We have built a society like a fortress, where the “other” is no longer a brother or a sister.
We have traded our humanity for security, where a person’s worth is measured by their bank account while their cultural background is a threat. We have forgotten how to see a face. We only see a category.
On Tuesday 3 February 2026, the logic of the Fortress Europe dropped its blood-stained fruit in Chios. Off the coast of Vrontados, a high-speed Hellenic Coast Guard vessel collided with a small boat carrying forty souls. Fourteen people died in an instant. Another died in the hospital, her body broken beyond repair. Two mothers lost their unborn children. Eleven children were left to carry the scars of a militarized frontier.
The state speaks of “murderous smugglers”. It claims that a small, fragile boat tried to “ram” a giant war vessel. It tells us that it was too dark for the cameras, that the thermal imaging, once again wasn’t working – a “technical failure” creating a vacuum in which only the state’s voice is heard.
The state decides that terror is a more useful tool than dignity!
They arrest the survivors, they turn witnesses into suspects, they blame the dead for “choosing” this path, the only one left open to them.
We cannot allow the Aegean to be a graveyard while men in suits proclaim “law and order”. We cannot allow the manufacture of “enemies” to be the blueprint for our laws.
We cannot allow transparency to be a “technical impossibility” when lives are at stake.
We hope for the dismantling of a regime that criminalizes the simple act of survival.
Only when we stop treating rights as “benefits” will we find our own souls again.
Only then will we see the “other” as ourselves.
Only then will we truly live.
The way out is not a mystery, it is a choice of the heart.
