On Thursday 4/6, 18 locals from Athens and Chalkida arrived at the Ritsona camp at 11 a.m., to participate in the mobilization organized by the camp’s migrants in cooperation with the Solidarity With Migrants assembly. Arriving at the gate, which was open, the police tried to prevent us from entering the camp. In fact, the police tried to close the gate so that we could be completely excluded from the camp, which was prevented by the intervention of migrants and our own reaction. While waiting for the mobilization to begin, we were informed by a migrant that representatives of the Ministry of Immigration Policy had already intervened to prevent the mobilization, which had been announced publicly in the previous days. Eventually, after negotiations and disagreements between the representatives of the migrant communities and IOM(International Organization for Migration), the camp administration and the police, the protest finally took place. At about 12:45 we all finally entered the camp, and started a demonstration with a large number of immigrants, passing by the accommodation areas where migrants stay and heading out of the camp. During the demonstration, migrants who participated in it encouraged the rest of the camp’s population to break through fear posed by the government’s threats and to take part in the demonstration. We distributed texts and talked to a lot of people from the Kurdish, Afghan, Arab and African communities, and about 200 people who were on the march at that time came out of the camp gate. The demonstration moved dynamically alongside the road outside the camp and not according to the route originally decided by immigrants, due to the threats of the Ministry.
The most popular demands of migrants were legalization papers for everyone, freedom of movement and passports, cash benefits, along with slogans and improvised placards against refugee / immigrant evictions and in favor of access to education for all children. Today, with about 3,000 people imprisoned in the camp and with the escalating anti-migration war waged by the Greek state and capital, the inconvenience of imprisoned migrants in Ritsona is growing, as is currently the case throughout Greece and by extent Europe, resulting in dozens of similar mobilizations of migrants.
The participation of our assembly in this mobilization was the result of our systematic communication with migrants of the camp in the last 2 months, despite the quarantine and isolation of migrants in the name of the health crisis and Covid-19. It was a mobilization of locals and migrants, another step towards building the multinational-multicultural and proletariat communities of struggle we want to build.