Bare life in Evros
“Bare life” is not just a term of the French and Italian philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. It is not an intellectual creation, useful exclusively in the field of theory. “Bare life” is the human life that biopolitics, as exercised by calculating powers, deprive of anything human. Stripped of all rights, it becomes destructible and eradicable, whenever the cannibalistic appetites and “needs” of one or another totalitarian, or pseudo-democratic regime dictates.
The photographs of the 92 migrants and refugees, mostly Asian, who were found by the Greek authorities stripped naked at the northeastern border region of Evros, and were trying in vain to hide their nudity by using their hands or even by hiding behind the nudity of the man next to them, is the most brutally clear depiction of “bare life” today. Nothing, of course, compares to the Nazi death camps of World War II, and yet at the sight of the desperate naked people at the Greek-Turkish border, our memory immediately recalled the images of the skeletonized naked victims of Nazism in Auschwitz and the other extermination camps of “rats” or “cockroaches” (dehumanization starts at the level of terminology).
The 92 refugees from countries torn apart by war, lack of freedom or poverty wanted to hide somewhere in the depth of their shame; to become invisible, even to themselves, to avoid seeing their humiliation by barbaric hands, which robbed them of their dignity. Nakedness degrades every human being – for Muslims, the grief of degradation is compounded by the provisions and prohibitions of their religion.
The Turkish government defends itself by attacking, as is its custom, in a strategy that is diplomatically more efficient than our country wants to believe. With insulting arrogance, Ankara tries to give us lessons in civility. Greece has the duty to protect the 92 humiliated victims in every way and in every international forum. It must collect their personal narratives and complaints and hand them over to the United Nations, the European Union and NATO. It must do this not with selfish pettiness, to score a few points in its dispute with Turkey, but because it has to prove in practice, every time, that its politics is guided by the ethics of solidarity towards the naked supplicants.
