The Coloniality of Asylum (New Politics of Autonomy) by Fiorenza Picozza

Author:Fiorenza Picozza [Picozza, Fiorenza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-02-10T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Battleground of Asylum

Navigation, Co-optation and Sabotage

I visited for the first time some of Hamburg’s refugee camps in February 2016, in the course of a ‘mobilisation-tour’ arranged by Never Mind the Papers prior to the imminent International Conference of Refugees and Migrants. Co-organised by Lampedusa in Hamburg and Never Mind the Papers, the conference would be held at Kampnagel11 shortly afterwards, and host hundreds of refugee activists and supporters from around Europe and beyond with the aim of discussing self-organisation and solidarity in the light of the ‘long summer of migration’. Key to its organisation was to involve as many refugee newcomers as possible and that was the purpose of that particular ‘mobi-tour’, a well-established practice before larger political actions, meant to break the isolation of camps’ residents and create bridges with activist networks. We were a mixed group of refugee and non-refugee activists, comprising speakers of the most common languages of the camps’ residents – Arabic, Persian, English, French, Tigrinya and Serbo-Croatian – so that we could directly speak with them, while also distributing flyers with the conference information and contacts details of free legal aid organisations.

In the piercing cold of a sunny Sunday morning, armed with a sound system and a tea-wagon, we stood outside Schnackenburgallee – at the time, the largest camp of the city, hosting more than three thousand refugees crammed in dire living conditions. The music pumping out of the sound system attracted the residents to come outside, and they gathered around us in small groups, sipping a warm cup of tea, grabbing the conference flyers and chatting with us. The camp was located next to a highway in the industrial area of Stellingen, a north-western suburb, and it took about twenty minutes to reach it by foot from the nearest railway station. An hourly bus service was available on weekdays, but on weekends, it ran only for three hours in the evenings. Living units were built with containers placed on two levels, each hosting four people in bunk beds. Some units were reserved to families and women travelling alone; the rest were inhabited by single men, usually sorted out by nationality. Other units were used as kitchen and canteen – the only closed spaces in which food consumption was permitted – and, in the emergency of the ‘crisis’, huge tents had been erected by the military and the Red Cross in order to increase the camp’s capacity.

That day I met two key figures of the conference organisation, Omar and Habib, respectively, a Syrian and Afghan asylum seekers, both of whom had arrived in October, at the peak of the ‘crisis’, and had been allocated to Schnackenburgallee. At the time, Never Mind the Papers was thriving: the excitement of the ‘long summer of migration’ was still in the air, and meetings registered a very good attendance by both long-term members of Lampedusa in Hamburg and refugee newcomers who had sought the activists’ support to their struggles inside the camps. In particular, the conference organisation

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