Live in Greece “at your own risk”

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This is our weekly round-up from Greece.

More evidence on illegal pushbacks has been revealed this week, including a Legal Centre Lesvos video on a 200 migrants pushback and the creepy findings of the until now unknown practice of pushing back people from Italy to Greece on the ‘dungeons’ of luxurious commercial ships.

In what appears to be a continuous effort to cover up the ‘Greek Watergate,’ the Greek government indirectly yet clearly turned down the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy president Christos Rammos' request to inform the Parliament of the Authorities' findings.

Expectant mothers are asked to “give birth at their own risk” due to a lack of hospital pediatricians. This is the latest in a series of degrading Greek NHS. This week also included the postponement of chemotherapies due to the lack of hospital pharmacists and humiliating situations in the largest psychiatric hospital in Greece.

Civilization ‘hand-cuffed’ at the dungeons

While the new Frontex chief Hans Leijtens vowed on Thursday to end illegal pushbacks (Opens in a new window) of migrants at the EU border, a report with creepy findings was published.

Asylum seekers are held in secret prisons on commercial ships to facilitate illegal pushbacks from Italy to Greece: this was what Lighthouse Reports reported (Opens in a new window) on Thursday, in collaboration with SRF, ARD Monitor, Al Jazeera, Il Domani, and Solomon.

“As holidaymakers sip on cold beer and cocktails on the deck of a passenger ferry, a buzz of excitement in the air, a very different situation is playing below deck. In the bowels of this vessel, there are people, including children, chained and locked up in dark places against their will,” the report noted. “This is Europe’s lesser-known pushback practice, where secret prisons on private ships are used to illegally return asylum seekers to where they came from,” they added.

According to the report, asylum seekers, including children, are detained in metal boxes and dark rooms, sometimes hand-cuffed to metal shelves, in the context of these illegal pushbacks by Italy. In one such room, “names and dates of detainees are scribbled on the walls in different languages,” it is noted - bringing to mind engravings we see when visiting medieval prisons.

Also on Thursday, Legal Centre Lesvos published a video (Opens in a new window) revealing the pushback of 200 migrants off the shores of Crete in 2020. The video documents an organized pushback of people who had left Turkey to seek asylum in Europe. Those who survived accuse the Greek Coast Guard of pushing them back to Turkey using life rafts.

More specifically, in October 2020, these 200 asylum seekers had left Turkey for Europe when a storm broke out while the boat was off the coast of the Greek island of Crete. They send an SOS to the Greek Coast Guard - with the Greek Coast Guard verifying they received such a call. However, 11 of the boat passengers, who have filed a lawsuit against the Greek state with the European Court of Human Rights, claim that, instead of helping them, the Greek Coast Guard pushed them violently back to Turkey, abandoning them in life rafts.

The Greek authorities reportedly deny until today that such a pushback took place. Legal Centre Lesvos, in this video, combining evidence from interviews and other available data, documents what happened that day, which appears to be “a massive, coordinated, and illegal pushback operation (Opens in a new window).”

Just to put things more in context, according (Opens in a new window) to statistics released by UNHCR on Wednesday, 326 people have died or gone missing in the attempt to reach Greece via the Eastern Mediterranean from Turkey and other states in 2022. That's nearly three times as many as in 2021.

Greek government blocks transparency efforts

The New Democracy government blocked (Opens in a new window) the Hellenic Authority for Communication Security and Privacy (ADAE) president Christos Rammos from testifying to the Institutions and Transparency Parliamentary Committee.

The ADAE president had officially requested on 17 January a hearing by the Committee to inform the Parliament of the Authority’s findings on the wiretapping scandal. He had filed the request with the Committee’s president Bouras and told the Parliament president Tasoulas about this request.

During a Committee session on the Communist Party KKE wiretapping, Bouras responded to the request by saying he will “wait to specifically see Mr. Rammos’s request and then the procedures provided for this will be followed. We will see when evidence becomes more specific,” he added.

ND MPs-members of the Committee appeared outraged and accused Rammos of exceeding his authority with this move. He said that it is up to the Parliament to decide when they will call the ADAE president to testify.

The main opposition, SYRIZA, accused ND of attempting a cover-up, protested, and walked out of the Committee session. They also criticized Committee president Bouras for his decision. Bouras was reported to have claimed he received the ADAE president's request but not to have had the time to read it as he received it on… his name day.

Previously, SYRIZA-affiliated newspaper Avgi had reported (Opens in a new window) that the government, via Parliament president Tasoulas (an ND MP), was planning to block the ADAE president from testifying on the wiretapping investigation for the Committee to be summoned at a time more favorable for the governing party.

On Thursday, SYRIZA president Tsipras contacted (Opens in a new window) Parliament president Tasoulas. He emphasized that the Parliament should immediately accept the ADAE president's request as his testimony on the wiretapping scandal and the investigation results is of major institutional importance.

Tsipras pointed out that all parties should converge on calling Rammos, that Tasoulas should reconsider his stance and that, in any case, ND will have to undertake the historical responsibility of their decision.

Speaking later to journalists, however, Tasoulas insisted (Opens in a new window) on his cover-up stance, claiming “there cannot be self-invited guests” in the Committee and attempting to justify the whole thing by calling upon procedural protocol.

It is phenomenal for a Parliament to refuse to be informed on such a serious matter.

Meanwhile, Inside Story revealed (Opens in a new window) on Friday that Predator spyware targets in Greece were more than 20, calling upon ADAE findings. That is, officially verified targets were more than we thought they were.

According to the report, there has been specific evidence for the wiretapping of seven people. At the same time, two more, who work in the private sector, appear to have verified their wiretapping without, however, has made the information public. It is noted that most of the targets either completely ignore that they have been targeted or avoid investigating the issue further while knowing they have visited the infected link.

“Give birth at your own risk”

Are you an expectant mother? Can you imagine being brought to the maternity clinic with labor pains - and the clinic requesting you to sign a document declaring you will give birth at your own risk?

This is exactly what expectant mothers were asked to sign due to the lack of pediatricians on shift in Argos (Peloponnese) hospital. According to hospital doctors, this is (Opens in a new window) what women are requested to sign - with the hospital’s management and Health Ministry being complacent:

“I, the signatory of this and expectant mother was comprehensively and informed by the gynecologist on shift and in the presence of the midwife responsible that today no pediatrician is on shift, hence giving birth with no pediatrician present entails risk should any complications occur and that I was proposed to be referred to another health structure. Despite this, I wish to be admitted to the Maternity Gynaecological clinic of the Argos General Hospital, and I undertake to have my pediatrician to assist.”

It is reported that the lack of pediatricians in maternity hospitals drives quite a few women in hospitals outside their prefecture to give birth. In the whole Argolida prefecture (Argos is one of its cities), with a population of some 93.000, there is only one hospital pediatrician in Nafplio, who is called to cover all the needs!

This is just the latest in a series of state-induced crimes in the context of the systematic dissolution of the NHS - we often report about it in this newsletter.

In another tragic episode of the series, last week, approximately 120 cancer patients in Metaxa hospital -one of the main Athens cancer hospitals- received their chemotherapy with a two-day delay (Opens in a new window). Why? Because according to what Metaxas’s employees reported (Opens in a new window), the only hospital main pharmacist had tested positive for Covid, and they were left with the helping pharmacist “who had come from Janio Hospital to help for some months and who was forced to work even while she was sick with fever.” The helping pharmacist, meanwhile, returned to Janio hospital, where she is appointed.

According to the employees’ union press release, the lack of a pharmacist obliged the hospital to postpone the chemotherapies.

The hospital’s assistant manager claimed there is not only one employee in the pharmacy but two - yet both of them sick- and a third one who has not been trained yet.

A similarly grim situation is also the case in psychiatric clinics. Doctors in Dafni psychiatric hospital -the largest in the country- reported (Opens in a new window) this week significant understaffing, which leads to worrying incidents.

Emphasizing the particular conditions under which the transfer of psychiatric patients should take place (eg, when they need to be transferred to another hospital), they describe incidents like a patient who needed urgent medical treatment and was under intense excitation, ended up “to be chased in the corridors and being subjected to violence by police officers” creating threatening conditions for everyone’s well-being there.

Doctors often report only one nurse per 15 patients in Dafni. “We experience daily the tragic understaffing which combined with overstaffed beds leads to a huge workload, low nursing standards and bad hospitalization conditions of hospitalization…” they added.

But expectant mothers - cancer -and psychiatric patients need not worry:

Minister of Citizen Protection Theodorikakos announced earlier this month that 600 more policemen (Opens in a new window) and 400 more border guards (Opens in a new window) will be hired.