Wednesday 9 November 2011

Talking about the R word at a time of 'crisis'

During this time of ‘crisis’, people say that you cannot talk about rights. There is no ear and no taste for it. To do so is to engage in a luxury that Greece doesn’t have right now. So its kinda bitterly ironic that as the avenues for talking about rights are closing, so those most oppressed by this lack seem most affected by the ‘crisis’, and even further to the outside of this thing we could call Greek society. It becomes clear that at the moment, rights are the reserve of Greeks. That this crisis is a Greek one, Greek business. Any migrants affected by it are merely caught in the crossfire.

So, as Greeks demonstrate, discuss and occupy buildings, all around the city migrants are looking through the rubbish, searching out scrap to sell and scraps to eat[1]. As the country gets poorer and work becomes more scarce, the old adage that migrants are the first and hardest hit is here, in front of the eyes of all in the city. Yet it is essentially ignored. Searching through the rubbish is becoming a very necessary and increasingly competitive way to survive. You can sense the bare existence of thousands of people struggling; and the blackness at the heart of any crisis that can ignore this. This is a humanitarian crisis, not an economic one.

Migrants are mortally affected by the crisis, but have the least possibility to give voice to this violence. Why would you engage in voicing your pain and rage at a political situation you have been excluded from? And between political activity and survival, survival wins out every time. So far the crisis is affecting migrants, but as objects, not as subjects.

At the same time, migrant communities are struggling to respond. They are increasingly called upon to provide basic support: food, medicine and shelter. Yet they appear less and less as hubs for the struggle for the rights of their communities. How and why to be spokespeople when the government pays no attention to anything not framed in economic terms? How and why to represent people who are trying desperately to escape from Greece? All of it seems to have left many groups and networks  at a loss as to what to do, or as to what their role is now, in all of this.

But the presence of thousands of migrants, ignored by the government (but not by the police) also highlights the farce of the state and its claim to represent people and their interests. On the one hand the ‘subjects’ it claims to represent despise it, and on the other, the people it claims are illegitimate are stuck here. The question is not just how to look to the state for rights and recognition, but also, and more importantly, why to look to the state at all?

The fight to be here doesn’t stop just because the state isn’t paying attention. As much as the state won’t pay attention, now it also cant. Just as the people feel themselves backed into a corner, so does the state. Its under attack and maybe getting weaker. Migrants in Greece could never rely on the state, for rights and recognition or support without a fight. Everything that was given was done so begrudgingly. They have had to look to their communities and nurture those structures of support that have absolutely nothing to do with the state. The difference is that now the situation is more dire, and Greek communities must also do the same. For all of the extreme hardship this crisis creates, especially for those most oppressed, it also necessitates finding ways to meet people’s needs in ways outside of the state.

Mosques have been feeding and sheltering thousands of people this last year (its estimated that one mosque alone was feeding 600 people every day during Ramadan). A few weeks ago, a collective started a community health project in one neighbourhood in Athens. Such community based projects, right now, is what needs to happen. There is becoming an ever clearer shared necessity to survive. And nobody is likely to be going anywhere right now. They have the potential to reconnect people together through the mere nature of them being in the same place and sharing the same need at that time. No other qualification is needed (Ok, in the case of the mosque you must be a Muslim so this is a whole other issue of exclusion). Such projects make more apparent that the exclusion of migrants that is so viscous right now is only the language of the state speaking through us, like a poltergeist that we can and must exorcise, if we don’t want the response to be a xenophobic kicking out or locking up.

So when people say that the opportunity for talking about rights has passed, what they actually mean is that the opportunity to talk about rights to the state has passed. But rights haven’t gone away. They aren’t just statements made to and by the state. They are also acts of survival, among and between people. So just as a conversation with the state is off the agenda, the opportunities to make rights still exist. Perhaps there is even a greater chance to act out rights now, when the state is both weak and not paying attention. But perhaps framing all of this in the language of rights is itself a bit to grand and daunting. It’s about finding ways to meet people’s needs in the here and now. And right now those needs are basic and great.



[1] Thats not to say that this separation is absolute. The Union of Immigrant Workers is one of several groups supporting strikes and present at demos.