Migrant detention centre on Lesvos. Photo by author, all rights reserved.
20 April 2016, 6 a.m., Lesvos: three police teams enter the NoBorder Kitchen camp located on a beach a few hundred meters away from the city centre of Mytilene, and arrest the 350 Pakistani migrants who were sleeping inside the tents. After about half an hour, the migrants are transferred to the hotspot of Moria, fingerprinted and detained there. Since the day after the signing of the EU-Turkey agreement (18 March 2016), the hotspot has officially become a “closed facility”, as defined by UNHCR officers on the island, that is to say a centre of first deportation. The NoBorder Kitchen camp was opened by British, German and Greek activists in November 2015 as a safe space for migrants who refused to be identified in the hotspot, thereby avoiding being fingerprinted.
In order to understand what the eviction of the NoBorder camp reveals about the transformations of the frontier-island we should retrace the events that took place in Lesvos. We must look both at events that have become visible through the media and events that are exclusively filed in the archives of the Greek authorities and the European agencies in charge of governing migration, such as Frontex and European Asylum Support Office (EASO). Such a reconstruction involves following the pace and temporality of arrivals and departures on the frontier-island of Lesvos during the last nine months, during which time migrant arrivals have substantially increased.
