Monthly Archive for October, 2010

Greece requested the European Union to send armed so called Frontex Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABITs) to the Greek-Turkish border. This became public on Monday the 25th of October 2010. Greek government statistics state that irregular migration has been increasing in the Evros-Region where the land broder to Turkey stretches over 12 km. According to the Greek Minister of Citizens’ Protection Christos Papoutsis only during the first October weekend of this year 1,400 refugees have been intercepted in that region.

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Frontex PRESS KIT: Rapid Border Intervention Teams

Frontex Press Release I

Frontex Press Release II

Rough translation of the Network for social support to migrants and refugees announcement on RABIT’s operation at Evros:

The development of Frontex’ Rapid Border Intervention Team in Evros region is not a blessing, European help or “solidarity”. A modern military unit to confront not an opposing army but of the fugitives of poverty, imperialist wars and climate change, is not only a threat for asylum rights in Europe, a fact that raises the risks in migration routes and the possibility of deportation to a country where migrants’ lives are threatened. It is a threat to the whole society, a society even more addicted to “state of emergency” policies, policies of stigmatization and collective responsibility, mass deportation and detention, policies emanating from the darkest periods of European history. It is clear: the “solidarity” of European governments is on exporting repression mechanisms, on rights restrictions and on enforcement of anti-social policies. It proves the ideological proximity between Papandreou, Berlousakoni and Sarkozy, a common effort to redirect social rage on immigrants, who are becoming scapegoats of economic crisis. We insist: it is not migrants who threaten the income, employment and security of local people. It is the illegalization and precarization policies which make migrants vulnerable to labor exploitation and social exclusion. It is the denial of any reception fascilities and the dismantling of existing hospitality structures. It is the violation of the right to political and umanitarian asylum proceedures. It is the policies which assign immigration policy to police and repressive mechanisms. That’s why we resist to the efforts of the government and the media to create the image of immigrants as a threat. We resist Frontex, the most developed part of european militarism which directs against the “new enemy” created by the European neo-racism.

Unwelcome migrant hunters of Frontex!
Solidarity with migrants!

For the first time since it was launched in 2004, Frontex, the Warsaw-based agency responsible for the EU’s external borders, has funded and organised its own charter flight to deport undocumented aliens. Le Monde reports that on 28 September, “in a deliberately low-key operation,” 56 Georgian migrants arrested in Poland, France, Austria and Germany were flown from Warsaw to the Georgian capital Tbilisi. In 2011, Frontex, which has has been granted a budget of 676 million euros for the period 2008-2013, plans to organise and finance between 30 and 40 charters to repatriate migrants who have illegally entered the EU. For Frontex’s deputy director, the increased role of the European Union “will come as a relief to national governments who will no longer have to ‘carry the burden’ of negative public opinion, embarrassment and disapproval prompted by collective repatriation procedures.” Le Monde also notes that “another advantage” of grouped operations is that they benefit from the “added weight” of the EU, “which can exert more pressure than individual member states when negotiating with third countries on the return of their citizens.”