Manolada strawberry farmers shoot immigrants who demanded 6 months salaries. 28 wounded in hospital.
The immigrant workers had reportedly gathered to demand six-months’ worth of unpaid wages when one of three work supervisors whom they were negotiating with shot them. About 20-30 of the 200 strawberry pickers from Bangladesh got injured. Local media reported that four of them are in a serious health condition. The employer has been arrested and investigations are going on.
Several thousand migrant workers (many of them reportedly undocumented) are empoyed as strawberry pickers in the area.
This is not the first time that immigrants in Nea Manolada have protested against harsh working conditions.
In 2008, immigrant farm workers staged a two-day strike (delaying the shipments of strawberries by at least a few days) to protest against harsh working conditions. Their strike exposed slave wage exploitation, shocking living conditions and prejudice.
The government at the time responded to the strike by ordering labour inspectors to crack the whip on farmers exploiting migrant workers in Nea Manolada.
Despite the country’s soaring rate of unemployment, agriculture is heavily reliant on immigrant labour.
In 2009, two farmers in Manolada, alleged to have tied two Bangladeshi immigrants to a motorcycle and reportedly dragged them through a central square.

KEERFA activists said at a press conference on April 8, “The culmination of the poor detention conditions, the mistreatment and tortures migrants have to deal with in reception centers was the three suicide attempts which happened in Amygdaleza center in northern Athens last weekend”.

KEERFA coordinator, Petros Constantinou, talked about the inhuman conditions in reception centers, adding that hunger strikes have spread across Greece, while many police departments have turned into places of abuse for immigrants and refugees.

Local immigrant community leaders who also spoke at the press conference called on authorities to give them permission to visit with hunger-striking migrants at the detention centers and to provide them access to doctors and lawyers.

Source: http://www.globalpost.com/

“There is a total lack of a humanitarian response and solidarity” in Greece towards Syrian asylum-seekers, Willem de Jonge, general director of Doctors Without Borders in Greece, told AFP on the sidelines of a press conference.

Greece — a key entry point for the European Union — has often been criticised for conditions in its detention centres, where undocumented migrants are held alongside asylum-seekers without any distinction.

Only a small proportion of the estimated one million people who have fled Syria since the conflict erupted two years ago have gone to Greece.

“There is no reception system (for refugees), no facilities and the accommodation capacity is only 800 beds for all of Greece,” said Ioanna Kotsioni, a member of the organisation known by its French initials MSF.

De Jonge said the health of Syrian refugees, many of whom suffer psychological trauma, deteriorates during their stay in detention centres where they are held along with their children.

MSF said the refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria arrive in Greece either by crossing the river Evros on the northeastern border with Turkey, or via islands near the Turkish coast.

“In Evros, I met a Syrian mother with two young kids, under 10. All she asked for was to go back to Turkey. She had been there in a cell for two weeks,” de Jonge said.

According to data compiled by MSF, Syrian refugees made up 40 percent of all illegal registered entries in Greece for 2012, making them the second largest group after Afghans.

Police in recession-hit Greece said they arrested 7,500 Syrian nationals last year as part of a continuing crackdown on illegal immigration, according to MSF.

“In camps, in Jordan or in Turkey, the sanitary conditions may be difficult… but at least they are free to move around,” said de Jonge.

The Greek branch of Amnesty also called Thursday for an urgent investigation into allegations of ill-treatment by police at a detention facility for refugees and immigrants in Corinth, southern Greece.

Amnesty also cited the case of a Syrian who complained about police brutality while he was detained in a police station in the nearby city of Tripoli.

Beaten up and robbed by traffickers when they arrived in Athens, Osama, his wife and two children were arrested as illegal immigrants and thrown into detention when they recounted their ordeal to Greek police. Ordered out of Greece but without any place to go, he rues the day he set foot in the country.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/

“All our hope is now in God. There is a war in Syria and the country has been destroyed,” said the 35-year-old as he sat in a dingy Athens basement apartment with a Syrian flag on the wall.

“In Greece, we have had the most bitter experiences and we cannot go to another country. We have no money, no IDs or passports to travel. We are trapped here.”

Greek authorities say police are obliged to arrest people who enter the country illegally.

Osama’s family is just one of a growing number of Syrian refugees arriving in Europe in the hope of a fresh start, only to find themselves trapped in its most financially ravaged nation, where the crisis has fuelled hatred for migrants.

Last year, Greece – the main gateway into the EU for migrants – arrested more than 8,000 Syrians for entering illegally as the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad raged on. Most had hoped to make their way to northern Europe.

Rights groups have criticized the treatment of Syrians in Greece, saying they are subject to arrest, detention, refusal of asylum and even deportation – a far cry from their reception in other EU nations like Sweden and Germany, which offer some form of automatic protection to Syrians.

“The situation for Syrian asylum seekers, like other asylum seekers in Greece, is pretty bad,” said Eva Cosse, who monitors Greece for rights group Human Rights Watch.

ROBBED AND JAILED

Osama’s story highlights the predicament of Syrian refugees, who find scant sympathy in Greece and little prospect of finding asylum or getting a job. Desperate to leave, they end up being exploited by traffickers.

After a bomb hit his home in Aleppo last year, Osama paid 7,000 euros ($9,000) to traffickers who smuggled his family by boat from Turkey to the Greek island of Samos.

Once in Athens, smugglers promising to take them onward in Europe lured them to an apartment where they were blindfolded, beaten, and their documents and 12,500 euros in savings stolen.

To their shock, police responded by arresting the entire family – including their children aged 3 and 5 – and putting them in an overcrowded detention center for illegal immigrants.

“We had been robbed, they nearly destroyed our souls, and we were jailed even though we were victims,” said Osama, who only gave his first name for fear of his relatives’ safety in Syria.

Weeks after their initial detention, Osama says he returned to the police station to follow up on their robbery, only to be arrested again and held for 10 days since he had stayed over the time limit allowed under their deportation order.

With a return to Syria ruled out and moving elsewhere in Europe impossible without money or passports, Osama’s family now rarely ventures out of their home in Athens, fearful of arrest by police and attacks by far-right vigilantes.

Nearly destitute, they rely on fellow Syrians to survive.

UNFAIR SYSTEM

Depending on where they arrive, Syrians face a “protection lottery” when they enter the EU, Human Rights Watch says, and by all accounts, Greece is one of the worst choices.

Since the start of 2012, at least 55 Syrians have been deported by Greece, the agency says, citing police figures.

Greece denies deporting Syrians, saying 58 repatriations last year were of those who wanted to go back – though HRW disputes that since voluntary returns are listed separately from deportations, and the EU’s Frontex agency has also reported a sharp increase in “forced returns” of Syrians by Greece.

Greece also rejected 150 asylum applications from Syrians last year and approved only two, the UN refugee agency says, when thousands fled a conflict that has claimed 70,000 lives.

“We wonder how on earth the examining authorities could consider any Syrian claim that was put in the course of 2012 as unfounded?” said Petros Mastakas, an associate protection officer at the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees.

“We have no answer from the police on this.”

Greece – where even putting in a request for asylum requires camping for days outside an Athens office – is known for extremely low recognition rates for asylum seekers and in 2011 approved only 0.5 percent of refugee cases, Cosse said.

Such is Greece’s reputation that most Syrians refuse to request asylum here, the UNHCR says.

The UNHCR has suggested options to allow Syrians to stay legally in Greece even if they don’t want to seek asylum, but has had little response from the authorities, he said.

Instead, Greek police end up arresting and releasing Syrians with orders to leave the country within 30 days even though most have few practical options to do so – leaving them at risk of a vicious circle of arrest and detention, rights groups say.

DETENTION CENTRES

In a sprawling government complex in an Athens suburb, Greece’s top immigration official at the public order ministry denies that the country treats Syrian refugees unfairly.

“What we are trying to do is to treat them differently – to begin with, to release them from detention centers,” said Patroklos Georgiadis, adding that Greece wants to give Syrians special status but has yet to find a legal formula to do so.

He also denies that Greece has rejected Syrian asylum requests, saying that a 3-5 year backlog meant those who applied last year could not have had their case heard yet.

He defended Greece’s detention of Syrians, saying it had no choice but to arrest anyone who entered illegally and that it was legal to hold them for up to 18 months.

Greece’s deep financial crisis has exacerbated its long-running struggle to handle the influx of migrants from Asia and Africa, and rising hostility towards migrants has prompted a surge in attacks against them and helped usher the far-right Golden Dawn party to parliament last year for the first time.

The numbers of Syrians entering Greece so far represent a tiny fraction of the one million refugees who have fled Syria since the crisis erupted in 2011, but the government is worried that a sudden influx could stretch the nation beyond its limits.

“I told a counterpart that every morning, I have migrants from Syria on my mind,” Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said in a speech this week. “And this isn’t my job.”

Still, most Syrians who come to Greece are shocked at the depths of anti-immigrant sentiment here and their treatment at the hands of the police, says Aref Alobeid, a Syrian political science professor who has lived in Greece for over two decades.

“They cannot believe that such things happen in an EU country,” he said. “That’s why most of them want to leave after a few days and go to another European country.”

ONLY SIN

Among them is a former Syrian police officer turned rebel, who did not give his name for fear of his family’s fate.

He believed traffickers who told him he would be able to move on to other European countries after entering Greece from Turkey. What he got instead was a three-month stay in a cramped detention cell with 50 others in a Greek border town.

He refuses to seek asylum here, saying he was shocked to see police beating fellow detainees. Later in Athens he witnessed attacks against migrants by far-right vigilantes.

“You make a request, you are given a piece of paper, you are not allowed to go to another country, you are not given any help,” the 26-year-old said, showing off shrapnel wounds he sustained in Syria. “What’s the point? There is no hope.”

(Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou; Editing by Giles Elgood)

A big operation of Municipal Police started on Friday afternoon on the touristic area of Thiseio, in central Athens, to remove immigrants from the streets, who work as peddlers to live. During this operation Cheikh Babacar Ndiaye a 37 years old immigrant from Senegal, was chased and he died falling from a height, on the rails of the subway in Thiseio station. From the blood seen on the pictures possibly his death resulted from the fall.
Subway metro services were disrupted for at least two hours. First aid assistants removed the body of the immigrant from the rails. Meanwhile his friends gathered at the station, together with other people from Senegal.
Some of them mourned, but when they saw the stretcher with the dead body they began to shout and protest. Some of them they shouted that Police is racists. Riot police arrived immediately and attacked the gathered people, and cleared the area around the station. At the same moment of the attack the dead body of immigrant was moved to an ambulance and left the area, for an unknown and undeclared direction, in spite of the questions made ​​on this.

Source & photos: http://www.demotix.com/news/1765476/immigrant-dies-during-police-operation-athens#media-1765433

One of the accused assassins was serving in the Fire Department. In the appartments of the two arrested the police found batons, butterfly knives, bullets, brass knuckles, an airgun, and, among other things, dozens of election leaflets for the Golden Dawn neonazi party.

The tourists held by Greek police as illegal migrants

By Chloe Hadjimatheou BBC News, Athens

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.

“I was very scared,” he says.

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.

“There were members of the public who saw what happened, like the man who works in the shop opposite the police station, but they were too afraid to help me,” he says.

Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras.

“I can understand them asking me for ID and I even understand that there may have been a case to justify them hitting me in the first instance. But why did they continue beating me after I was handcuffed?” he asks.

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.

The operation aims to tackle the wave of illegal immigration which over the last decade has changed the face of Athens’s city centre.

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.

This has been an enormous shock for the country which, until recently, was more familiar with outward rather than inward migration. Now, in the grip of a crippling economic crisis and with a welfare system in meltdown, the government lacks the resources to support this new growing population.

Few people are in any doubt that Greece needs an effective programme to manage its undocumented migrants.

Lt Col Christos Manouras of the Hellenic police force says operation Xenios Zeus, launched last August, has slowed down the flow of illegal immigrants. Anyone who looks foreign, or who has aroused suspicion, may be stopped, he says.

“If someone is stopped by the police and they do not have a valid means of identification we will accompany them to the station until their nationality can be determined,” he explains.

“I think that is normal and I would expect Greeks to be subjected to the same treatment abroad.”

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.

A hospitalised American

In July last year, 38-year-old Christian Ukwuorji, a US citizen born in Nigeria, visited Greece with his wife and three children. They visited Rhodes and Santorini, and stopped in Athens on the way back.

It was while he was walking in central Athens with a friend that Ukwuorji was stopped and asked for his ID by the Greek police. Despite showing them his US passport, he was detained with a group of immigrants and taken to the police station.

While there Ukwuorji says he tried to take a photograph of his handcuffs on his mobile phone but when officers saw what he was doing they jumped on him, beating him until he passed out. He woke up in hospital with concussion.

The police returned his passport and his damaged mobile phone. He was not charged with any offence. The US Embassy has requested an investigation, but six months on there has been no word from the police. Ukwuorji believes he was the victim of racism and says he will never visit Greece again.

It is impossible to determine how many people have had a similar experience – but enough Americans for the US State Department to issue a warning to its citizens travelling to the country.

It updated its website on 15 November to warn of “confirmed reports of US African-American citizens detained by police conducting sweeps for illegal immigrants in Athens”, as well as a wider problem in Greek cities of “unprovoked harassment and violent attacks against persons who, because of their complexion, are perceived to be foreign migrants”.

Tourism is a major source of revenue in Greece, especially important at a time when many other businesses are going bust. Anything that deterred visitors in large numbers would be a disaster for the economy.

The Greek Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigoris Delavekouras responded to the State Department warning by issuing a statement that “isolated incidents of racist violence which have occurred are foreign to Greeks, our civilization and the long tradition of Greek hospitality.”

It is not only tourists who have been affected.

In May last year a visiting academic from India, Dr Shailendra Kumar Rai was arrested outside the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he was working as a visiting lecturer.

He had popped out for lunch, and forgotten to take his passport with him.

“The police thought I was Pakistani and since they didn’t speak English they couldn’t understand me when I tried to explain that I am from India,” he says.

When passing students saw their lecturer being held by police and lined up against a wall with a group of immigrants they were horrified and rushed inside to tell his colleagues.

Despite protests from university staff who insisted they could vouch for him, the police handcuffed him and marched him down to the police station.

“Some of my Greek colleagues were almost crying with embarrassment,” Rai recalls.

“I understand why the police need to ask for identity documents, they are just doing their job. But I think they are too aggressive – in my country only criminals are handcuffed.”

He was eventually released but there was an outcry in the Greek media which asked why an esteemed academic invited to the country to share his knowledge should be humiliated in such a way.

Rai says he experienced no racial prejudice during his time in Greece, and does not accuse the police who arrested him of racism.

But in a report for 2012, the Racist Violence Recording Network, a group consisting of 23 NGOs and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, called on the Greek government to “explicitly prevent police officers from racially motivated violent practices” referring to 15 incidents where “illegal acts” had taken place.

There have been a number of reports alleging strong support among the police for Golden Dawn, the ultra-right party that soared in popularity last year, winning 18 seats in June parliamentary elections.

But police spokesman Lt Col Manouras insists that voting preferences are a personal issue.

“Whatever a police officer may feel in their private life, when they come to work and put on the uniform they assume the values of the force,” he says.

Greek police have absolute respect for human rights and treat people of all colour and ethnicity as fellow human beings, he says.

“Of course I cannot rule out the possibility that a police officer may have acted improperly,” he adds, “but this would be an isolated incident.”

He said he could not comment on the cases of Hyun Young Jung and Christian Ukwuorji, as they are under investigation. The Greek Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests to discuss the cases.

When Jung was released from police custody without charge just a few hours after being detained, he says one officer shouted after him, “Hey Korean, go home!”

Instead Jung went straight to the Korean Embassy in Athens and returned with the consul to confront the men who he said hit him.

It took five further visits to the police station, an official complaint from the embassy to the chief of police and 10 days of waiting before the officers involved in Jung’s case were named.

Meanwhile the backpacker had published his story on a travellers’ blog read by more than 60,000 people.

The case turned into a full-scale diplomatic incident with the Korean ambassador to Greece requesting a meeting with the minister of Public Order, and the Greek Chief of Police, to insist on a fair investigation and just punishment for the officers involved.

Jung, who is now on the last leg of his travels in the US, is still waiting for the police verdict but says that whatever the outcome he will never go back to Greece.

“I travelled through Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Armenia but I never felt in as much danger as in Athens,” he says.

“Whenever people ask me if they should visit Greece I tell them to go to Turkey instead.”

Christian Ukwuorji, who also lodged an official complaint against the police with the help of the American Embassy, has now been waiting for more than six months for an outcome.

He would like to see the men who hit him prosecuted, but says he holds out little hope of any justice.

“The police there are very corrupt and nothing will be done about it,” he says. “I have learned that this is how Greece is.”