Migrants, most of them carrying face masks to guard towards the unfold of COVID-19, collect exterior the short-term refugee camp in Kara Tepe as they wait to depart from Lesbos for mainland Greece on Sept. 28, 2020. (AP Photograph/Panagiotis Balaskas)

When the COVID-19 pandemic first appeared, and we had been preoccupied with bread-baking and Tiger King, it was talked about as the good equalizer, a second to convey us all collectively.

But as we enter the eighth month of this international disaster, it turns into more and more clear that we’re hardly “on this collectively.”

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What’s solidarity? Throughout coronavirus and all the time, it is greater than ‘we’re all on this collectively’

We not too long ago returned from the island of Lesbos, the positioning of the most recent tragedy inside European borders — the burning of the Moria refugee camp. We witnessed 1000’s of individuals being sequestered on a barren stretch of street with out meals or water, tear-gassed after which herded into a brand new camp unexpectedly constructed on the grounds of an previous capturing vary on a windswept peninsula.

We entered the camp with a gaggle of journalists and noticed first-hand the woefully insufficient residing circumstances, in addition to a barbed-wire facility holding suspected COVID-19 circumstances aside from everybody else.

The COVID-19 space of the Lesbos camp is seen at daybreak.

(Kenya-Jade Pinto), Writer supplied

If something, COVID-19 was an afterthought on the camp. When your child is sleeping on a flattened cardboard field and you haven’t had water for days, a world pandemic is a distant menace that pales compared to the on a regular basis violence that’s omnipresent. But there was a spectre of worry across the growing COVID-19 numbers. It’s a menace that’s not possible to fight when you will have nowhere to scrub your palms.

COVID-19 weaponized

We grappled with the ethics of travelling throughout a world pandemic. However as a result of considered one of us is at present based mostly in Athens and dealing on a long-term mission documenting migration and surveillance applied sciences, we felt it was crucial to witness the constructing of a brand new detention facility that can function a testing floor for brand new technological interventions.

Already, the COVID-19 pandemic has been weaponized to justify growing surveillance mechanisms, resulting in probably far-reaching human rights abuses for communities on the margins.

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Only in the near past, Frontex, Europe’s border-monitoring company, introduced that it was piloting a brand new aerostat maritime surveillance system, utilizing Greece as a testing floor.

Refugees and migrants arrive with a dinghy accompanied by Frontex vessels on the village of Skala Sikaminias, on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey in February 2020.

(AP Photograph/Micheal Varaklas)

The European Fee’s new Migration Pact reveals the European Union’s staunch refusal to cease criminalizing migration, its empowerment of Frontex, its insistence on locking folks in far-away frontier camps and its failure to redistribute accountability for migrants amongst EU member states.

Graffiti is seen in Lesbos.

(Kenya-Jade Pinto), Writer supplied

We additionally witnessed the inaction of the worldwide neighborhood throughout our time on Lesbos.

Whereas native preoccupations with spiking COVID-19 numbers are comprehensible, and as existential fatigue units because the pandemic endures, it’s telling that the pandemic is simply one of many many layers which can be making 2020 a really tough 12 months for therefore many migrants and refugees.

Misplaced in anonymous images, numbers

The tales of particular person lives can get misplaced in anonymous images and numbers when reporting on worldwide disaster of mammoth proportions. But many Canadians might have deep connections to the folks nonetheless detained on Lesbos, significantly as a result of greater than 40,000 Syrian mates, neighbours and relations had been resettled to Canada in 2015-16. Most of the folks in Lesbos are Syrian.

Simply think about how terrifying it will be to be detained in bunk beds with strangers and no working water, monitored by an omnipresent authorities, with nowhere to scrub, bathe or correctly disinfect amid a pandemic that’s killed greater than 1,000,000 folks — and caught in a violent migration system for years with no sign of ending.

The burned stays of a shelter in Moria camp, Lesbos.

(Kenya-Jade Pinto), Writer supplied

COVID-19 is without doubt one of the many intractable and overwhelming issues dealing with the world at present that may be overwhelming to ponder. Nevertheless, understanding how the pandemic is skilled all over the world will convey us nearer to the in any other case empty sentiment of “we’re all on this collectively.”

Wanting past our personal body of reference permits us the chance to think about the deep connections amongst us all, tied collectively by the identical virulent illness, a once-in-a-lifetime expertise highlighting simply how a lot we owe to one another as members of the worldwide neighborhood.

Learn extra:

Hearth destroys Moria refugee camp: one other tragic wake-up name for the EU’s asylum coverage

It’s turning into evident that issues can and certain will worsen earlier than they get higher in refugee camps all over the world.

Whereas the solutions are but to be discovered, we should proceed to ask the query: What does it imply to be on this ordeal collectively, when barbed wire, digital borders and insurance policies that flip locations of refuge into prisons hold us aside?

Petra Molnar is a fellow with European Digital Rights (EDRi). She receives funding from the Mozilla Basis for this mission.

Kenya-Jade Pinto doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.