There are tears in their eyes and the last hugs are achingly long. No one wants to let another smart young person leave Greece for Germany.
Edlira had been giving up her Sundays to teach Greek to immigrants in a dusty Athens suburb until the country’s crisis finally caught up with her. Now she is becoming a migrant herself — the third volunteer teacher from the migrant Sunday School to emigrate in as many months. The irony is lost on no one.
But for Edlira there is a double hurt. She is leaving the country she calls home, where she went to school and university, without a Greek passport.
On paper she is as much a foreigner as when she arrived in Greece as a child from Albania 17 years ago.
“I want to stay. I speak Greek better than Albanian,” said the 28-year-old nurse. “But there is a moment in job interviews when they look at my name — Edlira Xhezairaj — and they say, ‘So you are not Greek?’ And then conversation drops. It’s not a nice feeling.”
“I don’t think it’s possible ever to be really accepted,” she said, the wound raw.
In Europe, only Luxembourg and Austria officially make it more difficult for immigrants to acquire nationality. In reality, however, it’s not unusual for foreigners in Greece to be left in limbo for 20 years or more, rights groups claim.
So Kafkaesque has the system become that officials commonly issue residence permits that are already expired, said Elena Papageorgiou, who runs the Sunday school in Kolonos.
Four years after her husband, an Iraqi Kurd, applied for Greek nationality, he has just been given a place in the queue to begin the byzantine process. “And we are married and know the system,” she said. “Can you imagine how it is for people who don’t?”
– ‘Speak Greek or die’ –
For two decades Greece has been one of the main entry points into the EU for migrants, many fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The vast majority go on illegally to northern Europe, but many get stuck in Greece after being stopped by police or when money to pay people smugglers runs out.
Greece has neither the resources nor the will to tackle the problem, activists claim, with Brussels requiring asylum seekers to be processed where they first arrive — a burden for a country whose own finance minister admits it is “bankrupt”.
The minority of migrants who want to make a life in Greece face not only official indifference but hostility and often violence from supporters of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn, now the country’s third-largest political party.
“Speak Greek or Die” is the chilling title of a song recorded by one its most high-profile MPs and punk musician, Artemis Matthaiopoulos.
Solace Godwin speaks Greek as well as any Greek but it did not stop the junior doctor being abused for the colour of her skin while treating a 57-year-old bank clerk in a hospital in northern Greece. “What you need is Hitler and soap,” the man told her.
The Nigeria-born medic, whose family came to Greece when she was 14, went to the police.
Source:thepeninsulaqatar.com
