Page - 200 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

200 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Estela Schindel | Sea border crossing to Europe Abbas’ most dreadful journey “At what point of your journey were you most afraid?” I ask Abbas. “When we blew off the boat“ he answers. And he adds: “The water was already at our knees and the Greek border guards were just watching us from their ship. They were ready to let us die.” Illegalized1 migrants trying to reach Greece from Turkey by sea are provided by the traffickers with an inflatable boat, a knife and the instructions to puncture the rubber dinghy themselves to let the air out if they are in sight of a border patrol ship, in order to turn the situation into a sea emergency. They call this action “blowing off” the boat. Instead of pushing them back to Turkish waters, the border guards are then obliged to rescue them and bring them ashore. Abbas, a man in his twenties, comes from Afghanistan and is telling me the story of his several attempts to enter Europe through the Greek-Turkish border, by land and by sea. The most frightening experience was on that third attempt, he says, when their boat was intercepted while approaching Greek territorial waters and they “blew off the boat.” he recalls: “When we saw the hellenic coast Guard ship approaching, we destroyed the boat with a knife, and it soon started leaking. We asked for help to the Greek patrol, but they wouldn’t rescue us. They were pointing at us with a strong reflector. I hold a child in my arms to show them that there were children on board. When the boat was near enough they threw us a rope and asked us to pull, in order to get closer. But then, instead of rescuing us they used some long tool to break the motor of our boat. Afterwards they cut the rope and remained there, just watching, while the water was already at our knees, ready to let us die.” Eventually, Abbas and the rest of the group were rescued by ships of the Turkish Gendarmerie. It was only after several attempts – on the seventh try, in fact – that he made it to the island of Lesbos. Our conversation takes place under the shade of pine trees at Pikpa, an open door, community-run home for migrants that opera- tes in the outskirts of Mytilini, Lesbos Island’s capital. Abbas says he left his country after the Taliban threatened him for having worked as a translator with NATO. Now he waits in Pikpa in order to continue his journey to the European continent, and complains that he can’t sleep at night out of worry for the three friends with whom he was travelling, detained at a prison on the island of chios. And he is still in shock after almost drowning in the Aegean. Abbas is one of more than a dozen refugees, mostly from Afghanistan, whom I interviewed during two research stays in the Greek-Turkish maritime border area in 2013 and 2014, in order to hear first-hand accounts about their sea journeys to Europe. Although this European sea border is not as present in the media as the Mediterranean zone close to Malta or Lampedusa, it has proven to be just as lethal. The number of deaths of migrants crossing the Aegean has increased, especially since the construction of a fence along the Greek-Turkish land border in 1 critical scholarship on borders and migration refers to “illegalized” instead of “illegal” migrants as a way of making explicit that the “illegal” condition is not intrinsic to those travellers but created by a certain border and visa regime, a usage I chose to follow here. Whether the travellers I interviewed for my research should be technically considered as “migrants”, “refugees” or “asylum seekers” cannot be determined in advance and for every single case, so “illegalized travellers” as used by Weber and Pickering (2011) might be the most adequate term. My Afghan and Syrian interviewees are fleeing war and persecution and therefore should be considered refugees although the word most often used in Greece translates as “migrants”. While conscious of the important differences between these categories, for style reasons I will use them alternatively as equivalents through the text. Regarding the “traffickers”, I’m using here indifferently this word, the more neutral “facilitator” and “agents”, the word used in the refugees’ jargon, in spite of being aware of the differences between them.