The Martinican poet and essayist Aimé Césaire argued in his Discourse on colonialism (1955) that Europe had cast the curse of Nazism on itself by losing its soul in the colonies in the first place.[1] Strategists and politicians in his day said that Europe was indefensible. Césaire replied that the worst thing was that Europe was morally and spiritually indefensible. Europe’s colonialism was justified on the idea that Europe was the cradle of the Enlightenment, of ‘civilisation’, and later on of human rights. European lives were always regarded as more valuable than those of non-Europeans. It was exactly this dominant attitude that became the focal point of Césaire’s criticism.
The recent destruction of camp Moria and the subsequent haggling and peddling of people confronts us with the more general question of whether Europe is defensible? Or should we consider the camp, as well as its destruction, as an emblem that reverberates the legacy of a colonial Europe, which erroneously, and again, presents itself as a moral compass for the entire planet?
Europe’s asylum system described Moria as a regular registration center where asylum seekers could initiate their asylum application in conformity with human rights. Yet, Moria was far from being a humanitarian registration center. As a result of the EU-Turkey deal in 2016, Moria was transformed into the largest refugee camp in Europe with more than 13,000 residents, despite the fact that it was originally constructed to accommodate up to 3,000 refugees. Apart from an extreme shortage of sanitation facilities, healthcare centers and overcrowded accommodation, lack of shelters and space forced a great number of refugees to live in improvised shelters outside the camp. In 2015, the former mayor of Lesbos had already cautioned that Moria would turn into ‘the Guantánamo Bay of Europe’. The Afghan and Syrian refugees (interviewed by one of the authors of this article during a field research in 2017) used the term ‘Jahanam’ to describe Moria; ‘Jahanam’ denotes hell in Arabic and Persian.
