The mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis, spoke on Friday October 4th to the UN General Assembly about Athens’ experience with immigration, and also discussed the Golden Dawn case.
Øyvind Strømmen
According to GreekReporter.com, Kaminis said that he views the recent Golden Dawn crackdown as a good first step, even if “the problem of neo-Nazism in Greece is a very complex one”. GreekReporter.com also provides a transcript of Kaminis’s UN speech. An excerpt:
But Athens has another characteristic that renders the integration of immigrants particularly challenging: it is the stronghold of Greece’s extreme right-wing party of ‘Chrysi Avgi’. This party has rallied support behind an aggressively anti-immigrant platform. Since 2010, it has seen its power rapidly expand, gaining a bit over of 6% of the national vote in the 2012 national elections and 16 seats in the Greek parliament. Those of you who have been watching the news these past couple of days know that ‘Chrysi Avgi’ and its local chapters are not very different from a common criminal organization. Its menace and aggression has been especially directed against immigrants, with regular attacks and pogroms against the most vulnerable among them.
I do not have the time now to discuss the complex factors that have rendered Greece’s capital and largest urban centre the seedbed of this extremist right-wing party. But I can tell you that its presence and actions have created a particularly inhospitable environment for the integration of immigrants.
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