Farjad and fellow-residents at the Kærshovedgaard 'departure' centre, Denmark. All rights reserved.‘If we return, they will kill us.
But here, they are killing us slowly…They don’t care about us. They say we
might stay here until we die’. (Farjad, hunger striker at the removal centre Kærshovedgaard,
Denmark, October 2016)
Farjad
and twenty-seven other fellow-residents at the Kærshovedgaard so-called ‘departure’
centre (udrejsecenter) had been on
hunger strike for the seventh day when we met them. They live cut-off at Kærshovedgaard,
one of two recently-opened Danish deportation centres, the other being in
Sjælsmark, about 35 km North of urban Copenhagen. Kjærshovedgaard is a former
prison placed in the remote woods in the Mid-Jutland peninsula. Today the
buildings quarter about 200 asylum seekers, men and women. Most of these people
had their application rejected by the Danish authorities; others are awaiting to
appeal their first instance decision (they are so-called ‘phase-two’ asylum
seekers).
The Kærshovegaard and Sjælsmark deportation
camps bear witness to the widespread implementation, across northern Europe, of
practices of ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf 2006). These policies create a strict relationship
between criminal and immigration law. This mutual dependence accomplishes a
twofold strategy: on the one hand, within criminal law, a process of exclusion,
resulting in physical and societal segregation from the rest of the society enacted
through physical confinement and detention-like conditions. On the other,
policies of exclusion entailing the isolation and then expulsion/deportation of
criminalized migrants from the national territory (Aas and Bosworth 2013). Thus
Denmark follows apace the developments observed in the rest of Europe, also triggered
by European measures such as the 2008 EU directive on returns (2008/115/EC).
This prompts the enactment of return schemes based on ‘common standards and
procedures’ in the member states to ‘return illegal stayers from third
countries’. The directive entails the possibility of detaining people for up to
18 months and putting in place a 5-year ban from EU territory. The
implementation of these regulations have resulted in the physical and spatio-geographical
control and isolation of the ‘undesired’, ‘unwanted’, turned into ‘deportables’.
These people, according to the Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration and
Housing Inger Støjberg ‘must be sent out of the country as soon as possible’,
and their life in Denmark made as ‘intolerable as possible’.
The conversion of the Sjælsmark military barracks into
a deportation centre was made public by the previous Social Democrat-led
government. The first deportation centres for rejected asylum seekers were opened in 2013 (see also Gibney
2008; De Genova & Peutz 2010), with the aim of pressing rejected
asylum-seekers, foreign national offenders, and individuals on so-called ‘tolerated
stay’ to leave the country as soon as possible and preferably ‘voluntarily’. Those
accommodated in the centres are held there either because
deportation is not possible in the foreseeable future (that is, within the 18
months that mark the time limit for immigration detention) and/or because there
are no legal grounds for detaining them. This way, residents are neither
detained nor free, but held in a legal grey-zone, which the hunger strikers protest
against, being fearful of detention in conditions of pseudo-captivity for the
rest of their lives.
The poor standard
of the structures, their geographical isolation and the withdrawal of all forms
of economic support together with the mandatory (poor) food catering, are put
in place by authorities in removal centres with the clear purpose of pushing
people to a voluntary departure and return to the country of origin. The
proposal to execute stricter deportation practices was formerly drafted and
approved under the former centre-left government (backed also by the Unity List
and the Social Liberals) and the support of the right-wing Liberal Alliance. In late summer 2013, the then Minister of Justice Morten
Bødskov avowed that:
“The accommodation in the departure centre is a very clear
message telling them [rejected asylum seekers] that this is the last stop in
Denmark and that now you must go home. The asylum seekers will be further
motivated to leave with the revoking of all forms of monetary support and
instead the application of a packet lunch scheme and by accepting counselling
on their voluntary departure”.
The deportation centre Kærshovedgaard was opened under
the government so-called asylum political package in the fall of 2015. It was meant
to act as a supplementary facility to the already up and running Sjælsmark
centre. Throughout 2016, people staying at Sjælsmark were transferred to
Kærshovedgaard, mainly to make space for families with children. Today about
160 rejected asylum seekers, including several children are living in isolation
at the Sjælsmark centre. In the near future, the selection will start at an
earlier phase: all those who receive a negative answer to their asylum
application will be moved immediately to Avnstrup center, nearby Roskilde. This
centre will function as a new removal center, where authorities will assess whether the rejected
asylum seeker cooperates or not with his/her ‘repatriation’. If considered
unwilling to cooperate, the rejected asylum seeker is to be moved to the deportation
centers Kærshovedgaard or Sjælsmark. The ‘return center’ is part of the 2018 state
budget implementations agreed by the government and the Danish People’s Party.
Compared to the deportation centres already operative in
other European countries (e.g. Spain, Italy, the UK), Danish authorities tend
to emphasize the more lenient conditions required for the duration in Danish
removal centres. Official brochures and homepages inform us for example that ‘the residents are not detained and they can
thus move freely to and from the centre. However, as a point of departure they will
be subject to so-called ‘residence-duty’. This means that while they are ‘free’
to leave the centre in daytime, they have the duty to stay overnight at the
centre. Those who are obliged to respect this, can only stay overnight outside
the centre if the immigration service has given them permission’.
Yet we argue that these concessions to the rule do not
change the inhumane conditions of this system and tend actually to reinforce
paradigms that associate immigration with crime, and crime to the perceived need
for physically and socially isolating people. This logic underpins deportation
centres despite the fact that no crime has been committed, unless migration and
asylum are treated as such. The mainstream media and the political narrative further
contribute to entrenching in public opinion this criminalization framing.
Hunger strikes as performative and citizenship
acts
Farjad and the others have chosen to
protest against what they see as their collective criminalisation and stigmatisation
by Danish authorities. They see their exclusion and isolation from the rest of
the society as a way to erase them as persona, to leave them with only their bare life,
deprived of all basic rights. They decided to protest by the only way still available
to them, taking their situation fully into account:
by refusing to eat. In this sense, their hunger strikes are in itself to be understood as an
act of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen 2008) a radical political performative act
(Butler 2015) in line with similar acts of protest and struggles initiated by
non-status refugees living in deportation centres in Denmark and elsewhere. At
the end of 2015, for instance, a group of residents in Sjælsmark centre
initiated a movement that aimed at making public the consequences of this politics
of dehumanisation; politics that ‘kill slowly’ which are structurally produced and
legitimized by law. Tragically, most of them were
lately forcibly relocated to Kærshovedgaard.
Findings
from other countries
show that removal centres only lead to a deterioration in life conditions and
increase the numbers of individuals forced into illegality, who decide to go underground
to avoid deportation, and who are pushed into a life of uncertainty and destitution.
Personal testimonies, reports and articles further prove irrefutably how longterm
confinement to the deportation centres afflicts the psychological and physical
well-being of the residents, and particularly children. The hunger strikers at Kærshovedgaard
explained that they had observed their fellow residents undergo a
transformation after arriving in deportation camps, whereby ‘the lights in
their eyes go out’. That these are matters of life and death is illustrated for
example by the tragic news of the fourth death at the immigration removal
centre Morton Hall in the UK. Also at Kærshovedgaard, several suicide attempts have
been registered in the past year.
Stuck
in a legal and existential grey-zone, living in isolation, invisible to the
rest of society, nearly under detention and with minimal prospects of pursuing
a future life in Denmark or Europe, hunger strikers highlight the intolerable
life conditions that Danish and European politics have condemned them to, regarding
their motives for migrating and their aims in life as a criminal offense.
We argue that rather than facilitating
returns, deportation centres have opened up a legal grey zone that allows nation
states to deny their legal, political and humanitarian responsibilities for rejected
asylum-seekers, with tragic implications for the present and future life of these
people. Also, the politics of refusal and contempt practiced by the Danish
government towards rejected asylum seekers is regularly justified by the need
to safeguard the welfare state and the country’s social cohesion. We want
to expose
this link between nationalism, racism, and welfare chauvinism.
Most of the (un)deportables in Danish
removal centres come from countries that Denmark declares safe (amongst these
Afghanistan, Somalia), or countries with which no bilateral agreement has yet
been enforced. In their monthly binding meetings with the foreign police, they are
relentlessly encouraged to leave the country for destinations they know are unsafe,
from whence they fled years ago, or sometimes have never visited (e.g. the case
of children with parents in Sjælsmark centre). Yet the incitements to leave the
departure centres have reportedly been poor, if not non-existent: as of early
2017, only two of the then 116 Kærshovedgaard residents have been returned. At
the same time an unknown but increasing number has gone underground before or
after arrival in deportation centres. Thus, while on the one side there are
clear records that these practices of isolation, exhaustion, and segregation
are failing their goal, on the other side their evident impact includes putting
non-status refugees in distress and under psychological pressure, through legally-sanctioned practices of state violence
and the deprivation of basic rights.
These practices also put removal centre staff in the awkward position of
‘managing’ rejected asylum seekers who the government seems neither to care
for, nor wish to control. The prison and probation service operating the centre
reflect the logics of the crimmigration procedure. Prison officers lack a mandate
to perform any of their core functions, including using force, disciplining, or
‘rehabilitating’ residents. Meanwhile, Red Cross workers, who carry out ‘humanitarian’ tasks navigate uneasily between
their humanitarian mandate and the restrictive conditions of the centres. A
prison officer remarked bluntly during an interview:
‘They
say we should make life ‘intolerable’ for them, to make life shit. I find that
appalling. They should get out here and see the reality. A colleague of mine
said that one day we’ll have to get a funeral undertaker out here, because what
are we to do with them? (…) This gets right to the long-term question: what do
we do with them? They are unwanted here, they are unwanted everywhere they go.
It’s not dignified to treat them like that’.
The officer’s concern brings to mind
Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of the situation for ‘undesirable’ refugees and the stateless,
for whom there is no law and no place to turn to, no rights to claim. Inmates are
indeed reduced to a condition of bare life,
denied both political and legal representation. The hunger strike should be interpreted
in this light: an act of refusal and rebellion against their being forcefully
made invisible to the rest of the society. A way to make this visible in the
only possible way left available: by using their bodies.
This is Noman’s Land
There is a spatial approach and a racial
control through which migrant populations are managed in Europe today. Through spatial
means to the extent that spaces of detention and deportation need to be
produced and reproduced. Through racial control in the sense that it targets
disproportionately populations racialized as non-white.
The condition of rightlessness is partly generated by the fact that residents
of Kærshovedgård are not referred to as detained – although this indeed is a
matter for debate (Ugelvik & Ugelvik, Valenta & Thorshaug). As the
hunger strikers at Kærshovedgaard observe:
‘We have to pass by seven locked
gates and doors to get out and back in again … We are treated like criminals,
but still, prisoners have more rights than we do’.
The biometric control system enables
the immigration service to register residents’ movements inside and out of the
centre; a practice which has
been directly criticised by the so-called
Helsinki-committee. Also, failure to regularly register and be present can
generate a prison sentence of up to one and a half years. But according to
authorities, residents are nevertheless ‘free to move and free to leave’ at any
time; yet whether they leave to their countries of origin, or abscond and
remain irregularly in Denmark or elsewhere in Europe, whether they remain detainable and deportable, seems to mean very little to these
Danish authorities.
Indeed, what seems vital for them is
to find ways to offload responsibility for the residents’ fate. In a recent
article on the treatment of rejected asylum-seekers in the Netherlands, Barak
Kalir coins the term ‘surrogate deportation’ to describe the strategy, which
saves states any costs and administrative efforts associated with forced removals,
such as: operating detention, administering appeals processes, purchasing
flight tickets, arranging travel documents, and offering medical attention.
Hunger strikers have not managed to engage
their controlling, or ‘caretaking’ state representatives in dialogue regarding their
action. People at Kærshovedgaard and Sjælsmark are ‘nobody’s problem’ in no man’s
land – at least not until they ‘show up’ in another European country to get trapped
in yet another of the vicious cycles of the European bureaucratic roundabout procedures.
Meanwhile, the Danish version
of a deportation centre provides the state with an economically,
politically, and legally convenient alternative to detention. For the people at
Kærshovedgaard and Sjælsmark this can only mean being trapped in a legal and
social limbo, deprived of their basic rights. This is why people have been on
hunger strike at Kærshovedgaard, to expose and thereby counter the culture of criminalisation,
abandonment, and deportation.