Xenophobia Rises from Ashes of Greek Economy

By Apostolis Fotiadis

Athens - Last January, several pupils coming out of a high school in Kallithea, a central residential neigbourhood in Athens, attacked a Pakistani passer-by.

The nature of the assault alarmed Maria Daneil and Artemis Kalofuri, as well as other teachers in schools around the area, who consider this to be just the latest in a sequence of racially charged confrontations in Greece’s economically fraught urban areas.

"There has been a deteriorating picture including anti-migrant attacks, the attack on a makeshift mosque, harassment of students, as well as the appearance of people flaunting neo-Nazi paraphernalia around the schools. We felt that passive observation is not effective anymore, we had to do something," Kalofuri told IPS.

With support from the local branch of the association of teachers (ELME), the educators formed a student discussion group, where questions on migration, racism and fascism, as well as current social issues arising from those problems, could be raised and analysed by pupils themselves.

Kalofuri said, "Between 60 or 70 people showed up the third time we met." 


Daneil believes the attack is further complicated by the fact that the assailants were mostly second- generation migrants themselves.

"It is socially complicated," she says, "but the pattern involves the radicalisation of isolated or less wealthy kids, with family issues, that at some point come in contact with radical nationalist groups."

Both teachers mentioned links between a very small number of pupils and radical nationalist groups as well as the establishment of a culture of fear and silence regarding the issue.

Fear, particularly, is what Yunus Mohammedi, an Afghan immigrant residing in Greece for over ten years, has begun to notice in the city, as public aggression has almost become a daily issue.

In order to alert fellow Afghan immigrants, Mohammedi circulated a map of Athens, marking in red the zones where most violent incidents take place.

"This is how we used to warn people about the places they ought to avoid in Afghanistan when I worked there for Doctors Without Borders," he recalled to IPS.

"We explain to new-comers as well as people for who have been in Athens for longer, which places to avoid when it gets dark and advise them not to walk around alone if possible."

A trained pathologist and one of the few Afghans that speaks fluent Greek, Mohammedi has become a person with whom many Afghans consult when they are in trouble.

"Ten years ago things were very different. Back then you had to worry about having a job and making ends meet. Now it is dangerous, we often have to care for people stabbed or violently beaten. I often receive phone calls from people threatening me for getting involved," he said.

Hardships fuel racial hatred

The economic crisis has altered significantly the social rules between Greeks and immigrants and asylum seekers, mostly from Asia and Africa.

Since 2005 Greece has become the main influx point for undocumented migrants, with more than 80 percent entering Europe coming from Turkey through the Aegean Sea or the Northeast mainland boundary of the river Evros.

The vast majority of these migrants hope to move towards Northern Europe. However, clauses in the Dublin II regulations that dictate the returns of irregular immigrants to the country they entered have effectively condemned scores of immigrants to remain stuck in limbo in Greece.

This has transformed the country, and Athens in particular, into a depot of hundreds of thousand of irregular immigrants and asylum seekers, who survive on below-subsistence incomes won in a vast black market.

Certain areas of the capital have been morphing slowly into semi-permanent migrant quarters with the municipality estimating that in certain central areas, Greeks number less than four percent of the population.

Since 2008, the worsening economic crisis replaced most Greek’s passive understanding of migrant workers’ plights with xenophobic intolerance.

According to Eurostat, Greece’s economy is retracting at the alarming rate of 7.5 percent, while unemployment climbed to 21 percent last December.

Moreover, increasing involvement of migrants in violent thefts and organised criminal activity has inflated antipathies. Greek police have registered an increase in the involvement of migrants in violent crime rates from 24 -25 percent in 2000 to over 65 percent today.

Lack of employment in the regular and irregular markets has increased antagonisms not only between Greeks and foreigners but also between various migrant groups.

Far-right groups have capitalised on this situation to increase their popularity and recruit membership around the run-down areas of the city, leading to an explosion of anti-migrant rhetoric and violent attacks against Asian and African migrants.

Marianna Tzeferakoy, a lawyer with the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR), told IPS, "Many people referring to the GCR for assistance have reported violent behavior, but given that no structure for monitoring the situation is available, we have no picture of the scale of the problem. We know only that is it worsening very quickly."

Tzeferaku as well as Mohammedi have alleged that Greek police personnel are systematically discouraging migrants from reporting violent incidents.

Judith Sunderland, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, added that a recently completed fact- finding mission in Athens supported fears of a brewing crisis.

"The testimonies we have collected so far from victims and associations providing services to migrants and asylum seekers suggest that the violence has increased significantly over the last several years," Sunderland told IPS.

"We have collected numerous testimonies indicating that the police have failed to intervene rapidly or have discouraged victims from filing official complaints. We are similarly concerned that the government has not yet acknowledged the gravity of the situation. Neither consistent condemnations of attacks, nor a clear plan of action to prevent attacks and punish those responsible, have been articulated."

Greek police spokesman Athanasios Kokkalakis, who has opposed these allegations, told IPS, "Whenever the Greek police has received a detailed report about incidents related to racially motivated violence it has intervened and arrested anyone responsible, even in cases where the accused have been police officers themselves," he stressed.

The combination of a relentless migration wave and the deteriorating economic crisis fuelled by austerity measures is giving birth to complicated social issues says, Kokkalakis added.

"Migrants are at the same moment victims and perpetrators of crime. They arrive in a country in which social cohesion is challenged and welfare and social structures that could support them are on the point of collapse. At the same time they are under enormous pressure from international trafficking networks that push more and more of these people into criminal activity."

Last week the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) completed a three-month-long pilot project of documenting xenophobic aggression.

A representative told IPS, "It is early to talk about specific results; yet it is obvious that a pattern of violent aggression has started forming in certain areas of the capital."

After the results are examined the agency will try to put in place a permanent observatory of racial and anti-migrant violence.

Evangelist Sued in U.S. for Inciting Anti-Gay Hatred in Uganda

By Charundi Panagoda and Jim Lobe

Washington D.C./Uganda - A major U.S. civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts Wednesday on behalf of a Ugandan gay rights organisation, the Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG), against a right-wing evangelist leader for inciting hatred against homosexuals that has led to increased violence against LGBT persons in the East African country.

The lawsuit was filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in the home state of Scott Lively, the defendant, who heads the Abiding Truth Ministries, a fundamentalist Christian group.

He is also the author of "The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party", a 1995 book that claimed Nazism was created and propagated by homosexuals, and a second book, "Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child", a how-to guide for parents to "prevent" their children from becoming homosexual.

"Lively has been the man with the plan in this enterprise," said Pam Spees, a senior CCR staff attorney.

"He long ago set out a very specific and detailed methodology for stripping away the most basic human rights protections, to silence and ultimately disappear LGBT people. Unfortunately, he found willing accomplices and fertile ground in Uganda," she said.

Reached at the coffee house he owns in Springfield, Massachusetts, Lively, who has not been served yet, harshly denounced the lawsuit, which is being brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a 1789 anti-piracy law that, since 1980, has been used by foreign nationals to sue corporations and foreign individuals for human rights abuses committed overseas.

"It's a frivolous lawsuit. Everything that they are alleging is speech, and speech is not actionable. You can't bring a lawsuit in the United States saying that someone is legally liable for their speech." he told IPS.

He called the claims against him "just outrageous" and "without basis".

Lively began working with Ugandan anti-gay forces in 2002. According to CCR, he headed a conference in 2009 with Stephen Langa, another U.S. evangelist, titled "Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda", in which he characterised the gay movement as an "evil institution".

In the same presentation, Lively told audiences that homosexuals were a threat to children, committed child rape and "recruited" children into homosexuality.

Among the attendees, who included prominent politicians and members of the media, was Ugandan parliamentarian David Bahati. One month later, Bahati introduced the "Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill", which criminalised gay-rights advocacy, depriving LGBT activists of freedom of assembly, association and the right to be free of discrimination. It also called for the death penalty for being a "serial offender for the offense of homosexuality".

At the same time, Ugandan tabloids and state-owned media called openly for persecuting homosexuals in what became a major campaign against them. After a number of attacks against homosexuals, many went into hiding.

In January 2011, an outspoken gay rights activist and chief litigation officer for SMUG, David Kato, was beaten to death in his neighbourhood after one tabloid published a photo of him and other advocates headlined "Hang Them".

The murder drew international attention and strong denunciations from Western governments, including the U.S. and Britain, some of which threatened to cut aid to Uganda unless the pending bill was withdrawn.

The bill was shelved under international pressure but was reintroduced in October last year.

Gay rights advocates pointed specifically to U.S. evangelicals, including Lively and Langa, a member of the Washington-based extreme- right Christian group the Fellowship, as responsible for stoking the anti-gay hysteria that resulted in the death of Kato.

"U.S evangelical leaders like Scott Lively have actively and intensively worked to eradicate any trace of LGBT advocacy and identity...His influence has been incredibly harmful and destructive for LGBT Ugandans fighting for their rights," said Frank Mugisha, executive director of SMUG, who received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2011 for his work promoting LGBT rights amidst the hostile climate in Uganda.

"We have to stop people like Scott Lively from helping to codify and give legal cover to hatred," he said.

Lively asserted that he is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which guarantees free speech.

"If you put everything I've said in context, nothing I said could motivate someone to hurt a homosexual. It's taken out of context. They're liars; they're being dishonest," he told IPS in a telephone interview.

But Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Lively's anti-gay propaganda "is not harmless". The center characterised his Abiding Truth Ministries as a "hate group" in 2008.

"When you lie about people, saying they cause genocide or they are Nazis, it often makes these populations vulnerable to violence," Beirich told IPS.

"Lively is being ridiculous," she said, "He's (in Uganda) saying anti-gay things and riling up the population to pass this disgusting legislation. He may have a right to free speech, but he needs to be held responsible for what he says as well."

The Alien Tort Statute has attracted considerable controversy as a tool for foreigners to hold alleged human rights abusers accountable in U.S. courts for their activities overseas. The Supreme Court upheld its use for that purpose in 2005 but is expected to review it again in June.

CCR said the suit against Lively marks the first time the statute has been wielded by victims of persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Nearly 5,000 Chickens Rescued from Factory Farm

By Alastair Bland

San Francisco - When East Bay activists learned that 50,000 chickens were on the verge of dying at an abandoned factory farm in Turlock, they rushed to Stanislaus County. The rescue effort got underway in full force on February 23 after a citizen phone call to the Stanislaus Animal Services Agency had led officials to the site of A&L Poultry, where approximately 50,000 egg-laying hens had gone without food or proper care for about two weeks. Roughly one-third of the chickens were dead by the time help arrived, while the rest were on the verge of perishing.

"If that anonymous tip hadn't come in, all of them would have been dead," said Dana Portnoy, an Oakland resident who has been volunteering for six years with Animal Place, a farm animal sanctuary in Grass Valley that helped coordinate the chicken rescue.

Officials with the Stanislaus Animal Services Agency first arrived on February 21, and though the birds were plainly distressed and starving, legal issues blocked volunteers and officials from extracting the hens immediately. "Some of the rescuers made a stink about how we were letting the chickens starve," said Annette Patton, executive director of the agency. "But there's no way you can just drive up to a farm and start stealing chickens. The birds were someone's property." But Patton was also distraught by the scene and said, "It's unspeakable to the volume of deceased animals we found."

Portnoy said it wasn't until February 23 that officials began passing injured and starving birds out of the defunct farm to waiting volunteers. Only state and county officials were allowed inside the building, where the hens had been living in "battery cages," the cramped quarters frequently cited by critics as one of the cruelest common features of factory farming.

The farm's owner, Andy Keung Cheung, had abandoned his animals because he could no longer afford to feed them. Keung Cheung's attorney, Martha Carlton-Magaña, said in a statement that "an attempt to arrange for delivery of the chickens to a third party in order to avoid the usual business practice of euthanizing the chickens resulted in an unacceptable situation A&L Poultry did not intend, and profoundly regrets." Carlton-Magaña said in an interview that the third party failed to meet an agreement and remove the chickens from the farm.

When officials entered the farm, 17,000 hens were already dead in their cages, and nearly all the rest were emaciated and close to death. A number of hens had managed to escape their cages, but then drowned in a manure catchment basin, according to Christine Morrissey, sanctuary manager of the Stockton-based rescue center Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary, where about two-dozen birds were brought for recovery.

The majority of the 4,600 rescued chickens are currently housed at a shelter in Vacaville operated by Animal Place and will eventually be put up for adoption. The effort is being hailed as the single largest mass rescue of farm animals in state history.

But nearly 30,000 chickens were euthanized, bringing the death toll to about 45,000 hens, and local activists have been collecting signatures in support of a bid to urge Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager to prosecute Keung Cheung. As of late last week, the district attorney's office said it could not comment on the case, because it was waiting for reports and information from the Stanislaus Animal Services Agency.

Patton said she hopes the district attorney will take action. "It's our allegation that [Keung Cheung] broke the law," she said. Specifically, he may have violated California Penal Code 597, which states that "every person who maliciously and intentionally maims, mutilates, tortures or wounds a living animal or maliciously and intentionally kills an animal, is guilty of an offence punishable by imprisonment."

But some are concerned that Keung Cheung may only get a slap on the wrist. "Unfortunately, the law isn't as clear when it comes to farm animals as it is with dogs and cats and other pets," said Anne Martin, an Oakland resident and a lead volunteer with Harvest Home. "If he can say that what he did was standard farm practice, then he may be off the hook."

Shani Campbell, president of the Oakland-based group United for Animals, said the starvation of the birds could have been easily avoided. "All [Keung Cheung] had to do was make a phone call to the Animal Services Agency or the Sheriff's Department, rather than just leave them to starve," she said. "Or, Harvest Home or Animal Place certainly would have stepped in."

The conditions uncovered by local activists at A&L Poultry bring to the spotlight the ethical issues surrounding factory farming of eggs and other animal products. Kim Sturla, the executive director of Animal Place, noted that factory farming practices tend to be well concealed from the public, making cases like the A&L Poultry rescue not only shocking, but also educationally valuable.

"For us, cases like these serve as a platform to educate the public about egg farming," Sturla said. Standard practice in the chicken egg industry is to clip off the beaks of newly hatched females, while the males are killed and disposed of. "The birds are then crammed into cages, and they're shitting on top of each other," Sturla noted. "The odor is unimaginable, and the only substrate they stand on is wire. Their lives are horrific from the moment they hatch from the egg. It's beyond cruelty."

Even farms billed as "free-range" tend to produce comparable suffering in similar conditions, according to critics. Many people now tout "pasture-raised eggs" as the highest standard in commercial egg production.
The 50,000 hens that inhabited A&L Poultry were just a slight fraction of the national population of egg-laying hens. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 281 million egg-laying hens were living on farms nationwide in 2010, and many millions more chickens are raised and killed for meat every day. In California, 19 million hens produce 5 billion eggs annually for human consumption. Iowa ranked first nationwide in 2010 with 51 million egg-laying hens. The vast majority live in overcrowded battery cages.

But Proposition 2, passed by voters in 2008, will take effect in 2015 and impose requirements that farmers provide relatively spacious conditions for their hens — enough room, anyway, for them to stretch, stand up, and turn around. In spite of such improvements, millions of chickens will remain the engine of a massive egg industry. Campbell with United for Animals is a vegan, as are many who assisted in the hen rescue. She believes that only a transition away from egg consumption can alleviate the suffering inherent to egg farming. "Even vegetarians who eat eggs are contributing to animal death," she said, noting that male chicks at egg "hatcheries" are killed immediately after birth.

Anyone who applies to adopt any of the rescued birds will be carefully screened, Sturla said, to avoid placing the chickens back into the hands of commercial interests. "We don't mind if people eat the eggs," she said. "We just don't want them adopting the chickens for that purpose. We want them to be pets."

Israel Police Expel Harvard Students from Palestinian Village

By Oz Rosenburg

 Jerusalem - Israel Border Police expelled a group of 55 students from Harvard University from a Palestinian village after a confrontation erupted along the separation fence near Jerusalem.

 According to Border Police, the confrontation occurred after a bus full of Harvard students who were touring the area began traveling along a route inside the village of Walaja which is intended solely for Israeli security vehicles.

“They arrived on a Palestinian bus and traveled along the route of the fence,” said a Border Police spokesperson, calling the incident a “clear transgression.” The spokesperson also stated that none of the students were detained for question, but were forced to leave the area.

Border Police forces detained the tour leader and Walaja resident Shereen al-Araj for questioning. She was taken to a police base in Atarot and was released on bail after an investigation which lasted several hours.

According to al-Araj, the bus was on the way to look at one of the houses that is slated for demolition so that the security fence can be built. Once the bus arrived at the house, the students exited the bus, only to be met by a private security firm employed to protect bulldozers.

“The security guards approached us and said that we could not be there because it was a “closed military zone,” despite the fact that Israel’s High Court established that it is not.”

According to al-Araj, the private security guards called the Border Police, which eventually escorted the bus out of the village, but not before taking the I.D. cards of the Palestinian students on the bus, as well as that of the driver.  

The students, who study at the Harvard Kennedy School, were part of a yearly tour to Israel and the West Bank which is put on by the Palestinian Committee.

Shell Says Was Sued for Causing Climate Change

By Tom Bergin

United States - Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell Plc said it was sued for causing climate change but that, like some other global warming cases taken against energy companies by environmentalists, the cases were dismissed.

The Anglo-Dutch group said in its annual report, published on Thursday, that, "together with other energy companies" it was subject to climate change litigation taken by parties it did not name.

"We believe these lawsuits are without merit and are not material to Shell," the world's second-largest non-government controlled oil company by market value added.

Scientists believe carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels such as oil and gas are a major cause of global warming.

A spokesman said the cases related to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and had been dismissed years ago. He said the comment in the report reflected Shell's view that any future lawsuits of a similar nature would also be without merit.

Companies have generally been successful in such legal battles.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit against five big power companies, that sought to force them to cut their carbon dioxide emissions, claiming the utilities had created a public nuisance by contributing to climate change.

The oil industry has worked hard for over a decade to position itself as part of the solution to global warming rather than its principal culprit.

Natural gas, which accounted for around half of Shell's 2011 output, produces around half the CO2 that coal does, to yield a similar amount of energy.

Companies have sought to expand markets, and prices, for gas, by telling governments the quickest way to cut CO2 emissions was to replace coal-fired power plants with gas turbines, and for gas to be adopted as a transport fuel.

The advocacy effort has accelerated in recent years after an explosion of shale gas production in the United States led to a collapse in natural gas prices.

Study: Prostate Screening Isn't Saving Lives

By Marilynn Marchione

Europe - A big study of men in Europe gives mixed results about prostate cancer screening that may do little to change minds about its value.

The study finds that PSA blood tests every four years seem to cut the risk of death from prostate cancer. 

But it also finds that screening makes no difference in overall mortality rates because most men die of other causes — not their prostate tumors.

The results underscore a frustrating truth about this disease: most prostate cancers grow too slowly to threaten a man's life and there is no good way to tell which ones will. Finding cancer often leads to treatments that can cause impotence, incontinence and other problems. The PSA test also is just a measure of inflammation, which can be due to many things besides cancer.

"A man needs to make a choice for himself, realizing the benefits exist in theory, but the harms have been shown in every study that we've ever done in prostate cancer," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "If there is an overall mortality benefit from prostate screening it is very, very small."

He had no role in the study, which was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

In October, a government-appointed panel of experts, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, recommended against screening with PSA tests. Only two big studies have looked at this — a U.S. one that found annual screening did not cut prostate cancer death risk and a European one that found screening every four years did. (In Europe, prostate screening is less common and is done at wider intervals than in the United States.)

The new research is longer follow-up from the European study: 11-year results on 162,000 men ages 55 to 69. Researchers found that 1,055 men would need to be offered screening and 37 cancers would need to be detected to prevent a single death from prostate cancer. Overall death rates did not differ between the group offered screening and the group not offered it.

About half of the cancers that were detected did not need to be treated, researchers estimate.

The study was led by Dr. Fritz Schroder of Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Several authors hold patents or get fees from PSA tests.

Men who choose to be screened should be prepared for a tough discussion of whether to have a biopsy or to treat any cancer that is found, said Dr. Christopher Logothetis, prostate cancer research chief at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Prostate cancer "is only one of the causes of death, and it is not the main cause of death in these patients," he said.

Others believe the study supports the value of PSA tests and think the benefit will become clearer with even longer follow-up.

"Urologists are very passionate about it because we see all the bad cases," said Dr. Stephen Freedland, a Duke University urologist who has consulted for a few makers of prostate cancer drugs.

"What we need to do is separate screening from treatment. Not everyone diagnosed needs to be treated. 

But the best way of knowing who to treat is getting a sense of how bad the cancer is," he said. Annual tests may be too often, "but I don't think the solution to that is to give up all screening."