Ahmet Abuhamed runs a fish shop in Perama, a town near the port of Piraeus. He sells the day’s catch, including sea bream, mackerel, sardines and octopus. A 40-year-old father of four, he moved to Greece 20 years ago from Rosetta, an Egyptian fishing village near Alexandria.
“All the fishermen [in Greece] are Egyptian,” he says. “Go to any island in the country and listen to the conversations on the boats. You’ll hear names like Alim and Mohammad.”
Egyptian fishermen have worked in Greece for decades. Abuhamed speaks Greek fluently and has many Greek friends. The country feels like a second home, he says.
In the past two decades, Abuhamed has brought more than 60 relatives and friends to work in Greece.
Many immigrants can’t afford the fee to file police reports, but they are reporting attacks to human rights groups. One Greek organization has recorded more than 300 vigilante attacks since April.
In a recent report, Human Rights Watch also recorded dozens of beatings and stabbings some in broad daylight, says senior researcher Judith Sunderland.
“I was shocked on a daily basis by the stories that we heard and the suffering that we found,” she says. “We had no idea of the scale. It really does appear to be a daily phenomenon.”
Sunderland and others suspect some of the attackers may be sympathizers of Golden Dawn an extreme nationalist party that wants, in its own words, to clean Greece of immigrants and land-mine the border with Turkey to prevent more immigrants from crossing. In parliamentary elections in June, the party won 18 seats of 300 in parliament.
Its members recently left fliers at businesses owned by immigrants in the Piraeus suburbs that demanded that the immigrants leave in a month or else.
Ilias Panagiotaros, a parliamentary deputy for Golden Dawn, dismisses the connection between his party and the attacks.
More than a million immigrants live in Greece about 10 percent of the country’s population. About 800,000 live here legally, while more than 350,000 are undocumented.
Many of the newcomers are Muslims from North Africa and Central and South Asia. Some Greeks feel threatened and burdened by them, especially as the debt crisis has destroyed the country’s economy, says Jan Egeland, Europe director of Human Rights Watch.
“We see that austerity makes all of the things come out of the shadows,” he said. “Migrants and minorities are the first to feel this.”
The Egyptian fishermen of Rosetta who work here legally are certainly feeling it.
They’re alarmed at how unwelcome they suddenly feel in a country that once embraced them.
2012 National Public Radio