By clandestina
Lampedusa is not the only death zone,
concentration camps are not a nightmare buried in the past
dates and numbers in the Greek Guantanamo calendar…
August 4, 2012
On August 4th, Greek institutional racism celebrated the anniversary of the 1936 military dictatorship by launching the “Xenios Zeus” operation, a spectacular celebration of mass arrests of sans-papiers in the center of Athens… The police operation was named “Xenios Zeus” (what a wicked sense of humor!), after the god who protected strangers in Ancient Greece. The reasons justifying the operation went back to some contested conception of Bronze Age history: “From the Dorian invasion, 4,000 years ago, the country has never accepted such a large scale invasion … migration might be a bigger problem than the economic crisis” (Nikos Dendias, Minister of Public Order, August 4, 2012).
7,000: The number of sans-papiers immigrants currently detained in concentration camps in Greece. To that should be added an unreported number of undocumented imprisonments of migrants in police stations throughout the country.
77,526: The number of immigrants captured by the Greek police since the beginning of the “Xenios Zeus” police operation, in the city of Athens only. The vast majority of them were “legal” immigrants, the number of …read more
From: Clandestine