This week in Lesvos, Greece, a group of us are holding a commemoration in our city’s public square for those who have lost their lives in the Aegean sea. The number is spiralling – 139 people died in 2024 alone – as a result of the illegal deportation policy of “pushbacks”. The term doesn’t quite capture the violence involved or the brutality motivating them.
The pushbacks follow an all-too familiar anti-migration logic. Their systemic use is a symptom of the decreasing will of governments to pull that logic’s punches. For that reason they are officially denied, since “democracies” don’t do such things. But the same logic led, from 2016 to 2020, to the deaths of twenty-six people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent in the island’s notorious Moria camp. They did not die because of shadow policies, but as a result of policy working as intended: having landed on European soil, those in the camp were denied minimum standards of living, and did not carry enough weight in the social conscience. We don’t know very much about them. But what we do know tells us more about the living than the dead.
The camp was where the state’s duty of care reached its limits. It wasn’t a place designed to kill, but a place where death was allowed to be close. Its managers (local, national, and at the European level) kept it purposefully underdeveloped, as a demonstration of kinship with the “host” population, rather than the “hosted”. The camp’s conditions, universally condemned, were the consequence of a promise to the European electorate: “don’t worry, this is temporary, they will not alter our geography, nor our ways of life. If we must accept them, we will not let them have it too good.”
Keeping memory alive informs our work. It comes with ethical questions and contradictions. Who are we to keep memory alive, who (usually) don’t know the dead, nor the details of their lives? What does that mean when we are not subject to the same oppressive processes? But that’s the point, isn’t it? We are up against states that sends a message of affinity to favoured groups through a thousand policies designed to immiserate. That message assumes the worst of its recipients, then aims to cultivate it, and is followed up with sham surprise when it morphs into far-right political violence (they send the message, then shoot the messenger). We commemorate in order to reject that assumption.
When policies kill, their architects claim the deaths were natural, or blame the dead themselves. In doing so they remove meaning from their lives. We commemorate in order to restore it, to point to shifts in consciousness, towards paths to action, and towards an empathy that rejects the limits nurtured by our states.
