Greece: 30 detention centers to be built, while police and Nazis join efforts against immigrants and leftists (OL-FTGS)

Police and Nazis have started mass operations in Athens targeting people of colour and antifascists – 30 new detention centres to be built by the government in Greece

The Parties are preparing for elections and the government that has cultivated for several months -via government friendly media- xenophobic rhetoric, more or less blaming migrants for the economic crisis, announced that 30 new detention centres will be built in the country. Meanwhile, police is carrying out daily mass ‘sweeper operations’ as they call them, this in fact means hundreds of police officers invading without warning an urban district, blockading entire building blocks in the centre of the city and then they raid the area detaining everyone who is of colour. On Thursday 29/03 they detained 1,226 people and eventually charged 54 of them.

Parallel to the formal targeting of migrants by the police, the neo-nazis who have been enhanced politically operate as well, beating up people of colour in the neighbourhoods of Athens but also attacking to antifascists, like they did a few days ago in the University of Athens, Physics and Mathematics department, where they injured students. A few days ago Skaramanga Squat in Athens issued a communiqué responding to the recent damages to motorcycles parked in front of the squat by policemen and men in helmets titled: ‘When the boss does not feel safe, then he looses the leash of his dogs’.

The NGO-run Network for Recording the Racist Violence, in its first pilot research recorded 63 incidents of explicit racist violence taking place the last 3 months of 2011. These are just the incidents that was possible to be recorded as many of them pass unrecorded since the victims might be people without documents, so they do not even go to the hospital.

From: Occupied London - From the Greek Streets.