Under the ice storm at the start of the year, a man was found dead between Roxham Road and the Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle border crossing on Wednesday. The cause of death is currently unknown, but the media have mentioned the fact that it is a person who was trying to cross the border.
All the hypocrisy of the border is revealed each time a body is stranded there. The dead reveal the primary function of the border: the state erects a rampart to ensure the accumulation and retention of capital, while allowing itself to dispose of bodies. See how willingly we accept cross-border mobility if it is intended above all to produce a drudgery and precarious labor force. But when you show up at the border in the name of life, the seal is complete, ruthless, without appeal. Capturing value, rejecting bodies: one hypocrisy among others.
The grossest, most obvious hypocrisy, being undoubtedly the immediate, unconditional solidarity, deployed with regard to the refugees who arrived from Ukraine in the last year, while we continue to shout about the “migration crisis” of the Roxham. Let’s be clear: we owe all our solidarity to the Ukrainians displaced by the war, that is indisputable. But the contrast is so striking. There are those who are welcomed, those who are imprisoned and those who are left to die at the border.
We will certainly evoke the criterion of “merit” and “innocence”, but frankly, if we started to do the accounts – of looting, exploitation, deprivation, the fabrication of instability chronicle in the countries of the South — the spreadsheet would not serve the argument. It doesn’t matter, in fact, since it has nothing to do with merit, and everything to do with the prioritization of lives and the management of human mobility ordered by racial capitalism.
Moreover, the States harshly punish anyone who transgresses this order. On January 10, in Athens, the trial continues of Sarah Mardini and Seán Binder, two humanitarian workers from the Emergency Response Center International, a small organization founded in 2016 to help migrants arriving on the beaches of the island of Lesbos in aboard makeshift boats.
For distributing blankets and water to people arriving at the gates of Europe, Binder and Mardini were charged in 2018 with participation in a criminal organization, espionage, illegal use of radio frequencies, human trafficking , fraud and money laundering. Detained before their trial for more than a hundred days, then released, but still banned from entering Greek territory, they have been waiting for five years for the court to consider these far-fetched, politically tainted accusations from start to finish. They face 25 years in prison.
Last March, the New York TimesMagazine devoted a long report to the legal saga in which Sarah Mardini, Seán Binder and their colleagues are immersed. This case was part of a clear trend towards the criminalization of humanitarian aid offered to migrants at the gates of Europe.
In the case of Sarah Mardini, the charges against her contain a dark irony. A few years before her arrest, the young woman herself was one of the migrants who arrived in Lesbos by sea, aboard a raft with holes.
From a middle-class Syrian family, a top competitive swimmer, Sarah Mardini fled war-torn Syria in 2016, along with her younger sister, Yusra. Like many Syrians, daily violence prompted the Mardini sisters to take a plane to Turkey, before attempting the perilous crossing of the Aegean Sea to Lesbos, then joining the migratory routes linking Greece to northern Europe. .
Their story has also been widely publicized, but especially through Yusra, who won the sympathy of the Western media by participating in the Rio Olympics, in the first delegation for refugees, then by becoming “ambassador of Goodwill” to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
A feature film produced by Netflix, The Swimmers (swimmers, 2022), recounts the heroic and tragic journey of the Mardini sisters from Syria to Germany, where they received asylum. A land and sea crossing strewn with violence and exploitation, which would have turned into a tragedy had it not been for the athletic prowess of Sarah and Yusra, who swam their overcrowded raft between Izmir and the shore of Lesbos.
The Swimmers illustrates well the drama of emergency migration, the selfishness and hypocrisy of European states in the face of migrants. However, the film seemed to me to stop where the story really begins. We are presented as a happy ending Yusra Mardini’s Olympic adventure, in 2016, just before Sarah returned to Greece, to lend a hand to people who are still stranded on Greek beaches every day.
At the end of the film, a mere mention of the charges against Sarah and her comrades appears on screen, before the credits. Repression of migration and border violence are always asides, footnotes, side stories. We prefer sentimental stories, that of “deserved” and “successful” migrations, stories that, above all, flatter our charitable soul. It is time to focus on another story.