Evros: Two immigrants froze to death and news from the demostration solidarity there18/12

At Fylakio detention centre (Evros, Greece)18/12

Friday, December 17. 2010. The dead bodies of two sans-papiers immigrants who tried to cross the greco-turkish border were discovered near Nea Vissa village. The two men from Africa froze to death. Nea Vissa is close to the city of Orestiada, were Frontex headquarters are located.
Frontex: Blood on your hands, now also in Evros region. In the end, not really surprising… Oh, you are just a coordinator?! What do you guys in Warsaw and at the border think, which cameras and patrols forced the dead to hide themselves so long and so far from urban terrain that they froze to death?

Yesterday, i.e. Saturday, the 18th of December 2010, saw a mobilisation from the Greek antiracist movement to the Evros region, where most of the border crossings happened the last months and where many hundreds of migrants are being detained under comparably horrible circumstances as in the infamous prison of Pagani.
Three busses and a number of cars converged on Fylakio (and later on Orestiada for a demonstration), where the detention centre is free standing in the middle of nowhere. No other houses closeby, just an industrial site. It is deep winter these days, snow everywhere and freezing cold, especially when the sun goes down.

Police was taking our visit very serious and had blocked access to the site with a bus and a number of riot police. A delegation of doctors, lawyers and translators was able to get inside and get in touch with the detainees, always under the watchful eyes of the staff. We also brought blankets and shoes and other basic necessities.

The inside conditions are very bad. The water pipe froze, so there is no fresh water, and the hygenic conditions are appaling, there is insufficient medical care (you have the choice between cough syrup and aspirin) and the food consists basically of sandwiches every day. There were reports about mistreatment and beatings.

While we were there, about 350 ppl were detained in Fylakio, but two weeks ago, there were about 1,000. So about two-thirds were released recently, and we suspect it was in preparation for our visit. Nevertheless, the cells were totally over-crowded, not giving adequate space to a human being, and that the detainees are never let outside, not even for a short time, is obvious from experience.

The worst however, and that brings us back to Hamis Abdalah Ghasmi, is the uncertainty. Why am I here, for how long will I stay, what will happen to me? These are the questions that are never answered. The detention period varies betwwen two weeks and several months, and apparently, asylum seekers are routinely detained for several months, while people classified as “illegal migrants” are being released earlier. Detention period is also dependent on other factors, like nationality, deportability, etc. The lawyers working in the area say they find no legal remedy to free the detainees.
The obvious question that remains is: By now, there have been numerous reports about what is going on in the Evros region. It is a well establishd fact that human right, international law, European conventions and regulations are openly breached here. The Greek government doesn’t even try to hide it, it even brought in Frontex, as if to drag down the European border guards into this mess. And indeed, according to Der Spiegel, a german magazine, the German part of the Frontex operation has asked to be excluded from certain parts of the operation. So what is the game the Greek government is playing with the lives of the migrants?

 FROM  athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=1240033
 http://frontexplode.eu/2010/12/18/evros-two-immigrants-froze-to-death/
http://w2eu.net/

Greek police clash with students at British solidarity demo

Greek police fired teargas on Thursday in clashes with protesting university students and at least three demonstrators were injured, Reuters witnesses said.

Over 1,000 students tried to break through a police cordon to march to the British embassy in Athens, in solidarity with British students who oppose plans to increase tuition fees, and against austerity and education reforms in Greece.

Protesters carried a banner reading, in English: "Solidarity to the struggle of British students." The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in Britain plans to almost triple tuition fees to up to 9,000 pounds a year.

Three protesters were detained during the clashes and were later released, a police official said.

More protest rallies are planned on December 6 to mark the anniversary of the police killing of a teen-ager, which triggered the country's worst riot in decades in 2008, and on December 15 during a nationwide anti-austerity strike.

Thursday Dec 2, 2010

How's that for solidarity! Thanks Greek folks! Nice one!

Fight against the disastrous diversion dam of Acheloos river greece

"against the dam"

” The dam and the works in Mesochora will be completed by the end of 2010. It has been completed almost 100%. The operation will begin in 2012 and will bring a profit of EUR 30,000,000. We only need to overcome the obstacle of the State Council”. This is what the Minister for the Environment declared in mid-July 2010 concerning the crime against the ecosystem of Acheloos from the pharaonic-like construction projects on the upstream and the total destruction from the attempted diversion of the river in Thessaly. They consider only the quantity of water diverted without reference to the destruction of the ecosystem of the river from its source in southern Pindos to the delta at the mouth of the Ionian Sea.
Acheloos shapes in the areas its waters run through for thousands of years a unique ecosystem with rich biodiversity in flora and fauna, which is directly dependent on its natural flow. It is a major factor in the quality of life of the communities on its banks and beyond the urban perimeter.
After the changes on the lower watercourse of Acheloos in the recent years with the creation of monstrous dams, waste disposal from small and large companies and silt, fertilizers and pesticides from industrialized agricultural production, the “boxing” of a great portion of it, ¨green¨ development of dams and the diversion of the upper reaches of the river, here they come again to complete the disaster. To give the final blow to the Acheloos, by escalating its looting
The capitalists, using as a trojan horse the ideology of “green” growth, continue their disastrous invasion, ignoring the impact on the natural environment and society. They count in euros the capital gain from the looting and prepare a new wave of attacks on nature and man.
In times of crisis of capitalism, political and economic bosses claim as a way-out the false ideology of green development, intending the continuation and deepening of the plundering of nature and society, the restructuring of state and economy under the tutelage of the EU and IMF
Although local initiatives are essential to the dynamics and evolution of this fight, their absence or decline would not mean a stop of the fight, especially since it is not a narrow local environmental issue but a central political issue.
This unprecedented attack that is already planned, will turn to disaster areas forests, mountains, lakes, seas, rivers across the country. The colonialism of capital on public land in every corner of the globe will wreak death and misery to local communities and the transnational bosses will be the ones to gain the wealth from this looting. On the one hand, the billions will accumulate and continue to be capitalized from multinational companies, while on the other hand society, immersed in the middle ages in matters of work, will produce in conditions of modern slavery all this wealth.
Today, the already existing diversion projects for Acheloos, whose completion has been stopped four times so far by the Council of State, is presented as works of “green” development. In essence, big construction companies pillage everything under the protection of the state like conquerors, giving their local fellow partners tidbits of the spoils and giving the local populations promises.
Here comes forth the contribution of the social movements and the importance of social struggle in defense of nature. Not expecting anything substantial from the institutional brokers, we are organizing from below the resistance and we are setting up our levees to stem the assault of state and capital in order to strengthen the ties of solidarity and camaraderie of those fighting and to synthesize our principles and our positions in the direction towards the comprehensive choice of breaking up with the power and antisocial requirements. Although local initiatives are essential to the dynamics and evolution of this fight, their absence or decline would not mean a stop of the fight, especially since it is not a narrow local environmental issue but a central political issue.
Understanding Acheloos as part of the natural world that was looted from the state and capital, common belief of those found from 2007 in Mesochora, was to intervene precisely where destructive activities evolve and contribute to the revival of the struggle against dams and the diversion of the river. In contrast, a logic that wants the fight to confine itself and move away from the point of dams and the diversion of the river where it was focused until now, we think it clearly constrains the fight’s potential,  becoming a disastrous choice, one step before admitting a defeat this thinking itself will lead us to.

The residents of Mesochora, since 1990 chose the dignified way of resistance, and it’s up to them to continue today. Against the local authority (mayors and prefects) and interests of the Public Electricity Company (DEI), the state and construction companies, but also beyond partisan and institutional logics that cultivate illusions – such as that the solution is the demand for the creation of a separate environment ministry – that lead to compromise, fatalism and resignation in the face of an imminent demise of the area.
From our side, seeking the radicalization, expansion and coordination of social struggle from below, we stand in solidarity alongside those who struggle collectively against the plundering of nature. And we consider our fighting presence in the area where the crime of the dams and the river diversion, as necessary and useful for the development and deployment of both the struggle to defend the Acheloos and local communities in its upper reaches, and for the protection of the natural world and society in its totality.
So, after a series of coordinated events and interventions throughout the year in Athens, Patras, Ioannina, Agrinio, Trikala, Karditsa, Larissa and other cities, we are once again for the fourth year on the banks of the Acheloos, in Mesochora in autonomous meeting for the fight.
Against the green development, the dams and the diversion of Acheloos
Against the looting of nature. Fight for Land and Freedom
Independent Meeting for the Fight
(Self-managed hangout, Agrinio / Comrades from Arta, Trikala / Initiative for the fight for Land and Freedom, from Strefi’s Hill, Athens)
Mesochora, Trikala Prefecture, 4-10 August 2010
The text in greek, spanish.

CALL: ALL AT THE PROTEST GATHERING, OUTSIDE THE FRENCH EMBASSY ATHENS

 TUESDAY, 10TH AUGUST, 7AM THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATION, FASCISTIZATION, "CLEANSINGS" WILL NOT PASS

ALL AT THE PROTEST GATHERING, OUTSIDE THE FRENCH EMBASSY IN ATHENS
TUESDAY, 10TH AUGUST, 7AM
THE POLICY OF DISCRIMINATION, FASCISTIZATION, "CLEANSINGS" WILL NOT PASS