Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that a refugee named Omar Diallo suffered injuries during a recent attack on the street in Athens that required several stitches. Back in his home country of Guinea the 28-year-old was used to violence, but the hostile racism he has encountered in a Greece beset by crisis is a significant shock for him.
In the quarter of Athens where Diallo lives, an area full of empty, graffiti-covered shops with "for rent" and "for sale" signs, it is becoming more and more dangerous to be a dark-skinned foreigner. "There are places here where we do not have the right to walk, or where we can walk only in groups," he said.
Diallo was alone on the street when he was assaulted. The attack was quick and quiet, without any demands or racist insults.
"Four people assaulted me on the street. One hit me on the head with something, I fell to the ground, and they beat me. They ran away when they were done," he says.
Diallo fled his West African home in September 2009 after a massacre broke out at a stadium in connection with a public assembly convened by the opposition. His father was among the 157 people who were killed and Diallo ended up in prison.
After his release, Diallo decided to leave his homeland, as he had begun to fear for his life. However, just a few years after he succeeded in reaching Athens in hope of a better life there, he ended up lying on the ground with blood flowing from his head.
Police officers discovered Diallo and took him to hospital. His case is by no means exceptional.
"I saw a young Pakistani beaten up right in front of me by two giants who ran the length of an entire bus to get to him and kick him out onto the street. I didn’t interfere because I was scared to death," a French pensioner who has been living in Athens for about one year told the AFP.
Officials who follow racially motivated assaults recorded 154 of them last year; of those, 107 occurred in Athens. In at least eight cases the victims or witnesses said they recognized their assailants were persons connected to the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.
Diallo, who studied international relations in Conakry, feels that the number of racist attacks has been rising ever since conservative Greek PM Antonis Samaras took power in June 2012. Golden Dawn also made it into the Greek Parliament for the first time then, where its MPs have 18 seats in the 300-seat assembly. "They feel politically strengthened," Diallo said.
According to a recent report on racially motivated violence in Greece, only 24 of the victims of racially motivated assault in 2012 ever filed formal charges with police. "As far as I can tell, the assailants aren’t trying to kill anyone, but they are causing visible injuries in order to disseminate fear in those communities," said Doctor Nikitas Kanakis, secretary-general of the Greek branch of the NGO Doctors of the World.
Kanakis has long done his best to draw attention to this problem and the victims of racially motivated assaulted often turn directly to him instead of going to hospital. Thanks to his reputation, Kanakis has been able to draw attention to several such assaults, including the case of a 14-year-old Afghani boy whose face was sliced up by violent offenders using a broken bottle in a suburb of Athens dominated by neo-Nazis. "Racist assaults take place practically every day at various places around the country, but primarily in Athens," says Jorgos Tsabropulos, the head of the Athens office of the UNHCR.
The government’s response to this problem is full of internal contradictions. On the one hand, Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias, who has condemned Golden Dawn’s assaults as unacceptable, recently told the BBC that "Golden Dawn is unequivocally a neo-Nazi party."
Dendias said a special police unit had been created to fight racist crime and that "people who behave illegally should end up in prison." However, in the same interview he more or less declared that "creating new laws won’t help", even though Greece is under pressure from the Council of Europe to adopt new legislation in this area.
Dendias said the rise in Golden Dawn’s influence and its racist, xenophobic posturing is due to an influx of undocumented refugees into Greece, whom he called "an enormous burden on Greek society". He has called on the EU to provide Greece financial assistance so the country can better put up with rising numbers of refugees.
