Almost two years ago, the Adriana set sail from the Libyan coast. It carried 750 people, hoping to reach Italy. But the Adriana broke down in international waters, off the coast of Pylos, in Greece’s Search-and-Rescue zone. Moving toward them in the dead of night was the LS-920, a Greek Coast Guard ship carrying years of institutional experience of illegal interventions at sea. They attached a rope, tried to tug the Adriana’s passengers toward Italy—to make it someone else’s problem—and yanked it. The Adriana lurched this way, then that, and then sank. Everyone on the lower deck drowned—an estimated 650 people, mostly women and children—as the LS-920 fled the scene. Greece then began the cover-up, defaming the survivors as ruthless traffickers.
This week, CPT Aegean Migrant Solidarity brings an update on the ongoing struggle for justice for the survivors and relatives of the dead. The team is part of the Free Pylos 9 campaign, launched in the aftermath of the shipwreck to defend nine survivors whose faces had been splashed on front pages and named as the ship’s captains and smuggling crew. Campaigners, lawyers, and reporters have worked determinedly to expose the extent of the cover-up. Now, 17 Coast Guard officials—from crew to commandant—are facing a judicial investigation for causing the shipwreck and failing to rescue.
In Smart Borders and Refugee Camps in Greece, Aegean Migrant Solidarity investigates the enabling technology behind this system. Through the use of advanced Artificial Intelligence tools, Greece “secures” its borders with cameras that detect movement on the other side. AI determines potential “suspicious” activity, triggers an alarm, and Greece intercepts. This technology facilitates the mass collective expulsions—known as pushbacks—that have so often proved deadly. If migrants survive the gauntlet, they find themselves in closed camps, where state-of-the-art AI technology is used only to control them, monitor their movements, and subject them to total surveillance.
Such camps are the consequence of a logic that racializes people in order to exclude them, not only geographically, but from the bounds of our limited empathy. No longer ordinary people who share our needs and hopes, they are recast as a threat to public order in an attempt to justify the warped standard of their treatment.
Look to the West Bank to see the results of this logic. CPT Palestine reports on settlers in South Hebron attacking Palestinian families, only for Israeli police to arrive and arrest the victims. In Al Khalil, Palestinians are herded into shops and locked inside so that settlers can walk the streets under military protection, without the inconvenient reminder that other people live there.
What links the survivors of the Adriana and the Palestinians held behind shuttered doors in Al Khalil? They were supposed to stay quiet. Their stories are discredited by whatever lazy racist trope lies within reach. But the antidote is truth, and we are excavating it.
