Greek Police Arrests And Beat Tourists Mistaken For Immigrants
Greek police have stepped up efforts to catch illegal immigrants in recent months, launching a new operation to check the papers of people who look foreign. But tourists have also been picked up in the sweeps - and at least two have been badly beaten.
When Korean backpacker Hyun Young Jung was stopped by a tall scruffy looking man speaking Greek on the street in central Athens he thought it might be some kind of scam, so he dismissed the man politely and continued on his way.
A few moments later he was stopped again, this time by a man in uniform who asked for his documents. But as a hardened traveller he was cautious.
Greece was the 16th stop in his two-year-long round-the-world trip and he’d often been warned about people dressing in fake uniforms to extract money from backpackers, so while he handed over his passport he also asked the man to show him his police ID.
Instead, Jung says, he received a punch in the face.
Within seconds, the uniformed man and his plainclothes partner - the man who had first approached Jung - had him down on the ground and were kicking him, according to the Korean.
In shock, Jung was by now convinced he was being mugged by criminals and began shouting for help from passers-by.
It was only when he was handcuffed and dragged 500m (500 yards) up the road to the nearest police station that he realised he was actually under arrest.
Jung says that outside the station the uniformed officer, without any kind of warning, turned on him again, hitting him in the face.
Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras.
Jung was held with a number of migrants from Africa and Asia who had also been rounded up as part of the police’s anti-immigration operation Xenios Zeus - named, strangely, after the ancient Greek god of hospitality.
It is thought that up to 95% of undocumented migrants entering the European Union arrive via Greece, and because border controls make it hard to continue into the rest of Europe many end up stuck in the country.
According to some estimates, immigrants could now make up as much as 10% of the population.
But while more than 60,000 people have been detained on the streets of Athens since it was launched in August 2012, there have been fewer than 4,200 arrests.
And some visitors to Greece have been detained despite having shown police their passports.
Last summer, a Nigerian-born American, Christian Ukwuorji, visited Greece on a family holiday with his wife and three children.
When police stopped him in central Athens he showed them his US passport, but they handcuffed him anyway and took him to the central police station.
They gave no reason for holding him, but after a few hours in custody Ukwuorji says he was so badly beaten that he passed out. He woke up in hospital.
“I went there to spend my money but they stopped me just because of my colour,” he says. “They are racist.”
(via blackamazon)
abokononist:randomhumanrambling:socialistexan:punkpedagogy:
I hadn’t seen anything about this, but wow.
WTF…
What.
Jesus CHRIST
This Hellenistic Pagan is smacking her head.
I feel sick
i went to athens for the summer when i was 18 yo and the racism i experienced was disgusting. i am really not surprised that in the past year you have this huge resurgence of anti immigrant, racist policies. not at all.
ATHENS — Greek police vowed Sunday not to relent in their efforts to evict undocumented immigrants after a sweep they said had netted 1,130 in central Athens over the weekend.
Police said a total of 4,900 people were rounded up in the capital on Saturday, of which 1,130 were detained. “The police operation to evict undocumented immigrants will continue,” a statement said.
AFP: Greek police detains 1,130 immigrants
From the news:
Operation Xenios Zeus, named after the name of the king of the ancient Greek gods in his role as protector of guests, mobilised 2,000 police in Athens and another 2,500 on Greece’s eastern border with Turkey.
Police spokesman Christos Manouras said Saturday the operation was a necessity for debt-laden Greece’s national survival.
“We must send the message that Greece cannot afford work and hospitality” to would-be immigrants, he said.[…]
But as the country struggles with a crippling economic crisis and sweeping austerity cuts, social tensions are on the rise and the increase in undocumented immigrants has fuelled xenophobia and racist attacks.
For the first time in Greek political history, the country in June voted into parliament a neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, which has promised to purge the country of illegal migrants.
(via redlightpolitics)
I know that xenophobia is a common response to economic crisis, but xenophobia never solved anyone’s economic woes. Also, am I missing something about the name? Shouldn’t it be called the opposite of Zeus as protector of guests, since the goal is to get ride of the people they’re seeing as guests? Then again, that language of hospitality obscures the fact that one of the groups of people they want to keep out are Syrian refugees. “Refugees” are not the same as uninvited house guests.
(via paolaandfrancesca)
someone is making money off this. that’s the thing about all this right wing hate and sweeping away of undocumented immigrants into detention centers. this is for a profit for fortune 500 companies and to deem certain people as expendable for free labor and to occupy only certain space. someone is always behind these groups and their missions funding and offering something in exchange for this.
(via strugglingtobeheard)(via so-treu)
Bishoy, a 25-year-old Egyptian asylum seeker, at an anti-racist demonstration in the southern Athens suburb of Kallithea, where he was a victim in one of two separate racist attacks in May 2012 that left four migrants injured.
The Greek authorities are failing to tackle a rising wave of xenophobic violence that has left migrants afraid to walk the streets.
Check out our video and photo series here.
i’m pretty sure the greek authorities aren’t “failing” anything. in fact it seems that they’re pretty successful in facilitating this violence, and i wouldn’t be surprised if they are directly involved.
Greece to open new detention centres for illegal migrants
Greece will open the first of up to 30 camps for illegal immigrants within weeks, in what some describe as a “desperate bid” to contain the social chaos prompted by the economic crisis.
In Athens officials have approved the construction of three of the 30 detention centres that the government has vowed to build on disused military sites.
“The first centre will begin operating in the next 30 to 45 days,” the deputy public order minister, Manolis Othona, said. “It will open as long as the buildings are in sufficiently good shape.”
It was the first official confirmation that the camps would be operational before the Greek general election in early May.
A wave of migrants from the developing world has been blamed for a rise in crime that authorities say has assumed “epidemic proportions”.
Break-ins, robberies, muggings and murders have soared, with burglaries rising by 125% in the greater Athens region in 2011, according to Greek police.
“On the basis of arrests and investigations we believe that up to 70% of violent crime is perpetrated by foreigners and I say this without wishing to demonise migrants,” said police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis.
“Unfortunately, the influx has increased with a 20% rise in the number of Africans and south-east Asians noted across the Greek-Turkish border since the start of 2012.”
Migrants’ groups and leftist parties have both criticised the camps as degrading and resonant of the worst excesses of Nazi rule. “It’s not the migrants who are responsible for rising crime, but policies that Greece is being forced to take [by the EU and IMF] that are spreading poverty, unemployment and misery,” said Petros Constantinou, national co-ordinator of the movement against racism.
For several consecutive years more than 90% of all illegal migrants detained in the EU have been caught in Greece. Around 130,000 are estimated to enter the country each year, exploiting the long, unwieldy Greek coastline and the porous northern frontier which would-be migrants view as Europe’s back door.
Many migrants survive in appalling conditions in the heart of Athens, transforming parts of the historic centre into a dangerous and insanitary ghetto.
“Everyone is afraid. Athens has become a city of fear,” said Dr Nikitas Kanakis, who heads the Greek branch of Doctors of the World, which works with the migrants. “The lack of night shelters or public places to go and wash is a huge problem.”
Around 5,000 migrants have been revealed as living in an estimated 500 abandoned buildings. More than 2,000 other properties occupied by migrants have been denounced as unfit for human habitation. Doctors and officials have described the conditions as a “public health time bomb”.
Police with sniffer dogs conducted a major “sweep” of the area on Thursday, rounding up undocumented migrants and illegal street vendors.
“The current situation cannot continue,” said the citizens’ protection minister, Michalis Chrysohoidis, announcing the campaign to move 30,000 illegal migrants into “closed hospitality centres” under a €250m (£208m) EU-funded scheme.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are wandering aimlessly through the streets, being forced to break the law, being exploited by criminal networks and deterring legitimate immigrants from staying in the country.”
Under the programme migrants would be “given hospitality” in the centres before being “immediately asked to return home”, Chrysohoidis added.
The move has been welcomed by residents and business owners in central Athens where streets fights regularly erupt between gangs and migrants.
Mired in its fifth straight year of recession, Greece’s jobless rate has reached a record 21% with youth unemployment now at an unprecedented 51%.
“They will call us racists for doing this but the situation is clearly out of control,” said Vangelis Kontopoulos, who helps run a cafe within view of the Acropolis.
“A lot say it would be better if we issued green cards that allowed them to move on to other countries in the European Union but that’s never going to happen. EU law has seen to it that they can’t move on. They’re trapped here.”
The Athens mayor, Yiorgos Kaminis, told the Guardian he welcomed the measures but cautioned that they would only work if there was “full respect of human rights, including the right to asylum”.
He added: “We also have to step up the fight against illegal migrants and promote the fight for the faster absorption into society of legal migrants.”
Chrysohoidis insists the detention centres will help the local economies they are located in, by creating thousands of jobs, from cleaners to private security guards who, alongside armed police, will patrol the sites, which will include former barracks and airfields.
But regional prefectures across Greece remain sceptical about the camps, with many local officials voicing concerns over the dysfunctional Greek state’s ability to create problem-free facilities. The detainees will far outnumber Greece’s jail population, which currently stands at 12,500.
With a neo-fascist right rising in popularity amid the migrant influx, a growing number of immigrants would prefer to be repatriated. “There’s a lot of tension between the different ethnic groups and I’d say 90% of the new arrivals want to leave Greece but don’t have the means,” said Azad Kerim, a Kurdish migrant.
“It’s much better in Iraq than it is here. More and more are discovering they’ve made the journey for nothing,” he said, adding he had waited 15 years to acquire the papers that would give him legal status in Greece.
More and more evidence that the EU and its current policies are a breeding ground for neo-fascist filth and racism spreading throughout Athens and the rest of the country. It’s indubitable that the rise in far-right rhetoric is almost always correlated with general political and economic instability. France and Germany’s heinous immigration policies have forced people seeking asylum to be trapped in Greece, wherein the economic situation cannot feasibly create a space for them to socially adjust, since Greece is where the EU’s economic junta is at its most rampant. Make no mistake, the choice to invest this money in detention centers in lieu of, I don’t know, anything else, is an excuse to continue pushing for their racist, neoliberal agenda.
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.
Greece’s Epidemic of Racist Attacks - NYTimes.com
And more to the point regarding my previous post about the EU. Similar reports about growing racism and violence, this time in Greece.
(via redlightpolitics)
