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.

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*  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.

The Open Society and its Enemies (Take 2)

by Les May

IN an earlier article I discussed the BBC2 film Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind.  This film can now be viewed on iPlayer.

If, like me, you are puzzled by the constant claims that Labour and Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic, I urge you to view it.

It may cause you to ask why Labour is being targeted in this way when the vicious attacks on Jews and Jewishness in Hungary and Turkey receive no attention media.  The UK is, and I hope will remain, the safest country in Europe for Jewish people.

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The Open Society and its Enemies

by Les May

I DID not see all of the BBC2 film Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind shown at 9pm on Sunday evening.   I came in at the point where a phalanx of white men were shown in a torchlight process chanting what I thought was ‘You’ll never replace the white race’, but which the director, Mike Rudin, says was ‘Jews will not replace us’.

The ‘Global Mastermind’ of the title is George Soros.  His ‘crime’ has been to donate very large sums of money to fund thousands of education, health, human rights and democracy projects through the Open Society Foundations.   For his pains he has had Donald Trump retweet a video that claimed to show cash being handed out to people in Honduras to ‘storm the US border’, with a suggestion that the cash might have come from him, Soros. 

 

When Trump was asked whether Soros was funding the migrant caravan, he replied: ‘I wouldn't be surprised.  A lot of people say yes’.

Rudin claims that the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has accused Soros of being at the heart of a Jewish conspiracy to ‘divide’ and ‘shatter’ Turkey and other nations.

Viktor Orban Prime Minister of Hungary is quoted as saying ‘We are fighting an enemy that is different from us.  Not open but hiding.  Not straightforward but crafty.  Not honest but unprincipled.  Not national but international.   Does not believe in working but speculates with money.  Does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world’.  In just 8 weeks in 1944 about 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Nazis. 
 
However you wrap this up it is anti-semitism; in the first case aimed at Soros because he is Jewish and in the second reviving the sort of thing Adolf Hitler said about Jewish people.

As a committed socialist I see the treatment meted out to Jewish people ‘the canary in the coal mine’.  If they attack them, then they will attack socialists, trade unionists and old fashioned liberals.  This is why I found this film so disturbing.

You can find what is substantially a transcript of the film at;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49584157

You can find clips at;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008c6g

You can see the whole film at midnight on BBC2 on Thursday 12 September.

What I find truly staggering is that with this going on in the USA, Hungary and in other places in Europe, British Jewish organisations are focusing their attention on attacking the Labour party, and Jeremy Corbyn in particular, as being anti-semitic.   I don’t believe it and I don’t know anyone who supports Labour who does.  And saying so does not make me a Jew hater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies

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John Rety the anarchist poet by Harry Eyres

John Rety, a former anarchist editor of

Freedom newspaper died in February 2010

and Harry Eyres wrote this

essay about him in the Financial Times:

THE last time I saw John Rety, in a café at the Royal Festival Hall in London, three floors beneath the Poetry Library, he told me he didn’t feel old. He was off to play in a British Senior Masters chess tournament in Austria, close to the border with Hungary, the land of his birth.
'I don’t really believe in old age,' he said, as if this was another of those myths, like the overriding importance of money, that needed puncturing.  I had no idea how old he was and didn’t think much about it.  He looked exactly the same as he had always done: hair and beard thick, trousers and jersey rumpled, deep brown eyes peering out from under bushy brows with what I thought was an inextinguishable mischief and contrariness. 
But John, poet and publisher – of my poems and those of others, some well-known and others not – died suddenly at home last month.  It turned out he was coming up to his 80th birthday.  For the past 30 years he’d been publishing poetry at his small press, Hearing Eye, and hosting weekly poetry readings at Torriano Meeting House in north London.  He kept going, as small grants came and went, as the publishing and bookselling climate became more and more inhospitable to small press poetry.
John refused to publish my work while I was poetry editor of the Daily Express, as he disapproved so strongly of that paper’s politics. But he did show interest in the Daily Poem column that I ran there for nearly five years in which, more by accident than design, I ended up featuring a number of poets from his stable. One day he said to me, 'Why don’t you print your commentary on the Daily Poem upside down, like the solution to a chess puzzle?'
As the poet Julia Casterton rightly remarked, quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, John 'had an eye for all things counter, original, spare and strange'.
Politics was something that might have come between us.  I came to voting age just as Margaret Thatcher came to power, in what seemed a post-socialist world.  But John was a lifelong anarchist and peace activist who never renounced the political commitment and principles forged in the fight against fascism.  During the Vietnam war, he chained himself to the railings of the Imperial War Museum.
He was once asked when he had become an anarchist.  'During the war in Budapest,' he replied.  'I think I was part of the resistance.'  Maybe he was not quite sure because he was only nine when the war began.  On the day the war ended, in Budapest, his grandmother, who had looked after him when his Jewish parents went into hiding, approached a guard who had a Swastika armband and a rifle. 'You can put those away now,' she said.  He shot her dead.
Later, living in England, John became editor of the anarchist paper Freedom and more recently the poetry editor of the communist daily the Morning Star (presumably old rifts between anarchists and communists had been healed).  His anthology of poems from the Morning Star, entitled Well Versed, with an introduction by the veteran socialist politician Tony Benn, recently went into a second printing.
The reasons for this are more poetic than political. It is, in fact, an excellent and enjoyable anthology (I must declare an interest: it contains one short poem of mine) and not at all what you might expect. The best poems in it are not tub-thumping but intelligent, funny and human. Paul Birtill is a poet John supported and published for many years and time and again his dark humour hits the mark; I love his poem 'Global Warming', which ends like this:
'I’ve also/ noticed those old guys with/ "The End Is Nigh" signboards/ seem a lot more confident/ these days – have a certain/ spring in their step.'
There is also fine work by Jeremy Kingston – even better as a poet than as a theatre critic for The Times.  Well-known names include Dannie Abse and John Heath-Stubbs.
Open-mindedness and catholic taste do not always go with intense political commitment, but in John’s case they did. His short introduction to Well Versed is one of the wisest short statements you could find about the place of poetry in our time: “A choice of poems cannot be divorced from one’s view of life ... There is real love, there is real anger, there is biting satire, and there is also celebration when it is called for ... [These] poems hint at a new age when the ethics which exist behind closed doors might suddenly, as by quantum leap, take over the public domain.”
What John represented, battled for and supported all his life, was well described as a 'bizarre old-fashioned decency'.  Poetry readings at Torriano Meeting House were the least glamorous occasions you could imagine but they had something that the glitzy, vacuous gatherings more characteristic of this age are completely lacking; call it humanity.  And then you could ask why decency, and the expression of real human emotions, should have come to seem bizarre and old-fashioned

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.'