Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou*

The Lavrio camp was established in 1947 in the coastal town of Lavrio in Greece, as the country’s first state structure dedicated to the reception of asylum seekers. After 1980, due to the political instability in neighboring Turkey, the majority of the camp’s population consisted of left-wing Turkish asylum seekers and subsequently, almost exclusively of persecuted Kurdish asylum seekers predominantly from Turkey, who were associated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The Lavrio camp gradually acquired a central position within the trajectories of Kurdish migrants passing through (but also settling in) Greece and became a political showcase in exile for the struggle led by the PKK, as well as a part of the PKK’s transnational migrant network.

For the last 30 years, the Lavrio state-run camp was operated by the Red Cross in an informal cooperation with the PKK network. It was the PKK, for example, that decided in most cases who would, and who would not, be accommodated in the camp. However, in the midst of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, and the multiple changes it brought in the governance of migration at the national and European level, the status of the camp changed dramatically. Specifically, in 2017, the Greek government demanded from camp residents to ‘de-politicise’ the camp by taking down all symbols, posters and images defining it as a political space of the PKK, and planned for camp residents to be moved to other recently established state-run camp facilities. When camp residents refused, the government withdrew from the site and the camp became self-organised. Since then, the camp was run with the support of the PKK network, as well as local, national, and transnational solidarity initiatives.

In early July 2023, in a sudden (and rather violent) operation, police forces evacuated the roughly 50 Kurdish migrants living in the Lavrio camp, including several families with children, and moved them to state-run refugee camps across Greece. Demolition work has already started inside the camp, with local authorities claiming to want to turn the space into an underground car park and a public square.

During and after the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, the spatial form of asylum seekers’ camps in their various articulations became the cornerstone of migration policies on European territory (see Maestri and Hughes, 2017; Martin et al., 2020) which Kreichauf (2018) adequatly describes as the “campization” of refugee accommodation. In the vast majority of cases, policy-makers aimed at locating camps not only at the external geographical borders of the European territory (e.g. the so-called ‘hotspots’ in Greece and Italy), but also at a distance from urban centers, usually in remote or isolated areas, where they are out of the sight of local populations (Kibreab, 2007; Roman, Belloni, Cingolani et al., 2021). This is also the case in Greece, where most of the post-2015 camps and camp-like spaces were set up at an average distance of approximately 10 km from urban centers (IOM, 2022).

In light of these trends, where policy-makers arguably attempt to render refugees as invisible, the Lavrio camp can be seen as an analytically deviant case. Since its foundation, it has been located in the heart of the town of Lavrio, next to the police station, the fire brigade and the town hall. Yet, in the period following the Greek financial crisis, when local authorities envisioned turning the former industrial town into a seaside tourist stopover for yachts, the camp’s presence became highly disputed and contested.

In my presentation at the Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure workshop, I focus on the post-2015 period. Specifically, I look into the events surrounding the withdrawal of the state and the transformation of the camp into a self-organised space, to study how the city and the camp made sense of their life together and the presence of the camp in a central and therefore visible place.

Doing so, I argue that the Kurdish identity of the camp became a crucial factor for its relationship with the town. Kurdish struggles and displacement represent, for both camp residents and locals, the epitome of the refugee figure and allows locals to form a rewarding self-perception as being the only ones who “gave home to political exiles”, as some locals said in personal communications. However, the so-called refugee crisis and its aftermath led to the increasing economisation of the relationship between the camp and the city. The ideal political refugee no longer is understood merely as the political refugee. Instead, refugees are being evaluated in terms of their (economic) costs and benefits. 

To conclude, I discuss the meanings and significations of refugeeness, aiming to contribute to a novel understanding of refugee camps not as insular spaces, but as spaces that are connected to, and interwoven with, their surroundings and the wider histories of displacement.

Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Geography (NTUA & Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She is scheduled to speak at the workshop titled “Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure”, September 1 2023. For more information and the program, see: https://ruralsociologywageningen.nl/category/events/ 

References

IOM (2022) Factsheets, Greece Derived at: https://greece.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl1086/files/documents/_merged-mainland-march_22_compressed.pdf

Kibreab, G. (2007). Why governments prefer spatially segregated settlement sites for urban refugees. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 27–35. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.21365

Kreichauf, R. (2018). From forced migration to forced arrival: The campization of refugee accommodation in European cities. Comparative Migration Studies, 6(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-017-0069-8

Maestri, G., & Hughes, S. M. (2017). Contested spaces of citizenship: Camps, borders and urban encounters. Citizenship Studies, 21(6), 625–639. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2017.1341657

Martin, D., Minca, C., & Katz, I. (2020). Rethinking the camp: On spatial technologies of power and resistance. Progress in Human Geography, 44(4), 743–768.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519856702

Roman, E. et al. (2021). Figurations of Displacement in southern Europe: Empirical findings and reflections on protracted displacement and translocal networks of forced migrants in Greece and Italy (TRAFIG working paper 9). Bonn: BICC.