For Sibel

The puzzle of arrival
Some time ago, »Le Monde Diplomatique« published an atlas of globalization. Large and small circles, dots and other pictograms illustrate the basis data of global interdependence. The central organ of European globalization critique has also »charted« the topic of migration, drawing up a map of Europe on which the new camps are marked, as well as cases of death and ill-treatment at Europe's outer borders. The main features of this geography are not capital cities, but »detention centers«, shown by thick black dots. At the south-eastern edge of the European Union, on the Aegean Sea, they nearly form a continuous line. The Aegean region contains the highest concentration of camps in Europe.
But what is a camp? The concept of the camp, which Giorgio Agamben has called the ultimate symbol of sovereignist power over life, cannot be separated from its historical associations. They also form the basis for the evidence underlying Agamben's theory. It is no coincidence that the camps in countries like Italy or Greece are called »Welcome Centres« or »barracks«, as, particularly in Greece, associations with concentration camps cannot be thrown off. Even just thirty years ago, there were camps of this kind for communists and republicans under the fascist regime. The associations are however above all important for a critical ideological and political examination.
Both the migrants in the camps and the critics in the cities draw on a human rights discourse that is now apparently the only vehicle that allows the interests of migrants to be articulated. When we visited a »detention center« on one of the Greek islands, the migrants not only immediately showed us the scandalous and inhumane living conditions, but also asked us to photograph the sanitary facilities, for example. Not every migrant knows the details of European asylum and migration laws, which are always changing anyway, but there exists a store of knowledge about a critical public discourse in Europe to which they refer. Whereas the »deportation prison« (Abschiebeknast) that has become an established term of invective in left-wing, anti-racist scenes makes up only a small part of everyday reality for migrants in Germany, the camps in south-eastern Europe, above all in Italy and Greece, are omni-functional institutions of migration politics. The camps are by no means places of totalitarian immobilization. Their relative permeability, the temporary nature of a stay there, give them the function of intermediate stopover points. The camps are spaces in which are crystallized the contradictions that pervade the immigration policies of the EU countries on different axes. At first glance, migrants are subject to a rigid system of mobility control. But wherever they can, they try to circumvent this system with »microscopic« ruses. For example, migrants who set out for Greece from Turkish tourist cities on the Aegean, like Bodrum, know that they will not be sent back by the Greek coastguard if they throw themselves into the water: a risk many are willing to take.

The transnational »mujahideen« of Rastanski Lojia1
Michael Winterbottom's film »In this World« is the most prominent in a series of feature films and documentaries that focus on the transnational routes of the world's undocumented migrants. Its closing credits record a happy ending that isn't one: »On 9 August 2002, Jamal Udin Tobari's application for asylum was refused. He was however allowed to enter the country with a special permit and now lives in London. He has to leave the country one day before his 18th birthday.«2 Jamal is the protagonist of a real story of transit, from the Pakistanis camp Shamshatoo via Turkey to London. With Jamal, Winterbottom reconstructs an on-the-road biography along the stations of the complicated route to Europe. The journalist Christopher Cooper from the »Wall Street Journal« does something different. He reconstructs a thanatography, a crime. Cooper makes himself the mobile witness of a fatal, border-crossing mobility. He just changes its direction. With the help of Ntabir Kasmi, the brother of Bilal Kasmi, who was killed, Cooper follows the stages of Bilal's last journey. Before the journey started, Ntabir, who lives in Athens, paid a broker there 1,400 dollars in advance. This allowed Bilal to get to the Ankara airport via Tehran. However, the security hysteria that followed 11 September 2001 bore its fruits: the Turkish security officials discovered his faked passport and deported him to Tehran. Several weeks later, Bilal made another attempt to get to Istanbul, this time by car. He was again arrested on the Turkish-Iranian border and sent back. He didn't manage to reach the Turkish capital until December, hidden in a truck. Together with 45 other transit migrants, in an attempt organized by people smugglers, he succeeded in crossing the border to Greece. Their »guides« disappeared directly afterwards, while at the same time the Greek border police appeared, taking them all into custody. After a few days in a Greek border prison, he was »repatriated« to Turkey. The final solution for him and 30 other migrants was the dangerous route through Bulgaria, where they were shot at while crossing the border. Only Bilal and one other person succeeded in reaching Sofia, while the others were forced to return and wait for a more favourable moment. In Sofia, Bilal joined up with six other migrants. Together, they reached Macedonia. It was the cheapest route to Greece, but unfortunately not the safest. On March 2, while their families were waiting for them to arrive in Athens as agreed, all seven of them were executed in a place called Rastanski Lojia as al Qaeda Mujahideen.
Two years later – the Pakistani community in Athens had obstinately insisted on a hand-over of the bodies – the immunity of the then interior minister of the Macedonian Republic was lifted. He is seen as the wirepuller of this crime and was charged for other war crimes against Albanian refugees as well. The police press spokeswoman explained that the victims had been arrested as illegal migrants and murdered by policemen. Then they had been photographed with weapons to connect them with an alleged al Qaeda attack on the US embassy in Skopje.3

Keeping sheep in Hotel Almanya
In Turkey, on the opposite side of the cordon of camps, the map shows literally nothing. For years now, Turkey has become the target of imperial migration policies that see in it an under-controlled transitory space on the way to Europe. For this reason, there is no trace of camps in a conventional sense. Although the government is at present working on a reform of border surveillance strategy to meet the demands of the notorious »Schengen Acquis« by forming a unified civil authority, the related micro-policies or practices of mobility and its control still have an improvised character. Because there is no functional system of deportation, arrested migrants are frequently released again. Police take over school buildings and hotels to provide custody for migrants. Hotels on the Turkish Aegean coast have become a place of transit in which various dynamic forces of this transnational social room come into collision with one another in a way that exemplifies the whole situation. »Hotel Almanya« is one of the many small or medium-sized pensions on the Turkish Riviera that are partly used by the Turkish authority. It is a small pension that not only accommodates German and Russian tourists, but also leases out a few rooms to the police, who keep migrants there until their status has been established and they must either be set free or deported. Migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Liberia and Sudan, alone or with their families, are »checked-in« here in extremely confined circumstances. Many of them know all about how to get further, where it is worth applying for asylum, and what they have to take into account in the process. There are many such »Hotel Almanyas« - improvised deportation camps in schools, factories or police stations – in Turkey. But this inadequate system also gives the migrants leeway and opportunities. Many carry several passports so that they are »a different person« at each control; others feign infectious and serious illnesses of which the officials are afraid. Hotels are not only temporary or improvised prisons; they are also used by the networks of the migration business. »Koyun ticareti«, a term that has come into use in the coastal region, means something like »sheep trade«, and denotes the informal networks that many inhabitants use to improve their mediocre income. In the border region between the USA and Mexico, commercial »guides« who are able to cross the national border by virtue of the organization of a different mobility are called »coyotes«. British sailors called those who organized stowaway passages »sharks«. On the Greek-Albanian border they are called »korakia«, ravens, and in Chinese there is the »shetou«: in English, the »snakehead«: »This means a person who is as cunning as a snake and knows how to use his/her agile head to find a way through difficult obstacles.«4 This was also the name of the Chinese network blamed for the Dover tragedy. Animal names are also used by the networks of the migration business. However, »koyun ticareti« does not have much in common with the phantom of a globally active »smuggler« mafia, but includes many people who are involved on their own account and only know the next link in the transport chain. They include those who buy laid-up ships and put them into the business, as well as fishermen, corrupt policemen and hotel owners who let migrants work in their kitchens while in transit. This is not only a good camouflage, but also an opportunity to pay the high travel costs. In many a sweatshop in and near Izmir and Istanbul, there are entire travel groups who work to pay off their tickets to the West.

Undocumented Fridays or: in the bosom of the Aegean
Whereas the Robinson Crusoe story, with its idealization of methodological individualism, is now considered to be discredited in migration theory, a nomad called Friday has still long roamed about in the subterranean whispering of the metaphorics of mobility. In his debut novel »Friday«, Michel Tournier describes Robinson Crusoe as a manic topocrat of his island, who, however, fails totally when Friday appears. Friday unintentionally causes Robinson's world to collapse in a productive manner: Robinson enters into a physical relationship with the geological underworld of the island by becoming its material in its bosom, and even makes a new beginning that leads to a transformation of the island space for both of them. A less famous nomad, but who makes up for it by being one of the first post-colonial Robinson figures of literary history, Susan Barton from J. M. Coetzee's novel »Foe«, »smuggles« into the metropolis of London a Friday whose »excruciating slowness« makes him imperceptible, while Susan, with Defoe, the author of the Robinson saga, fails because of the fictionalization of her life story and becomes a maritime element of a Friday who has been transformed into ocean currents. Inhabited spaces of transit change the direction of their regulation. It would be possible to speak of the camps on the Greek side of the Aegean as institutions with limited liability. As temporary places of internment, after three months they guarantee a ticket to Athens (as the registration centre for an asylum application) plus a demand to leave the country »voluntarily« within two weeks. However, the subordinate phrase contained in the »release document« is interesting to us: »in the direction of your choosing.« For those who, for example, are clearly identified as Iranians or Iraqis, however, this means the immediate, almost clandestine, mostly nocturnal »repatriation« over the waters of the border river, the Evros, to Turkey. Mostly under threat of force. For those who succeed in leaving the camp with the »release document«, it normally means either disappearing into the production centres of the »shadow economy« to finance the costs for the onwards »trip«, working to pay off debts owed to people smugglers and their transnationally expanding companies, or simply gradually integrating into the social and working life of their community, in Athens for example, as »undocumented workers of the world.« It often means a combination of all these possibilities.
During a raid carried out by border police in two apartments near the city of Mitilini, the following emerged: four »human smugglers« from Turkey and Greece detained 40 migrants as a guarantee until their families in Athens had paid their travel costs. According to the report of a UNHCR representative, it could be proven in the case of several of the detainees that they had been sent back to Turkey at least twice already. In the Turkish city of Marmaris on the opposite side from Mitilini, they remained until their families or networks could finance a new trip to Greece on the way to Italy. While this story seems to lend itself to stylizing this case as proof for the infamous face of »trafficking«, it can also be read as a document of the practices of the transnational social border region around the Aegean. In view of the massive transit volume, the fact that the Greek Interior Ministry has rejected the construction of a large internment camp with room for more than 2,000 migrants where the three countries Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria meet – a project decided upon by the European Commission in Thessaloniki in 2003 - could be called a paradox. According to the Prefect of Alexandroupoulis, a mega-camp like this would establish the border region as the most popular stop-off route for transnational »migration flows« and annul the balance of control over the existing »passages«. The predecessor of the camp in question, the camp in Vena, even possesses the unbelievable ability to disappear and reappear depending on the political or »occupation« situation. Last year, a large-scale anti-racist protest was planned against this camp, and its operators had the unique idea of announcing its disbandment – because it was empty at the time. After it became known that the demonstrators had demobilized, it was of course put into operation again.
However, this case does not at all represent a paradox, but the beginning of a productive transformation of (European) migration control, which is accompanied among other things by the changed function of the camps in south-eastern Europe describe here. Whereas in the classical European immigration countries the new, transnational migration is forced into the Procrustes' Bed of the Fordian institutions, south-east Europe is a bit like a laboratory for the development of a post-Fordian regime of migration. The migration and border regime that results, in this case in Greece, should by no means be understood as a simple product of EU migration bureaucrats and their fantasies of control. On the contrary: the internment centres on the one hand mark a temporary topography of the respective migration routes, while on the other their temporary character or the process they embody, which can for now be called a regime of improvisation, documents the unique institutionalization of transit migration within the regulatory modes of Greek migration policies and the maxim on which they are based: Greece is a transit immigration country.
This institutionalized permeability is thus not a symptom of the southern mentality, but an expression of the gaps that arise owing to balances of power. These balances of power, in which the actions of the migrants and their traffickers play just as much a role as the relative autonomy of the NGOs with regard to their governmental and »intergouvernemental« clients, but also the direct economic interests of deregulation, as the »Olympic Games« location clearly demonstrates, are what we call practices of the migration or border regime. We find these practices along the borders of Greece to non-EU countries such as Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey particularly in the geography of migration routes, which has already established a considerable power over the way that which happens at the borders is defined, despite the harmonization policies of the European Commission that have been put into action. The regulation even changes the direction: that is, the regulation, and not so much the control of transit in the entire south-eastern European region – and its informal, border-crossing economies – is what is implemented in the EU migration and border policies for south-eastern Europe. Provincialise the heart of Europe! In this respect, the regional border regime can be seen as a socio-technological response to (or attack on) the transnational practices of migration. The specific way in which camps are geared as transit spaces makes this new course of regulation extremely clear.

This text is based on discussions and research that took place as part of the project »TRANSIT MIGRATION« with Sabine Hess, Efthimia panagiotidis and Manuela Bojadzijev.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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