who cut themselves with razor blades. One Georgian and one Iranian detainee cut
themselves. The police was reluctant to take these people to hospital, though they were at
risk of excessive bleeding. We managed to get their attention and force them to react by
hammering on the doors.’ (PROASYL, 2012). What is more, there is no specialist
investigation of self-inflicted deaths in Greece to help ensure that lessons are learned.
Despite mental health problems abounding in reception and detention centres (Medicins
Sans Frontieres, 2010; 2014; 2017), there has not been a systematic recording of self-harm,
rendering these acts all the more invisible to outside observers.
‘Our hunger strike is our right to freedom’
Other forms of corporeal resistance, such as hunger strikes,135 attract more attention and
some also make it to the public sphere, mainly because these acts are often accompanied
by a written statement from those performing them. In 2011, PROASYL reported that
nine of the men detained in the Soufli border station went on hunger strike which lasted
for 15 days (PRO ASYL, 2012). ‘We, the detainees of this prison who sign this petition,
denounce the behaviour of the police, the detention conditions, the lack of hygiene, the
bad quality of food served and we ask for your full support…Patience has its limits. We
have reached our limit. Our hunger strike is our right to freedom.’, they wrote in their
statement.
As was related to me by a lawyer I interviewed in 2019, the police in an attempt to stop
the hunger strike resorted to violence to an extent that two persons had to hospitalised.
According to the hospital records she traced, one was admitted to the hospital in a coma.
When UNHCR received information about the incident at one of its regular visits, the
representative could not track down anyone involved. The police had told her that they
were in the hospital, when in fact they were in the next room in hiding so that monitors
could not see the scars and the wounds. When a delegation of lawyers, including my
interviewee, met two of the men at a later visit to the border station, they told them what
had happened, but they did not want to report it because they were afraid of retribution.
The lawyers filed a complaint, which was even shared with the Ministry of Public Order,
so that they could stop the deportation process underway. They were deported and the
The multicultural team of Infomobile systematically collects information about hunger strikes inside
immigration detention cdntres. In fact, this is one of the few sources about resistance from behind bars in
Greece. See Infomobile (n.d.).
135
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