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31/5/2016 / Issue #007 / Text: William Herrmann

The Destruction of Us & Them

Hidden from the sun and the rain, families huddle in tents, unsupported and hopeless this situation offers little option but to wait. Days pass slow, sometimes tear-gas causes tents to zip shut, there’s endless lines for food, a small hope remains for a future guarded by bullets, gas and a tall fence. 

Trapped between a life dangerous enough to risk death to escape, and closed European borders, thousands occupy Greece, a country with few prospects and lacking the means to support its new arrivals.

Aid Delivery Mission arrived into Idomeni, northern Greece, as an action kitchen central to a group that supports the growing population surrounding the border. Often serving more than 13,000 meals a day to multiple locations, the goal has been to bring food and humanity to a situation where these basic rights are forgotten. As a kitchen central to an active network, ADM has the ability to react quickly and freely, on one level to deliver aid, and on another to deliver something more human.

The act of support and empowerment becomes truly important if you face this situation with open eyes. Seeing police beatings, understanding exploitation and hearing personal stories of injustice, these are the fuel for action; but the tension in this environment can mean these actions are restrained. In a place where tear gas suffocates children and the innocent suffer at the hands of military, it’s important to remind people they aren’t alone and haven’t been forgotten.

This misery is not random, it’s not a cause, it’s an effect, a reaction to intolerant EU policy and on a local scale, a reaction to every closed minded comment and racist action. Ignorant perspectives or sensationalised stories too easily forget that these communities have fled oppression and war, walked a path so dangerous that children are haunted by suffering, and are now forced to wait in poverty for a life of safety.

In Idomeni, there’s giving food and there’s giving respect, without fences to herd people, without visibility jackets and without the concept of ‘us & them’, a situation is born where community can grow. Some groups give and go, others choose to build fortresses from which to drip feed the population and keep them alive. On the ground there’s an opportunity to give food with solidarity and respect, bridging a gap and destroying ‘us & them’.

It’s this ‘us & them’ that forms policies condemning families to the mud, the many fences now scarring European borders are a manifestation of this fear, the question is, how can this situation be solved? Behind the fence, in meeting rooms filled with important people, this question is discussed. Proposed solutions disguise xenophobic beliefs, a relocation programme that amounts to human trafficking and new prisons disguised as ‘hot spots’, these are the political solutions formed by ‘us & them’. 

As hollow political solutions take hold and the beliefs they represent are normalised, the situation gets worse; people are pushed further from a human life, fences grow and Europe forgets. If there’s any chance of solving this de-humanisation, at some point ‘us & them’ needs to be destroyed, because a solution won’t come from closed minded ideologies making decisions from behind a fence.