## **Introduction**

 

Since 2015 Asylum seekers in Greece can only apply for asylum on the so-called Hot spots. Those are the refugee camps on the Greek islands in the eastern Aegean at the sea border to Turkey.

People who arrive on the islands and get the chance to ask for asylum are then restricted in their movement and only allowed to leave the island with a positive answer on their asylum claim, which for some takes years.  

The idea behind this migration policy introduced by EU, imposed on Greece is to control and even reduce the migration flow.  

 

A common practice on the sea and land border between Greece and Turkey are so called push backs as another key element of the current EU migration policy in which arriving refugees are detected and mostly violently pushed back into Turkish territory. Even arriving on Greek territory, their right to asylum is not given.

 

The current Kara Tepe camp on Lesvos was supposed to be a temporarily limited response to the previous camp Moria, which was burnt down in September 2020, which had more than 20.000 residents at its peak.

Kara Tepe Camp has then been set up within one week to imprison again the refugees, left on the street after the fire without shelter. This ‘temporary’ camp has now lasted more than two years.

 

However also on the island of Lesvos (as on other islands already implemented) the Greek state is about to finish the construction of a highly surveilled prison camp in February 2023. As we see it from other islands there is high surveillance technologies. The camp is far away from the city, built next to a garbage dump, accessed by a dirt road.

Those camps are funded by EU and are central parts of their inhuman migration policy.

 

In the following text a group of women describes the living situation in the current Kara Tepe camp.

 

 

 

## That’s what we call a prison – Kara Tepe Camp 2022

 

[…] Some of us have been trapped here for years. The system tries to make us invisible, but we try anyways to send our voices to all of you and the rest of the world. 

Being a refugee, especially as a woman, exposes us to a set of problems. Governments make us promises to improve our situation, but things never change, and their words are simply lies. 

The camp in which we live is not a good place. We do not demand for better conditions in the camp: we simply do not want any camp to exist at all. We hear people telling us that the camp in which we are living now is better and safer than the infamous camp of Moria in which we were living before. But this is still a camp! And no camp is a safe place. We still do not have any freedom of movement, huge fires break out in the camp almost every month. 

Big amounts of money are spent in this camp, but we do not see the smallest improvement. We still live in tents or isoboxes, toilet services do not have stable running water, half of the camp is without electricity… As women, it is hard to even have access and fulfil our most basic needs, for example going to the toilets at night, because even that is not safe for us.

We do not have access to proper health assistance because the doctors in the camp are very few and attend us roughly: they give the same medicines for all health issues. Neither accessing the public health system is easy for us, if we do not hold any paper. The whole system is nonsense.

And yet, the camp’s administration and some of the NGOs working in the camp lie about the real conditions of the camp and they receive funds to carry on their work. 

Even to enter and to exit the camp is difficult for us. 

Until a few months ago, we could not exit the camp if we were not on the daily list, in which we were sorted into groups according to our ID card number, and there were specific time slots in which we could leave and come back. This clearly means that we were free to move only on specific days and at the week-ends no one could go out of the camp. Now exiting the camp is easier but we always fear that police officers will find some reasons not to let us out. 

When we want to enter the camp there are double security checks where we are asked for our papers, before accessing and after accessing the camp. This implies that we should always carry our identification papers with us. It happened that our phones ran out of battery, and we could not show the picture of our documents and therefore had to wait for hours before they allowed us to enter in the camp. 

Police officers check our private belongings, such as bags, backpacks and wallets and scan our bodies with a metal detector, regardless of the fact that you are an adult or a child. 

It may happen that you carry your own medicines in your bag: they will stop you and not let you enter until a doctor comes and confirms that those are medicines and not drugs… 

If you ask them what is the reason for checking us, they will answer that that’s for our safety. 

But how dare they to talk about safety when they hold us captive in a camp?

There’s more. The Greek government is planning to open a new camp similar to the one already existing in Samos: a closed camp with a highly efficient system of surveillance, in the middle of nowhere. That’s what we call a prison.

Some of us have been trapped on this island for years. 

The asylum procedures are extremely slow and once again money is required to access our rights: at a certain point of the asylum procedure, we need to pay to open a new case, we need to pay to withdraw our passports, but how could people have money if they have been stuck here for years without any income? 

There are women who have no other choice but to work as sex workers to collect the money they need to leave this place. 

In the end, we want to tell you this: we fled our countries because of different reasons, among which war, safety issues, we passed borders, which was not easy, we faced lots of violence: we were beaten up by police, beaten up by fascists, beaten up by smugglers and people were even killed and even raped. We were pushed back by the Greek Cost Guard several times before we could reach this island. 

We saw many people dying in the mountains, in the forests and in the sea, we risked our lives. 

We looked for a place to live safely, where our children could be comfortable, we wanted to live in a place without worrying about the possibility of us as women or any of our child to be raped. 

We wanted not to stress anymore about the fact that someone would come and burn our place or come to attack us for no reason but hate towards us. We are human beings like you, we should have the same rights, we do not ask for more.

We arrived here with all this on our mind, and we found a different truth. Every single talk about democracy, human rights, freedom, safety, protection is a big lie. 

Still, in the face of all of these problems we resist, we keep on complaining, protesting, resisting until we reach an equal place for all of us where these injustices do not exist anymore. 

We raise our voices against borders.