Greece: 39 Months at City Plaza for Refugees Ends
- Details
- Published on Monday, 15 July 2019 02:16
- Written by editor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1861 ... July 15, 2019
______________________________________________
Greece: 39 Months at City Plaza for Refugees Ends
Economic and Political Refugee Solidarity Initiative
On July 10th, 2019, the keys of squatted City Plaza, Athens, Greece, were handed back to the former employees of the hotel, to whom the mobile equipment in the building belongs. All refugees living at City Plaza have been moved to safe housing within the city.
On 22 April 2016, the Economic and Political Refugee Solidarity Initiative squatted the empty City Plaza building with a two-fold goal: to create, on the one hand, a space of safety and dignity in which to house refugees in the centre of the city and, on the other, to create a centre of struggle against racism, borders, and social exclusion; for the freedom of movement and for the right to stay.
The decision to squat was taken at a critical political juncture. On 18th March 2016, one month before the squat opened, the EU-Turkey deal to restrict the movement of refugees to Europe was signed. It was the deal that marked the... end of the "summer of migration" -- the period which began in July 2015 when, under pressure from approximately one million people, the European borders "opened." This was the deal that turned the islands of the Aegean into a sort of prison for migrants, and which turned mainland Greece into a trap for over 60,000 people.
The SYRIZA-ANEL government of the time, following its capitulation to the neoliberal management of the economic crisis, took on the implementation of a policy of control, deterrence and discouragement of migration. With the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and NATO patrolling the Aegean, with detention centres such as Moria on the islands, with awful camps as the only policy for housing refugees on the mainland, by punishing solidarity and the struggle of refugees. During that time, the housing issue was very pressing. The refugees who had arrived in Athens were either homeless or were being housed in the awful camps of Elliniko, Malakasa, or the port of Piraeus, while hundreds of people slept in tents or cardboard boxes in city streets and squares.
