This statement, is an answer to the attempt by the government, to criminalize solidarity with the hunger strikers by saying that “those who are responsible for these processes we will search for with the prosecutor’s intervention and those who participated will be held accountable”.
Below is an email address for you to support this performative statement!
Continue reading ‘Performative statement of civil disobedience!’
On thursday the 27th of January, three days after the hunger strike began, the hunger strikers were ordered to leave the law school. Here you will find a description of what happend that day and under what conditions now the hunger strikers are keeping on their stuggles.
We just heard (17h 18)
Police didn’t enter the building of the hunger strikers yet, but they are now preparing. They evacuated the streets around and do not allow anybody to reach the building.
Check our twitter account for updates to this.
Update from Athens (23h 07):
It seems that after hours of negotiations the police operation is avoided. Migrants assembly agreed to move from the law school in order to continue the hunger strike and set the following conditions: the place that they will move will be free of police presence, supporting and solidarity people will also have all time access in the building and that migrants and supporters will leave from the law school publicly, as a demonstration.
Since hours Athens’ center is blocked by thousands of policemen, and hundreds of supporters couldn’t reach the law school building.
The 25th of January is the day on which 300 migrants in Greece started a hunger strike. Their demand is a collective legalisation of all the people excluded from Greek society based on their status – be it asylum seekers, not recognised refugees, illegalised people, exploited migrant labourers. It is not the first hunger strike in Greece where human beings are forced to use such a drastic measure to fight for their rights.
Hunger strikers in Thessaloniki
On January 25, 300 migrant workers went on hunger strike in Athens and Thessaloniki. Their main demand is to be legalized. At this moment, when the financial crisis has violently erupted and ultra-right political forces have come to the fore, this may sound as a maximalist demand. For this reason, we need to pay attention to their demands so as to create symbolic cracks in the system and achieve political victories.
The political establishment and mainstream media in Greece have already started putting pressure to the migrants’ struggle and to those in solidarity. It is urgent to vow now the broadest support possible!
Below the call for signatures. Those that wish to sign are welcome to send their name and profession in the following address: ypografes.allilegyi.stin.apergia@gmail.com
It is also important that individuals, assemblies, groups and organizations express their support through letters of support, press releases and actions of solidarity.
Continue reading ‘[300] Call for Solidarity’
Short Update on the upcoming Hunger Strike for Legalisation in Greece. First of all, there is a new blog that will cover the hunger strike in Greek language: hungerstrike300.espivblogs.net. We will try to get as much content as possible translated on this site. You can follow all updates in this category: hungerstrike300 (rss).
So much for the technicalities. In the meanwhile, about 300 hunger strikers have arrived from Chania, Crete to join the other hunger strikers in Athens and Thessaloniki. Here is a video of their arrival in the port of Patra
The hunger strike will start tomorrow
Yesterday (21st of January 2011) was a bad day for the Dublin II system. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg judged Belgium and Greece for violating European Convention on Human Rights.
Continue reading ‘ECtHR front kicks Dublin II’
Announcement by the Assembly of Migrant Hunger Strikers
We are migrant men and women from all over Greece. We came here due to poverty, unemployment, wars and dictatorships. The multinational companies and their political servants did not leave another choice for us than risking 10 times our lives to arrive in Europe’s door. The West that is depriving our countries while having much better living conditions is our only chance to live as humans. We came (either with regular entry or not) in Greece and we are working to support ourselves and our families. We live without dignity, in the darkness of illegalness in order to benefit employers and state’s services from the harsh exploitation of our labor. We live from our sweat and with the dream, some day, to have equal rights with our Greek fellow workers.
During the last period our life has become even more unbearable. As salaries and pensions are cut and everything is getting more expensive, the migrants are presented as those to blame, as those whose fault is the abjection and harsh exploitation of greek workers and small businessman. The propaganda of fascist and racist parties and groups is nowadays the official state discourse for issues of migration. The far right discourse is reproduced through media when they talk about us. The “proposals” of the far right are announced as governmental policies: wall in Evros, floating detention centers and European army in the Aegean, repression in the cities, massive deportations. They want to convince greek workers that, all in a sudden, we are a threat to them, that we are to blame for the unprecedented attack from their own governments.
The answer to the lies and the cruelty has to be given now and it will come from us, from migrant men and women. We are going in the front line, with our own lives to stop this injustice. We ask the legalization of all migrant men and women, we ask for equal political and social rights and obligations with greek workers. We ask from our greek fellow workers, from every person suffering from exploitation to stand next to us. We ask them to support our struggle. Not to let the lie, the injustice, the fascism and the autarchy of the political and economic elites to be dominant in their own places too; all these conditions that are dominant in our countries and led us to migrate, us and our children, in order to be able to live with dignity.
We don’t have another way to make our voices heard, to make you learn about our rights. Three hundred (300) of us will start a Hunger Strike in Athens and in Thessaloniki, in the 25th of January. We risk our lives, as, one way or another, this is no life for people with dignity. We prefer to die here rather our children to suffer what we have been through.
January 2011
Assembly of migrant hunger strikers
[Update] There are now blogs of the Hunger Strikers:
A short TV report on the situation of Sudanese refugees in Patras, that does for once not try to problematise migration, but focuses on the situation of the protagonists and gives a voice to them.
Hürriyet daily alerts us to the fact that the Greek Parliament has passed the long announced overhaul of the country’s migration law.
The new law removes control over asylum seekers from the police and hands it over to a new asylum service that will deal with a backlog of some 47,000 applicants, many of them awaiting approval for years. The law will also put in place a procedure for appealing rejected asylum requests.
Citizen’s Protection Minister Christos Papoutsis said the law would allow Greece to set up a screening process under which illegal migrants “will be voluntarily repatriated or expelled.”
We had previously reported on the screening centres: Screening, Detention, Centres
noborder09lesvos clandestina.org schengen visa “dangle” birds of immigrants