A tourist who has not been to Athens for 25 years would not recognize the center of this city today. The once elite parts of the Greek capital, Omonia and Syntagma squares, are full of immigrants from Asian and African countries; the surrounding streets are crowded with cheap guesthouses where they stay. The situation is similar in many other Greek cities. Estimates of the total number of immigrants in Greece range from a few hundred thousand to almost 1,5 million - since ten years ago, Greece has been the most important "gateway to Europe" for those moving towards the "promised world" fleeing war, violence, misery in to their unhappy homelands.
Since the beginning of the economic crisis in this country, the violence of the Greek right-wing groups against immigrants has become more frequent. The rightists constantly claim that the crime rate has increased enormously due to the increased number of immigrants, which is not true, neither in Greece nor in other countries facing a similar phenomenon. At the same time, they keep silent about the fact that a good part of the Greek economy (agriculture, tourism, construction...) for years rested on cheap labor, and that this labor force consisted of immigrants (in the 1990s from the Balkan states and the former USSR, and two thousand from Asia and Africa).
Serbia is one of the countries that are located on the Western Balkan route through which, through Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia, a wave of immigrants moves. That wave is getting bigger every year, and it will certainly not decrease. New war conflicts in the Near and Middle East, in many African countries, contribute to its increase. Only the war in Syria, which began in 2011, forced millions of people to flee outside the borders of this country, and the situation in the entire region (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia...) is drastically worsening, with gloomy predictions that the situation will probably even worse.
Most immigrants just pass through Serbia on their way to other European countries, but that is a situation that will inevitably change. In relation to asylum seekers, Serbia must fulfill its obligations as a signatory to international conventions, but that should be only one of the reasons for improving their position. The other reasons should include basic humanity, solidarity and the awareness that everyone can find themselves in a situation where they have to leave their country. At least people in this region should know that, hundreds of thousands of refugees left for good in other countries after the Yugoslav wars. Their arrival also changed the cities and countries they arrived in, and for the better. The people of Vienna today admit that their city, which once resembled a beautiful, but somewhat boring and sterile museum, has become a dynamic, colorful capital that lives since refugees from Yugoslavia began to arrive in the 24s, and then citizens of many African and Asian countries. XNUMX hours a day. Many other European cities boast similar wealth, and those who talk about deteriorating security and fear of immigrants in Serbia should be thinking about this.
