Over the last two months we have witnessed a series of murders in which the Greek State is the main actor. On 14 June, the fishing boat Adriana sank at the deepest point of the Mediterranean while the Greek Coast Guard dangerously tried to pull it towards Italy and killed more than 500 migrants who will probably never be found. On 8 July, a cop shot and killed a Syrian migrant in Larisa. On 10 July, Anna, a trans migrant woman, was murdered in her own home. On 26 July a migrant died in Amygdaleza detention center due to a lack of medical support. The detainee was sick and, according to other prisoners, prison personnel refused to provide him with medical treatment. When the ambulance arrived after many hours of waiting the man was already dead.
In all of these cases we see that the victims are those on the margins. Those they leave behind will never be able to find answers, and will not receive the support of a State that is ultimately responsible. Its racist, sexist, queerphobic narrative classifies people as targets, leading to attacks carried out with impunity in the knowledge that the State will, most probably, never condemn them.
These attacks are perpetrated either by State forces, or by those in society who know they have the power to harm, even kill, precisely because their targets are also considered by the State itself as less important than the “White Greek citizen”. According to the Greek State, these people’s lives do not have the same value as its citizens. For them they are migrants entering the country “illegally”, who are therefore a cultural and demographic threat. They are people who have broken laws and who, on that account, can be subject to extra-judicial killing. They are workers, queers, women, people who do not follow culturally normative rules, who lead “abnormal unworthy lives”.
The European Union has built its fortress around Greek and European frontiers, and in this zone murders are carried out every day in the name of security and our “European way of life”. It is through these murders that the government, police, and the State structures, act against those who cannot and will not be accepted into the country.
“Migration management” doesn’t just stop at the borders. It is built upon the narrative that migrants are criminal in order to justify the daily violence reaching into every aspect of migrant lives: at sea, in the streets, in the hospitals, in their homes. Pushbacks happen every day at the Greek borders, yet society remains silent because a significant portion of the population considers this necessary for the protection of its way of life. States murder those attempting to reach their countries and, when they cannot simply kill them at the borders, they use many strategies to keep them marginalised, denying them rights to residency, to work, to healthcare, creating possibilities of new killings without consequences.