ANKARA - Professor in UCLA, a member of the scientific commitee of Observatory of the Refugee and Migration Crisis in the Aegean, Prof. Dr. Laurie Kain Hart said, “We need a massive refusal of camps, of assaults, of walls, of death at sea, and we need massive temporary assistance in the midst of the current crisis."
After the attack on Idlib on Thursday, February 27, thousands of refugees who aimed to go to the Europe floecked to the border cities regarding the statements of Turkish government on opening the borders. Upon the announcement, European countries and especially neighboring countries were mobilized on border security measures.
While there have been serious violations of human rights at the borders, 6 refugees lost their lives as a result of the fire opened by Greece forces. Thousands of refugees have been subjected to violence by the police and civilian racist groups. Refugees keep waiting in the fields and forests on the borderline, with limited aid.
We talked with UCLA professor, Prof. Dr. Laurie Kain Hart about the crisis on borders, the liminal state of refugees and the racist attacks in relation with the Turkish and Greek history together with other macro-political actors. Prof. Dr. Laurie Kain Hart is a sociocultural anthropologist with a research focus on the long term effects ethnopolitical conflict, civil war, migration and nationalism among many others with a regional focus in Greece and the Mediterranean area.
Dear Prof. Hart, thank you so much for accepting our request of interview. How do you evaluate this current crisis on the Turkish-Greek border with its relation to human rights and the treatment of minorities?
The punitive policies of Greece and Turkey concerning migrants on the border are on the one hand particular to the histories of Greece and Turkey and their mutual historical entanglement (and disentanglement), and on the other hand simply current state practice in Europe and, arguably, globally.
We have to go back always to the internationally sanctioned so-called "exchange of populations" in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 between Greece and Turkey that mandated the exile of Orthodox Christians in Anatolia to Greece and Muslims in Greece to Turkey to understand the treatment of minorities in these states and their exclusionary and punitive policies. Policies of "ethnic cleansing" and population displacement have routinely been employed by both states to maintain and strengthen their nationalist profiles.
Indeed, Orthodox Anatolian/Pontian refugees to Greece--called "prosphyges"-- were themselves stigmatized, sequestered into substandard housing, and manipulated politically against other ethnic groups (such as the Macedonian-speaking minority at the northern border) . Greece's fantasy of itself as a monocultural nation meant that minority languages and ethnic groups were suppressed throughout the 20th century and the Greek state recognizes only religious (e.g. "Muslim"), not ethnolinguistic or cultural, minorities.
Policies of 'ethnic cleansing' and population displacement have routinely been employed by both states to maintain and strengthen their nationalist profiles.
The ill treatment of Albanian undocumented labor migrants into Greece beginning in the 1990s gave rise to public debate concerning human rights and some expansion of liberal notions of multiculturalism. Initially indeed during and after the new Syrian refugee crisis of 2015 locals in the Aegean islands called on their own historical memory of expulsion to extend sympathy and compassion to these new "prosfyghes." But the combination of the strains of the economic crisis, the rise of right wing populist-fascist alliances, European negligence, and the overwhelming numbers of war-driven refugees have meant that there is increasing tension and aggression towards the refugees.
Let us remember that the punitive apparatuses of the Euro-Mediterranean migration “crisis” have been systematically built into Europe’s national and collective post-WWII common sense. The European Union has staked its claim to liberal-democratic peace and beneficence since the 1980s on the sequestration and exclusion—and worse, the fatal repulsion or refoulement—of vulnerable migrants and refugees from the global South and East. Its humanitarian double speak is founded in this longstanding, foundational, politics of exclusion and expulsion. The delusional “hospitality-detention" complex of the camps and hot spots (as Maurizio Albahari succinctly calls the Italian sequestration strategy of the late 20th-early 21st c) wrapped policies of deportation and incarceration in the rhetoric of rescue; and even that rhetoric is now wearing away to expose a policy of simple criminalization of migration and migrant assistance. Human rights are only selective citizens' rights. As Europe practices them, they depend on the systematic exclusion of others stripped of rights.
Dear Prof. Hart, you have authored my publications on civil war, violence and urban anthropology considering the psychological effects of displacement and homelessness on individuals. Stuck in between borders, refugees seem to be waiting for Godot in some no man’s land, just like Beckett’s, only this time there is no comedy in it, but just tragedy. Therefore, we want to ask you the anthropology of this "inbetweenness" of the refugees. Turkey tries to "kick" them out; Europe tries to send them back… What happens to “human” while waiting in between?
It is heartbreaking to try to put into my own words what migrants themselves say, over and over again, so much better. We need to listen. The human caught in between is in anthropological terms in a permanently liminal state, suspended. This state of paralysis deprives them of a past (the "capital" of their past means nothing now); a present (they are "nowhere", children with no school, adults with no work, people with no houses, resources, and sometimes no food) and a future (deprived of any agency to make a move, the future does not exist).
The effect is like that of the solitary confinement of prisoners. Solitary confinement has brutal, dehumanizing, literally maddening, psychiatric effects, and so does this punitive incarceration of refugees- both on those confined and on those who confine them.
Solitary confinement has brutal, dehumanizing, literally maddening, psychiatric effects, and so does this punitive incarceration of refugees
How do you observe the phenomenon of anti-refugee attacks from far-right groups, such as the incidents on the port of Thermi, on the island of Lesbos? As you also worked on the former child political refugees of the Greek Civil War, how do you find that in such an experienced society like Greeks, who knows what it means a civil war and forced displacement, still anti-refugee attacks find some correspondence?
I am afraid that sharing similar experiences of oppression does not on its own engender sympathy and compassion for others. Above all what is important is how these relations are shaped by powerful external structural forces, how, for example, the state and the international community choose to act in relation to attacks from the far right, how they shape public action. It is easy to shape a zero-sum condition where the success of one group is dependent on the deprivation of another, and it is possible explicitly to refuse that route. There is a long-standing political split in Greek society that came to its great crisis during the civil war of 1946-9. These problems have not been resolved and continue to emerge at every crisis point.
What is the responsibility of the states, the international macro-political forces regarding the phobia and hatred against refugees on the individual level?
The responsibility ultimately is on a global scale: Greece and Turkey are simply the site for the current North-South emergency. They offer the possibility of concerted action by international community-and especially the European community --to take supportive action towards a fair opening of borders. Recognizing the multiple sources of emergency from climate disaster to state plunder to war we need a profound reorientation to the ideology of states and borders, recognizing that the current approach is out-of-time, and inadequate to the challenges we face. We can no longer function with the maps of the 1950s as a guide to our human organization.
How do you evaluate refugees being used as some “bargain tool”?
We need to connect the dots between the US initiated wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Great Power conflicts on the battleground of Syria and the so-called refugee crisis.
There is an agenda of opening the borders not, but rather sending refugees to “closed refugee camps”. What does it mean closing and isolating refugees in some camps? On the other hand, what if the borders are opened? What do you think of a flow of refugee passes to Europe all in once? What can be a smart and humanitarian urban planning to welcome refugees and engage them into society?
In the early years of the influx of Albanians into Italy, the Mayor of Bari lobbied for an approach to refugee resettlement that involved distribution across the urban-rural fabric and not sequestration and concentration into camps. He was thwarted by the national government. Camps are the worst solution. We need an "extensive" approach that reaches into all crisis areas--working at places of origin and through migration trajectories and in places of destination and we need a multi-level approach that recognizes and targets both the macro-causes and the micro-conditions of migrant life. We need sanctuary for the moment, and freedom of movement for the long term.
Camps are the worst solution. We need an "extensive" approach that reaches into all crisis areas--working at places of origin and through migration trajectories and in places of destination.
What do you think about where this process is leading to? What might be your suggestions regarding this ongoing crisis, in order to increase a social solidarity and empathy and to reduce the physical and psychological pain that refugees experience?
Ultimately we need to work against the idea that the refugees/migrants are the threat to "good society" and well being by targeting not groups of people but instead the conditions and structural forces that create violence. People are neither good nor bad, heroes nor devils. Let us think simply about what people need to be productive and happy and part of a good, diverse, society: good shelter, work, agency, a chance to be equal. We need a massive refusal of camps, of assaults, of walls, of death at sea, and we need massive temporary assistance in the midst of the current crisis. Europe and the international community including above all the US have to take responsibility for their histories of exploitation and accumulation, for the global hierarchies this "community" has engendered and that lie behind the refugee wave it deceptively treats as an external phenomenon.
MA / Eylül Deniz Yaşar - Emrullah Acar