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Greece: the Greek-Albanian case

01 September 1993

The presence of Albanian migrants in Athens has led to them being stereotyped as "dangerous Albanians", young, male, penniless, unskilled, predatory, violent, untrustworthy and being responsible for most of the serious crime in the capital.

Earlier this year the Albanian government deported an active priest of the Greek Orthodox community located in southern Albania (northern Epirus). The government claimed he was acting against the interests of the Albanian state. The Greek minority in Albania is 400,000 out of a total population of 3 million.

The Greek government responded by rounding up 20,000 Albanian migrants and deporting them back to Albania over one week. The Minister of Public Order said that Albanians were responsible for creating unemployment and called on citizens to help the police by informing them of "illegal" migrants. Shortly after this confrontation the normal pattern was restored: any crime being committed by an Albanian getting headline news and racist attacks on Albanians. These events have taken place in the context of Balkan nationalism, by Greece over the name of the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia and Albania over Serbian treatment of its minority community in Kosovo.

The Greek conservative neo-liberal government (which lost office in October) made no attempt to regularise the position of illegal Albanian migrants. It did not choose to legalise their presence or to effect its threat to deport them and close the border. Their present state of "semi-illegality", to which the other political parties offered no alternative, suited the government which used them to justify increased legal powers.

Taken from a talk by Vassilis Karydis, lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the Democritus University of Thrace (56 Sina Str. 10672 Athens Greece) at the 21st Conference of the European Group for the Study of Social Control and Deviance in Prague in September 1993.