Trouble at the Greek border crossing

by Brian Bamford

IN March1997, I stood on the Greek border at the Albanian Kakavijë frontier crossing near the Greek town of Ioannina, and watched as wagons driven by the Greek police emptied Gypsies out of the back onto Albania territory.  That was during the political crisis set off by the Pyramid sales* scandal, and all pretense of State power had collapsed in Albania.  

Later a Greek customs officers tried to explain to me why he was turning back middle-class Albanians, and he told me in English: 'this is just like the problem in the USA with its border with Mexico -- we can't keep letting people through'.  

One young lass who'd been turned back that day had traveled from her home further north to the Kakavijë frontier, and the guard said she had tried to cross three-times and each time with a different father.  When I spoke to the Albanian consul in Ioannina, he told me that there was nothing he could do for these people, and that I could have more influence by connecting the Greek Embassy in London.  This I did and I reported incident in Freedom at the time.  

That was in 1997, but as I write today with the enforced Turkish pressure on emigrants from Syria now being pushed up against the Greek frontier, according to the Politico website:

'Greek authorities [have] said they had intercepted around 4,000 people attempting to cross at points along the 50-mile border on Friday night. Some estimates suggested more than 1,000 made it to Greece on Friday, although the government denied these estimates. After 66 people were arrested Friday night, another 70 were arrested on Saturday. Officials said Saturday night more than 10,000 people were at the border.'

This weekend about 1,000 people are reported to be stranded between Turkey and Greece.

And the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterated Saturday that the country no longer intended to work to prevent migrants from entering Europe. 'We will not close these doors ... Why? The European Union needs to keep its promises. We don’t have to take care of this many refugees, to feed them,' he said.
 
The Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has suggested that Austria could soon consider closing its border if the situation worsens.

Kurz tweeted Saturday that Austria is ready to provide additional police support to other countries but added, 'If the protection of the EU's external border is unsuccessful, Austria will protect its borders.'

A statement by European Council President Charles Michel read: 'The EU is actively engaged to uphold the EU-Turkey Statement and to support Greece and Bulgaria to protect the EU’s external borders.'

On the eve of the Serbian Parliamentary elections, which were to be held in the Republic of Serbia on 23 December 2000^[1], I was in Achau in the Baverian Alps, and there I boarded a train for Saltzburg which ultimately connected with a train bound for Belgrade via Budapest.  Owing to visa problems I was held up at Subotica in northern Serbia, and sent back to the Serb Embassy in Hungary to get authentication for my Freedom Press credentials which was soon sorted.  But not before I was briefly detained by Hungarian police as I was on my way to the railway station, who demanded my passport and accused me of being a Iranian.  At that time Hungary was anxious to affiliate to the EU, and there was a fear of an invasion of immigrants from Serbia and Kosvo.

What was interesting was that while I was being held by the frontier guards at Subottica, a Kosovan migrant was brought out, and we exchanged greetings before he was taken off somewhere.  I managed to give him some sandwiches which he ate greedily before he was hauled off by armed guards.  Kosovans are Muslims. yet this didn't prevent him eating and apparently enjoying the ham butties.

One can't spend time in the Balkans** without becoming concious of the importance of frontiers to those people who don't live on islands as we do.

********************
 
*  A pyramid scheme creates the illusion of financial success by paying off early investors with funds provided by later investors.  The scheme eventually collapses when no more investors can be found.  When the schemes began to collapse in Albania [in 1997] and the money vanished, Europe’s second-poorest country (ahead of Bosnia-Herzegovina) erupted into violent riots that left one person dead, scores injured and city halls, courts and police stations in flames.
High-risk, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes have popped up in Poland, Romania, the former Yugoslav federation and the former Soviet Union, where transition economies, lax regulation and vulnerable populations have created fertile ground for abuse.

But only in Albania did the schemes reach such mammoth proportions and operate with the tacit blessing--some say complicity--of the government.
Suddenly Albania, a country that seemed to be emerging successfully from decades of brutal Communist rule and numbing isolation, was plunged into a crisis that has undermined both its wobbly economy and chances for the government’s survival, exposed a false sense of prosperity and led to profound questioning of the nominally democratic system that Albania adopted after the belated fall of Stalinism in 1991.


**  The First Balkan War began when the League member states attacked the Ottoman Empire on 8 October 1912 and ended eight months later with the signing of the Treaty of London on 30 May 1913. The Second Balkan War began on 16 June 1913. Both Serbia and Greece, utilizing the argument that the war had been prolonged, repudiated important particulars of the pre-war treaty and retained occupation of all the conquered districts in their possession, which were to be divided according to specific predefined boundaries.

Antonio Gramsci at Wakefield History Group

Comrades


Antonio Gramsci was born on Sardinia to parents of Albanian origin.
When he was seven his father was imprisoned for embezzlement.  This placed great financial strain on the family and Gramsci had to take part time work until 1904 when his father was finally released.
Gramsci then completed High School and won a scholarship to the University of Turin where he studied linguistics and literature.   However illness and poverty again mean he was unable to complete his studies.
In 1914 he started writing for socialist papers as a means of supporting himself.  Indeed he would combine journalism and political activism for the next ten years, focusing in particular on organising factory workers in the industrial heartland of Turin.
Gramsci had joined the PSI (the Italian socialists) in 1913.  Then in 1919 he helped found the weekly 'L'Ordine Nuovo'.  The paper was seen by Lenin as being close to Bolshevism and in 1921 the editorial group -including Gramsci- formed the core of the new PCI (Italian Communist Party).
Gramsci was elected to Parliament as representative for the Veneto region in 1924.  Vehemently anti-Mussolini, he was arrested by the Fascist Government in 1926 under the Emergency Powers Act (and despite apparent parliamentary immunity!).
The prosecutor at his trial said it was imperative to 'stop Gramsci's brain from functioning'.  Despite this whilst in prison Gramsci wrote 3000 pages of notes that contributed greatly to the development of Marxist thought.
Gramsci died in prison half way through his 20 year sentence.  He was only 46.


*Wakefield Socialist History group are holding an event, "THE POLITICS OF ANTONIO GRAMCI", at the Red Shed, Vicarage Street, Wakefield WF1 on Saturday 3 December, 1-4pm.  If you would like to speak at the event please get in touch.


Fraternally
Alan Stewart
Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group

Pale-faced Reply by Irrelevant Old Man!

Dear Adam Lawrence-Barr,

NICE to hear from you.  I only became aware of you after someone drew my attention to your spat with Nick Heath over your interview with the Catholic Worker.  I think he accused you of returning to the 'Big Tent' approach to anarchism, and you humbly said that Freedom had no intention of returning to the 'Big Tent' approach.  I don't know what the alternative is perhaps it amounts to proclaiming what Orwell called the 'smelly little orthodoxy' of left wing politics.  Whatever is the case, Northern Voices would be more than happy to publish your ideas on the NV Blog.

 You mention a few groups or tenants of Freedom that are doing 'work', implying that by offering rooms or collecting rents and standing in their shadows Freedom is somehow made more significant by its proximity to these bodies.  It's a curious argument to pursue, especially when at the last meeting of the Friends of Freedom you revealed that the inmates at Freedom had managed to 'squander' a large sum of money left to Freedom by a benefactor some 7-years ago.  You did say 'squander' didn't you?  And did you go on to absolve yourself by saying:  'It was before my time'?  Also, is it true that a member of the Friends has been financing the Collective out of their own pocket? 

None of these misdemeanours seems to inhibit you from taking that moral high ground in your e-mail and accusing Northern Voices an 'attempt to steal away the means of production from the workers using it by a bunch of old irrelevant white men'.  I'm glad you raised the matter in this for it suggests that you have not read a word of the Freedom archives or even of Northern Voices.  By couching your profound critique in such terms I suppose that you are claiming that you are more in touch with the shop-floor and the world of work?  And that your record in anarchist politics is somehow superior to mine and the other three supporters of the 'Modest program'?

Well, that is interesting:  how long have you been involved in Freedom?  The problem is that you seem to be representing the Metropolitan elite, and apart from David Goodway from Yorkshire, who is on the Friends of Freedom to represent the provinces?  Your own name sounds like something from the Home Counties and the middle-class, it doesn't have a proletarian ring to it does it?  It doesn't sound owt like someone who has been apprenticed in a factory, or has worked in the shipyards in Gibraltar like me, or has been a weighman in a Lancashire textile mill.  Or someone who has done time in Strangeways, or been detained in a dungeon in the province of Segovia in the summer of 1963, before even Stuart Christie went to Franco's Spain.  I'll not mention about the interviews I did for Freedom during the pyramid sales riots in Albania in 1997, and in Belgrade during the general elections there in December 2000.  What today seems to be held to be 'irrelevant' on the left of politics is the concerns of the blue-collar worker:  take the lack of interest in many quarters in the recent High Court case over blacklisting - that is the elephant which has somehow been left outside the room.  Where are the representatives of North & South Wales on the Friends of Freedom?  Where is the Scottish connection?  Where are the Northerners?  Where are the genuine Proles and blue-collar workers? 

 Come-on Adam Lawrence-Barr, who are you kidding? 

 Kind regards, 

 Brian Bamford

Ukraine & Spain, is it the same?

Does the Civil War in east Ukraine resemble the Spanish War?

LAST Thursday, Sabrina Tavernise in the International New York Times wrote a report of an incident that reminded me of my experiences in Spain under Franco in the early 1960s, Albania, Hungary, and former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.  She was in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine at a checkpoint held by a 'pro-Russian rebel with bad teeth and aviator sunglasses [who] was trying to help (her)'.  These rebels had been fighting Ukrainian regular troops but they were protective towards her an America journalist as they waited for orders from 'a higher-up'.  Later a brown Lada with tinted windows screeched to a halt at the check-point and a man got out wearing a maroon beret and black leather fingerless gloves.  He had little time for the men who were chatting to Sabrina and wouldn't give them his contact details, he merely indicated that she should get into the back of the Lada.   

The Ukrainian rebel insisted she write down her telephone number and other details before getting into the car 'just in case', and he said 'Don't be afraid  they're just going to check you out.'  The man in the sunglasses and 'arms slathered in tattoos' drove off with Sabrina into 'a strange slide into a Wonderland world, were fact was hard to tell from fiction and reality and absurdity came in equal portions.'  They ended up at his girl friend's flat in a 'dingy one room apartment', and he told her that his name was Denis and that he was head of an intelligence group in Luhansk.  He said he was tired and didn't want to be bothered checking her documents at the office.  A woman who introduced herself as Tamara Vladimirovna exclaimed at the pleasure of having such a lovely guest and shook Sabrina's hand warmly.   

These kind of incidents often happened to me in such situations in other countries in Europe:  people who one may expect to be hostile such as the Civil Guards in the mountains in Segovia in the summer of 1963, when I was returning from a trip to the Asturias where the miners were on strike, who detained me while the authorities did checks on my papers in Alicante, surprised me and I ended up being treated to Sunday dinner by the wives of the Civil Guards together with wine and Sherry; I don't recall them offering me a Cognac with my coffee though!  Something similar happened to me in Belgrade in December 2000 after the fall of Slobodan Milošević, in 1989 in Visigrad, Hungary  before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Sarranda in Albania at the time of the rioting and civil unrest over the Pyramid Sales scandal there.  The thing is to avoid the political rhetoric, the stereotype thinking and to realise that when you get involved politics and journalism in places like the Ukraine now, and Spain under General Franco you can't operate according to any political, ideological or a priori guide book; circumstances force you to think on your feet and if you don't do that you really could end up dead..  Sabrina Tavernise made a journalistic judgement and she was well treated well, and George Orwell made similar judgements in the Spanish Civil War but in his case he and his wife only just escaped in one piece.   

The story of  Sabrina Tavernise's experience was published the day before Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by persons unknown.  Sabrina's 'interrogator' Denis introduced himself as 'a mercenary from Russia' and he said 'I don't give a damn about any of this.'  Denis did not say who paid him but said that his group formed the heart of the rebel forces and that most of the 'insurgents here – about 80% in his words -  were were scrappy locals:  taxi drivers and coal miners who had never seen a battle'  He added:  '20% were better because they had fought in Afghanistan.'   

Reading Sabrina's account the involvement of Denis and what he says are 'about 50 Russians... being paid to fight against Ukraine's government' one could be forgiven for making a mental comparison between Denis and his Russian mercenary mates and the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.  The International Brigaders too were accused of being mercenaries in the 1930s, and they too saw the Spanish republican fighters militias as inferior and even racially less able:  there is plenty of documentation to demonstrate this attitude in the archives.  On the news today even the defenders of the Muslims fighting in Syria, are arguing that they are only like George Orwell who fought in Spain and wrote 'Homage to Catalonia'.  The truth is that the rebels argue that the Kiev government was installed as a result of a coup and the Spanish republican government in 1936 was threatened by military sedition which in some ways superficially represented a similar situation.  There is, however, a vast ideological difference between the participants in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and the Russian mercenaries in Luhansk, Slovyansk and Donetsk: in the case of the Russian mercenaries in east Ukraine – take Mr. Strelkov, a native Muscovite whose real name is Igor Girkin, who made a public appearance earlier this month at a news conference; Mr. Strelkov is described by the journalist Noah Sneider as having 'ideological rigidity [that] precedes any connections he has to Russia's security services, stretching back at least to at least to his days at the Moscow State Institute for History & Archives... [t]here Mr. Strelkov obsessed over military history and joined a small but vocal group of students who advocated a return to monarchism.'   

If Noah Sneider is to be believed it seems that under Mr. Putin people like Mr. Strelkov (or Mr. Girkin) are coming to the fore.  Mr. Sneider writes: 

'An ultra-nationalist and reactionary Mr. Strelkov fits an increasingly familiar profile in Russia, one that has emerged strongly with the re-election of President Vladimir V. Putin.  Messianic and militaristic, such figures combine a deep belief in Russia's historic destiny with a contempt for for the “decadent” West, while yearning for the re-establishment of a czarist empire.'   

Strangely (or perhaps predictably) in the West we have some people who are on the left who find themselves defending the Russian strategy and argue that poor Mr. Putin and Russia are in danger of encirclement by the ideas of wicked western liberal democracies.   Better a reactionary Russia or even an oriental despotism, than a decadent liberal USA or European Union.   

What ought we to do now that 298 passengers have died?   

Ought we to have more severe sanctions against Russia as a consequence of the plane that was shot down?  Ought the US or the EU to intervene to support the Kiev government?   

When America, France and the U.K. failed to intervene on the side of the Spanish republican government in the Spanish Civil War there was much criticism of them on the left.  And when, Orson Wells asked President Roosevelt in 1939 if he had any regrets, Roosevelt said 'Yes, my failure to support the Spanish republic in 1936.'