This is not a song about the refugees. This is a refugee song.
Since the beginning of 2015, the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War has been underway. More than 1 million people were uprooted from the Middle East and Africa and pushed to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. Causes: imperialist rivalries, war and poverty, threatening their survival. Over 12,000 people found death on the way. The bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is littered with corpses of refugees while many have also been killed on land. In Greece, the refugee population is steadily rising, reaching nearly 60.000. At the same time, the EU-Turkey Agreement captures thousands of people in the Aegean islands and brings dramatic delays in asylum procedures. These people are not alone! From Eidomeni to the Port of Piraeus, from the coasts of Lesvos to the refugee camps of Athens, locals and refugees open another route: the path of struggle, coexistence, solidarity of peoples, against xenophobia and racist hatred. “Brother and Sister” is our choice to go along this route. People from different origins, united by love for music and life, stand together: Children and grandchildren of immigrants, refugees who escaped the war only to be hostage to the Greek camps, people trapped in Moria, locals. If war and uprooting is the choice of the powerful, then resistance, internationalism and solidarity is ours. Instead of describing the lives of the “others”, instead of exhausting our sensitivity to “humanitarian” fireworks, we meet and sing for our own real and common everyday life.
We live together, we sing together, we struggle together.