Holes in the Fence: The Summer of 2015
By Katerina Rozakou (Panteion University)
The front entrance of the main walled compound at Moria, April 15, 2016. (photograph by Yannis Hamilakis)
“Mom, why is that wired fence there? Why is there a padlock? Why are people locked in? Why can’t they go out?”
I tried to reassure my three-and-a-half-year-old son that the padlock was of little use. When his mom crossed the entrance to the Moria Registration and Identification Center and the padlock closed behind her, she would not be imprisoned. She would come out in eight to ten hours and meet him and his father again. The people who were inside the enclosure would also come out in three, four, five days, or in a week or two. I then tried to comfort him and explain that the wired fence was full of holes. People came in and out all the time. In fact, the people who were sleeping in the makeshift tents or the sheer ground around the enclosure were longing to get inside. The latter part was hard to explain: Why would people wait for weeks in the hills? Why would people even want to enter the fenced area? Why would people keep other people there? Finally, were people, after leaving Moria, the same? I could not explain to my son then, but in this short note, almost six years later, I will try to make sense of these questions about Moria in the summer of 2015.
My research in Moria explored bureaucratic practices and the overall treatment of human mobility and primarily focused on the police officers who, as the embodiment of the state, oversaw the Registration and Identification Center and performed border rituals, such as receiving border-crossers, fingerprinting, and entering their data to Greek and EU electronic databases. The police officers were exhausted and unable to keep up with the rhythm of the border. In an endless passage, hundreds and sometimes thousands of border-crossers arrived every day to be registered, deemed “irregular” for entering the country without authorization. The imperative was fast processing. In the summer of 2015, police officers worked in a totally different manner than before, as they strove to accelerate rather than decelerate mobility. In a sense, my research focused on the powerful who felt that they had become powerless. In an often-self-victimizing tone, the police officers expressed their exasperation and discontent. They were guarding the border on behalf of “Europe,” who merely wanted the unwanted border-crossers from Asia and Africa as far as possible away from its northern and western European core. However, unable to control and decelerate human mobility, the police officers were facilitating it.
The summer of 2015 became known as “the long summer of migration”—though not “long” in the sense of a motionless, leisurely, and idle summer. The expression acquired new meaning in 2015, when critical migration researchers Kasparek and Speer (2015) used it to refer to the vigorous and relatively unhindered mobility of hundreds of thousands of people who entered Europe in Greece, people fleeing war and poverty who defied and crossed several European borders on their route to western and northern Europe. During the summer of 2015, I did fieldwork inside the Moria Registration and Identification Center, which was constantly beyond its maximum capacity of 750 people, and thousands of border-crossers camped in the adjacent olive groves, waiting to enter its gate. In the next years, the camp would become notorious for the protracted waiting and the appalling and dehumanizing living conditions that border-crossers were subjected to by the Greek and European border regimes. “Moria,” as it would come to be known widely, became the cornerstone and, simultaneously, the shame of EU border and migration policies, a major destination for cosmopolitan humanitarians, a theme in media stories, and a fetish for social researchers.
At the time, Moria was not the place of waiting and despair that it later became. At first glance, it was quite the contrary: a site of velocity and hope (Rozakou 2020). I had not lied to my son: the border-crossers were indeed longing to get inside Moria, even if this included their detention in horrific conditions in overcrowded prefabricated units with bare and torn mattresses, extreme heat, lukewarm water running intermittently from the tap, and little and poor-quality food. Apart from Syrian border-crossers, who temporarily stayed at another site, the Kara Tepe camp (run by no authority since mid-July 2015) until they were officially allowed to leave the island, the rest headed to the Moria camp to have their registration conducted. Moria was thus the necessary layover during their perilous and unpredictable journey.
Going through Moria was a rite of passage to illegality. The border-crossers left Moria with a newly acquired juridico-social status and relationship to the state. Upon completion of their registration, they received the valuable harti (paper, in Greek): an expulsion order that notified them that they were obliged to leave the country in thirty days. This powerful bureaucratic object was fetishized and had acquired its value as the materialization of statecraft (Rozakou 2017). Nevertheless, the police officers mocked the “irregular” or “incomplete” practices that led to its production, as they were forced to overlook proper recording procedures, which were impossible to perform and, in any case, idealized. And very often the border-crossers themselves were unaware of what the document wrote and thought, instead, that it was an official permit to travel. In fact, so it was. Even though this bureaucratic document practically deemed its holder as “illegal,” it enabled mobility out of the island and the country.
In the summer of 2015, Moria exhaled a sense of urgency. The border-crossers were highly aware of the historical circumstances, and they were eager to acquire the valuable document that would set them free. The borders might close at any time. The border-crossers plotted their way in and out of Moria and mobilized various people (NGO workers, humanitarian volunteers, the occasional tourist, reporter, or researcher) in order to speed up procedures. The accelerated rhythm of the border that was full of possibilities was also full of danger. On August 31, 2015, a forty-year-old Somali woman died at the gate of the Moria camp just before she, her two sons, and her elderly mother were about to enter to be registered. The woman had voluntarily left the hospital, despite the doctors’ insistence on keeping her hospitalized, because she was afraid that this would delay her family’s registration and, ultimately, cost them their opportunity to leave the island and Greece. Hasting could be as dangerous and brutal as waiting. Already during the long summer of migration, Moria was dominated by unpredictability, arbitrariness, and violence.
I visited Moria several times after the summer of 2015. A couple of weeks after my departure from the field, I returned in October 2015 amid the preparations for the inauguration of the Moria EU hotspot that was designed to function as a “sorting center” (Agier 2011, 47). Proclaimed as part of a European legibility mission and with the operational support of EU agencies (such as EASO [European Asylum Support Office] and Frontex [European Border and Coast Guard Agency], among others), Moria would record and classify the border-crossers and eventually deport Europe’s undesirables. In these days, Moria was full of infrastructural activity and an international air that resonated with the excess of national, supra-national, state, and humanitarian sovereignties in place. During my next visit, in April 2016, Moria seemed inaccessible. The EU–Turkey Statement had been put into effect a month earlier, and the plan of the collective expulsion of border-crossers was about to commence. The fence around Moria seemed to expand and solidify.
Nevertheless, the idealized plan of efficient bureaucracy, legibility, and expulsion never materialized. In the autumn of 2017, when I visited Moria again, the hotspot approach had already led to a small number of deportations to Turkey, the “congestion” of Moria, and despicable living conditions. The camp kept expanding, the humanitarians flooding in, the ISO boxes, tents, and other structures spreading to the adjacent hills. Moria continued to grow, devouring border-crossers’ time as protracted waiting prevailed, gnawing human dreams. The living conditions at Moria remained appalling, despite the flows of money that came from private donations and EU funding.
In the years that followed the long summer of migration, Moria acquired the features of a city-camp, with its population exceeding 20,000 in 2019 (Karathanasis 2020). The fence had new holes that both border-crossers and journalists/researchers customarily used (on Lampedusa, see Elbek 2021). The rigid and vicious border regime that Moria signified was both a terrain of control and domination and one of possibilities and subversion. When I told my son that the wire fence of Moria was full of holes in the summer of 2015, I was not merely trying to comfort a frightened and stressed child, although I did, most consciously, present these holes as far more liberating than they actually were.
Katerina Rozakou teaches social anthropology at the Panteion University in Athens, Greece.
References Cited
Agier, Michel 2011. Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Translated by David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity.
Elbek, Laust Lund 2021. There’s a Hole in the Fence: Civil Pragmatism in Ambiguous Encounters on Lampedusa. Italy: Ethnos.
Karathanasis, Pafsanias 2020. Moria RIC 2020: Between a “Hotspot” and a “City-Camp.” https://refugeeobservatory.aegean.gr/sites/default/files/Karathanasis.Moria_.CampCity.2020.pdf/
Kasparek, Bernt, and Marc and Speer. 2015. “Of Hope: Hungary and the Long Summer of Migration.” Bordermonitoring.eu, September 9. https://bordermonitoring.eu/ungarn/2015/09/of-hope-en/.
Rozakou, Katerina 2020. “Accelerated Time: Waiting and Hasting during the “Long Summer of Migration.’” In Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi, 23–39. London: Routledge.
Rozakou, Katerina 2017. “Non-Recording the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Greece: Navigating through Irregular Bureaucracy.” Focaal 77:36–49.