A once-bustling Athens street has become a ghetto rife with drugs and prostitutes and a home for unwanted immigrants. Iason Athanasiadis on a cautionary tale for Fortress Europe.
The middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and an alert expression creasing his wolfish face hovered on a street corner in central Athens. I was leaning on a parked car next to him, observing the ebb and flow of people across a crowded street of faded neoclassical houses and rundown Sixties cement buildings in Greece's worst drugs ghetto.
I had been watching the man for some time as he circulated in crowds of addicts who deferred to him. Now, huddling with two younger men, he traded rapid, intense sentences. All three threw hurried looks around at the dozens of addicts surrounding them.
"It's a certain ?200 (Dh1005) by the end of the day," one said as he stared down a Bangladeshi grocer standing at the entrance to his store, willing him to disappear. A mostly male crowd shuffled up and down the road, lost in a stupor of addiction, seemingly oblivious to the honks of passing cars. One prematurely aged man with a long unkempt beard leant into the face of his impassive interlocutor, screaming abuse. A woman with her right breast flapping loose from her soiled clothing stumbled by, attracting sparse glances. Her place in the hierarchy of addiction was obvious: she provided sex to the mostly foreign drug dealers in exchange for a hit. The assembled men would have to innovate alternative stratagems for getting their daily dose.
A contemporary Greek tragedy is unfurling in the seedy downtown district spreading out on either side of Sofokleous Street, a severely rundown area of faded neoclassical buildings in central Athens. Sandwiched between the tourist districts fanning out from the foothills of the Acropolis and the commercial hub of Omonoia Square, Sofokleous has been abandoned to Asian, Middle Eastern and African immigrants and drug-users. Those few Greeks who venture in are heroin addicts searching for dealers or well-equipped police teams.
During the 2004 Olympics, the police conducted snap stops of immigrants in the city, checking that their papers were in order. Though none were specifically taken to Sofokleous, it was implicit that, despite heavy police patrolling around the area, the police would not harass those already there. Addicts were channelled off the high-visibility public squares onto the backstreets. The opening of a government drugs clinic in Sofokleous served as a focal point for drug addicts, while another body that offered free dinners to migrants was soon drawing up to 1,500 people to Sofokleous at mealtimes. A large influx of illegal immigrants into the depressed area's squalid hotels ensued, creating a multicultural ghetto overnight. Its gradual deterioration serves as a wake-up call to other EU states that ignoring the issue of immigration in their own countries could have very serious repercussions - abuse of immigrants' rights, higher crime rates and eventually, societal breakdown.
At the bottom of the street, a dark blue police riot van stands where Sofokleous spills out onto gritty Pireos Avenue, an industrial motorway flanked by no-go slums and gentrifying districts. Wires protect the vehicle's windows from projectiles. Officers mill around, drinking frappé coffee and smoking cigarettes. Two addicts slump off the aftermath of their dose in the monumental doorway of a once-splendid neoclassical house gone to ruin. A third man lies upon cardboard sheeting on the side of the road, ignored by the Chinese traders who pass by pushing wheelbarrows of textiles to their basement boutiques. "It's a place where people can hide and get lost, to be separated from the rest of society," said Irene Banias, a professor of political science specialising in international law at Istanbul's Bogazici University. It was not always like this. Named for the ancient Greek tragedian, the street's current state is a tragic example of what happens when a government does not plan either for the assimilation of immigrants or the rehabilitation of drug addicts, preferring instead to sweep them into out-of-sight back-alleys. Built in the 19th century on the plains stretching away from the Parthenon and the original Athenian city-state, Sofokleous was part of a vibrant commercial conurbation springing up around the neighbourhoods of crowded wooden houses that formed Ottoman Athens. When the city was named the capital of the modern Greek state in 1834, it had a German king, several mosques dating from the Ottoman occupation and just 170 residences left standing after the drawn-out war of independence. Athens numbered just 10,000 residents, one-sixth the size of cosmopolitan Salonika. The Athens stock exchange moved to Sofokleous in 1881, cementing the neighbourhood's commercial reputation and turning it into the Wall Street of Athens. But Sofokleous is not just an old neighbourhood gone to ruin, blighted by drugs and poverty - it is an object lesson in the mismanagement of unwanted immigrants, a cautionary tale for states unwilling to assimilate migrants and unable to turn them back. Sofokleous and the rubbish-strewn streets and commercial arcades around it are the haunts of Western African prostitutes, Bangladeshi heroin-pushers and dazed addicts openly shooting up. Even the scandal-fixated Greek mainstream media has abandoned the disintegration of a once-affluent neighbourhood into a festering urban sore. The sight of addicts in central squares and metro stations was, until recently, a reliable source of outrage - but their removal from public life has rendered them almost invisible in the media as well. Out of sight, out of mind. Lifo magazine calls the transformation of Sofokleous "an organised plan or criminal negligence by officials who managed to turn one of Athens' most beautiful neighbourhoods into a ghetto. As with every other ghetto in the world, this one too fulfils a need: it isolates in the same neighbourhood all the people whom no one wants."
"We could clean this street up overnight if only there was the political will," one policeman walking the beat told me. "It's become the Dachau of crack." The Greek government protests that the EU is impassive about fighting the endless stream of immigrants flooding in from Turkey. On the land and sea border between Greece and the aspiring EU entrant, soldiers and coast guards play ping-pong with hapless immigrants abandoned by the mostly Kurdish human smugglers who charge upwards of $1000 (Dh3,673) for every attempted crossing. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that criminal gangs net about $410 million annually from transporting migrants from Africa to Europe. In Istanbul's crowded slums of Aksaray and Kumkapi, thousands of African and Middle Eastern men cool their heels in low-rent, high-turnover hotels on the city's Left Side, consoling themselves with the thought that they are already treading European ground. Every night, groups set off for the beaches or forests through which they hope to penetrate into Greece and the Schengen zone, within which one can cross Europe's internal borders with ease. Those who make it past the coastguard spotlights and patrols slash their inflatable rafts with knives on the beach - to enable a claim of "shipwreck" on Greek shores. Many stumble by cover of night over the border and into the tender mercies of Greek army patrols; they are held for 24 hours and sent back over the border the next night. Once they arrive in Athens, they can claim asylum and initiate lengthy legal processes that secure their stay in the country at least temporarily. Most claim they belong to failed states with no diplomatic representation in Greece: Somalia for the Africans, Afghanistan or Palestine for Middle Easterners. "They ask for political asylum because it'll keep them in the country for the nine-10 months it takes to process them," said Alexandros Zavos, president of the Hellenic Migration Policy Institute (IMEPO). "The only palpable data you can get on them are fingerprints because they make up all the rest." Two of these are Ahmad and Zaki, two Palestinians sitting on the steps of a gently crumbling building blackened by age, sipping glumly on Amstel beers. They show me the beers and joke about Ramadan, which started the previous day. When I ask them which town they come from in Palestine, they look stumped. Their North African accents make these two new arrivals in Greece unlikely Palestinians. When they see I mean them no harm, they admit their real names and tell me they are Algerians. "I was working for the mukhabarat in Algiers," said Ahmad. "I became tired of it and decided to go to France where there is work." A friendly Kurdish-Syrian people-smuggler brought them over on the searoute from the Turkish coastal city of Izmir to the Greek island of Samos. They tried their luck finding work as day labourers in Athens and the port city of Patra but failed in both places. Ignorant of Greek or English, they sleep rough on park-benches in the warm summer evenings and pay ?5 (Dh25) for a festering bed in a dormitory controlled by Sudanese when the weather chills. They were arrested by the Greek police in Athens, but the bureaucracy - unwilling to hold them in a cell and incapable of sending them back to Turkey - served them with deportation papers and let them back onto the streets. Now they live - alongside Africans, Arabs, Central Asians and Afghans who made the same journey - in this multicultural district of boarded-up, crumbling houses and hope for an upturn in their fortunes. A few streets past the clothes-shops decorated with dangling Chinese fairy lamps, addicts sleeping off their hangovers squeezed in between parked cars, and signs in a jumble of alphabets advertising call-centres, Pakistani barber shops and stolen mobile phones, Italian and German tourists stroll through lit-up streets, admiring views of the illuminated Parthenon, courted for their custom by the apron-clad waiters of traditional taverns hung with fairy-lights. These tourists represent the desirable Europe that Ahmad and Zaki are striving towards but, for the time being, their world remains as unattainable to the two young men as that of the French tourists they would have seen promenading around downtown Algiers.
Greece's islands are the most popular illegal entry point by sea into the EU after Spain's Canaries, and they may soon take first place: twice as many immigrants were washing up on the beaches of the three Greek islands closest to the Turkish shore in 2007 than did so the year before, while the number of arrivals in the Canaries plunged from 32,000 to under 10,000 in the same year. The underfunded and under-equipped Greek state has its work cut out managing immigrant interdiction, especially as tighter security in Spain and Italy is forcing immigrants to focus on more accessible Greece - the most overwhelmed and least welcoming country in Europe, according to the European Social Survey. In a country of 11 million people that hosts a million immigrants, 64 per cent of Greeks believe that foreigners make the country worse. Close to a third believe that none should be allowed to settle in the country. One of these is Giannis, the 64-year-old proprietor of a kiosk on Heroes Square in the entertainment district of Psirri, a few streets away from Sofokleous. "If they made me prime minister of the country for one month," he states boldly, "I wouldn't leave a single foreigner. We used to leave the key to our house under the mat and leave, but now we can't because of the crime rate." "Our race is disappearing," he says, adding a favourite cliché of pessimists: "Every last year is better." When the head of the Greek Socialist Party turned up at the Presidential mansion for a reception accompanied by a Greek-raised African woman lacking Greek residency papers, a minor scandal ensued in the press. But not over the fact that a person could live in Greece for decades without obtaining the recognition of the state - rather because a black, non-Orthodox Christian woman appeared alongside a Greek politician at a high-profile political event. "In Greece there was never a culture that we'd accept immigrants," said Zavos. "We were in the sending business and haven't accepted that when we accept immigrants, they may remain. We viewed them as tourists who would come and go. This new reality needs some time to be absorbed." Over 50 per cent of legal immigrants want to remain in Greece and become Greek citizens, according to IMEPO surveys. The tipping point will come when immigrant labour stops supporting the already rickety national welfare system without taking from it and make demands for insurance and other benefits. "Once they start drawing from it, they'll blow it sky-high," Zavos said. Worried by this prospect, the Greek government has one of the lowest rates of successful asylum application in Europe. The detention conditions in which illegal immigrants, refugees and others awaiting settlement of their cases are held are so poor that Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway have refused to return illegal immigrants who come through Greece into the EU back to the Greeks. "There are serious problems with the asylum system in Greece," said William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. "It doesn't meet European or international standards."
Brussels has struggled to formulate a coherent European immigration policy. Critics like Amnesty International have dubbed the EU "Fortress Europe", reflecting the preference for short-term solutions like housing arrested illegal immigrants in extraterritorial detention camps in places like Libya, or granting high-speed seacraft to coastal member states so they may intercept boatloads of refugees. 224 detention camps are scattered across the EU with the capacity to house 30,000 asylum-seekers and immigrants awaiting deportation - for up to 18 months in some cases. In a number of EU countries there is no upper limit on detention length. "Intercepting people and kicking them out has become extremely militarised," said Banias, the Istanbul-based academic. "Every country has the right to control its borders but all these countries have assumed certain responsibilities by subscribing to international conventions. And these people have rights." Banias argues that the EU is partly to blame for the development of sophisticated, transnational human trafficking networks that stretch from Bangladesh and West Africa to Istanbul, Berlin and London. More stringent security on Europe's porous land and sea borders has been matched by greater sophistication among the human smugglers. With demand to enter Europe's closing gates running at an all-time high, the prices demanded by the smugglers are also rising. "As the walls of the castle get higher and higher, fewer people will be able to penetrate," said Banias. "There will be fewer holes in the system ten years from now."
A few streets away from Sofokleous, in the neighbourhood of Kerameikos, real estate prices have risen since the private Benaki Museum opened an exhibition space for its Islamic art collections in two restored buildings in 2004. The collection is as eclectic as the architectural melange in the surrounding streets, where the surviving column-stubs of the Roman-era marketplace, hip bars, convenience stores festooned in Urdu and Bangladeshi script and the red lights of the area's brothels come together to create one of Athens' most lively neighbourhoods. Around 2004, yuppies began moving into top-floor apartments boasting soaring views over central Athens' cement canyons. On Sunday mornings, well-dressed financial consultants and media personalities with expensive degrees from London or Paris step over slumped, unconscious bodies on their way to friends' terraces for lazy brunches set to a jazz soundtrack. A few months before the Olympics, there was a huge outcry in the Greek media as immigrants, Roma and addicts were detained and removed from high-visibility town squares where they would upset foreign tourists arriving in Athens. For a short while, the government planned to lock up undesirables in a high-security prison camp atop a hill a few miles outside Athens. But embarrassed politicians backed down after the international media got hold of the story. Instead, the unwanted were removed from the wide-open spaces frequented by Westerners and boxed up in the warren of streets around Sofokleous. Rumours abounded about the district and its strange denizens. One former Greek ambassador told The New York Times that "If one were looking for a sleeper cell, this is where it would be." In the end, the Olympics passed without incident. But the restrictions on social misfits did not loosen up and Sofokleous, pressed into service as a holding-pen for undesirables, bore the brunt of the new policy. The street went from being a lively commercial centre of restaurants and immigrant-run businesses that resembled parts of Cairo, Karachi or Lagos to a shadow of its former self. Businesses were forced to erect metal bars and cameras after repeated robberies by needle-yielding addicts, and restaurants removed their outdoor seating. "Now I park my delivery truck in front of my store so that my few remaining customers don't have to step over bodies," one irate shop-owner said, refusing to give his name for fear of retribution by the criminal mafias that control Sofokleous.
In the courtyard of the Benaki Museum visitors stroll through an exhibition of photographs from the Arab world assembled by the photo agency VII. The images show a veiled woman passing in front of an illuminated McDonalds sign in Kuwait City; overweight boys in djallabiahs steering rally simulators in a Dubai games arcade; Syrian girls hurling snowballs at each other on a mountain resort close to Damascus. The images toy with the West's received wisdom about the Arab World. The show was commissioned by the Stanley Foundation to dispel stereotypes in an era of rising civilisational conflict. Its appearance in Athens marks an attempt by the Benaki to educate the Greek public about a region that is geographically proximate, economically intertwined but culturally misunderstood: alongside Cyprus and Bulgaria, Greece forms a part of the EU's border with Muslim Turkey. The building of dozens of mosques during the 400-year Ottoman occupation of Greece, and the pressures from ruling Turks for Greeks to convert fostered an antagonism toward Islam among many Greeks. Today, however, 12 per cent of Greece's workforce is already non-Greek and the influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe is turning the streets of Athens into approximations of the scenes depicted in the exhibition. A few streets down is the al Jabbar mosque, an unlicensed prayer-room on the third floor of an apartment block serving the area's Bangladeshi Muslim community. Its caretaker is Nazrul Islam, 40. Suspicious of journalists, he speaks good Greek, runs a convenience store and boasts of his contacts with Greek intelligence. "No one notified us," he shrugs when I ask him about the show at the Benaki Museum, adding that he is more concerned about the lack of an official mosque in Athens after more than a hundred years of negotiations over its construction - despite the presence of two shuttered Ottoman mosques nearby. But he is careful not to say anything that could be read as criticism of the Greek government's treatment of refugees. Another community leader, the similarly cautious Sheikh Mohieddin, believes that change will come "slowly, slowly" and that "we can't get all our rights overnight." I first met him in 2003, when he was under severe pressure from Greek intelligence to report al-Qaeda sympathisers in his congregation. Sitting in a neon-lit food court above Omonoia Square - then inhabited by dozens of drug-addicts - he expressed the frustrations of an older generation of devout Sudanese, Egyptian and Syrian educated professionals (many of whom have lived in Athens for decades) with the explosion of licentiousness brought by a new generation of often illiterate men trying to escape traditional societies for the West they imagined existed beyond their satellite TV screens.
Sofokleous has become a centre for muggings, prostitution and the trafficking of drugs and human beings. Last month, 16 people were injured in hand-to-hand street-fighting among rival African gangs over control of the lucrative narcotics trade. Greek police sources say the Nigerians are now so well entrenched they have driven out the previously dominant Ukranian and Albanian mafias. A constellation of other nationalities divide among them the jigsaw of crime, with Roma gangs controlling the trade in humans, Eastern Europeans selling smuggled cigarettes and electronics and Iraqi Kurds dominating the forged documents industry. Greek criminals still top the almost 5,000 thefts and break-ins reported to Greek police in the first eight months of 2008.
Back on the street the predatory crowd of African and Middle Eastern men working the crowd first quench then renew its urge for heroin. Around them, a shifting sea of wrecked men ebb and flow, living out the daily rituals of their withdrawal symptoms, struggling with the pain until its intensity swells into sufficient motivation to beg, steal and sell enough to afford another go.
Suddenly, there is a commotion. Two men and a woman rush in, huddle around a crumpled tinfoil wrap containing a freshly-procured dose and unwrap it with trembling fingers. As others start crowding around them and scuffling, they change their minds and leave, a scattering of hangers-on loping behind them like stray dogs hoping for a few scraps from the dinner table. The dealers watch them impassively.
Inside the dark arcade, slumped men and women sleep off the buzz of an injection. Others openly prepare their implements to shoot up. Discarded syringes crunch underfoot.
The passage leads out to Theatre Square, a once-chic part of central Athens. A police car is stopped in the middle of the street and three uniformed men apply handcuffs to a junkie. The addicts look on blankly from inside the arcade, a few steps and whole worlds of emotion away. One sticks a syringe into his arm even as he gawps at the police.
"Aren't you worried that the police will catch you?" I ask his companion.
"There's no fear, we have tsiliadorous," he slurred, using an old-fashioned word for scout dating from the anti-Nazi guerrilla campaigns in the Second World War.
I step out into Theatre Square to speak to the policemen.
"Why are you photographing?" they ask me angrily, eyeing my camera. "Why do you want to show this? It's been done, there's nothing new to add."
They are all in their late twenties, assigned to street patrols and frustrated at their inability to bring about change on the ground, forced to arrest the usual suspects time and again - almost always addicts rather than dealers - on possession charges. Since there is no mechanism to ensure that detainees enter rehabilitation, a vicious circle is perpetuated. The addicts are released back onto the streets where heroin reclaims them if death does not.
The drug pushers themselves are careful not to walk around with banned substances on their person. They keep them inside dilapidated cement apartment blocks inhabited by immigrants freshly-arrived from Turkey on the well-trodden human smuggling route stretching from the Middle East and Central Asia to Istanbul, Athens and onto Rome, Paris, London and New York. The warren of housing towering over Sofokleous and the urban grid around it is such that drugs are easily transportable to adjoining safe-houses in the event of a police raid. More often than not, cultural insensitivity on the part of the police leads to the raids turning into public relations disasters. During Ramadan this year, officers entered one of Athens' oldest unofficial mosques on Geraniou Street four times in one month, according to its imam. A hundred praying immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were frisked by police, who did not bother to remove their shoes to enter; in a compromise, they kept their dogs waiting outside. No drugs were found. Outside on the street, the parked police jeeps' sirens cast a frantic blue glow upon the addicted crowds shuffling by. The tsiliadoroi kept their eyes on the police. But no one looked out for the drug dealers.
Iason Athanasiadis is an Istanbul-based writer and photographer.
