Invisible from the public eye, refugees face more human rights violations than ever in Greece, writes Begüm Başdaş.

Begüm Başdaş is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School Berlin. 

On the Greek island of Lesvos, many locals cherish a return to “normal life” while unprecedented scale of human rights violations are taking place at Europe’s borders. However, the “normal life” granted to locals is made possible by the normalisation of violence at the Aegean Sea and the invisibility of refugee lives through encampment. 

The recent Netflix movie, The Swimmers, based on a true story of the deadly journey taken by two sisters Sara and Yusra Mardini (played by Manal and Nathalie Issa) from Syria through Turkey, Greece and the Balkan route to reach Germany in 2015, is a reminder of the duplicity and the cost of such politics of normalisation at Europe’s borders today.

The Swimmers is a hard-won success story that ends with glorious applause at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. The Mardini sisters may claim to be lucky because they survived, but they also show persistence and endurance. The success of The Swimmers, like most other refugee narratives in Europe, is carried on the shoulders of the sisters, quite literally.

The skills and talent gained back at home still require hard work to re-earn them, to prove that they deserve the positions offered to them. Yusra’s traumas of drowning in the Aegean Sea and the bullets aimed her way return as flashbacks when her butterfly strokes race through the pool in Rio, giving her strength to swim for the people who died on the same journey.

The heroic narrative about two young women swimming across the EU borders tied to a shabby dinghy is dismantled as Sara says, “what we went through is not special”. But still, none of this should be normalised.

Lesvos, at the edge of the EU’s external borders, was once internationally acclaimed and received the UN Nansen Award in 2016 and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its solidarity with refugees. Many of those people are still on the island, doing work that gets darker each day.

However, as Lesvos became the laboratory of EU migration policies after the EU-Turkey Deal and the entrapment of people in abhorrent camps, the main representation of the island became a “warehouse” of gross human rights violations framed with the graveyard of life jackets.

In the absence of any dignified solution from the EU, the Deal was a deal-breaker for many locals that riled anti-refugee reactions on the island and now as the only loud and powerful voice represented in the mainstream media, it is becoming normalised with the full collaboration of Greek and EU authorities. 

This summer, I talked to locals in Lesvos to understand how their everyday lives changed since 2015. Myrto,* a woman in her 40s and who works in public service on the island, still had the fear of uncertainty and suffering of people in her eyes as she described the crowds of refugees in the streets of Mytilene, the town centre of Lesvos in 2015.

When I asked her how things are today, she relaxed, smiled, and said “we are back to normal” as we sipped our espressos in a spot where I participated in my first protest against the pushbacks at the Aegean Sea in 2013. Almost a decade after, the violence at the sea borders has become the norm and local life now feels detached from it. 

Many locals I talked with shared the sense of “normalcy” on the island as they now encounter fewer refugees in their everyday lives due to pushbacks that were rarely discussed in the interviews. In February 2022, the UNHCR noted almost 540 reports of “informal returns” of asylum seekers across the borders since 2020 and the Hellenic Police has published data reporting that at least 230,000 people were “prevented” from entering Greece so far in 2022.

The pushback cases reported by NGOs and investigative journalists point to higher numbers, with many shipwrecks causing people to die at sea. Despite the OLAF report on how the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, was involved in covering up these human rights violations, impunity and silence remains the norm. 

Dimitris, a young business owner in Lesvos, said “we [locals] do not ask much. We ask for a normal life. Now the last year is moving towards there” as the number of refugees, who he said were different from the locals due to their religion and other bodily practices, decreased.

Two years ago, most locals protested against the construction of a new closed and controlled centre for refugees that will now be completed by April 2023 in Lesvos, but Dimitris has come to terms with it as a necessity as long as it does not host “too many” people that would shift the population balance on the island.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) recently reported about how such high security centres funded by the European Commission on other Greek islands are “prison like” and exacerbate the psychological traumas of refugees held in these hostile environments. 

Today, if people arrive at the island, they are not greeted by volunteers. Most of the humanitarian organisations celebrated in The Swimmers left Lesvos because the Greek government pushed them out through arbitrary regulations or trumped-up criminal charges, just like Sara and her friends who are facing imprisonment.

The story of the Mardini sisters should indeed be celebrated and embraced, because they represent the extraordinary migrant struggles against such normalising forces that fail people on the move and try to make them invisible at the borders every day.

* Pseudonyms used to protect the privacy of the interview participants.