Nikos Romanos’ name is closely tied to the equally well known Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the 15-year-old boy who was shot and killed by police officer Epaminondas Korkoneas in Athens, on December 6, 2008. Only 15 years of age himself, Romanos witnessed his best friend die in front of his eyes. The murder sparked weeks of nationwide rioting.

Several years later, Romanos was caught together with four of his comrades while trying to flee from a bank robbery in Velvento. Following their arrest they were beaten up under police custody to such extent that the photographs released by the police had to be overtly photoshopped to hide their injuries.

Nikos Romanos, Andreas-Dimitris Bourzoukos, Giannis Mihailidis and Dimitris Politis openly stated that they are anarchists and revolutionaries. They were subsequently convicted on the charges of armed robbery, while the initial terrorism charges failed to stand in court. Many refer back to the speech delivered by the State Attorney Grigoris Peponis during the trial for the robbery in Velvento: “It is the first time I see a robbery in which they [the perpetrators] set the hostages free, while during the police chase, they did not use the heavy weapons they had, neither did they shoot the policemen, nor did they use the hostage as a human shield in order to escape.”

Last spring, while in prison, Nikos Romanos succeeded in passing the Greek entrance exams for university and was admitted to a faculty in Athens. Since September 2014, the beginning of the academic term, he has been eligible for educational furloughs (exit permits) to regularly attend classes.

The Ministry of Justice and the President of Greece, Karolos Papoulias, wanted to award Romanos and other inmates for their academic success. However, Romanos, being an anarchist, refused to attend the ceremony as this would go against his principles. The rejection of this invitation from the head of state and the refusal to accept the €500 prize money resulted in a clearly vindictive denial, by the prison council, of Romanos’s application for prison furlough to attend classes.

Many believe this is part of a more generalized vengeful tactic of the state to those resisting the new prison system. The type-C prisons in Greece have some similarities with the F-type prisons in Turkey. They are intended for “dangerous criminals” and the “ideological enemies of the state,” which includes revolutionary, political and rebellious prisoners — as well as those who voice their protest against injustices in jail.

On Monday, November 10, 2014, with anarchy forever in his heart (as he wrote), Nikos Romanos commenced his hunger strike. He thereby reaffirmed his anarchist principles and explained his motivation in a statement that laid claim to his lawful entitlement to educational leave from prison.

In his own words:

In addition to being instruments of control and repression, laws are also used for maintenance of balances or what is otherwise called social contracts; they reflect socio-political correlations and partially form certain positions for the conduct of the social war.

This is why I want to make my choice as clear as possible: I am not defending their legitimacy — on the contrary, I use them as political blackmail to gain breaths of freedom from the devastating condition of incarceration.

On November 24, Romanos was transferred to the Athens General Hospital Gennimatas, where he remains — under strong police surveillance — to this day. His transfer was accompanied by an official document of the prison prosecutor, who audaciously stated that the hospital doctors bear responsibility for whatever happens to him, thus indirectly urging the hospital staff to enforce force-feeding.

Nikos Romanos’s physician, Pantelia (Lina) Vergopoulou, reported on November 28 that he is in critical condition, faced with life-threatening complications. His doctor warns that “it is no longer his health that is in danger, but his life,” given that “from one day to the next he may suffer a kidney or a heart failure.”

According to Romanos’ lawyer, Fragkiskos Ragkousis, Romanos has lost 17 kilos (over 35 pounds) and is now fighting for his life. With a heart rate of 170 bpm, Ragousis said that unless there is a change, cardiac arrest is considered “to be expected.” He also denounced the forced-feeding ordered by the district attorney director of the prison, stating that “this is equal to torture of the prisoner.”

During Romanos’ battle, other prisoners joined him as a sign of support and comradery. On November 17, anarchist prisoner Yannis Michailidis went on hunger strike as a sign of solidarity with the struggle of Nikos Romanos and as of November 28 he in turn also needed to be hospitalized in Piraeus general hospital Tzaneio, after he was diagnosed with bradycardia.

On November 30, Andreas-Dimitris Bourzoukos and Dimitris Politis, anarchist prisoners and comrades of Romanos, released a statement saying that:

As a minimum token of solidarity with Nikos, we will also go on a hunger strike as of Monday December 1 — like comrade Yannis Michailidis, who is conducting a hunger strike since the 17th of November — until his claim is met. Together until the end, together until victory.

With fears that the health of the two initial hunger strikers may be imminently and irreversibly damaged, many solidarity actions have taken place both within Greece and in other parts of the world. Nikos’ comrades declared to stand by his side in his struggle and support every move he desires and must take to accompany his battle, and will support every expression of aggressive solidarity that is needed. Romanos also declared that “solidarity means attack” and added an interesting post scriptum: “To all the armchair ‘fighters’, the professional humanists, the ‘sensitive’ intellectuals and spiritual personages: I say to you good riddance in advance.”

Rather than defend the legitimacy of state laws, Nikos Romanos is using one of the few means of struggle at his disposal in a state of captivity: placing his body as a barricade to get a breath of freedom. All comrades stand firm and continue their hunger strike.

The passion for freedom is stronger than all prisons!

Danai Limneou is an activist in the anti-authoritarian/anarchist movement in Greece.

Source of the article: http://roarmag.org/2014/12/hunger-strike-romanos-anarchist/

Source of the featured image: Dromografos

The deaths come as Morocco, under pressure from Spain, struggles to limit the rising tide of sub-Saharan Africans heading to its northern shores in a desperate quest to reach mainland Europe.

Hundreds of migrants headed out to sea from the Moroccan town of Fnideq at 6 am (0600 GMT) in a mass attempt to circumvent the six-metre (20-foot) barriers that mark the land border with the Ceuta enclave, Spanish and Moroccan officials said.

Moroccan police pulled the bodies of nine migrants, including a woman, from the waters near the Spanish border post, the photographer said.

Authorities in Fnideq said around 200 migrants attempted the crossing, while the authorities in Ceuta said around 400 had taken part in the desperate bid to reach EU territory, braving the strong currents of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Moroccan coastguard vessels picked up 150 of the migrants, while the rest turned back to shore, the official MAP news agency reported.

The head of a rights group in the region, Mohamed Benaissa, said many of the migrants were from Cameroon.

Officials in Ceuta said that before heading to the beach, they clashed with police as they tried to enter the Spanish territory via a bridge used to transport goods.

“The immigrants adopted a very aggressive violent attitude, throwing rocks and other objects at the Moroccan and Spanish security forces,” said a spokesman for the authorities in Ceuta.

The Spanish police managed to drive them away using anti-riot gear, including rubber bullets.

“This drama shows once again the risks taken by illegal migrants, who put their lives in danger,” the authorities in Fnideq said.

Storming the barriers

Ceuta is the northernmost point on the coast of northwest Africa and lies just 15 kilometres (9 miles) across the strait from the Spanish mainland.

Along with Spain’s other north African enclave Melilla, it has the European Union’s only land borders in Africa.

They are both seen as stepping stones to a better life in Europe for sub-Saharan migrants, who often risk their lives attempting to enter the tiny Spanish enclaves, either by sea or by storming the barriers separating them from Morocco.

On Sunday, the bodies of five presumed migrants thought to have been trying to reach Spain in an inflatable boat were found in the Nador area of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, near Melilla.

According to the Rif Human Rights Association, more than 40 migrants died trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla from Morocco over the past two years.

Many more attempt the perilous journey across the Strait of Gibraltar, often in overloaded makeshift boats.

Spain is just one of the southern European countries facing a mounting influx of African migrants and asylum-seekers.

Earlier this week, Italy said the number of asylum-seekers landing on its shores rose tenfold in January, compared with the same month last year.

Rome launched a military and humanitarian response last October, after hundreds of migrants drowned in two shipwreck tragedies near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Faced with the same problem, Spain last year began to put barbed wire along Melilla’s 11-kilometre (seven-mile) border fence in a bid to deter the migrants, drawing criticism from rights groups.

The authorities in Tangiers, Morocco’s main northern city, also said they were beefing up surveillance along the coast, where they claim to intercept scores of migrants trying to reach Europe each week.

Morocco estimates there are around 30,000 illegal immigrants on its soil, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa.

In early January, the government launched an operation to regularise their situation and grant them residency permits, in the face of allegations that several migrants had died at the hands of police in 2013.

Source: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140206/9-migrants-drown-trying-reach-spanish-enclave-morocco

This is an email sent by one of Reinform’s members who is at the moment in Athens, Greece. Yesterday she participated in the protest against the Greek Coast Guard which is allegedly accused of the drowning of 12 migrants (3 women and 9 children) off the coast of Farmakonisi island.

Hello everybody,

Yesterday I attended the interview that 3 of the 16 survivors gave to several political organizations for the rights of immigrants and Greek journalists at Sintagma Square.

I was shocked to hear what the 3 men, Abdel Sabur Azizi, EHsanula and Fada Mohumad Ahmadi, experienced during the night of 21st January . They were exhausted and shocked by the loss of their own family members but they had summoned the courage to be able to answer all the questions.

I heard one of them saying that his wife and his child jumped into the water after they got panicked when their boat was towed by the Greek Coast Guard which was heading at high speed for the Turkish coast. When the man saw his wife and his child sinking into the water, he started screaming and asking for life-jackets but the Coast Guards were just swearing at him and ignored him. “Other Coast Guards were shooting in the air with their guns trying to intimidate us and they shouted back to us: Fuck you, we will kill you all”, said the same man.

One journalist asked the 3 migrants, how it is possible that only men managed to survive. The answer was that they managed to climb on the vessel of the Greek Coast Guard which could not move because its engine was stopped. While they struggling to climb on the vessel, the Guards were trying to kick them back but in the meantime Turkish boats approached and the Greek Coat Guards were panicked.

Afterwards the survivors were brought to a posh restaurant on the nearby island of Leros. Later on they were transferred to the Police Station of Leros where they spent the night with their wet clothes still on and also without any food and water. At the Police Station they were asked to sign several papers with the help of a translator who spoke Farsi but not their language. When members of the UNHCR showed up at the Police Station, then the Police officers changed their attitude and they were pretending that they following the process in order to help the migrants.

“They only thing we want now is to find the bodies of our family members and bury them”, said another migrant.

After the interview was finished, several representatives of the political organizations talked about the responsibility of the Greek Government to this crime and asked the Greek authorities to take under consideration the testimonies of the survivors during the judicial process in order the perpetrators of this crime to be punished. Afterwards all demonstrators walked to the Police Station of Omonia where official declarations were submitted by the organizations demanding the immediate judicial process for those ones who are behind this crime as well as the application of the law for the rights of migrants .

I am wondering now who is really responsible for this crime? Who is allowing Coast Guards to behave like that? Isn’t Prime Minister Antonis Samaras who is blaming the migrants for the hunger of the Greek people and at the same time he is boosting for the fact that EU has now accepted officially the term “illegal migrant” ? Isn’t Merchant Marine Minister Militadis Varvitsiotis who is trying to deny that a crime has been committed by saying that all these testimonies is an exaggerated and made up story to stain the honour of Greece?

Best regards,

V.I.

26 January 2014, Athens

Indeed the contradictions involved in the process cause complications since there are not only white people who come as tourists in Greece. So plenty of non-white tourists were brutally detained and beaten up by the Greek police since August 2012 that ‘Xenios Dias’ started. Moreover, the mainstream Greek perceptions of Europe and the West these days are shifting once again, since Greek government officials and their corporate media often blame the evil North Europeans for the austerity. Indeed the same governmental officials make also statements about the benefits of austerity.

Within such confused socio-cultural context, since the 1980s, the ideological elevation of a ‘Europe-ness’ took place, peaking in the 1990s in the name of the so-called European integration. Under this slogan on the one hand, the policies of European integration correctly led to a loosening of the internal borders for people living within the EU. On the other hand, this was accompanied with the militarisation of the external European borders leading to ‘Fortress Europe’, a continent where non-Europeans are often condemned to death for their effort to cross the sealed common border. Frontex, national borders police forces, and coastguards are just some of the apparatuses dedicated to the militarization of the European border.

So along the so-called ‘Europeanization’ of Greek state’s institutions we had the ideological upgrading of the Greek borders into European ones. Greece was located very much on the margin of that undetermined Europeness as the most south-eastern EU (and previously EEC) member country. Surrounded by non-members for decades. So it became the favoured territory for the application of at least two xenophobic projects: the Greek one and the European one, often in tension with each other, but usually in collaboration. This process in ideological level was confirming a much desired admission of Greece to the European family and even worse as a significant player in the European securitisation project.

This anti-migratory dogma did not limit itself to the borders; it was soon matched with the ongoing process of the militarization of public-space policing in European cities. The case of the Greek border guards symbolizes perfectly this extension of border-control security tactics to urban spaces; in 2010, it was reported that out of the 510 border guards employed in the country, 473 were, in fact, serving in Athens.6 Indeed, deployment of border guards in cities has become standard practice these days; for example, in the summer of 2013 UKBA organized a large-scale operation in London’s underground stations stopping and checking migrants and people of migratory origin. So security and military techniques developed supposedly to protect the borders of a nation-state from a military attack (from the organized army of another nation-state) have been applied against unarmed migrants on the borders or on the city centres.

It is not simply the deployment of border guards in the cities; the urban policing itself targets the ethnic Other. In the case of Greece, the semi-military police operation ‘Sweep’, in the early 1990s, targeted migrants in the Omonoia7 area of central Athens and elsewhere. However, this paled in comparison to what was to follow. In 2005, operation ‘Polis’ led to over 200,000 people across the country being stopped and searched, and although the emphasis was on youths and migrants, they were not the only victims. Today the ongoing operation ‘Xenios Zeus’ has resulted in over 84,000 migrants being detained between August 2012 and February 2013, targeting everyone who appears to be foreign.[2]

Such operations imply and apply a state-directed exclusion of the population of the cities, which takes spatial characteristics since it displaces people from where they live and locks them in police stations temporarily until their documents are checked or detention camps if they are arrested. The Other is gradually exiled or declared as undesired from parts of the city and more generally public spaces. Officially, this phenomenon is not based explicitly on racial criteria – as neo-Nazis demand; rather, the formal state authorities’ claim is that they are trying to tackle the ‘crime’ of living without proper permission. In the case of UKBA operations or the operations of the respective French police, some of the officers stopping and searching non-white passers-by are themselves non-white, precisely because the European state authorities are aware of the racism involved in the process, and there is the hope to give the idea that it is not racist since non-white people are the physical agents of racism.

However, as Kassidiaris’ case [3] suggests, you do not have to be white in order to apply fascism. By extension, as the example of police and border police forces physically targeting migrants en masse implies, you do not have to be explicitly and openly a neo-Nazi state apparatus in order to apply policies of racial discrimination in the streets and pave the way for the actual neo-Nazis. The cases of migrants who have been stopped and checked for their papers by Golden Dawn members, often in order to be beaten up afterwards, are not rare. The distance between anti-migratory policing in Athens and the Golden Dawn’s ban of migrants from certain public spaces was not that long.

by Dimitris Dalakoglou

A longer version of this article was published as: Dalakoglou. D. (2013) ‘From the Bottom of the Aegean Sea’ to Golden Dawn: Security, Xenophobia and the Politics of Hate in Greece. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 3

Notes

[1]: One of the main slogans of Anarchists in Greece is ‘On the mines of Evros River (the river that marks the land border between Greece and Turkey) and on the bottom of Aegean Sea is built the security of each European’ (‘Στις νάρκες του ′Eβρου, στον πάτο του Aιγαίου, χτίζεται η ασφάλεια του κάθε Eυρωπαιου’).

[2] Given that this operation was implemented, ostensibly, with the intention of tackling crime level (implying a direct link between migrants and criminality) it has had very poor results indeed, as scarcely any of those detained was guilty of any offence other than lacking proper documents. Then the approximately 5,000 (by 9 September 2013) migrants who were arrested as part of Xenios Zeus have been transferred to and locked in new detention centres that were opened by the debt-ridden state. It is worth noting that another big public work completed by Greece during 2012 was the fence along the Turkish-Greek border in order to prevent migration.

[3] When the extreme-Right online forum ‘Stormfront’ published his photograph, in August 2013, setting the question to its users whether they felt he looked like a white man. Kassidiaris’ fellow Nazis were quite vocal on the subject; most of them concluding that he does not look like a white man.

On Saturday night, violent riots broke out in the Detention Centre of Migrants in Amigdaleza, ironically called Guest Centre for Migrants). It is well documented that the detention conditions are horrific and that most of the prisoners are held illegally since they have not committed any crime nor have they been tried and sentenced by any court.

Following the riots, the “guests” in Amygdaleza already count 48 hours locked in containers, running the risk of heat stroke. In most f the containers there is no electricity and no air-conditioning, in some the water supply is cut.

The police is responding to the riot Amigdaleza with even more crackdown, choosing to set up a nightmarish scene of tension that exacerbates the already deadlocked polities of the Ministry of Public Order and brings even closer the possibility of a new rebellion.

During yesterday’s inspection, the physician in charge of the Centre, Elpida Efthimiatou, found bruises on many prisoners during the intervention of the riot police, who apparently released their grudge to any prisoner found on their way. There are even unconfirmed allegations of gunfire during the police intervention. According to the police, ten police officers were injured by stones during the revolt.

Signs of beating

The lawyers who saw the apprehended detainees reported allegations of brutal beatings at the Migration Office of the Police, where they were taken. 83 prisoners have been brought so far to the District Attorney´s office, all on the same felony charges (rioting, escape attempt, arson, endangering of human life, grievous bodily harm, verbal abuse). Police arrested yesterday two of the ten prisoners that had escaped and are still looking for the rest.

At the same time, the police and the Ministry of Public Order, with the assistance of the media, is trying to manage the event, brandishing the risk of undocumented immigrants, while failing to mention that the inmates in Amygdaleza are not detained for any criminal offense, but only for administrative reasons –in many cases because they had expired work permits and have not had the chance to renew them, due mostly to bureaucratic obstacles.

The conditions

Spiros Rizakos, NGO Aitima:

As it has repeatedly been decided by European courts, our country subjects the imprisoned refugees and migrants to inhuman and degrading treatment. The result? Prisoner suicides, death of an ill prisoner and repeated riots. Our country is not just ignoring the decisions of the European courts, but is leading the situation to the extreme regardless of the consequences. But respect for international law, human rights, human dignity is ultimately a matter of democracy and civilisation. The question that becomes more and more compelling is whether we will accept as a country and as citizens the violation of basic values of democracy and humanity, whether we will enter into this dangerous path.

Yanna Kourtowic, Netword for the Political and Social Rigths:

The issue is not the conditions of detention. Because even if the conditions were not horrific, and the containers were not boiled hot, if there were sheds and trees, if the food was not deplorable (from which some catering company is becoming rich, with 5.87euro per person daily to provide a piece of bread), even if there were doctors and hygienic and cleaning products, the detention camps of Mr. Dendias [1]would still be places of humiliation and torture according to international courts that repeatedly condemned Greece over this. Places outside the legal framework, where people are sentenced without having committed any crime, without having been tried and without time-limit on the detention. What judge will try them?

Eva Kosse, Human Rights Watch:

What happened in Amygdaleza was expected. International human rights groups have documented scandalous conditions of detention of migrants and asylum seekers in Greece. While the Greek government has taken some modest steps to improve the conditions of detention, migrants and asylum seekers, including children, are still being held in inappropriate conditions, often characterised as inhumane and degrading. Under international law, migrants who do not have permission to enter or remain in a country may be subject to detention, in some cases. However, the detention should be judged on an individual basis and should not be the rule. Extradition procedures should be followed with due speed and diligence so as to minimise the time of detention. The detention of asylum seekers should remain a last resort. The objective of the detention policy applied by Greece seems to be more the punishment of migrants rather than their extradition, which is expressly prohibited by the international law of human rights.

—

[1] Nikos Dendias is Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection. He is the political supervisor of a Police Force that openly beats and tortures, the inspirer of pogrom-like operations such as Zeus (against migrants) and Thetis (against drug addicts) and responsible for the eviction of the longest-standing squats of the city (which have been cultural centres and strongholds against the neo-nazi Golden Dawn)

 

http://www.x-pressed.org/?xpd_article=amigdaleza-the-greek-abu-graib#!prettyPhoto

 

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