Athens—I am walking around downtown Athens watching thousands of migrants fielding pitches from smugglers for alternative routes to Germany and Austria. I ask a friendly policeman fifty years younger than me why he doesn’t arrest the smugglers and throw the key away. “Others will take their place quicker than we put the handcuffs on them,” he tells me. “And they pretend to be migrants the moment we approach.”
Smuggling people is big business, and most of the bad guys are Afghans, as far as I can tell while mixing among them. It is grim stuff, especially where children are concerned. Victoria Square is a tree-lined park where long ago my grandfather owned a large family house. The area is no longer chic, hence the influx of migrants and smugglers. Yet there are Good Samaritans handing out food despite the fact that Greece herself is the poorest country in the EU and is being squeezed daily by the hated troika.
I chat with a man called Vangelis who is handing out sweets and bread to migrants. I tell him that I’m Golden Dawn and what he’s doing is commendable. “Golden Dawn was good in keeping criminals in line in the past,” he says, “but these people here are victims, and that’s why I’m here.” “What about the people-smugglers?” I ask him. “They should be shot on the spot,” he tells me with a smile. The ones I feel very sorry for are the poor Greeks whose shops and fast-food joints are totally empty because of the migrants lining the streets in front of them.
The next day I’m back near the square but to the east of it, where migrant creep is taking place. What I notice is the relative wealth of many of them, paying shops in order to load their mobiles and buying food and drink. From what I can tell they are Afghans, Moroccans, and Pakistanis, not a Syrian among them. The latter are mostly with wives and children and are law-abiding. The former look aggressive, are mostly young and seem demanding. The Port of Piraeus is where most of these non-refugees are concentrated, and I predict forced roundups sooner rather than later as they smell weakness on the part of the Greek government to crack down.
