What We Did Not Say Last Night

Last night I wrote about the Hellenic search and rescue zone, about a duty under the 1979 Hamburg Convention, and about three things the Greek state owes the public on this. I stopped there on purpose. The duty argument is the narrow one. It is the one that holds whatever you think about the wider war.

This morning I want to say the wider thing as well, because a position that is only ever made narrowly stops being a position.

The project that boarded those boats six hundred miles from its own shore is a colonial project. That is not AURIO’s phrasing, it is the conclusion arrived at by the senior judicial organ of the United Nations in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, and by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, who has described the occupation as “not merely belligerent, but settler colonial in nature”. A foreign sovereign claiming permanent control of land that is not its own, moving its own population onto that land, deciding who eats, who moves, who fishes, who flies, who builds, and who is permitted to remain alive, is a system of supremacy and control in the technical sense the law uses. That is what the court found. AURIO is not adding to the record. AURIO is reading it with the country, out loud, in the language the country actually speaks.

We are an anti colonial party. We say so in our founding year, in our own words, on the day of the workers, in a country whose own state was won out of an empire. The same right we claim for any village in this country to grow its own food, to run its own grid, to keep its own value, to make its own laws, we claim for any community anywhere that lives under the rule of another. Sovereignty cannot be defended at home and denied abroad without losing its meaning at home as well.

The narrow point from last night still stands. There are three things the Greek state owes the public on this. The log of every SAR distress call received and the response taken. Direct Greek state responsibility, not “coordination”, for the detained civilians once they are landed. A clear public statement that the Hellenic SAR zone is not rented out. None of the three has been provided. Today’s wider point sits behind that absence and gives it weight. A country that cannot say what is true about a colonial project is going to find it harder, not easier, to defend its own search and rescue zone the next time someone tests it.

The conditions are assembled. What is missing is the political act.

AURIO