During several collectives’ assemblies which we participated in, a more comprehensive description of the situation was requested. We gathered some facts so as to summarize the migration issue in Igoumenitsa and to show that the situation tends to a head
(19 January 2011).
Despite the fact that Igoumenitsa accepts immigrants the last 15 years, the ‘migration’ starts to exist as an issue in the local society of this northwest town from 2007 onwards, when around 200 Kurds were arrested with the well known method ‘cleaner,’ were carried in the stadium of Igoumenitsa and from there summarily in a concentration camp in Alexandroupoli (northern Greece), to eventually be delivered to Turkish authorities.
With the completion of the projects in the new port of Igoumenitsa, the town starts to accept more and more immigrants from Sudan, Somalia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Morocco, Algeria, whose only goal is to flee towards the rest of Europe, as they say that Greece is for them a huge prison.
In 2008 fourteen immigrants (two underage) lost their lives in a refrigerator truck, while this was the time when the Kurdish Arivan Osman Abdullah was tortured wildly by port cops in Igoumenitsa and eventually died. Since then, several initiatives were taken outside Igoumenitsa as well, on the issue of Arivan’s assassination, but the case has so far remained on paper and the port cops circulate free as if nothing happened, while a witness whom the cops chased openly the following time was so terrified that he didn’t intend to give evidence (the witness had lost a lung from bomb gases in Iraq, he could not run and the cops sent trained dogs to hunt him, while they were kick backing him all the time).
The incident of the murder is answered with the first major demo compared to the town’s standards, with support from comrades from the surrounding areas. From this point the activity around the migration issue starts while we become receivers of a clearer picture of what really happens at the edge of the city when at the same time the rest of the city life continues as normal…
Cops invasions in makeshift camps of immigrants and burning of their minimum personal belongings, mass arrests and beatings of immigrants, attacks of cop dogs, night chasing… Kurdish immigrant from Iraq is identified by cops in port of Igoumenitsa during a truck control. The cops sent him away and leave him free, after they kick backed him when a cop hangs in the arms and threatens him that if he catches him again he will shoot him. Also Kurdish immigrant from Iraq was lured by a car on Egnatia Road. The driver stops the car; the cops come and say to the Greek driver to leave the place, since the man lured is a foreigner. The driver of course goes away, and the migrant is transported by ambulance to the Medical Center of Igoumenitsa and then to Filiaton Hospital suffering very serious injuries.
One more Kurdish immigrant was found with ten stitches on the head, beaten by a truck driver at the port of Igoumenitsa while everyday Somalis, Sudanese, Kurds, Palestinians, Moroccans and uprooted people are treated like second grade people when at the same time 15- and 16-year-old boys from Afghanistan look for food in the garbage.
Countless incidents of brutal racist violence make the lives of these people even more difficult: DI.AS motorcycle police force mobsters chasing the immigrants, port cops and all rest kinds of cops beat them; supermarkets refuse them the entry, “indignant” citizens’ intimidating shoot in the air…
Currently about 450 people (immigrants, refugees) with serious diseases (chronic respiratory problems, diabetes, 
scabies, etc.) and serious injuries roam the city, living in groups with makeshift camps in the surrounding thickets, lacking medical care, food, clothing and elementary hygiene. Together with those who are stowed in wretched places of detention (illegal under the bourgeois legality), in squalid conditions (the detainees left without food and water for days), the number appears at times to exceed 500 people. Yet these numbers are not stable as they change regularly.
Underage detention in makeshift shaped hallway of the building of the port, mothers with psychological problems due to imprisonment in the same room… the death of Azif, 18-year-old youngster found dead in truck welded cache… events deliberately concealed, and so much more that we certainly don’t know of…
In a small society like the one of Igoumenitsa police-State enforcement is reasonable to influence the consciousnesses of the local population which in majority consent to this situation with their silence. And as if all this were not enough, fascist ‘indignant’ citizen, very well-known now, kickback shoots against 5 immigrants, severely injuring one of them. Fascist gang operates in town’s streets with the tolerance of police, beating and torturing immigrants whom they find alone sending them to hospital.
The last case so far has to do with one more assassination attempt against an immigrant, where driver shoot an immigrant on head almost in contact from an open window.
IMMIGRANTS ARE OUR SOCIAL AND CLASS BROTHERS AND SISTERS
NOTHING WILL BE LEFT UNANSWERED FROM NOW ON
Cell of Freedom squat (Katalipsi Keli tis Eleftherias)
against the contradictions of the existent
Contact: katalipsikeli@gmail.com