit on a financial and political level. The 300 migrants went on hunger strike in January 2011 to make their situation known, to ask for solidarity from Greek society and to demand their rights of the Greek state.

 “As salaries and pensions are cut and everything is getting more expensive, migrants are presented as those to blame for the abjection and harsh exploitation of Greek workers… The propaganda of fascist and racist parties and groups is nowadays the official state discourse for issues on migration… They want to convince Greek workers that we are a threat to them, that we are to blame for the unprecedented attack from their own governments.

The answer to the lies and the cruelty has to be given now and it will come from us,  from migrant men and women. We are going in the front line, with our own lives to stop this injustice. We ask the legalisation of all migrant men and women, we ask for equal political and social rights and obligations as Greek workers. We ask, from our Greek fellow workers, from every person suffering from exploitation, to stand next to us.” (From the Statement of the Hunger Strikers Assembly, 20th January 2011)


The strike was met with massive media hostility, alongside unprecedented state oppression and propaganda. Nonetheless, 43 days of strike saw the Greek authorities forced to reluctantly enter in negotiations and finally grant a number of their demands before the strike ended.

Although the successes of the 2011 strike are hard to measure in terms of actual ground won in negotiations with the State, the struggle brought an unprecedented amount of people together from different political networks and backgrounds to demand rights for all migrants, but also to expose and fight against the political systems which keep migrant workers in a vulnerable, highly exploitable position within European society.

From the 300 people who joined the strike, a large number were migrants who have lived and worked in Crete for many years. Since 2007 a number of  self-organised struggles have begun from there with migrants leading the way in demanding rights for themselves and in the context of wider society.

(Film not available online yet)

THE INVISIBLE WORKFORCE

view film online

In the agricultural zones of southern Italy, undocumented migrants move from one region to another, following the harvests in search of work. In August and September, the fields are dotted with tomato pickers. Segregated from Italian society, the non-European workers stay in abandoned houses among the fields.

 “Before migrant workers it was local people who worked the land… When the agricultural workers unionised, they were fighting for labourers’ rights but also for the right to the land… Now we have gone back to pre-industrial era in terms of working conditions”.

The temporary nature of seasonal work and the urgent need for a wage however small make organised resistance difficult, as the strike in the tomato fields of Nardo last summer showed. After several weeks and the harvest over, the strikers left empty-handed.

EMERGING SOLIDARITIES

In December 2010, a group of 35 migrant workers presented themselves in front of the Prefecture of Ioannina, a small city in the North West of Greece. Their intention was to begin a hunger strike, demanding that the authorities take action against their employer, the owner of a large tomato plantation who had not paid them for months of work.

The workers had started their struggle at the plantation in the remote village of Kalpaki some months earlier, by downing their tools and putting pressure on the boss. The owner refused to collaborate, tried to pay them with fake cheques and eventually packed up and left the country when the pressure got too much. Stuck at the plantation, with local authorities refusing to help, the workers had no choice but to head to the capital of the county. They camped outside the Prefecture and refused to leave until they received justice, carrying out a 12 day hunger strike in full public view.

The Kalpaki workers’ hunger strike has served as a backdrop for the emergence of a strong network of personal and political solidarity that is now firmly established in the city. Responses to the strike by autonomous political groups, students and other migrants who are in a similar situation were constant and sustained.

“The amount we gained from this struggle was nothing next to the experience and the cooperation that we had with people. Because before that, if you went out you were pointed out as an alien. You felt each day you were made a fool. But thanks to this struggle, people took us for people with a will and a motivation to fight. We have quite a lot of friends, with the same ideology as us. Each time we try to meet, evaluate…If there’s problems with other immigrants.. we go down there, we do marches… It was the strike that gave us this…”

Since the strike, relationships and discourses about how to organise together have continued to develop between migrants and local groups, creating a network of support and political action that aims to find common ground and attack the systems that sustain racism and xenophobia in the area.

“We want to move away from mere sloganism and actually engage in a relationship with people who are migrating, in a way that has an impact on them and on us, and in turn begins to show in the local society…To work with migrants on issues that concern both their and our everyday life. So that they come out of the sphere of invisibility and become visible, as equals with opinion and positions, to claim rights… For us the development of relationships leads to a practical negation of racism.”

(Film not available online yet)