Trubeta: ‘Rights’ in the grey area: undocumented border crossers on Lesvos 61 After a short break in winter, a new influx of immigrants reached Lesvos in February 2013. In view of the continuing failure of the authorities to act, activists and NGOs once again took action, opening PIKPA anew. The project operated in the same way, i.e., on the basis of solidarity. (However, in tandem with this, police stations across the island had become overcrowded and many individuals were living rough in the port area.) The status of the open reception centre changed in March 2013 when PIKPA came under the authority of the coastguard, a shift made with the consent of individual activists. This was the beginning of a controversy within the grassroots movement concerning the most appropriate way to exercise solidarity and address the political consequences of accepting the status of detention. Despite the controversy and a generally rising scepticism, the majority of those involved in the grassroots network and the volunteers continued to provide support. Yet, clearly, the involvement of a state authority such as the coastguard introduced a new aspect to the project, subjecting it to state surveillance. In practical terms, this meant that those residing in PIKPA now became officially either ‘detainees’ or ‘waiting to be detained’ and were under surveillance by the state authority in collaboration with activists. This reclassification in their administrative status, however, changed neither the living conditions of the residents nor the practical commitment of the activists. Indeed, PIKPA was still accessible to the public (even when the coastguard staff kept guard). Every ordinary citizen could enter, speak with the migrants and the activists, play with the children. And the migrants were allowed to leave PIKPA to go into town. Civil society agents continued to give support, bringing and distributing meals every day and caring for the residents, in spite of the involvement of the coastguard. This mixing of heterogeneous agents contradicts the classic image of prison and surveillance. (One example illustrates this: a member of the coastguard entered the PIKPA kitchen, talking on his mobile, apparently to his superior. He looked in a stack of papers lying on the kitchen table, where activists and volunteers were preparing a meal. The conversation was about new arrivals; as he looked at the register, he said: ‘I have XX detainees here’.)7 But surveillance was not just a task for the coastguard; it had also become a task for activists, mostly NGO members, who provided assistance to the authorities by filling out police and compulsory medical registrations for PIKPA residents. In fact, after passing into the jurisdiction of the coastguard, PIKPA was transformed from a civil society-administered open reception centre into an open screening centre under quasi-civilian surveillance. This hybrid mode of surveillance appeared to have a humanitarian face because of several factors: not only was the presence of the state authority discreet, but the registration process was to some degree carried out by friendly activists. Moreover, there was no doubt that if activists and volunteers had withdrawn from the project, the immigrants would have lost any chance of having their basic needs met; nor would it have been possible to monitor any exercise of arbitrary treatment by the state authority. And, Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016