As I got out of the van at a session at one of our regular camps, I felt a different atmosphere from when I was last there seven months ago, I saw a lot more kids in a lot less space. Other things remained the same. The Greek sun roasting concrete and loose stones. The 5 years to wait for your first asylum interview – a stagnant adolescence in a pressure cooker.
Will Ascott is co-founder of refugee charity project, Free Movement Skateboarding. Seven months ago he took a break from his work at the organisation for his health, writing this article about the experience. He has since returned to Athens, to rejoin the group – prompting this follow-up. He’s also learned to do linocuts, which we love.
There are all the familiar faces from before and many, many new ones. As expected, the girl I described in my previous article is still there. Just one of the kids I was close with has left for Germany in my time away. 55,400 have arrived this year (Oct 2019), the most since 2016, for their stretch in limbo, in pursuit of a better life.
A staple of teenage boys across the world, I witnessed a textbook “mum-cussing” as I arrived in the camp that day, but it was the reaction that shocked me. The following happened over about 3 seconds. One boy insults the other’s mum, and a fist sledgehammers its way through his teeth immediately. Staff quickly separate the brawl.
Unfortunately, such violence isn’t exactly rare at our sessions. But what struck me was the immediacy with which the punch was thrown. The words left his mouth and were met with a fist in that same moment. The boy’s capacity to respond in a measured and reasonable way has been stunted, whereas violent explosions come instantaneously.
Having spent time with this young man, I know there’s a good natured soul inside and we’re just not seeing it here, as his capacity for a reasoned response to perceived threats has been eroded by a life dogged by trauma. Fleeing war on his doorstep, crossing the Aegean sea and years in increasingly crowded, undignified Greek refugee camps. After a lifetime of genuine threats warranting adrenalised responses, ‘fuck your mum’ felt like one too, and before you can know it, his fist is covered in someone elses spit and blood.
As I escorted him away from the situation he slowly calms and the good heart I know returns. He subsequently helps younger kids get their pads on, keen to maintain his place on an outing to LATRAAC skate bowl in the coming days.
There are bigger forces at play in this incident. Violence breeds violence, and there’s nothing uglier than seeing it permeate from the international stage into the psyche of a 14 year old boy.
My previous article painted a picture of the situation in Athens, but things have worsened since 7th July when New Democracy gained power in a snap election promising a return to stability. Much like our previous story’s protagonist, the Greek state perceives a threat and must respond. The ‘threat’ to Greece comes from the most persecuted and vulnerable people arriving to Europe in search of safety. Their response to this has been calculated over years, not moments. In this way, we are in the realms of measured, conscious aggression against those who are the most powerless and voiceless – in the name of returning to Stability.
The children of asylum seekers no longer have access to public education. Stability. Migrants no longer have social security numbers meaning they cannot find employment or access basic public services like hospitals. Stability. The police are evicting squats knowing people can choose homelessness or being sent to the newly opened and notoriously underprovisioned and isolated Corinth camp. Stability.
When you can put faces to deprivation and attempt to grasp the scale of the crisis, knowing the trajectory Greece and the EU are determined to push, the pit in your stomach is vast. One of our sessions catered to a (now evicted) squat, as well as Greek kids from a local school, and as such this session saw our highest level of integration. Parents mingled. These children were also enrolled in local schools and some knew each other from outside the session. Having had their sense of identity stripped fleeing their war torn homes, they had begun to form a new one in tolerant Exarchia. Alas, it was stripped again, by militarised cops, treating families like dangerous criminals in early morning squat raids. They are now in Corinth, 100km from Athens, with no education provided.
I left Greece feeling fucking crackers. N0w, returning, I am in a good mental state, but feel a greater sense of hopelessness. I take real pride knowing that Free Movement offers some light relief to 200 young refugees each week. But it’s a drop in the ocean at best. Without a doubt, this assault on human rights will manifest in the behaviour of the young people we work with. There will be a lot more ‘fuck your mums’ met with bleeding mouths in the coming months, but this is no real crime, more of a symptom.
New Democracy and other populist right-wing parties across Europe are the true aggressors. We see the same patterns across the Mediterranean – from Greece, to Italy, to Spain – Fortress Europe will protect itself at any cost. The EU’s policies, for hundreds of thousands of people, amount to unnecessary suffering on an unimaginable scale.
It is left to small, over stretched NGOs and solidarity groups to pick up the pieces of this conscious political decision. Blood on the hands of the Greek state and the complicit European Union.
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