On April 29 a 58-year-old Albanian was hit by a car in Menidi Athens. Friends and other people reacted angry on the driver who could escape. He returned back though and shot on the people standing around the place of the “accident”. Another Albanian was shot to death while a Pakistani man was injured. The police is investigating the case. The driver escaped once again.
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The government continues its plans for the creation of new detention centres and its racist propaganda of the last week.
With 117 votes in a total of 154 voting members the amendment by Ministry of Citizen Protection, which envisages the creation of centres “hosting illegal immigrants with infectious diseases”, was approved on April 10th. The Minister of Citizen Protection had warned dramatically before the vote that Greece is still in danger of being excluded of the Schengen Area.
The Minister said that the so called “hospitality centres” (κέντρο φιλοξενίας) are guarded places and went on further asking:
Is it better if the migrant wanders through the streets as a vagrant spreading infectious diseases, or is it better if he stays closed up there?
The migrants in Greece from his point of view constitute a “hygiene bomb”.
Civil Protection Minister Michalis Chrysohoidis said detention centres for undocumented immigrants will begin to operate before the general election.
Chrysohoidis, who met on Monday, with the heads of immigrant organizations in Greece and IOM, said the first of some 30 centres would open in greater Athens, scrapping earlier plans to start the campaign near the northern city Kozani. The meeting with some representatives of migrant communities, government officials and IOM was organised in order to motivate the migrant communities representatives to spread the idea of voluntary return among their co-nationals and to talk about the governments plans of the new detention centres.
“We have a commitment to start operating these closed-hospitality centres, and we will keep to that commitment,” the minister said. “The first centre will operate before the general election in greater Athens, and it will act as a model to show Greek citizens that these facilities are safe for the public and will operate to high standards of health and hygiene.”
The government has met strong resistance from regional authorities around the country to scrap or delay plans to open detention centres, and switch plans to concentrate on sites near Athens as a priority.
Residents at Menidi, north of the capital, however, are also protesting against a proposed site at nearby Amygdaleza and set up roadblocks in the area last week to try and stop construction work.
The Minister of Citizen Protection is planning to “clean” the city centre of the Greek capital from the immigrants and “host” them in the new detention centres he has announced to create in all over Greece in the near future.
Today he had a meeting with the Greek Police and announced massive sweep operations starting tomorrow. We already see a massive police presence in public space and daily arrest all over Athens. The question is, how can the police raids we already observe every day become more huge and worse?
Mr. Chrysohoidis, Minister of Citizen Protection, announced today the creation of thirty new type detention centres for immigrants in cooperation with the Ministry of Defense. They are called “reception centres” or “centres of hospitality” in the dominant discourse although they are clearly to become huge prisons.
The minister had a meeting with the governors of 10 Greek prefectures to ask them if they agree to build detention centers in their areas and if they have specific facilities to offer for this purpose. Anyway, as he said, these prisons will be build even without the agreement of the prefectures. Throughout the last days and since the announcement of the creation of such a prison in Kozani the local politicians and the society had protested against these plans.
He also assured that the EU funding for these centers will be 250 million euros for the three following years.
For each detention centre a new independent police department will be created with personnel of 150 new police officers and also 70 private security men for every 250 immigrants detained.
According to the plan, each new detention center will be divided into four sectors with a capacity for 250 detained immigrants, if there are 1,000 immigrants in each of the 30 prisons announced it makes up a total of 30,000!
The new detention centres have become one of the main issues of concern today in Greek news which was dominated by a racist propaganda on “the problem of illegal immigration” constructing immigrants as a threat to security, public health etc.
On March 19, the Minister of Citizen Protection Michalis Chrisochoidis announced in the Greek Cabinet that a new immigrants’ detention camp will be created in Kozani (Neapoli).
The camp will be under the authority of Greek police and will be located in a former military base. The camp’s capacity will be 1,000 inmates.
It is planned to be ready by the end of April.
This will be the first official detention camp according to the new law of 2011 in Greece. The responsibility for guarding the perimeter of the detention camp will be given to the Greek police, but according to the Greek newspaper Vima Online, a private security company will be contracted for the guarding of the interior.
The local population reacted immediately by protesting against the “transfer of the problem” from the urban centres to other cities.
As the Vice-Minister of Citizen Protection Mr. Oikonomou said about the creation of 14 new detention centres in the very near future:
There will be no other solution to illegal migration than detention centres!
Three other detention centres are planned to be in Thessaloniki and at least two in Attika region. According to Minister of Citizen Protection Mr. Chrisochidis old military camps will be used and also former buildings of the Ministry of Education and other Ministries. The Minister while trying to convince the local population of its benefits said:
The aim is to support the local work force with new jobs. Soon enough the mayors who are now protesting against the construction of detention centres in their cities will be asking us to build also one in their region.
Vima Online (news in Greek)
Epikaira (news in Greek)
Kathimerini (news in english)
According to the authorities she was 20-25 years old and probably African. It is the sixth corpse found in the last period. An old man with a small girl are still missing. they had got lost in the river Evros.
Posted on febrero 19, 2012 in noticias de grecia
TEXT: ANDRÉS MOURENZA // PHOTO: ALESSANDRO PENSO
Nabi, a 20-years old Moroccan, is lying on the ground. He looks dead.
Twenty minutes earlier we were sitting in the recovered-from-garbage chairs and furniture, smoking cigarettes and chatting in one of the abandoned wagons of the old train station of Corinth (Greece). Nabi lives there with about other 50 migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen. Nasir—a polyglot, art lover Afghan interpreter—asks Nabi, another art lover, to draw something. The young Moroccan sketches the boat of the Hellenic Seaways moored just 200 meters down in the bay. They all are waiting the lucky day in which they will be able to catch the ferry; climbing to it, or hidden in the load of the trucks that the boat carries to Italy. And then… go further North in search for a job, a future, a safe and normal life. Crisis-hit Greece has become a nightmare for them. There is not the slightest possibility for work in a country with rocketing unemployment figures. Greeks don’t want them, neither they want to stay in Greece, but they are stuck here because European Union treaties allow third countries to return them to the state where they first entered the EU. And Greece has been the gate to Europe in the last years for 90 % of migrants.
Now, Nabi is lying on the ground.
Everything happened so quickly: a group of 4 or 5 locals drive their two cars to the old train station claiming that a migrant has stolen some money at the open air market this Saturday morning. They hit the first migrant they find, an old man cooking in an improvised fireplace. The locals try to do the same with other migrants, but the cries raise the alarm and more migrants appear from the old wagons with sticks and stones to expel the assailants. The locals go back to their cars, although one stops and punches another migrant in the face, just before getting in his black Renault Megane. The migrants try to stop the black Renault but the driver makes a U-turn knocking down a migrant, a 35-years old Algerian. He stops the car, its back aiming at us, and hits the gas at full speed in reverse gear. I jump on a small wall, as does the photographer Alessandro Penso and some migrants, to avoid being knocked down by the black car. Others run, but Nabi cannot beat the speed of the vehicle and gets hit. His body flies some meters away in front of our astonished eyes. The insane driver hits the gas and escapes leaving Nabi lying on the ground.
We all run to check his health. He has been badly hit, bleeding his face, but he is alive (later we will know that he got some bones broken). The police arrive and later the ambulance, considerably late since there is no ambulance driver working that day in Corinth (because of the austerity measures cuts) and has to come from a neighboring town
The migrants are in anger and despair. Some cry and claim that two of their Algerian friends –one about 50-years old named Ibrahim and the other a 20 years-old named Hassan- have been kidnapped and put into the first car. They call them on their cell phones, but nobody answers.
“This people come every now and then, with truncheons and sticks. If they find someone alone they beat him till he is almost dying,” denounces a 30-years old Tunisian, too afraid to give his name. “We don’t do anything wrong, we even eat from what we find in between the rubbish not to mess with the local people,” says Abduljalil: “We are only waiting here for the good weather to be able to escape from this country.” “Ten days ago –explains Ahmed, an Algerian- they came and fired me with a plastic-bullet gun. They were driving a white four-wheel drive Toyota”. However, these migrants cannot go to the police station.
“If they come to report something, I have to arrest them as they are living here illegally. I am sorry, but that is the law”, excuses himself a police inspectors of Corinth. Even now when a group of journalists –Italian photographer Alessandro Penso, Greek photographer Giorgos Moutafis, Spanish journalist Antonio Cuesta and myself- have witnessed the attack, the police officers try to downplay the incident.
-“You know… the car owner has some psychiatric problems. We have got him before. He has been at the hospital”, says the police inspector.
-“Maybe… but do his friends also have mental problems?”–we ask him.
-“This morning, the migrants robbed some money in the market…”- justifies the inspector.
-“But even if that happened, this does not give them the right to go and try to kill the migrants” –I complain.
-“Yes, that is your opinion”- says the inspector.
-“No, officer, that is not my opinion. That is the law.”
This happened today, February 18th 2012 in Corinth, Greece at about 3.45 p.m.
UPDATE: At 10.00 pm of Saturday, we had news about any suspect arrest had been made
A young 9-year-old girl and her grandfather disappeared on the 29th of January together with nine other migrants while trying to cross the border in Evros. They got lost when they boat turned around and they fell into the very cold waters of the river.
A three year old boy and two men survived the accident and informed the Greek authorities about the loss of the others in the boat.
Following a police operation aimed at finding the missing persons seven were found, among them the parents of the three-year-old boy. Two persons are still missing. The little girl and her grandfather.
Article from the New York Times by EVA COSSE
Published: January 26, 2012
When I tell people in Athens, my hometown, that I am doing research on racist violence in Greece, I am met with disbelief. There’s no problem, they say, and even if things sometimes happen it’s a temporary blip linked to the economic crisis.
The Greek government seems to share their view. It recorded only two hate crimes in the whole country in 2009 and one in 2008. More recent figures are not available.
I experienced the reality firsthand a week ago. I was interviewing Razia, an Afghan single mother, in the small apartment she shares with her three children in Aghios Panteleimonas square in Athens about the numerous attacks on her home since she moved in a year and a half earlier. Other Afghan migrants were visiting her the day I was there.
Suddenly masked thugs, who had been gathering outside, threw heavy objects at the front door, cracking the thick glass. During the few minutes the attack lasted, I could see the silhouettes of the attackers. People panicked and backed away from the windows, as the apartment is on the ground floor of the building, while Razia gathered up her scared children.
When the police came, they told Razia that she would have to come to the station to file an official complaint. She did. But even though the police station is less than 300 meters from her home, the apartment was attacked again on the following two nights. On the second night, someone sprayed cooking gas inside the apartment through the cracks of the broken window and tried unsuccessfully to set it alight.
“They wanted to burn us alive,” Razia told me later. “The windows and the door were broken.” She added that “we recognized” the man who did it. “He lives in a building next to this place and he always has a dog with him.”
She said that she identified one of the attackers to the officers who responded to her call, but that the police took no action. That same night she and her children moved out.
Greek residents in the neighborhood confirmed accounts from migrants that a group of vigilantes wearing hoods and masks gather nightly in Aghios Panteleimonas square at around 9 o’clock. Everyone knows who they are.
The family’s terrifying experience is part of wider epidemic of such violence in the Greek capital. Migrants and asylum seekers whom I and my colleagues from Human Rights Watch interviewed spoke of virtual no-go areas in Athens after dark because of the risk of attacks by vigilante groups. An association of Afghans in Greece provides newly arrived Afghan migrants with a map marked in red for areas to avoid.
The Pakistani Community of Greece, an association of immigrants, documented attacks on 60 Pakistani men in the first three months of 2011. Far-right extremists rampaged through immigrant neighborhoods in May, leaving at least 25 people hospitalized for stab wounds or severe beatings.
In September, a 24-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan was assaulted in Athens. Three of his attackers are set to stand trial, in the first such prosecution in Greece in years.
While Razia and her children are safe for the moment, the attacks in the area around her former apartment have continued. Two Afghan men were attacked in the same area by a group of about 15 people and had to seek hospital treatment. Thugs have also attacked the Internet café next door to Razia’s apartment that is owned by an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. One time, someone sprayed “Foreigners Out” in big blue letters on the café shutters while another time, the glass storefront was smashed.
Since everyone in the neighborhood seems to know about this group, why is it that the police officers at the station 300 meters away don’t prevent the attacks or catch the attackers? In part the answer lies with ordinary Greeks. The people responsible for the violence depend on the “passive participation” of those who tolerate it. In part the answer lies with the government, which needs to acknowledge Greece’s problem with racist violence openly and make combating it a political priority.
In short, the police and prosecutors have to do more than simply take reports. The attackers will back off only in the face of rapid police response, diligent investigations and successful prosecutions of attackers. Razia and her children deserve nothing less.
Eva Cosse works for the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. Continue reading ‘Greece’s Epidemic of Racist Attacks’