“Blowing Off” the Boat

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 12015, 199-216 Double blind reviewed article Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY.0 “Blowing off” the boat The sea border crossing to Europe, a navigation on the nature/culture divide Estela Schindel Abstract The crossing of undocumented travellers to Europe through the Greek-Turkish maritime border area and, particularly, the practice of destroying their own boats as a strategy to be rescued by border patrols are taken as a point of departure for a reflection on the political and cultural definition of the European borders today. Based on material collected during two research stays in the North Aegean, the article presents accounts of these sea crossings and analyzes them as navigations and negotiations along the symbolic boundary between “nature” and “culture”. The expulsion of unwanted migrants into a zone of exposure to the elements, or bare life, is the result of a border regime that forces unwanted travellers to take more dangerous routes, pushing them into a sphere of mere biological survival and submitting them to a particular mobility regime. This sea voyage is characterized as an experience of radical indetermination where the boundaries between what is conceived of as “nature” and a realm of civilization and technological superiority are being continually contested and redrawn. Keywords sea voyage, European borders, bare life, mobilities, modernity, nature, technology DOI 10.25364/08:201518 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 200 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe Abbas’ most dreadful journey “At what point of your journey were you most afraid?” I ask Abbas. “When we blew off the boat“ he answers. And he adds: “The water was already at our knees and the Greek border guards were just watching us from their ship. They were ready to let us die.” Illegalized1 migrants trying to reach Greece from Turkey by sea are provided by the traffickers with an inflatable boat, a knife and the instructions to puncture the rubber dinghy themselves to let the air out if they are in sight of a border patrol ship, in order to turn the situation into a sea emergency. They call this action “blowing off” the boat. Instead of pushing them back to Turkish waters, the border guards are then obliged to rescue them and bring them ashore. Abbas, a man in his twenties, comes from Afghanistan and is telling me the story of his several attempts to enter Europe through the Greek-Turkish border, by land and by sea. The most frightening experience was on that third attempt, he says, when their boat was intercepted while approaching Greek territorial waters and they “blew off the boat.” He recalls: “When we saw the Hellenic Coast Guard ship approaching, we destroyed the boat with a knife, and it soon started leaking. We asked for help to the Greek patrol, but they wouldn’t rescue us. They were pointing at us with a strong reflector. I hold a child in my arms to show them that there were children on board. When the boat was near enough they threw us a rope and asked us to pull, in order to get closer. But then, instead of rescuing us they used some long tool to break the motor of our boat. Afterwards they cut the rope and remained there, just watching, while the water was already at our knees, ready to let us die.” Eventually, Abbas and the rest of the group were rescued by ships of the Turkish Gendarmerie. It was only after several attempts – on the seventh try, in fact – that he made it to the island of Lesbos. Our conversation takes place under the shade of pine trees at Pikpa, an open door, community-run home for migrants that opera- tes in the outskirts of Mytilini, Lesbos Island’s capital. Abbas says he left his country after the Taliban threatened him for having worked as a translator with NATO. Now he waits in Pikpa in order to continue his journey to the European continent, and complains that he can’t sleep at night out of worry for the three friends with whom he was travelling, detained at a prison on the island of Chios. And he is still in shock after almost drowning in the Aegean. Abbas is one of more than a dozen refugees, mostly from Afghanistan, whom I interviewed during two research stays in the Greek-Turkish maritime border area in 2013 and 2014, in order to hear first-hand accounts about their sea journeys to Europe. Although this European sea border is not as present in the media as the Mediterranean zone close to Malta or Lampedusa, it has proven to be just as lethal. The number of deaths of migrants crossing the Aegean has increased, especially since the construction of a fence along the Greek-Turkish land border in 1 Critical scholarship on borders and migration refers to “illegalized” instead of “illegal” migrants as a way of making explicit that the “illegal” condition is not intrinsic to those travellers but created by a certain border and visa regime, a usage I chose to follow here. Whether the travellers I interviewed for my research should be technically considered as “migrants”, “refugees” or “asylum seekers” cannot be determined in advance and for every single case, so “illegalized travellers” as used by Weber and Pickering (2011) might be the most adequate term. My Afghan and Syrian interviewees are fleeing war and persecution and therefore should be considered refugees although the word most often used in Greece translates as “migrants”. While conscious of the important differences between these categories, for style reasons I will use them alternatively as equivalents through the text. Regarding the “traffickers”, I’m using here indifferently this word, the more neutral “facilitator” and “agents”, the word used in the refugees’ jargon, in spite of being aware of the differences between them. Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 201 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe 2012 led migrants and their “facilitators” to seek alternative routes (Frontex 2013b, 5). This field- work is part of a larger research that takes the very materiality of the border crossing as a star- ting point for inquiring about the sociocultural construction of the EU border regime. While I maintained conversations with different actors involved in the field, including members of NGOs and civil society initiatives, experts, authorities and border enforcement personnel, I had particular interest in putting the voice of the refugees themselves in the foreground. Who is crossing and how are they doing this? What are their perceptions of this risky undertaking? What happens on the high seas? The practice mentioned by Abbas of destroying the own boat used to be widespread in the Aegean and was confirmed to me by all interviewees whom I asked about it: Authorities consider this practice a criminal action while other actors in the field show understanding for this desperate measure and even see it as an act of resistance or, as an activist called it, a “self-rescue operation.” Testimonies indicate that this action has not always been effective in front of the Hellenic Coast Guard, which has been accused of serious mistreatment of migrants and of making their emergency situation even worse, as in the account of Abbas. In fact, migrants have ceased using this method when women and children are on board and it seems to be increasingly out of favor in general, since it has become more dangerous.2 The aim of this essay is not to evaluate this action in terms of moral values or of instrumen- tal use, but to take it as a point of departure for reflecting on the political and cultural definition of European borders today. What does it mean to put one’s own life at stake in order to be admitted into Europe through a rescue operation? What sort of border is being created with this action – or rather, what conception of “border” underlies it? Can we affirm that the border is being increasingly produced as a line along which “bare life” is being constructed and disputed? Border crossings in the North Aegean, like the ones experienced by Abbas, are radical experi- ences in which refugees risk everything, including their very existence, and most certainties are put into question. Traversing through a sort of “state of nature”, a condition outside all social conventions and certainties, illegalized travellers are exposed to the arbitrariness of trafficking networks and coastal patrols, but also abandoned to the merciless elements. My main claim will be that the European borders are being materially and symbolically constructed as boundaries between civilized areas of technological superiority and zones of exposure to the elements, in continuity and contiguity to what we consider “nature.” In this context, the boat crossing to Europe becomes a navigation along the line that divides a citizenship of rights from a state of total exposure and abandonment, or “bare life,” albeit this line is continually disputed and re-drawn. The illegalized migrants’ journey through this area of the Aegean is thus not only a transitory experience but also, or especially, a transitional one in which the assumptions that allegedly form the basis of social life are distorted and suspended. The self-destruction of the boats, I sustain, reveals the extent to which this radical indeterminacy is taken, and also points to the core of what is being currently disputed in the last instance at the European sea borders, namely the transformation of migrants from citizens into “bare life,” – biological existence – to be rescued or left to drown. Therefore, this operation is compatible both with the securitization 2 An underage Syrian boy suffering diabetes was accused of smuggling and of destroying the boat and received a 7-year sentence in an extremely controversial process.

Load more