• About Us
  • Who Are We
  • Work With Us
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
No Result
View All Result
The Globe Post
39 °f
New York
44 ° Fri
46 ° Sat
40 ° Sun
41 ° Mon
No Result
View All Result
The Globe Post
No Result
View All Result
Home Opinion

Beyond Numbers: Confronting Europe’s Broken Border System

Eleanor Paynter by Eleanor Paynter
05/30/23
in Opinion
Migrants waiting at the Turkish border.

Migrants waiting at the Turkish border. Photo: AFP

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Fatmata and Abu Bakar were trying to reach safety. They’d been on the move for months – from Sierra Leone to Greece, where they had hoped to obtain asylum. Instead, told to leave Greece but with no legal or financial means to travel, the couple decided to make their way along the precarious Balkan route.

They were entering North Macedonia on April 19, near the town of Gevgelija, when a police officer shot and killed Fatmata.

She didn’t die right away. She called out for Abu Bakar, who carried her into a police car, hoping for assistance. By the time officers reached the nearest hospital, Fatmata was no longer breathing.

“They didn’t put her on a bed,” Abu Bakar told me on a video call, “but they just carried her in by her arms and her legs.” Rather than being allowed to stay with her, Abu Bakar was taken to a detention center.

No Exception

It’s tempting to begin with the numbers when writing about border violence. They’re grim: UNHCR’s data portal shows that nearly 1,100 people have gone missing in the Mediterranean Sea since January of this year. Yet these numbers – and the more than 26,850 people who have drowned or gone missing in Mediterranean crossings over the last decade – have yet to motivate more compassionate policies or humane practices.

While Fatmata’s killing was sudden and brutal, it’s important to recognize what happened to Abu Bakar and Fatmata not as exceptional but as routine. Shootings are not an everyday occurrence, but they do happen.

Moreover, they fit within a broader pattern of policing borders at the cost of human lives. Similar to the case of Central American migration to the US, people trying to reach Europe by sea and through the Balkans have fled violence, extreme precarity, political persecution, and the consequences of climate change. They travel along dangerous routes because safe, legal pathways have been closed to them. 

Increasingly, they encounter EU borders beyond the geographical limits of the EU – as in the case of North Macedonia, a candidate for EU membership that has played a marked role in policing EU borders since 2015.

While the officer who shot Fatmata was with the North Macedonian police, that same week also marked the start of a joint operation between North Macedonia and EU border agency Frontex, which is deploying more than 100 members of its new armed standing corps there.

Fatmata’s murder is also a reminder that securitized borders are related to the expansion of militarized policing more broadly.

Fatmata, 23, was fairly certain she was pregnant and had recently shared this news with Abu Bakar. Authorities have kept the autopsy that could confirm this news confidential – not even Abu Bakar has seen it. So the question of whether Fatmata was killed carrying their child remains one of many unknown facts. 

Her mother and sisters in Sierra Leone wait anxiously; they have no body to bury. “It’s been over a month and she’s not been put to rest,” Fatmata’s older sister, also named Fatmata, told me. “We can’t see her and say our last words to her.”

Fatmata and Abu Bakar
Fatmata and Abu Bakar. Photo: provided

Securitization and Militarization of Borders

This violence, and the expanding web of people whose lives it transforms, is the inevitable consequence of the securitization and militarization of borders and of the EU’s efforts to externalize its borders, policing on behalf of Europe in countries outside the EU – in Senegal and in Libya, like in North Macedonia.

The EU Commission and Frontex claim that restrictive entry policies and border policing agreements with third countries like North Macedonia operate in the name of human rights, but these policies and practices continue to put migrants in danger.

The police officer’s shooting of a person attempting to reach safety, and her death in a police car en route to a hospital – where, Abu Bakar said, she was treated “like an animal” – underscores how border externalization prioritizes the rights of some people while legitimizing violence against Europe’s unwanted others.

“Did they shoot her because of her race?” Fatmata’s sister wondered. “Because she was a woman? Is it because she crossed the border? Were there no other ways to have her leave the country? She was unarmed. She had the right to live.”

Violence in Europe’s Border Zones

Death in Europe’s border zones has repeatedly made international news this year, including when a migrant boat moving from Turkey and knowingly ignored by Frontex wrecked near Crotone, Italy, on February 26, killing at least 70 people.

Tunisian authorities are planning new cemeteries to keep up with the number of drownings at their shores by people trying to leave. It’s difficult for the families of shipwreck victims to have confirmation of their loved one’s death, rare for the body to be returned home for burial. 

This violence – both the deaths themselves and the lack of sanctioned care for the deceased and their loved ones – has become so normalized among Western audiences that it sees only brief, if any, media coverage.

It accompanies a host of other practices that put lives at risk, including, for instance, the abandonment of migrants at Polish borders, and pushbacks like the one coordinated by Malta last week, when authorities allowed the Libyan coast guard to tow a boat carrying 500 people back to Benghazi, where it imprisoned the passengers.

I reached Abu Bakar and Fatmata’s sister through staff with Greece-based NGO Second Tree (a group I collaborate with), which is supporting Abu Bakar as he navigates legal and institutional hurdles. Second Tree staff’s presence is also a way of offering Abu Bakar community in a moment when authorities might otherwise have simply abandoned him, or – as they initially attempted – driven him to the border with Serbia and told him to leave.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Second Tree • NGO • Refugees (@second.tree)

As a scholar of migration, asylum, representation, and rights, I wrestle with what to do with accounts like Abu Bakar’s and Fatmata’s: how to convey the weight of this dehumanizing violence without sensationalizing suffering? Without turning people’s lives into abstract counts?

One answer is to recognize Fatmata’s murder both within the dimensions of trauma and personal grief, and also as a consequence of the structural violence cemented by Europe’s border regime.

Another answer comes from Abu Bakar himself. While he awaits word on his asylum claim, and on the outcome of criminal investigations into the shooting, one of the greatest risks, he says, is that people stop paying attention.

“Everyone should know what happened here.”

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Globe Post.
ShareTweet
Eleanor Paynter

Eleanor Paynter

ACLS Fellow and Migrations Postdoc at Cornell University (twitter: @ebpaynter)

Related Posts

A man holds a Romanian national flag during an anti-corruption demonstration in Romania's capital Bucharest.
World

Russia Denies Interfering in Romania Elections

by Staff Writer with AFP
December 5, 2024
Ukraine invasion
World

EU Lawmakers Approve New $38B Loan for Ukraine

by Staff Writer with AFP
October 22, 2024
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán
World

Will Hungary Hijack the EU During Its Presidency?

by Staff Writer with AFP
June 24, 2024
Ukraine children
World

Slovakia Split Over Ukraine in Presidential Vote

by Staff Writer with AFP
March 18, 2024
Ursula von der Leyen
World

EU Asks Member States for €50B to Support Ukraine

by Staff Writer
June 20, 2023
Customers queue to enter a re-opened Zara clothes shop
Environment

EU Targets Fast Fashion in Push for Durable Goods

by Staff Writer
May 23, 2023
Next Post
A man holds US, Taiwan flags

US and Taiwan Ink Trade Deal as China Issues Warning

This handout picture released by the state-owned company Ukrhydroenergo shows the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam which was damaged in Nova Kakhovka, near Kherson, on June 6, 2023. Photo: UKRHYDROENERGO / VIA AFP-JIJI

Russian-Held City 'Flooded' After Dam Breach

Please login to join discussion

Recommended

An Iranian protester

Iran’s Nuclear Program: From Its Origins to Today’s Dispute

June 23, 2025
Protesters and police clash during the “No Kings” protest in Los Angeles, California on June 14, 2025.

US Appeals Court Allows Trump Control of National Guard in LA

June 20, 2025
Donald Trump

Fact vs. Fiction: The Trump Administration’s Dubious War on Reverse Discrimination

June 18, 2025
Iranian missiles and Israeli interceptors light up the sky over Beirut, Lebanon, on June 14, 2025. Iran launched multiple missiles toward Israeli targets, triggering interception attempts above several regional capitals, including Beirut.

Israel-Iran Conflict: Latest Developments

June 18, 2025
Tens of thousands of protestors shut down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, April 5, 2025, protesting the Trump administration's abuse of the separation of federal powers as well as the deep cuts to governmental services overseen by presidential advisor Elon Musk.

Civil Society Is Holding the Line. Will Washington Notice?

June 17, 2025
An Iranian walking in front of a wall painting of the Iranian flag in Tehran

How Much Damage Has Israel Inflicted on Iran’s Nuclear Program?

June 16, 2025

Opinion

Donald Trump

Fact vs. Fiction: The Trump Administration’s Dubious War on Reverse Discrimination

June 18, 2025
Tens of thousands of protestors shut down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on Saturday, April 5, 2025, protesting the Trump administration's abuse of the separation of federal powers as well as the deep cuts to governmental services overseen by presidential advisor Elon Musk.

Civil Society Is Holding the Line. Will Washington Notice?

June 17, 2025
A Black Lives Matter mural in New York City.

Fuhgeddaboudit! America’s Erasure of History

April 2, 2025
Bust of Deputy Rubens Paiva in the Chamber of Deputies

Democratic Brazilians Are Still Here

March 18, 2025
A woman from Guatemala

Dispatch From Central America

January 28, 2025
US President Donald Trump

Dear Trump Supporters: Is This the America You Wanted?

January 28, 2025
Facebook Twitter

Newsletter

Do you like our reporting?
SUBSCRIBE

About Us

The Globe Post

The Globe Post is part of Globe Post Media, a U.S. digital news organization that is publishing the world's best targeted news sites.

submit oped

© 2018 The Globe Post

No Result
View All Result
  • National
  • World
  • Business
  • Interviews
  • Lifestyle
  • Democracy at Risk
    • Media Freedom
  • Opinion
    • Editorials
    • Columns
    • Book Reviews
    • Stage
  • Submit Op-ed

© 2018 The Globe Post