Mig@Net report - Intercultural conflict and dialogue

As far as our research could show, there were no racist attacks on white migrants. Instead there are several testimonies that show that Albanian and Romanian migrants participate and in many cases are organized under the banner of Chrysi Avgi.

In Athens Indymedia and in anti-racist web pages, the focus was on the racist pogrom by far-right groups that followed and not to the murder as such. Most of the posts refer to certain attacks to migrants in different areas of the center and to the tolerance or even cooperation of the police with the farright groups.

Our interviews with both Greek and migrant residents of the region show that a sense of fear, insecurity and intimidation is common across ethnic, racial and class boundaries. Both Greek and migrant residents told us that they closed their shops and remained indoors after seven in the evening out of fear of being attacked by criminals. Several Greek respondents described the murder as a tragic moment in this ongoing process rather as an exceptional event. The sense of widespread insecurity is reinforced by the feeling that the area is lacking police protection, and that it has been abandoned by the state and the municipality. Reacting by both violent and non-violent means in order to protect one-self becomes for many of the locals an urgent need.

In this context, neo-racist groups are often perceived by the Greeks residents as mostly ‘filling up the gap’ left by the lack of state protection and the absence of police control over Greek borders and migrant criminal networks.

In some cases, even those who criticized the violent tactics and racist ideology of far right groups, claimed that their intervention was inevitable. On 44