Freedom News

Greece: Anarchists call for solidarity as deaths mount at refugee camps

In this statement originally posted to the website of anarcho-syndicalist organisation Rocinante on February 2nd, the Greek group is calling for solidarity with refugees who have been dying at camps on the border with Turkey.

A barbarity against human existence itself is evolving in Greece. A serial crime, brought about by the racist policies of the Greek government. Refugee camps located throughout the country are structurally linked to the devaluation of human life. Deaths which have occurred within them are not coincidences or bad luck, they are the murderous effects of State racism. Every day that passes and concentration camps remain open finds refugees imprisoned in them, death gaining more and more space among the living — it becomes a banal daily routine. We must fight for the contrary: such death must not become normal.

Amid the hardest winter of recent years, thousands of people have been sleeping in summer tents, without access to clothing and medical care. Over the past ten days three refugees were killed in the camp of Moria bringing the total number of deaths in the camps in five. Among those who lost their lives was an infant, and there have been another seven suicide attempts. The murderous nature of the camps is more than obvious.

When the living conditions in the refugee camps cost human lives, official authorities remain publicly silent, and when forced to say something make qualifying statements, that they have “not yet identified the cause of death.” Their clumsy attempts to insinuate that the deaths are merely from natural causes and that there ultimately might not be a real issue simply confirms the size of the devaluation of human life taking place in the camps. Living in conditions where everyone can die and the reason never made known transforms prevention into a mere fiction.

Despite the efforts of the government to convince us to the contrary, nothing can humanise the existence of the camps. Our struggle against them, worldwide, must be intransigent.

The solidarity movement with refugees, the class forces in society, everyone who from the summer of 2015 until today has stood at the side of refugees and have turned solidarity in a public, open and social power, must join forces to create a major pole of social confrontation against the Euro-Turkish migration agreement, and eventually, to overthrow it. It is our duty towards human lives threatened by the racist policies being imposed. It’s the debt of life against death.

  • Stop the shameful agreement between Europe and Turkey.
  • Brook no more deaths in the hell of the refugee camps.
  • Offer accomodation of refugees within our cities, ofeer asylum and equal rights for health, education and work
  •  There must be free movement in Greece and the European Union

Anarcho-syndicalist Initiative Rocinante


Edited from a machine translation. Any errors, let us know!

Discover more from Freedom News

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading