A Successful Alternative to Refugee Camps: A Greek Squat Shames the EU and NGOs

Back in City Plaza, refugees such as Sultan are front and center in the mind of Nasim Lomani, a founding member of the collective and one of the activists “in solidarity with the refugees” (they eschew the NGO language of “volunteers”). A 36-year-old Afghan with a tough punk exterior and a soft voice, he himself is a refugee from an earlier generation. “The issue [is not just] the 400 people here,” he told me. “We care much more about the other 60,000 people that are outside. Because they [government officials] hide them. No one sees them.”

Between drags on his cigarette, he explained, “We try to scandalize the practices of the state, the EU, and even the NGOs—the way that they work with refugees, and create a pathetic population of dependency on the state.” City Plaza, he added, is not about “taking care” of the 400 people living there. “They do it by themselves. They are very strong people. They manage to arrive here. They escaped wars. They can organize a house like this themselves.” Indeed, the squat’s modest, in-house medical clinic is staffed by refugees who were medical professionals in their home countries but are not licensed to practice in Greece.

In the U.S., leftist anti-homelessness activists sometimes occupy abandoned buildings and operate squats in progressive pockets of the coasts. The City Plaza activists are much more ambitious. The old hotel is located in one of the most politically conservative neighborhoods, Aghios Panteleimonas, a former stronghold of the fascist Golden Dawn party. Weeks after the EU-Turkey deal was signed, the leftists broke the locks of City Plaza, seized the building, and reconnected the utilities while neighbors threatened to call either the police or the local fascist gangs to force them out. The squatters held their ground and established City Plaza as a home for people fleeing from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria. Over the past 20 months, City Plaza has served as home for 1,008 of them; they have staved off the owner’s eviction attempts and won over some of their neighbors by improving the blighted hotel and cleaning up the street.

Thus politically vulnerable people, fleeing war or extreme poverty, find themselves in a position of standing up to everyone from concerned neighbors to actual fascists to the state. And perhaps it’s fitting, since being displaced from home and treated like a criminal would certainly unsettle one’s faith in institutions. Lafazani explained that the refugees are told upfront that City Plaza is a squat, not an institutional space, but that some of the refugees come to see the value of their radically egalitarian project slowly, through actions rather than words. She described an early morning when the water company arrived to shut off their water and they woke all of the residents and made a human chain on the sidewalk to prevent company personnel from entering. A small, if temporary, victory: The water stayed on. “Then the refugees really understood that it’s not a [shelter] from the state.”The trappings inside City Plaza clearly reflect the founders’ leftist politics. There’s a seating area used for screening movies such as the Iranian Marxist feminist film Women Without Men. Along the wall, novels in English, Arabic, and Farsi are populated with clear-eyed Muslim characters who defy social, sexual, and political norms: Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. But the founders insist their aim is to find common cause, not to indoctrinate those living at the house, most of whom, Lafazani acknowledges, “don’t come because they are leftist.” Some of the house’s residents are Arab Spring activists who arrive with their own discourse of justice, rights, and dissent already well formulated; often, it is religiously infused, and it shapes life at City Plaza.

When the squat hosts dance parties, they are dry events, because some observant Muslim refugees do not drink alcohol; the hotel’s bar area has been transformed into a café that serves thick, steamy Turkish coffee and cardamom-flavored tea. If the values of some strains of Islam seem an odd fit with Marxism, the organizers insist that religious and ethnic differences have not been a source of conflict for the residents; nor, as one might expect, does one find residents debating differences in political ideology or gender norms. There is plenty of mundane conflict, but most of the daily bickering is chore-wars. “Damn Europe!” curses a young Syrian man in a short documentary about City Plaza. “I came for freedom and stability but I’m washing dishes.” Taped to a pillar in the hallway is a handwritten copy of the celebrated Greek poet Konstatinos Kavafis’s poem “Ithaca,” decorated with the stray crayon marks of a refugee child. The poem draws out the metaphor of life as a journey to Homer’s ever-elusive destination—Ithaca—but the verses take on another layer of poignancy in a house full of refugees who never expected to get trapped in a country with a 20 percent unemployment rate. Kavafis, a social rebel who lived and wrote from Alexandria and Istanbul, represents a shared Greek-Muslim Ottoman past. His words gesture toward the possibility of the Greeks and refugees forging a new, provisional, cosmopolitan future: