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Border assemblages between surveillance and spectacle: What was Moria and what comes after?

2022; Wiley; Volume: 124; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.13693

1548-1433

Yannis Hamilakis,

Global Security and Public Health

If contemporary mass migration from the Global South to the Global North is one of the defining features of our moment, a complex development that can be seen as shaping a new nomadic age (Czaika and Haas 2015; Hamilakis 2018), then how can we approach and how can we understand the "refugee camp" as a key node and a primary material artifact of this phenomenon? Can we comprehend it at all, especially the ones among us who have not inhabited it? And what happens when such camps, which we are accustomed to see in the Global South, become also a feature of the Global North, or at least its buffer states? These were some of the thoughts that motivated the assembling and curation of a special portfolio in this journal, devoted to the largest camp in Europe, the refugee camp of Moria, on the island of Lesvos (see the entire portfolio at https://www.americananthropologist.org/moria). It was its complete destruction by fire, in September 2020 (see contributions from Hamilakis and Papailias), which compelled us to gather our provisional thoughts here. This introductory essay is followed by eight more essays on the journal's website. This is a multimodal collection, making use of formats such as research essay, photo-essay, video, media reporting, biographical and other first-person accounts, and semi-fictional or fictional writing grounded on direct experience. Multimodality here does not simply aim at evoking the sensorial immediacy of the context (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019) but also at enabling the participation of authors from diverse backgrounds, crossing the divide between researchers and interlocutor/research participants, or volunteers/reception staff and migrants or, better, people-on-the-move.11 The choice of terminology is only one of the many pitfalls and challenges that work of this kind faces. It is well known, for example, that the dichotomy between migrant and refugee is entangled with the post–World War II histories of the twentieth century and the governmentality associated with migratory movements (Scalettaris 2007). Moreover, such a dichotomy often acquires directly political connotations and may result in dire effects for the people concerned. In Greece and in other European contexts today, xenophobic rhetoric is prepared to accept and facilitate "refugees" who are seen as fleeing war or persecution but not "migrants" who are seen as the people who have voluntarily left their country in search of better opportunities elsewhere, and for whom swift deportation is the reserved response. Such a dichotomy is not fit for purpose today as it does not take into account the endemic structural violence in many parts of the world, the impact of climate emergency on global mobility, and the fact that we have entered "a worldwide regime of protracted war" (Pandolfi and Rousseau 2016, 23). Nor can it describe the complexity of contemporary global movements and the combination of voluntary and involuntary factors implicated in the decision to cross a border in an informal and unconventional way. More importantly, it can result in the further criminalization of many if not most people who today cross borders in such a manner. While I have used in the past, along with most researchers, the term "migrants" for all these people, I am increasingly concerned that the term essentializes a temporary status and homogenizes a hugely diverse category. I would prefer that term "border-crossers," but this stresses only one moment in the journey, a moment that may take days, months, or even years. No term is unproblematic, but I found the term "people-on-the move" a powerful alternative that emphasizes mobility as the condition that shapes the life of such people at a specific moment in their life, although for some that moment may last for their whole lives. Yet, people-on-the-move themselves who often cross borders in dire or even tragic circumstances prefer at times to project their status as refugees. They do so in order to stress the circumstances that have contributed to their decision to embark on a journey and in order to claim international protection from global organizations such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), nation-states that have subscribed to the related treaties or other humanitarian agencies. Here is a dilemma faced by researchers and researcher-activists: how to balance a choice of language that does justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, does not essentialize the people they work with, and does not undervalue their agency, with the commitment to respect their own strategic choices of self-representation. In early October 2020, roughly one month after the big fire that raged over three days and completely destroyed it, I returned to Moria; it turned out to be one of the most affective and powerful (for me) visits. Fires were frequent in the camp before, but this one was unusual in its duration, intensity, and circumstances which are still under debate (see contribution from Papailias). I have attempted to present a mostly visual account of that visit and of the feelings it provoked in the photo essay published as part of this portfolio (see contribution from Hamilakis). Like many others, I have been researching, or rather experiencing and witnessing, that site since 2016 in biannual visits, mostly in January and in July. I also have been following its dispersal through human movement, oral accounts and testimonies, and discursive and visual narratives in the global mediascape ever since. As an archaeologist interested in materiality and sensoriality and as someone who has done extensive work on the links between the material past and national imagination, especially with reference to Greece, my take on this site was different from many other researchers, mostly coming from social anthropology, human geography, sociology, politics, and migration studies. Archaeological ethnography and the archaeology of the contemporary world were the strands that shaped this research-cum-activism project (Hamilakis 2016). The connections I established with the people I met there, most of whom have since continued their journey, are strong and lasting. And yet, as I was walking in the burnt and mostly silent landscape of Moria, punctuated by the sounds of hungry and desperate cats and dogs and the voices of human scavengers looking for scrap metal, I kept wondering: What was Moria? There are multiple and inevitably fragmented responses to this question, depending on who you ask, and I sense that a more comprehensive answer will elude us for some time, if not forever. And yet, forays into answering or at least tackling it, laboring with it, will need to be made. It will take time, it will take collective effort, it will require collaborative attempts, it may need multimodal, ethnographic, historical and archaeological, artistic, activist, and engaged responses. But what motivated the assembling and curation of this portfolio was the need for some immediate reflections, some first thoughts that may inspire future attempts, contributing perhaps to the emerging field of camp studies. Social anthropologists, archaeologists, anthropologist-activists who live on the island, educationists who worked on the site, and people-on-the-move who lived there for months have responded to my call. This essay will frame the portfolio of responses, connect the threads, and offer, briefly, some of my own provisional thoughts. "Moria no good," "Moria is prison," "This is Guantanamo," are some of the protesting responses I heard over the years from people-on-the-move who inhabited this camp. This is their experiential truth, which we have no right to dispute, and no grounds to do so either. Yet, it is a response that, as their more detailed and more intimate accounts and their own engagement with the site show, does not exhaust the range of roles, meanings, and effects of Moria. As well as a prison, Moria has been called a hell, a refugee camp (even compared to World War II concentration camps), a "hotspot," a "reception and identification center," the largest favela in Europe, a camp-city (Karathanasis 2020, drawing upon the concept proposed by Agier 2002), and more. A dry, matter-of-fact description would speak of a hillside locality called Pouria-Marmaro near the modern village of Moria on the border island of Lesvos. It is only 9 km from the main urban center of the island, the city of Mytilene, inhabited by about thirty thousand people. A partially walled-off and fenced compound housed for many years a Greek conscript army barracks (the Paradelli camp), the material remnants of which include elevated guard posts and rusted barbed wire. Most of the military buildings had been demolished when the place was turned into a migrant camp, although facilities such as toilets had survived in a derelict state, and they were renovated to be used by the new inhabitants of the camp. A section of the compound housed military facilities and army personnel long after the conscript training center had moved elsewhere and throughout the use of the facility to "process" people-on-the-move. This military sector was not there for nothing, nor was its presence accidental. The Greek army was partly responsible for running some of the operations, including the provision of food, which was contracted out to catering companies (Hamilakis, forthcoming). More than once during my field visits, I was reprimanded by guards for taking photographs because "this is a military zone." The history of this facility, and the continuous presence of the army there, militarized the whole operation. It is hard to escape the logic and the material presence of militarization, however, anywhere on the island. Given the historical tensions between Greece and Turkey, this has been a heavily militarized borderland for a century, and apart from the Greek army facilities and material presence, the warships of various EU countries moored at the ports or patrolling the narrow liquid passage between Lesvos and the Turkish coast are constant reminders. The compound had been used by the state and other authorities as a migrant center since 2013 to process the steady but fairly small number of people-on-the-move, following the closure of the notorious, overcrowded detention facility of Pagani. Pagagi opened in 2009 and it consisted of a warehouse-turned-prison, with bunk beds and metal bars in place of windows (Howden 2020, 62–63). It was destined for 300 people and it ended up housing over 1,200. It finally closed in 2012, following revolts and hunger strikes by the inmates as well as protests by solidarity groups. After its closure, Moria was chosen as a registration (and detention) center and it seemed that the relatively small number of people-on-the-move who arrived on Lesvos could be accommodated there and in small, solitary facilities elsewhere. The Syrian exodus, and especially its peak in 2015, changed everything. In the following months, Lesvos experienced the crossing and passage of an unprecedented number of people. Official police and coastguard statistics speak of around 512,000 people in 2015 alone (compared to around 12,000 in 2014), although no one really knows the exact numbers. In addition, the sealing of the northern Evros land border between Greece and Turkey and the construction there of a razor-wire barrier fence by Greece, which started in 2012, directed most border-crossers to the islands. This is the moment that gave rise to the "migration crisis" discourse in the European media and public opinion, a scheme that has been critiqued as a misnomer: it's not a migration crisis but a reception crisis on the part of the European societies and governmental establishments, the criticism goes (e.g., Christopoulos 2016). One could further claim that this reception crisis masks, in fact, a deeper identity crisis, not only of Europe but of the Global North as a whole, a crisis that has to do with its inability to deal with the unfinished histories of colonialism, as well as more recent neocolonialist enterprises, such as the "war on terror." For a brief moment in 2015, several European governments allowed a large number of people-on-the-move, mostly from Syria, to pass through and reach destination countries such as Germany. This was the moment when, as Rozakou (2) notes, Moria embodied hope, the promise of accelerated mobility: you had to be there, in the processing center, to be registered and finger-printed and then gain the "paper" (in effect, an expulsion order; Pallister-Wilkins 2020, 73) that allowed you to continue your journey into northern and western Europe. In this phase of its life, Moria was primarily a space of transience. In the autumn of 2015, the "hotspot approach" to migration was put into effect by the European Union, which established centers for the "streamlined" processing, identification, and documentation of people who entered the EU informally, through its Mediterranean borders. Securitization and comprehensive surveillance, but also management and regulation of the "migration flows" into Europe, were the main motivation for this move (cf. Dijstelbloem 2021; Kalir and Rozakou 2016; Neocleous and Kastrinou 2016; Tazzioli and Garelli 2020). Several centers were established, of which the one in Moria was perhaps the most notorious. But the Moria camp was not just a facility for processing and documentation. The EU-funded Reception and Identification Center (RIC) was only one component of the Moria assemblage, a technopolitical assemblage (cf. Dijstelbloem 2021), itself part of the nested assemblages of border-crossing and migration. The RIC itself was a heterogeneous organization, which involved agents such as Frontex (the EU's border guard authority), the Greek Ministry of Migration and the Greek Police, the UNHCR, the International Organization of Migration (IOM), and medical charities (Pollozek and Passoth 2019). The asylum service, run by the European Asylum Agency (EASO) in collaboration with the Greek asylum service, was another component. The PROKEKA (or the euphemistically called Pre-Departure Detention Center for Aliens), a high-security prison inside the compound run by the Greek police, was another one, and various NGOs, with the biggest perhaps being the Evangelical organization Eurorelief, were also involved (Doutrepont 2018). Each of these entities occupied their spatially distinct localities within the walled and fenced sector, although some were located outside it. As one research participant stressed to me, however, even within this compound, there was a clear "inside" and "outside": outside these highly securitized sectors there was a large area reserved for residence, often long-term residence, in prefab structures modeled, ironically, on shipping containers, which people-on-the-move called "ISO boxes," since they have the International Standardization Organization logo on them (Baumann 2020); in large tents known from refugee camps around the world and provided by various agencies; or even small holiday tents found or bought in the local market. In March 2016, the EU issued a statement of collaboration with Turkey, another measure of the externalization of the EU border. Among other things, it entailed the funding of Turkey (to the tune of 6 billion euros) to stop people before crossing the border, and the geographical containment on the islands, of people who crossed, unless they could prove a "vulnerability" status. The islands thus became open prisons themselves, and while at the beginning arrivals dropped significantly, they soon increased again. While the capacity of the Moria camp between 2015–2016 and 2020 had increased roughly to 2,500–3,000 persons, the inhabitants soon exceeded that number by far, and they started camping outside and around the main compound, either in tents provided by the UN and NGOs or, increasingly, in shelters constructed by themselves using whatever material they could find or purchase from the locals: stone, wooden pallets, plastic sheets and tarp. In late 2019 and early 2020, the numbers in and around the camp exceeded 20,000 people, and Moria was talked about as the second-largest city on the island, after Mytilene. At the time of the final fire, in September 2020, official records spoke of around 12,000 people living in Moria. A look at historic satellite images shows this organic and gradual change in the landscape of Moria, from the sparsely built conscript barracks to the heavily constructed "hotspot" facility (with the line of parked cars belonging to the growing number of employees getting longer and longer) to the gradual mushrooming of shelters covering the hills around it (Figures 1 and 2). A more grounded, experiential, and multisensorial engagement with the materiality of this complex would provide a textured effect and a sensorial impact and knowledge, not easily felt in the god's-eye view of satellite imagery and the macronarratives of the literature. When in operation, the first powerful sensorial impact of this site, beyond the view of the astonishing density of overcrowded shelter, was the strong odor from sewage filling the small stream outside the walled compound or overflowing onto the main road. The old septic tanks of the conscription army camp could not cope with the numbers of inhabitants, while the signage advertising the construction of new sewage facilities outlasted the camp itself, testifying to a touted project that was never completed. This was a materiality of a palimpsest. Signage from its different lives is scattered all over. In one of my earliest visits, in 2016, I was observing a worker laboring on the outside fence facing the main road, entangling razor wire around old, rusted barbed wire (Figure 3). These are the two characteristic technologies of fencing, the two iconic objects that link this locality to the long genealogy and political ecology of camps, from the fenced cattle ranches of the American West to the colonial encampments in Africa and the twentieth-century concentration camps to the twenty-first-century refugee detention facilities (Minca 2015). Their coexistence materializes these long but ever-present entangled histories, the long duration of the ideas of enclosure, separation, and racialized segregation and their current resurfacing in what Catherine Besteman (2019) calls militarized global apartheid. Razor wire, this technology of segregation and detention, dominated the scene here; it shapes and frames at the same time this materiality, a materiality of a labyrinth with nested security corridors and guarded doors. Police, the army, and personnel of the private security firm Group G4S guarded the various sectors. Even Eurorelief volunteers, often American college students on summer assignments or on a gap year, would guard some internal checkpoints and gates, checking people's papers, demonstrating vividly the merging of securitization and humanitarianism (Pandolfi and Rousseau 2016). This frightful materiality of securitization seemed superfluous and unnecessary at first. Interlocutors would stress to me that it is another material consequence of the economy or even industry of the border, the "Illegality Inc." as Andersson (2014) put it, whereas police personnel told Katerina Rozakou (personal communication) that the double layering is prescribed in EU regulation about these "hotspots." Huge amounts of money were available to be spent, and some of it went to the miles of razor wire. But I sensed then that these were only partial explanations. The meandering razor-wire fences, the uniformed guards of various kinds, the fortress-like "pre-departure facility," and the other paraphernalia of securitization spoke of a locality of detention. New arrivals had to stay inside the compound (especially in 2016–2017) until all registration was completed (usually twenty to thirty days); after that, they were able to move in and out by showing their papers to the guards or by simply using unofficial openings. Detention, in the broader sense of restriction, containment, regulation, and channeling of bodily movement, was certainly one function of this site. Yet it has been convincingly argued (e.g., Pollozek and Passoth 2019) that one of Moria's key roles was the capturing of information—the detailed biometric and other documentation of all border-crossers and the entering of their data into multiple national and supranational databases. In addition to this huge logistical and surveillance operation, the bodily pedagogy of subjugation was a further effect, intended or not, of this place, rendering it a biopolitical laboratory: docile, disciplined bodies had to wait in line for hours on end, performing waithood (Khosravi 2021b, 46) for food, medical care, asylum application, even the local bus to the town. "Waiting [is] a central category through which the biopolitical border operates," says Topak (2020, 1873), who has carried out fieldwork in Moria. But waithood in the camp has an additional effect: it devalued border-crossers' time and thus their worth as workers, even when they are allowed to join the workforce (Khosravi 2021a, 204). Yet, it soon became clear to me that in addition to this containment, regulation, devaluation, bodily training, and surveillance, there was another factor at play: the border and its infrastructure as an economy of spectacle, the other side of surveillance (cf. De Genova 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). Other researchers have already spoken of Moria as a "spectacle of deterrence" (Howden 2020), as a sight that would warn potential border-crossers of what awaits them upon entering Greece and the European Union. But there is more to the spectacular economy of Moria. In 2015–2016, and with less intensity in the following years, Lesvos became a global stage on which various dramatic acts were performed; "Fortress Europe," and the various rituals of humanitarianism, humanitarian reasoning, and humanitarian governance were the most prominent. In this global stage, Moria held a key position. Heads of state, the pope, global media celebrities, and countless journalists paraded on it. In April 2016, I witnessed how the compound's façade was transformed, a day before the high-profile papal visit (Figure 4). The high wall was whitewashed and the pro-migrant graffiti disappeared, new signs were put up, and people in flimsy, makeshift shelters, some of them also branding protest signs, were moved from the front to the very back of the camp. The seemingly superfluous materiality of detention, with the miles of razor wire, sent multiple messages both to the would-be border-crossers and to the "legitimate" citizens of Europe. To the first, the messages were the ones of the high-security and severe force that would meet them upon crossing the border, while to the second was that "illegitimate" visitors are securely contained behind several layers of razor wire, maintaining at the same time a façade of some sort of civility, order, and cleanliness. The back regions of this global stage, however, spoke of the brutality of this operation, some of which is recorded in this portfolio: the gang violence and the fear, especially during the night, which were often highly gendered (cf. contribution from Amiri); the lack of any systematic and structured educational opportunities for children and young adults (see contribution from Pavlou); the deaths due to hypothermia or asphyxiation from burning rubbish as fuel in makeshift stoves; and the discriminatory and often racialized logic of the whole edifice. Other researchers (e.g., Córdova Morales 2021) and my own interlocutors would often stress not only the preferential treatment of certain groups based on national, racial, religious, or cultural lines but also the illicit preemptive imprisonment of people of certain origin and nationality—Algerian men, for example, who were detained in the "Pre-Departure Center" upon arrival. These people were seen as less likely to receive asylum and were considered as "prone to criminality," as one interlocutor, a police officer working in the camp, stressed to me, expressing at the same time his own discomfort with such a measure. This national-racial profiling practice, it turned out, was an experimental scheme of the Greek police, which lacked any legal grounding (Kriona Saranti 2019). But there are also other things happening in the back regions. The multiple holes in the perimeter fence, in areas that were mostly away from visitors and TV cameras, spoke eloquently of the reshaping of this locale by the agency of its inhabitants. Indeed, the agency of the people-on-the-move that passed through this locale is the largely underreported and underdiscussed dimension of the Moria story. The transient population of this facility fluctuated not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of country of origin. This transience, this passing through Moria, became a barometer of global tensions and geopolitical developments, from the civil war in Syria, to the increasingly unstable and tragic situation in Afghanistan, to the public protests and their violent suppression by Kabilla, the ex-president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The late governor of Moria, Yannis Balbakakis (appointed by the previous, left-wing Greek government), a retired military officer, used to say often in media interviews that there are fifty-eight nationalities (ethnikotites) in Moria, something that he repeated during our conversation in July 2017. And while the authorities at the camp encouraged the appointment of "community leaders" from each sizeable group, defined mostly by country of origin, a form of paternalistic, top-down representation, people-on-the-move themselves had found a way to establish their own forms of self-organizing. Food and shelter became their immediate concerns, but education, art making, and political mobilization were also important. Ingenuity and inventiveness were everywhere to be seen. Once the walled compound filled up, shelters were first established in the area east of the compound, called "Olive Grove," and more recently, "The Jungle." This name seemingly connects Moria to the encampment at Calais, but it was, in fact, given by people from Afghanistan, who formed the largest group in the last years of its life; it comes from the word jangal, denoting the forested area in Farsi. Here, the regime of humanitarian governance clashed with attempts at self-organizing. A large international NGO rented the fields from locals, took over most of its area, and established a regimented landscaped space; people-on-the-move also terraced the slope, dug drainage canals, and built their own tents, schools (Figure 5), art studios, and places of worship, but not without difficulties. Zekria Farzad, who founded the bottom-up mutual aid, educational, and cultural organization Wave of Hope for the Future in Moria, which is now present in many camps in Greece, has spoken to me of the pressure and intimidation he received, not only from the authorities but also from NGO personnel (see contribution from Farzad). Olive trees were cut, branches and wood were gathered for construction and fuel, stones were laid out to create paved front yards for socializing. The electricity grid was tapped to provide for lighting and cell phone charging, but power cuts were routine. Plastic water bottles, the most common item in Moria due to lack of adequate running water, were recycled and put to diverse uses, including laying out floors and sleeping platforms, filling with ash and soil and wrapped up in multiple units to create a block or a stand, cut in half and used as open containers, and more. In late 2019 and 2020, when the population increased sharply, all the fields around the compound were occupied (Figures 1 and 2), and while an NGO created by border-crossers themselves (Refugees for Refugees) helped organize some of this, its expansion was mostly a self-motivated and self-organized effort. The food provided by the catering company was "food for ill people," a research collaborator told me (cf. Hamilakis 2022), bland and tasteless, and this is how it tasted to me when I tried it. Soon, people-on-the-move organized their own food provision, established small unofficial shops, created hearths using recycled and found material, and even founded large, sunken bread ovens (tanurs), which served whole communities. In other words, in a failing top-down system of securitization and humanitarian governance, asylum seekers took over, claimed agency, reshaped the landscape of the camp, and made sure that some minimally bearable conditions were established. They also often organized revolts and protests, both in Moria and in the town of Mytilene, protests that were often crushed by the regular and riot police. Liberte was the main slogan in a major 2017 Moria revolt, organized by people from west and central Africa; Azadi (meaning freedom in Farsi, Pashto, and other languages) was the one during the Afghani-organized protests in 2019 and 2020. Even the fire that completely destroyed Moria in September 2020 seemed to have been, according to one scenario, an outcome of a revolt. It started in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the seven-month-old curfew imposed upon all inhabitants of Moria by the government. It came after the authorities' decision to move COVID-infected people not into a clinic or a quarantine hotel but into a warehouse nearby (see contribution from Papailias). It seems that none of the characterizations and descriptions of Moria would in themselves suffice. It was not strictly a prison, yet detention was part of its role for some of the people or for all its inhabitants for some of the time. It was a surveillance and documentation apparatus, a huge logistical operation for capturing data, but an incomplete one nevertheless, as the official census following the fire showed 2,000 people "missing." It was also an apparatus of classification, labeling, grouping, and segregation, but even so, many of its inhabitants managed to forge links across national, ethnic, gender, and other boundaries and to continue their journey regardless. It was an institution of schooling in the bodily pedagogy of submission, yet protests and demonstrations were frequent. It was a settlement that, in its last phase, came to resemble a camp-city, but one with an arrested urbanity, or rather urbanity in suspension (cf. Agier 2002, 337), the kind of urbanity that only people-on-the move could build. It was a material monument to a failing policy, a ruin-to-be, a ruin in waiting, the ruination of which had been foretold several times over, in the camp revolts and the small or bigger fires that had erupted prior to the final one. And it was much more than these partial, fragmentary answers would indicate. And what comes after? Following the destruction of the camp, the authorities were forced to move thousands of people to the mainland, but they also established a new camp next to the sea and inside a former Greek army firing range, in an area reserved for warehousing and industrial uses. The camp is much more militarized than Moria. Using the pandemic as a continuous excuse, people are only rarely allowed out, and only for shopping, while they are exposed to the elements and without the immediate hinterland to provide firewood and raw materials. Surveillance and policing are also much more prominent in the new camp, and a separate police department was established inside it, making organizing, protest, and uprising more difficult. The generation and dissemination of imagery and information is strictly controlled, access to the site is tightly regulated, and, as in other migrant camps around Greece, a cement wall was built on one side and along the main road, preventing visual contact. Government images of the camp are mostly produced by drones, projecting order. At the same time, the number of people-on-the-move entering this camp on Lesvos (and on the other border islands) has decreased dramatically, partly due to the global pandemic and partly due to the illegal pushbacks, instigated by authorities and their border patrol agencies. As has been repeatedly reported, even people who manage to land on the islands are often violently forced into rafts with no engines and are left to float at sea (Cortinovis 2021). Solidarity initiatives and groups are being increasingly criminalized (Schack and Witcher 2020), and following the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Greek government warned that it will not accept people from the country attempting to cross into Greece. Its inhabitants and solidarity groups have already named this camp Moria 2. It is meant to be temporary while a new, closed facility is being considered in the middle of nowhere, far away from any urban center, out of sight for local inhabitants and media alike. Yet, given that this facility, too, is part of the same EU-wide policy of bordering and securitization, as indicated in the proposed "new pact on migration and asylum," which was announced, tellingly, only a few days after the Moria fire, its own promise of ruination is already there. I am grateful to the people who lived in Moria; to the many friends, "local" or otherwise, I met there; to Maria Choleva for the help with Figures 1 and 2; to Katerina Rozakou for insightful comments on this text; and to the journal editors and reviewers for their enthusiasm and support.