The Moria Fire as Catastrophe: Scenes of Witnessing
By Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly)
Frame 1: The Live and the Local
We’re here in Larso. It’s very windy. We’re here near the center where residents of Moria and the neighboring area are holding a protest. They’ve written “KYT [Reception and Identification Center] Finished” on the road so it won’t be rebuilt. . . . I’ve got a bad signal unfortunately. It’s very windy (Sto Nisi 2020b).
September 10, 2020. It’s two days after a massive fire broke out at Europe’s largest refugee camp on the island of Lesvos. Journalists from the local Greek-language news portal Sto Nisi (On the Island), set up in 2019 by progressive local journalists, are broadcasting live on Facebook, as they had been doing since the fire began at the Moria Reception and Identification Center. The brief video clip, now archived on their Facebook page, is jarring to watch. The camera, seeking out locals to interview, bounces around abruptly. The journalist, her back turned to the phone most of the time, never addresses the lens or introduces herself. The wind howls, making it hard to hear human voices but easy to imagine flames leaping out of control.
We came here because we had to block [Minister of Migration and Asylum] Mitirachi’s plan. The reporter asks, For Moria? A man interrupts. This isn’t Moria, he says looking toward the smoldering refugee detention center. That is Moria, he states, pointing in the opposite direction toward the thousand-person village of Moria, whose name has become synonymous with the notorious camp. In a bid to strip away these associations and any connection to that place, the man corrects the journalist, repeating the camp’s official name: That’s the KYT (Sto Nisi 2020b).
Throughout the livestream, a vicious, openly racist backchannel counter-commentary, filled with weeping emoticons, rages on the chat, reflecting many islanders’ rejection of the government plans to build a new closed camp (Figure 1). This move would literally cement the presence of refugees on the island, further entrenching the European Union policy of maintaining “hot spot” detainment facilities on its own/European territory beyond those already funded in North Africa and the Middle East: “Throw them in the sea”; “Where is the army?”; “The ancient olive trees are burning . . . what a shame”; “They should leave and go somewhere else!!! They burn everything and don’t respect anything!!!!”; “My little island.”
Figure 1. Screengrab from the Sto Nisi Facebook Live stream “All night in Moria,” with user comments accusing the refugees of being arsonists who destroy local land and olive trees. September 9, 2021.
In a classic essay, feminist film and media scholar Mary Ann Doane (2006, 262) argued that catastrophe anchors aspects of “normal” televisual temporality, such as immediacy, presence, urgency, and instantaneity. As human technologies fail during catastrophic events, the impossibility of representing what is happening is compensated for by on-site presence and present-ness. As a result, the “most catastrophic of technological catastrophes is the loss of the signal” (262).
As the journalist recounts what she has heard from others or seen in the near or distant past, she “covers the event with words” (258). She animates a black screen that shows nothing but shadows and points of light with word pictures: It’s staggering what we’re experiencing and can happen in a second. Our camera cannot capture it all. Before, for example, we saw a man looking for his family who did not even know the fire had broken out (Sto Nisi 2020a). Standing above the burning camp and outside the barbed-wire fence, she invokes a complex historical palimpsest: Here where I’m standing now until a few days ago there was a meeting place for asylum seekers. Down in that wing, African asylum seekers lived for many months. Since processes were so slow, some stayed up to two years. When there was space—a long time ago—here—where I am standing above now—Catholics used to gather. Her ongoing chatter, as long as she manages to maintain signal and audibility, invokes a space of commonality with the viewer through the incessant use of personal, spatial, and temporal deictic shifters (here, there, we, I, you, above, down).
The Moria fire as catastrophe, in this first scene of witnessing, unfolds as a contested attempt at connection and sensory contact implicating the viewer on an ethical and political level, simultaneously enfolding multiple pasts (“what Moria was”), complicating the typical “before/after” depiction of catastrophe as a spectacle of physical destruction.
Frame 2: Detective Story
“I’ve witnessed scenes like this before in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, when the state had effectively collapsed. I’ve never seen this in Europe” (BBC 2020).
Figure 2. Refugees stranded after the fire in Moria camp and before being moved into the Kara Tepe camp as BBC editor Gabriel Gatehouse reports. (Screengrab BBC News 2020)
BBC international editor Gabriel Gatehouse is walking beside a long line of refugees, turning back to face the camera in his bright yellow face mask, his name and position captioned on the frame (Figure 2). It is four days after the fire and the refugees, now refugees of Moria, are stranded without food, water, and access to sanitation facilities in yet another zone of exteriority and abandonment carved within their island confinement. By the end of the half-hour documentary, prepared for BBC Newsnight, we see the unhoused refugees registering at the hastily built camp near Kara Tepe, a few hundred meters up the road, soon to be dubbed Moria 2.0 by migrants and critics and condemned for even worse conditions.
I’ve never seen this in Europe. The reporter’s comment invokes and then retracts the possibility of comparing territory that is legally part of Europe to dysfunctional postcolonial failed states. A YouTube user in the comments below the uploaded video does not lose the opportunity to quip, “Since when was Greece European in the first place. They’re closer to Turks than Europeans.” Implying a cultural hierarchy based on racialized ontologies, the remark cuts to the chase about Greece’s history as a site for articulating the border between East and West, Christianity and Islam, Global North and Global South, European colonial pasts and postcolonial presents, “law” and “crime.” It is not really by chance that the reporter has arrived in Greece via Congo, a modern-day Marlow investigating yet another “heart of darkness”: the question is whether “Europe” is recognized as the source of the darkness or still considered the bearer of light.
Indeed, over the years Lesvos has been a place for global public figures, from artist Ai Weiwei and actress Angela Jolie to the Pope, to come to articulate civilizational discourses and witness not so much the “refugee crisis” as the contemporary decline of the West into barbarism. The controversial French anti-American, anti-Islam, anti-left pundit Bernard Henri Lévy, for instance, would write an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about his May 2020 trip to the Moria camp entitled “Europe’s Capital of Pain,” in which he advocated for the destruction of this “camp of indignity,” this “zone of quasi-lawlessness, a Guantanamo without culprits or suspects opened, like a plague, on the flank of Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and democratic Europe.” In his racialized metaphor, the European body (notably without Muslim and Arab elements) is imperiled by contagion, a metaphysical plague event coming from without. He suggests—clearly with Nazi concentration camps in mind—that Moria should be destroyed but preserved as a “memorial of inhumanity and shame.” What is strangely missing, though, is a reference to “who” committed this crime.
The BBC’s well-researched reportage, titled “Who Started the Fire at Europe’s Largest Refugee Camp?” approaches the fire—not Moria—as the crime to be investigated, reserving the role of detective for the journalist witness who has come from Europe to discover the truth. The crime here is not Moria as revenant of European colonialism’s past, as in Lévy’s discourse, but the disputed arson. The documentary does not deny that refugees—as has been their practice in the past—started the initial fires as an act of protest against moving COVID-19 infected refugees’ self-quarantining in a makeshift facility to a warehouse nearby. Against the Greek government position that the refugees were arsonists, the BBC documentary presents evidence that locals brought gasoline to the site to make sure the camp burned to the ground. Given the credibility of the BBC within post-imperial hierarchies of knowledge production, the BBC counter-narrative would prove of tactical significance for left activists and media outlets within the Greek political context. Nonetheless, the Greek government would go on to convict six Afghan nationals, including two minors, for setting the fire (Infomigrants 2021).
Figure 3. Choosing the opening image for BBC Newsnight. (Screengrab BBC 2020)
Set up as a liberal detective story and forensics investigation, the documentary treats individuals as embodiments of social positions representable through interviews—the right-wing mayor, locals, and refugees, as named individuals with life stories, and the embedded reporter himself, who reflexively depicts himself selecting footage from the computer hard drive of refugee filmmakers who had been trained by an NGO active on the island (Figure 3). Gatehouse, nonetheless, is the one who ultimately compiles and synthesizes what he describes as “a huge archive of evidence.” Solving the crime further suggests that proper procedures could make this place more like Europe. Yet, Moria’s status as an internal frontier and contemporary site where sovereignty can be exercised outside the law is precisely what defines its Europeanness.
Frame 3: From Dron-O-Rama to the Body as Camera
Media events are always events in media, enmeshed with new media technologies. For instance, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, depicted in pre-cinematic circular painted panoramas that had been used to provide 360-degree views of battles, cityscapes, and sea/landscapes, inaugurated a Western “monumental and memorializing panoramic aesthetic” for disaster reportage (Feldman 2005, 212). In the Aegean context, the shocking eventfulness of the so-called Asia Minor Catastrophe and the first massive and compulsory population exchange was fused to the iconic photographs of the 1922 Izmir/Smyrna fire reproduced widely in newspapers of the time. So today, the militarized “dron-o-rama” (Kaplan 2017) satellite view, as in the New York Times (Kingsley 2020) time-lapse footage of the Moria camp “before and after” the fire, contributes to this long history of European panoramic optics of disaster.
Figure 4. Drone footage of the burnt and still smoldering Moria camp by Russian video news agency RUPTLY. September 10, 2020. (Courtesy of RUPTLY)
While the Moria fire would be an opportunity to demo these new technologies of omniscience and spectacle (Figure 4), the fire as media event was also shaped by new visual idioms and ethical discourses linked to widely available technologies of video transmission and networked social media platforms. “Mobile witnessing” describes the new authenticities that have emerged “traversing binaries such as the private and the public, the body and the machine, the material and the virtual, the journalist and the citizen” (Reading 2009, 63). Bystanders-turned-victims, such as commuters or tourists unexpectedly caught up in a terrorist attack or extreme weather phenomenon, or victims/witnesses of police violence increasingly broadcast from within the event, “less as close viewers than as near misses” (Papailias 2016, 442; Papailias 2018). “Citizen camera-witnesses” also use mobile technologies of transmission to intentionally put their bodies on the line to document state violence with the aim of mobilizing publics through the evidential and affective power of images (Andén-Papadopoulos 2014, 754).
The BBC documentary appropriates the authenticity of refugee witnesses to establish proximity to the time-space of the fire as event. We quickly understand that the first frames of the documentary depicting charred and smoking olive trees were not captured by the BBC team, who indeed were not there at the time of the fire, but selected from the refugee filmmakers’ hard drive. While including the montage process in the documentary seems a respectful gesture of crediting, even a nod at collaborative authorship, this artful, indeed masterful, act of citation seems to me more to project Europe’s and the white man’s continuing right to frame the world’s discourse. The Sto Nisi journalists are also professionals; indeed, many work simultaneously for foreign outlets. Yet, given the hostility of many local residents and state agents to their reporting, we might liken their risky practices of mobile witnessing to that of citizen-cameras. Needless to say, though, in hierarchies of authenticity, their Greek-language witnessing texts, filmed from outside the barbed-wire fence, rank below those of refugee-victims who were inside the camp and whose bodies were closer to the fire and more vulnerable to harm.
The BBC documentary, in short, resembles textbook liberal anthropological participant observation that builds, more than bridges, distinctions between local embodied experience in the field (the refugees), which is cited and incorporated as evidence, and global witness on screen as authoritative explication (the British journalist). By contrast, Sto Nisi’s disjointed reporting in the form of multiple, uncompiled clips records the unpredictable, unfolding situation and the accompanying hateful counter-commentary, without any attempt at synthesis. The Sto Nisi witnessing appears to be less about representation than about engagement. It remains on their site as a trace of a kind of observant participation that emerges out of the commitments, experience, and subjectivity of inquirers seeking elusive “co-understandings” among people (Campbell and Lassiter 2014, 64).
Frame 4: The Eschatological
We had a catastrophe—that was the event. But through the arson that took place in Moria, through this catastrophe, something better came out. Moria is finished and we will repair the Moria area. We will make a park and give it to the municipality. Moria is not going to exist again, just like the current camp—which will be terminated, but which we all recognize is much better than what existed in Moria (Kathimerini 2021).
These comments by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on March 3, 2021, in a meeting with mayors of islands currently hosting refugee camps and hot spots bring us to the final scene of witnessing. We now leave the ground of media technologies to enter that of metaphysical and religious discourse. There, catastrophe meets common descriptions of Moria as “hell,” “hell on earth,” and, ultimately, an oxymoronic “burning hell.”
The fire as an optical field for projecting Greek/European innocence and fear inverts the endangered into the danger (Butler 1993), making those at risk to be burned alive appear as arsonists, burning down “our ancient olive trees,” destroying “my little island.” The charge of arson builds on a longer history of describing refugees as potential “health bombs,” further exacerbated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Refugees have also been weaponized as “ammunition” in the Greek–Turkish border skirmish that followed Turkey’s opening of the Meriç/Evros border, allowing migrants to move into European space. Now, in right-wing discourse, the refugees themselves were the “fire” escaping from the ghetto-camp and spreading virally through the country. In turn, the sense of urgency related to the danger of—not to—the refugees appears to warrant, even demand, police and military intervention, including tear gassing refugees; suspension of rights of movement, education, health care, proper shelter and sustenance; and even convictions and imprisonment.
Figure 5. Becoming refugees of Moria. Screengrab. (ReFOCUS Media Labs 2020)
The Moria fire was not the beginning, then, but the culmination of a political shift in the governance of the migrant population on Europe’s southeastern borders, a geopolitical stalemate based on EU–Turkey relations and also, at a national level, the expansion of repressive and xenophobic policies that emphasize deportations, relocations, and closed facilities. The fire, the images of destruction, the cries of the people, the images of thousands of migrants stranded on the island roads, made this conservative political shift appear as a humanitarian response to a state of emergency. The rescue of unaccompanied minors and their relocation to the mainland and other European countries was thus prominently broadcasted by government officials on national and international levels, in contrast to news of refugee injuries and deaths in the fire, as well as the incarceration of two minors on charges of arson.
From this standpoint, the fire as scene of witnessing manifests as an act of god, a natural catastrophe that brings “something better.” The prime minister’s promise to build a park over the site of the camp consciously overwrites what “Moria was” since its establishment in 2013—not to mention, through the neoliberal construction of nature as park, the historic olive groves and their meanings, as well. That the refugees could become refugees of Moria, though, underscores how their interactions with each other, human rights activists, NGOs, volunteers, artists, researchers, government officials, and local residents, but also with the environment, climate, materialities, and nonhumans, had enacted a complex experience of dwelling and emplacement in the camp and in Greece, following their displacement from an originary home (cf. Hamilakis 2017). The fire might have destroyed Moria’s physical structures, but clearly the spectral traces of this experience will continue to haunt local, national, and global discourses and experience and never be easily excised and “naturalized” into a pre-cultural blank space.
It may well be that political discourse in Greece and elsewhere is undergoing a broader shift from the rhetoric of crisis—debt crisis, refugee crisis—to an eschatological model of catastrophe and “end times,” linked to the contemporary experience of the pandemic. The prime minister’s words suggest such a turn, reminding us of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous discussion of the angel of history. Moving forward with back turned to the future, this angel recognizes the true nature of history as a series of catastrophes piling “wreckage upon wreckage,” not as a chain of events moving the nation forward. The prime minister would like Greek citizens to see in the fire a “storm of progress” and to never look back (Benjamin 1968, 257–58). In the reading I am proposing here, by contrast, witnessing Moria as catastrophe makes imperative a looking back at “what Moria was” and its particular contribution to the mountain of debris formed by Europe’s relentless history of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.
Penelope Papailias is an associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Thessaly in Greece and her most recent collaboration is the initiative dëcoloиıze hellάş.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Pantelis Probonas for his invaluable insight into the politics around refugee policy in Greece today and help with research into the media coverage of the Moria fire. I would also like to Yannis Hamilakis for the invitation to participate in this forum and for his close reading of this text and Sean Mallin for his assistance with copyediting.
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