ATHENS — As the sun went down over the Exarchia district of Athens one recent evening, hundreds of people gathered beneath a banner with the protest slogan, “No Pasarán,” a resistance slogan from the Spanish Civil War meaning “They shall not pass.”
It had been barely light outside when police descended on the neighborhood and evacuated four squats earlier that same morning. Two had been makeshift shelters for refugees and migrants; the other two housed anarchist collectives; 57 men, 51 women and 35 minors from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Turkey were shuttled away in police vans to have their legal status inspected at the city’s Aliens’ Bureau.
By 11 a.m. builders had been dispatched to brick up the windows and doors of the now empty squats. Police barred access, while locals looked on, annoyed at the disturbance.
The raids, which started on Monday, are part of a wider effort to make good on a campaign pledge by Greece’s new center-right prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who promised to “clean up” the “lawless” Athens neighborhood ahead of a national election in July.
Police spokesman Stravos Balaskas referred to the police intervention as a “silent vacuum cleaner” that “will gradually suck up all the garbage” in Exarchia. He later apologized, after coming under attack on social media and from opposition parties.
Police officers stand guard outside a building during an evacuation operation, in the Exarchia district, central Athens on August 26, 2019. | Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images
Some 27 families who have been living in an abandoned hotel near where the raids took place — some with children as young as nine weeks old — now say they are scared to leave the building. They worry police stationed further up the road will arrest them if they leave.
Exarchia is “like home for us. We were welcomed here, and we respect that,” says Saif, a Gazan refugee, who asked not to be identified by his real name.
When the raids took place, Saif was jolted from sleep by the arrival of dozens of officers in black masks or carrying riot shields.
“I woke the people up and explained the situation … [The families living in the abandoned hotel] chose to stay inside until the police came. If they went outside they would be arrested, but if they stayed they had a chance.”
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The neighborhood, which lies northeast of the city’s historic center, is notorious in Athens. In 1973, the Greek military junta quashed a student protest at Exarchia’s Athens Polytechnic University, killing more than 20 civilians and wounding hundreds. For self-proclaimed political descendants of the student resistance movement, the area is sacred ground.
More recently, anarchist collectives based in the neighborhood opened their doors to migrants and refugees seeking asylum in Greece.
The district has also become synonymous with drug-related crime, violence and reports of sexual harassment. Some 11 of the 19 squats still located there are dangerously overcrowded, with asylum seekers having nowhere else to go.
Successive governments and a number of media outlets have painted the neighborhood as a haven for anarchy and terrorism.
In July, Exarchia became a divisive issue in national and local election campaigns, according to Lefteris Papagiannakis, Athens’ outgoing deputy mayor in charge of refugees and migration. The new mayor of Athens, who was sworn into office earlier this week, is Mitsotakis’ nephew, Kostas Bakoyannis.
“It’s not fair on the neighborhood,” Papagiannakis said of the scrutiny it’s received, adding that the cleanup won’t “have a long-term effect, it’s a quick fix.”
Police focus must be a targeted crackdown on drug crime, not the eviction of vulnerable migrants, said Papagiannakis, and the state should work to provide extended accommodation.
The Greek government has struggled to deal with the large influx of people arriving in the country and seeking asylum since the summer of 2015. Of the 66,969 asylum applications registered in 2018, 58,793 remained pending by the end of the year.
The result is massive overcrowding. On Samos island, for example, more than 5,000 people live in a camp designed for 650.
A 2016 law passed by the Syriza government grants asylum seekers the right to free health care, but one of the first moves by the new government’s labor minister, Yiannis Vroutsis, was to revoke access for asylum seekers to the social insurance number needed to book medical appointments.
Police officers stand guard outside a building during an evacuation operation, in the Exarchia district, central Athens on August 26, 2019 | Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images
“By law they have access, but in practice, it’s a meandering bureaucracy in a system which is in any case difficult to decrypt,” said Andrea Contenta, advocacy coordinator for Doctors Without Borders Greece.
Of the 143 migrants detained in Exarchia on the morning of the raid, 134 have been moved to a hotel in the greater Athens region while their asylum applications are processed according to the Greek paper Kathimerini. A further nine will be deported.
Greece’s ministry of citizen protection did not respond to a request for comment on the squat evictions.
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Back in Exarchia, protesters who had gathered Monday evening outside Notara 26 — one of the remaining squats — were deciding what to do next.
A few blocks down, officers in riot gear lined the street where, earlier that day, one of the area’s largest squats had been evacuated. The protesters turned the corner, clapping, whistling, chanting at the police, “Solidarity is the weapon of the people,” before marching on toward the university grounds.
Around midnight, fire bombs erupted on the main square. Residents barely looked up from their drinks or paused their conversations. “It happens all the time,” a waiter told a concerned tourist reassuringly.
How long Exarchia will put up a fight, and protect its anarchists and migrants from eviction is an open question. By the next morning, the streets were empty save for four policemen guarding the Spirou Trikoupi street squat. More were waiting further up the street, their helmets under their arms, as construction workers unloaded long metal girders from a van and set about barricading the building.
Above them, someone had managed to break into the building in the night to hang a banner. It reads, “You can’t evict a movement.”