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Figure 2. At Allodhapon: the line of people waiting to apply for a pink card, July 2008. Photo credit Salvatore Poier.
The bureaucratic pathways for acquiring the pink card positioned new asylum applicants directly outside the central structure of police power for “aliens” in Athens. While asylum seekers often traveled to the capital from border sites to initiate applications, the militarized waiting zone at Allodhapon remade the border within the city in a spatial and temporal enactment of limbo. Applicants had to wait to cross the threshold from illegality into limbo through the acquisition of papers, and, more directly, entry into the building itself. The pink card thus conveyed both protective attributes and the terror associated with the policing apparatus of the state, providing protection from the very authorities that distributed it. None of the men I spoke with mentioned applying for asylum as their primary rationale for being at the police station, though the first man, who spoke specifically about the “red card,” demonstrated a clear acknowledgment that this paper was related to “political problems.” Their aim, however, was papers, because without papers they moved in fear.
As we were speaking, we heard disturbances from the front of the line, and some of the men around us began to move toward the barricade; one of my companions explained that they were starting to “open the doors.” The disturbances increased—men pressing into the crowd, some shouting, surging forward then back. Groups of young men began to run away from the barricade toward the back of the line, many of them laughing, shouting to each other the Greek expletive Fiye re malaka [Φύγε ρε μαλάκα] (“Go away, jerk-off”) and fighe, mavre [φύγε μαύρε] (“Go away, black man”)—a mimesis of a police officer’s shout thus transformed into a source of both humor and challenge.
Meanwhile, Salvatore had made it all the way to the very front of the line and was present when the doors opened. He later gave me the following account, which I summarize here. The police controlled the crowd with gas, and one police officer, in particular, openly hit people with his hands and a stick. Once the crowd was quiet, an older man came out, with white hair and glasses, wearing no uniform but a simple white shirt: apparently a bureaucrat, not an active officer. As Salvatore explained to me later, the police officers attending this man made everyone sit on the street, and he then began “choosing” people by “looking at their papers [their asylum applications] and their faces.” People held up their applications for him to see, and he began picking faces out of the crowd, announcing that they wanted people from Africa, and about 20 Africans came forward. The man admitted about 20 others, mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq. Then the choosing was over, and the doors were shut.
Alongside more spectacular forms of policing at Allodhapon, classification categories had a central role in the asylum process. The pink card itself was devoted to recording various categories of identification, including kinship, gender, and national origin. At Allodhapon, however, informal classification categories, which had yet to become official through bureaucratic authentication, both enabled and restricted access to the document. “Choosing” was carried out through a compound usage of papers (application forms) and faces, but the explicit call for Africans highlights also the role of race and the body in shaping these categories, which were only later codified in documentary form. These technologies of race and classification did not necessarily facilitate legibility, however, but were highly unpredictable. As I was speaking with the group of Pakistani men, a green-eyed, wiry man threw his arm around one of my companions, flashing a broad smile. He told me he was from Syria and stated, almost as a matter of pride: “I have been here for four months, every weekend [waiting].… One time I came here with a friend of mine. [From the] same country, we look the same—but they took him and not me!” While the doors of Allodhapon opened selectively, one never knew who would be let in, or why. Uncertainty, however, did not defuse the power of policing practices or surveillance mechanisms but imbued them with an arbitrariness that engendered confusion, frustration, and anxiety.
Figure 3. Asylum seekers waiting to be allowed to lodge an asylum application, July 2008. Photo credit Salvatore Poier.
This account of the pink card and its bureaucratic apparatuses reflects how, through the police, regulatory, “law-preserving” (Benjamin 1999) violence becomes entwined with the terror, unpredictability, and also indeterminacy of state power. The unpredictable, even nightmarish “magic” of the state (Das 2004; Hoag 2010; Taussig 1997) also vitalizes the instruments of regulatory authority with phantasmal dimensions (Nuijten 2003). While policing practices were formally aimed toward increasing control and legibility over asylum seekers, these activities themselves appeared anything but legible or rational (see Herzfeld 1992); the arbitrary, even mysterious qualities of procedures at Allodhapon increased the anxiety and fear among those waiting, who came back week after week in the hopes (but never the certainty) of acquiring the pink card.
Asylum Division, Allodhapon, July 2011
It is summer 2011, and I have returned to Athens for just ten days of follow up fieldwork, in order to examine the reforms currently being instituted in the asylum procedure. Through a kind of miracle, the person in charge of the asylum division at the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection has granted me permission to spend three days with the police, observing first instance asylum applications. Those I tell about my lucky break describe it as a product of the new culture of openness and transparency surrounding the reform of asylum in Greece.
At around 6 a.m., I get a ride to Allodhapon with Dora and Elektra, two acquaintances who now work for the UNHCR overseeing first instance asylum interviews. Dora flashes her badge, and following a cordial nod by the officer outside, we pass through the gates, around to the back of the main building, and down a ramp to a basement garage for employees. After picking up three surprisingly decent espressos (which cost about 50 cents each) at a café above the garage, we enter the main building through a side door, and I find myself in the “interview room” of the asylum department. I note how the informality and ease of our entrance contrasts with my earlier experiences at Allodhapon.
In addition to my 2008 participation among those waiting in the lines outside, for years I have heard from ARS workers and asylum seekers about the disorganized, corrupt, and chaotic world of the asylum division, and its entrenched disregard for procedural matters. I have been told that interpreters, not asylum officers, conducted the interviews, flagrantly mischaracterizing their content. I have heard repeatedly of the notorious near-zero percent acceptance rate at the first instance of the asylum procedure. But this was before the new asylum law and the transitional measures that have been put in place at Allodhapon.
Dora and Elektra have both prepared me by asserting that the police are not as difficult as they expected, and some of them are in fact “very good.” Though when they first took on their positions it was hard to establish trust, relationships are now generally very friendly. Indeed, an aura of vibrant, bustling sociability greets the beginning of the workday in the asylum division. Police officers, interpreters, and UNHCR representatives mill around, smoking, drinking coffee, chatting, and arranging files for the day’s series of interviews. Since there is not a uniform in sight, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the officers from the UNHCR employees. A few lawyers drop by to check on cases that are up for review today, including Fani, the wife of my longtime interlocutor Dimitris, a former ARS lawyer who now works as an adjudicator on the appeals board; Fani, with many years of experience in real estate law, is now representing asylum seekers. Many of the interpreters are dressed neatly in gray, collared t-shirts reading METAdrasi [METAδραση], a play on the Greek words for translation (metafrasi [μετάφραση]) and action (drasi [δράση]), an NGO that, among its activities, trains interpreters and contracts them out to the asylum division. Among them I recognize a young Afghan, a former ARS client whom I had last seen in 2008, and he greets me warmly. He too comments on how he has been
