Operation Zeus

[Sabby]

...wut. This just makes me shake my head :/. The report is a month old, but there's a more recent update linked within, and the story was just relayed to me through email.

Operation Zeus in August last year marked the start of an ugly reminder of a European past that we thought we had long buried.  Nearly 60 years after the end of the Second European War, migrants were round up from the streets of Greece and shoved unceremoniously into internment camps.  In May, women working in the sex industry were pulled from the streets, forcibly tested for HIV, publicly humiliated and imprisoned.  In March, they rounded up drug users from the streets of Athens and put them too into camps.  Last month in Thessaloniki they came for trans gender people.

On the 30th of May, the Greek authorities stepped up their cleansing of the streets of the undesirables.  The daily checks of papers, papers, papers whenever someone non-white encounters a police officer sees numerous migrants hauled to police stations, and many imprisoned in one of the hellholes that pass for the detention camps of Greece.  In April alone 10, 000 people were stopped in these checks, and there are currently 5, 000 languishing in the official camps with an unknown number in temporary facilities such as police cells and shipping containers.  Last month Dendias announced a doubling of the capacity of these camps, although with no commitment to closing the alternative facilities.

Greek citizens, drugs users, homeless people and women working in the sex industry, have also been targeted under these sweeps where they are hauled to police stations, forcibly tested for HIV and in some cases imprisoned among with the migrants in the internment camps.  As the graffiti is cleaned off the shop facades in anticipation of the summer tourist influx, the streets are being cleansed of undesirables.

On the 30th of May, a new group of undesirables was identified.  Trans gender people. For the last week, daily raids have been taking place in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city.  Under the pretense that of checking that the person is not involved in the sex industry trans people are being rounding up and arrested.  Their details are taken and they are detained for several hours.  On release they are warned that if they did not “return to normal” they would be arrested for public indecency.

This is not the first time that trans people have been targeted in Greece, in August last year, 25 trans women were arrested and force to undergo HIV testing and charged with prostitution offenses, in April, finally, the last of this group was acquitted.  This is however a new and sustained campaign against trans people, some of whom were stopped driving their cars and accused of sexual impropriety.

In May, the official broadcast to publicise Athens Pride was banned as it included a lesbian kiss, while in Thessaloniki, the  Metropolitan of the Greek Orthodox Church described Pride as an “unholy and unnatural event”, urging citizens not to take their children and indicating that he would like to see the event shut down.  At the end of last year gay men were repeated assaulted by member of the Golden Dawn, sometimes armed with knifes, in the wake of the violent and vicious rabble that saw the opening of the play “Corpus Christi” besieged by Nazis.  One MP from the fascist Golden Dawn attacked a journalist, punching him in the face and screeching after him as he escaped “You run away you faggot, you ass-muncher“, while the police silently watched.

This new escalation follows a familiar pattern of harassment, false imprisonment, detention, and arrests.  The experiences of migrants, drug users and women in the sex industry are all testimony to the deliberate targeting of marginalised groupings.   The pink triangle isn’t just a cool emblem, but a reminder that we’ve seen it all before.  We said never again – only it IS happening again….and one-by-one the people who may have spoken up disappear.

After a quick Google for a better source, I'm not finding the story covered by major news websites. It's mostly human rights blogs. If this is legit, I'm not sure why it's not being covered, but there's just too many reports, so I thought I'd bring it to Elliquiys attention. Maybe there's some local members who could shed some light on this?

[Kythia]

Stopped reading at "2nd European War". Huh?

[Kythia]

Forgot to say.

Full details - here

[Sabby]

Thank you Kythia, the extra source is appreciated.

Edit after reading: Looks like I'm not the only one having trouble with citations. I'm curious where all these blogs have gotten the info from.

[gaggedLouise]

It will be interesting to see what happens in Brazil in the lead-up to the two big events the country is hosting in the next three years, the Football World Cup next year and the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. Those two are first-class show and TV events, the kind where any host nation wants to present itself to the world, and naturally they don't want the street kids and slums to take center stage. The police in Rio and Sao Paulo are famously brutal and they've been making efforts already to push back the slum dwellers or to plainly level some of the poor districts that are too close to city centres, working together with the mayorates there. I would sort of imagine they're likely to speed this up as the games approach.

And the same with transsexuals, transgenders and escorts. Brazil can be both embracing and rough when it comes to trans people and shemales, some of whom work as escorts, street hookers, models or adult movie actors. The whole adult and sex worker scene, of any kind both ordinary, trans, gay and fetish-oriented, will most likely get ready to reach out when the athletes and journalists arrive, while the authorities, FIFA, the IOC and many in the churches definitely don't want these people and their trade into the picture.

[Kythia]

There are extensive links and citations to mainstream media in the article I linked, Sabby

[Sabby]

There are extensive links and citations to mainstream media in the article I linked, Sabby

Damn, my browser is being weird with the fonts and I didn't see the links, just normal text :/ I see them now though.

[Kythia]

Ah. Might be those crazy Greek letters.

[Ephiral]

Hmm. A nation in financial crisis, its people seeking any explanation and relief. In comes a marginal radical fascist organization, saying "It's all the fault of the outsiders and the sexual deviants!" They get a large surge of support, the outsiders and deviants get detained and harassed (particularly in areas where the police are known to have close ties to the fascists). And now there are at least a few sources quietly murmuring that the fascists are developing a paramilitary wing; they're certainly no strangers to violence.

Somehow I feel like I've heard this before, and the ending was pretty ugly for everyone involved.

[Cyrano Johnson]

I quite like this guy's definition of fascism and his diagnosis of the circumstances in which it succeeds. Certainly all the preconditions have been there in Greece for some time.

[Callie Del Noire]

I quite like this guy's definition of fascism and his diagnosis of the circumstances in which it succeeds. Certainly all the preconditions have been there in Greece for some time.

Looking back over their history.. I'd say for QUITE a while. They have not done as well as they presented for a long long time. I've been to Crete.. it's a nice place, nice folks.. but circumstances in some parts of Greece make healthy ground for the darker side of humanity.

[Oniya]

Considering how picky (not!) Zeus was about his partners, they could've picked a better name.