in and around the Mediterranean, the European Union is devoting its resources
to the exclusion of refugees and migrants using increased surveillance and
militarization of its borders, by affiliation with entities and States for whom
human rights are not a priority. With an enormous death toll at sea and huge
numbers arriving, civil society across Europe has mobilized to manifest
alternative values of hospitality to welcome refugees and solidarity towards
those at the borders. This paper will survey human rights reports and activist
materials to consider these two phenomena, before asking questions about the
scope for artists to respond to the refugee crisis.
Four years
ago, in October 2014, Operation Mare Nostrum, the Italian government’s humanitarian
mission in the Mediterranean to rescue people in boats in peril on journeys
from Libya, was terminated. The replacement Frontex
(EU) mission, Operation Triton, part-funded by voluntary contributions from the Irish state, has
a markedly
lesser focus on search-and-rescue and
an increased focus on surveillance and “border security”.
The International
Organization for Migration (IOM) says that deaths at sea have risen nine times since the ending of
Operation Mare Nostrum.[2]
Its ‘Missing
Migrants Project’ documents minimum
estimated deaths in the Mediterranean: 401 at the time of writing for the first
weeks of 2018. The organization, “Death by
Rescue”, has analysed
migrant shipwrecks which have led to the deaths of many in the Mediterranean. It
documents that, to fill the void left by the substantial withdrawal of state-led
search-and-rescue activities, commercial ships became the primary
search-and-rescue actors in the central Mediterranean, rescuing 11,954 people between 1 January and 20 May 2015 alone but also apparently
playing a major role in deaths because of their lack of specialist capacity to
provide such missions (thus, “death by rescue”).
The organization concludes: “[…] ending Mare Nostrum did not lead to
less crossings, only to more deaths at sea and a higher rate of mortality.” As of last month, Operation Triton is being
morphed into Operation Themis – I comment on this name below – due to have an “enhanced law enforcement focus”, continuing the metamorphosis of EU search-and-rescue operations into militarized
surveillance and border control missions.
Big business
Such
militarized surveillance and border control is big business, with the EU
working in partnership with the global arms and defence industry in this
context. The EU has a proliferation of working groups and partners developing
“defensive” technologies to control human movement at the borders. Just a few
examples of these entities are as follows: EUROSUR,
the European border surveillance system with a stated aim of “prevent[ing]
illegal migration”; the European Organization for Security Integrated
Border and Security Working Group, with a stated
aim of “development and uptake of better technology solutions for border
security [including] along maritime and land borders”; ROBORDER, with a
stated aim of “developing and demonstrating a fully-functional autonomous
border surveillance system with unmanned mobile robots […] in order to provide
accurate decision support services to the corresponding authorities for border
controlling”; OCEAN2020,
which focuses on naval defence by means of unmanned systems. The plethora of
institutions and the size of the budgets assigned to these projects demonstrate
EU plans to contract giants of the defence industry to patrol and police its
sea borders using state-of-the-art technology: the EU fund launched in 2016 to
build the Union’s military capabilities “foresees a
pooled €5 billion […] procurement budget.”
Ireland’s decision to participate in PESCO, the EU defence co-operation plan, was
approved by a Dáil majority of 75-42 last year – against the backdrop of the State apparently wishing to affirm
its position within the EU alongside negotiations around the impact of Brexit – and will entail substantial
financial contributions by the State.
Since
2016, the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders has taken the
principled decision no longer to accept finance from EU funds and institutions,
stating:
“Europe’s
main focus is not on how well people will be protected, but on how efficiently
they are kept away… There is nothing remotely humanitarian about these
policies. It cannot become the norm and must be challenged… MSF will not
receive funding from institutions and governments whose policies do so much
harm.”
The myriad
national-level and European-level immigration laws, imposing entry requirements,
and the lack of safe passage initiatives have caused refugees and other
migrants to risk unsafe, illegal routes at sea. There, EU policy is operating
to prevent many fleeing war and poverty from reaching our shores.
Outsourcing EU responsibilities
The EU is
also abandoning its supposed humanitarian values by outsourcing its
responsibilities for refugees to non-EU countries. A major step in that
direction was the EU-Turkey deal (“the Statement”) of two years ago whereby
migrants and asylum-seekers arriving in Greece would be returned to Turkey, a
country with a history of human rights abuses, not least against its large Kurdish
minority[3]
and where over 50,000
people were detained following a coup in July 2016.
Turkey
would be paid €6 billion in return for its cooperation. Amnesty International
noted that this deal meant EU leaders “blithely
disregarding their international obligations” towards
refugees. Meanwhile, Greece, “the
eurozone’s delinquent”, was
effectively abandoned in terms of European cooperation in accommodating
refugees, becoming, as the Greek prime minister described it, a “warehouse
of souls”. Humanitarians and activists in Greece have protested
the terrible human rights abuses occurring on EU territory since the EU-Turkey
deal, including overcrowding of the Greek islands, the very poor situation in
the camps with inadequate accommodation, facilities and protections.[4]
International non-governmental organizations with refugee protection and human
rights at the heart of their missions were criticized
for their initial failure to act and later mismanagement of the situation. Amnesty
International has also reported another all too predictable implication of the Statement
– it has resulted “in muting EU criticism of human rights
abuses in Turkey.”
The EU’s strategic
response to the human movement towards Europe has been to intensify its border
security operations beyond the EU border and deep into Africa, for example, by providing
funding to Sudan, in its words, “to tackle
root causes of instability, irregular migration and forced displacement”.
The EU insists
that, in providing funding, it is not giving money directly to the Sudanese
Government, whose President Omar Al-Bashir is subject to an arrest warrant by
the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, stating that “all
activities are carried out by agencies of EU Member States, international
organisations, private sector entities and NGOs”. Major concerns are already being
voiced about the involvement of the Janjaweed – implicated
in Darfur war crimes – as border guards, with IRIN news documenting “endemic” abuses
and asking whether “[the] pattern of corruption and rights
violations uncovered feeds into broader concerns over whether the EU’s
migration policies are making a difficult situation worse.”
The EU is also replicating such outsourcing or
“externalization”
policies in Libya, where the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (also known
as Frontex) is working with the Libyan Coast Guard. Human Rights Watch has commented:
“Hundreds
of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers, including children, who flock to
Libya mostly en route to Europe, experience torture, sexual assault and forced
labor at the hands of prison guards, members of the coast guard forces[5]
and smugglers.”
Claims by
the EU that its training activities would have a “substantial focus on human
rights and international law” and would “enhance protection of and respect for
human rights” must be seen as frankly
insincere. Other EU initiatives
include ‘processing centres’ in key transit countries such as Niger.
Last month, the EU issued a press
release celebrating the fact that asylum applications in the EU
were “down by 43% in 2017”. 2017 did not see the end of war or poverty; people
still want to flee to Europe. This reduction is the result of the EU
effectively pushing its borders back and back. Migrant rights activist,
Philippe Wannesson, quotes the EU Commissioner’s statement in its press
release:
“The EU will continue to
be the continent of solidarity, of openness and tolerance” and responds: “Yes,
it’s by paying Libyan coastguards to intercept at sea those people who want to
ask us for hospitality and asylum and sending them back into slavery and
torture that we will continue to be “the continent of solidarity, openness and
tolerance”.[6]
Humanitarian volunteers
Against
the failure of the EU and its Member States to respond to the refugee crisis
with an emphasis on the value of human life and shared humanity, civil society
across Europe has sought to uphold these values and act upon them. Humanitarian
volunteers were already well at work when the image of three-year old refugee,
Alan Kurdi, drowned along with his mother and five-year old brother and washed
up on a beach near Bodrum – and following images of young children drowned off
the Libyan coast near Zuwarah[7]
– put the media spotlight on the crisis at the borders. Eric Kempson and his family had been helping people from boats on
the shores of Lesvos before the later proliferation of voluntary humanitarian
groups in the area.[8]
It is impossible to give a full list of civil
society humanitarian actions. A few examples follow. During a temporary
suspension of normal immigration control arrangements between Hungary, Austria
and Germany, people lined the routes where Syrians and others were arriving to
hand out food and drink.[9]
All across Europe – in Ireland through Cork-Calais Refugee Solidarity – voluntary
groups collected and shipped donations of tents, clothes and medical supplies
to migrants stopped by borders from Calais to Lesbos. Voluntary doctors and, to
give some dignity to the dead, grave-diggers,
temporarily gave up their normal life to work in these makeshift, transit camps.
People also opened up their homes to refugees who had managed to make it to
Europe: in the UK, this was largely organized by the civil society group, “Refugees
At Home”, who documented last month having hosted 544
guests across 1,006 placements from 54 countries in total. In Ireland,
similar work matching voluntary host accommodation providers with refugees and
asylum-seekers is being carried out by the group “Home from Home – Ireland”. Refugees
Welcome and community groups, such as, locally, Sligo Global Kitchen and Welcome to
Roscommon, were set up opposing barriers between “them” and
“us”, providing hospitality.
Remarkable among
all these efforts has been the provision of search-and-rescue services in the
Mediterranean by ordinary people who saw the loss of human life and decided to intervene.
Only a few miles from here, West Belfast musician, Joby Fox, went to Lesbos to
volunteer offering humanitarian assistance and realized that, to prevent deaths at sea, a boat was
needed. The boat came in the form of a €32,000 lifeboat donated by British artist Jake Chapman. Joby has testified that lives were saved
literally metres from the shore, in the dark, amidst panic and rocks, stating
at that time:
“We’ve been using a human chain to reach the people who fall in
the water, but it’s treacherous for everyone. It’s freezing, frightening and
very dangerous. So having this boat will make all the difference.”
Since February
2016, Refugee Rescue, using their boat, “Mo Chara”, have rescued over 6,000
individuals risking their lives in the short stretch between Turkey and Lesbos
where there are dangerous rocks, shallows and the people who make it to land
are often deserted in inaccessible locations. They continue to call
for volunteers.
Culture of criminalisation
It is
well-documented by now that the EU response to such civil society actions has
not been positive. Those acting in solidarity with migrants have been faced
with criminalization, with the Institute of Race Relations reviewing such cases
in its report,
“Humanitarianism: the unacceptable face of solidarity”. These range from prosecution
of Danish and Spanish lifeguards who
rescue refugees through to a former children’s ombudsman and her spouse being
charged under anti-trafficking provisions for the assistance they provided to a
Syrian family, through to the criminalization of a French olive farmer for the help
he has offered to migrants on the Italian-French border.[10]
Combined with bulldozing of migrant encampments in Calais, documented by South African artist, Gideon Mendel, in his forensic art work, ‘Dzhangal’, and
Ventimiglia, the mayors in those locations sought to introduce orders criminalizing
unauthorized distribution of food and drink to refugees. In some cases, such
laws were overturned, however, the developing pattern remains clear:
“a wider political culture of criminalisation whereby volunteers
attempting to fill the gaps in state provision are stigmatised and criminalised
for providing food, shelter and clean water to migrants in informal
encampments”.
With
those assisting the “sans papiers” facing harassment by the authorities and
criminalization, the words of Pastor Niemoller should surely be ringing in our ears.
‘The Agency’
Such
prevention of solidarity and humanitarianism has been targeted, in particular,
at search-and-rescue volunteers: there have been “extraordinary
attempts to bully and de-legitimise NGO search and rescue missions in the
Mediterranean”. Such bullying has been
carried out by the EU entity, “Frontex” or “the Agency”. Again, in
the case of Frontex, despite many human rights concerns voiced against it,[11]
the EU has decided to beef-up
the Agency, its staff having grown by a third and likely
to double again by 2020. Civil society group Frontexit notes:
“Such reinforcement of capacities of an
EU agency is unprecedented and turns a complete blind eye to a number of human
rights violations, although [these have] been largely documented by
non-governmental organisations as well as by official bodies”.
Unprecedented, too, are the new legal powers of the
EU Agency to assess the “vulnerability” of Member States’ borders and to
introduce punitive measures where such States are non-compliant with Agency
recommendations to secure their borders.[12] This
astonishing legal move is in the detail of one of hundreds of EU Regulations. Through
this regulation, Member States are substantially giving away the power of their
people to determine national borders to an EU body, and each Member State is
consenting to increased EU control of its border arrangements if it allows its
borders to be too “vulnerable” to migrants. It provides for the use of force
with “service weapons, ammunition and equipment” and provides detailed
provisions on “forced return” operations, including the forced return of
children. The effects of this law, now in force, are certain to be less
humanitarian, more coercive – it is the kind of law far right-wing groups would
clamour for.
Artists respond
What, finally, is the scope for artists to respond to the refugee crisis? How does art act as a catalyst to
encourage hope for the future and the use of our imagination to change
conditions for humans at the border, for all of us?
Chinese
artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, conjectures that the flow of human migration
ultimately may not be held back. He says,
“Building
a dam does not address the source of the flow – it would need to be built
higher and higher, eventually holding back a massive volume. If a powerful
flood were to occur, it could wipe out everything in its path.”
In Europe,
we saw a glimpse of the dam bursting when border control arrangements were,
exceptionally, suspended by Austria and Germany in September 2015, as the
number of refugees could not be contained outside.
However, this situation did
not lead to any lasting, positive change in the relationship between humans and
borders. People remained stuck in temporary transit camps, in worsening
conditions, all over Europe. There was quickly a return to border controls and
these were controlled more aggressively, for example, by the detention
of over 700 “border crossing helpers” around the German-Austrian border in
October of the same year. Many refugees also find themselves in camps across Europe.
As Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, looking back to the Holocaust, comments:
“We
should not forget that the first camps were built in Europe as spaces for
controlling refugees, and that the succession of internment camps-concentration
camps-extermination camps represents a perfectly real filiation.”
But at a time when the EU is turning away from international human
rights commitments and restricting humanitarianism to assert border controls at
almost any cost, what scope is there for art to be engaged with the struggle
for human rights and more humane values?
How can artists show their solidarity with those at the borders?
How can art assist us to affirm hospitality, solidarity with migrants and
shared humanity? What difficulties does art encounter when doing these things?
Technologies are used both to restrict and to enable human
movement. How important are technology and technological advances in the making
of art?
Human life
is more connected and governed by technology than ever before. British artist,
James Bridle, discussing his digital installation mapping the sentiment of news
stories on the refugee crisis, “Wayfinding”, writes:
“On the ferries,
those in transit share information about which border points are open, which
countries are (relatively) friendly, where to buy bus tickets – information
often passed back from those who have already gone ahead, via Whatsapp messages
and Facebook groups.”
When supported by
real-life solidarities, such technology can be life-saving: recall the
seven-year old boy smuggled in a sealed lorry from Calais to the UK whose text
to a Calais Jungle volunteer who was in New York at the time saying “no oksijan”
enabled her to act to save his life. Many others have died because being linked
up to Whatsapp or Facebook cannot prevent a shipwreck when there is no human
assistance at sea, but instead multi-million-euro state-operated border control
machinery.
The EU,
then, has named its latest maritime border control mission Themis, after the
goddess personifying fairness, law, natural law. For the EU to
use this name for the entity it uses to deter, repress and exclude refugees at
sea, seems utterly cynical. Yet it is the case that the existence of this
entity and its powers are conditional on the “social contract” between EU
Member States and their consent to participating in the EU’s project to fortify
its borders.
Some committed humanitarians
raise valid concerns that the outburst of humanitarianism by civil society has
been ignorant of, or incapable of changing, the political structures in which
the disregard of human life at borders is embedded. Documentary photographer, Roman
Kutzowitz, says of
volunteer SAR missions in the Mediterranean:
“Humanitarian
intervention here is an IT-nerd from Cologne fixing the wiring onboard Sea Watch 3, 12 miles off the
coast of Libya […] the lifeguard from Euskal
Herria who tends to torture wounds onboard the Lifeline. But too few exercise
civil disobedience, too few recognize the interconnectedness
of the privileged western life and the plight of the subaltern […] Human Rights
now merely serve the EU image-politics. Because cycles of capital, weapons, and vegetables must keep spinning! […] The flows of weapons, the extraction of
resources abroad, and extortive IMF contracts are connected to migratory crises,
yet we continue to externalize and shrug off responsibility.”
Can art help us to see more clearly the political structures which
lead to inhumanity, including violence towards those at the borders and human
rights defenders?
Natasha
Walter, founder of the UK solidarity organization, Women for Refugee
Women, draws her own conclusion:
“while it is so tempting – and often so necessary – to keep within
the limits of the real in our politics, to keep plugging away at what will make
things a tiny bit better here and now, we also need to keep flexing that muscle
called hope. In times when inspiration seems to be running dry, we need to dip
into the reservoir of the imagination.”[13]
This paper was
originally presented at the Turbulence symposium on March 8, 2018, as part of
the education programme for the contemporary exhibition
Turbulence, December 2017 – April 2018 at The Model, Sligo, Ireland.
The author wishes
to thank Syd Bolton, Lawyer, Co-Convener of the Last Rights Project (www.lastrights.net), for reading and commenting on an initial
draft of this paper.
Notes and references
[1] This
is the term the media has often used to describe the arrivals of the last few
years, however, it would better be called the crisis at the borders or the
crisis of human rights. Since presentation of this paper but before its
publication, the Refugee Law Initiative has published a blog article discussing
Europe’s so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and asking questions as to the meaning of
words and the makings of a crisis.
[2] For minimum estimates of
monthly deaths since 2014, see ‘Missing Migrants’, IOM.
[3] Amnesty
International noted in its most recent country human rights
report on Turkey “violations of human rights by security forces continued with
impunity, especially in the predominantly Kurdish southeast”.
[4]A
Syrian family housed, at the time of writing, in Mosney direct provision centre
in County Meath told the author of this paper that they had spent several
months in a tent in a makeshift camp in Greece and the young children recalled with
horror trying to keep rats out of their tent.
[5]Dearden,
L., ‘Libyan coast
guard ‘opens fire’ during refugee rescue as deaths in Mediterranean Sea pass
record 1,500’, The Independent, 24 May 2017.
[6] Author’s translation.
[7] Author’s
poem on this atrocity, originally read aloud at a public protest outside the
European Commission offices in Belfast: ‘To Europe’, Writers For
Calais Refugees.
[8] See:
‘The British family helping thousands of refugees
on Lesbos’, Channel 4 News, 17 September 2015.
[9]
See, for example: MEE Staff, ‘Video shows
Austrians offering food and water to refugees on a packed train’,
Middle East Eye, 1 September 2015.
[10] See:
Fekete, L., Webber, F. and Edmond-Pettitt, A., ‘Humanitarianism: the unacceptable face
of solidarity’, Institute of Race Relations, 2017. This report gives
more details on these cases and many others, with analysis. See also: Marlowe,
L., ‘French farmer convicted of helping
migrants to cross border’, The Irish Times, 10 February 2017.
[11] See Statewatch
online for documentation of some of these concerns. Available:
www.statewatch.org
[12] Regulation (EU)
2016/1624 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2016
[13]
Quoted in The Guardian newspaper on 3 February 2018.
, https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/anna-morvern/refugee-crisis-in-mediterranean-role-of-eu-states-civil-society-and-art
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