It wasn’t long ago that I was impressed by the human capacity to adapt, to exist within the grip of true horror and still smile, building homes up from the cold mud. Even the rains that drowned Idomeni’s tent city couldn’t stop the smiles of strangers or the games of children. Maybe this adaptability was fuelled by a need to drive forward towards a better place, making the best of a temporary situation. For much of the population in Idomeni the road leading here has been life threatening, rough seas and smugglers were everyday dangers, a few weeks in the sub-human conditions of camp is just another price to pay on the road to safety. Hope afforded by a better future, no matter how small has been enough to build a place of relative comfort, tents are reinforced, pathways and benches built, hope is a truly powerful thing.
As the weeks have turned into months, it feels like hope has evaporated, each border closure turns many onto ideas of illegal passage towards European safety. Driven by hope, dangers become acceptable; but as the political landscape shifts and these safe destinations close borders, this hope slowly disappears.
Without hope and lacking support, camp has become a humanitarian crisis, the politics that created this situation are lost behind the media’s distorted image of muddy children, sick families and flooded tents, a shallow aesthetic represented by an equally shallow media. It can’t be denied, this place is inhumane and disgusting, there are mud covered children, and the air is thick with burning plastic; but if you recognise the people in the mess, the human individuals, these conditions are not enough to hide the intolerant EU policies that caused this mess.
I fear that as conditions worsen, and this humanitarian crisis grows, the emptying of camp will not be seen as a political act stopping refugees entering Europe, but instead, welcomed as an evacuation, saving people from the mud and illness, saving refugees from themselves.
The media has taken these images, these people and shown the drama, the dirt, presented what’s happening on the surface, and in the public eye, truly turning these individuals and families into refugees.
I’m still impressed by the human capacity to adapt, but I can’t help putting it in context, considering media representation, seeing the generalised image of dirt on computer screens worldwide and feeling that no matter how human these people are on the ground, to those consuming media and reading news stories, they become refugees; a mass to donate to, to discuss, to joke about from afar, but in the eyes of political Europe, not to let through an ever shrinking hole in their fence.