As everyone focuses on the third memorandum with its debts and endless debates another crisis continues on. All across Europe, from Greece to Italy and Kos to Calais, people trying to move across supposedly open modern borders are being abandoned, abused or murdered. Over summer the situation on the Greek islands has got worse as more people fleeing war and poverty arrive with nothing.

Normally the Greek islands are more than equipped to deal with the arrival of several thousand foreign people during the summer months. There are hotels, over priced restaurants, and plenty of entertainments for tourists and yet for people fleeing war there are only police batons, threats and deprivation. On the island of Kos in recent days the police have threatened refugees with knives, dispersed them with fire extinguishers and batons and corralled hundreds into an overcrowded and under supplied stadium. Personally I find the last image the most shocking- in the past stadiums have quickly become the sites of genocide.

It is estimated that over a 100,000 people have arrived in the territories of the Greek state so far this year. It isn’t really surprising that the currently bankrupt Greek state is struggling to find the resources to help these people, assuming it ever intended to anyway. However, they seem to be able to find extra riot police to confront the refugees easily enough. Many of the islands close to the Turkish coast are now hosting several thousand people on their way through the Greek territories and other than trying to police the situation the state seems to have little idea what to do.

With this clear failure of the state, self-organised groups have sprung up to try and provide some of the basic needs for the people passing through the Greek territories. In the islands, locals, and some tourists, have been doing what they can to provide food and supplies. Groups like solidarity Kos and various charities and NGO’s are doing what they can on a daily basis people to provide for the basic needs of migrants. In Athens there has been a large response to the needs of the people camped out in the Pedion Areos park. I suppose it was fortunate for those people that at least they found themselves close to Exarcheia where self-organisation isn’t a new concept.

For it’s part the Syriza government has not just done nothing to help the refugees but they have actively disrupted the solidarity movement. The destruction of the occupied centre of Kentauros in Athens, which before its destruction had been gathering supplies for the refugees, shows the state’s continued hostility to self-organisation, especially when people start to do the things the state is meant to do itself. Eventually the Greek state sent a ferry boat to the islands close to the Turkish shore to act as both a temporary accommodation and a documentation centre. The bureaucratic desire to identify and document migrants means that people are being held on the islands, either on the ferry boat, in the streets, or in abandoned buildings, while the police often slowly and haphazardly try to fill in their records.

Several hundred people have now been transferred from the islands to the mainland but more arrive each day. Once on the mainland people are either left to look after themselves or to try and continue their journeys to northern Europe at the risk of being stopped at every border. While the politicians and economists count the various numbers and the cash for Syriza’s memorandum, a more real, more human tragedy continues.
via:thebarbariantimes

http://thebarbariantimes.espivblogs.net/desperate-situation-for-migrants-in-greece/

http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=20778#more-20778