In April this year, the supervisors of a strawberry farm in Greece opened fire on a group of immigrant workers who had demanded to be paid their salaries which had been withheld for six months. The shooting left 33 Bangladeshi workers wounded (picture), eight of them seriously hurt. It also revealed the dire conditions in which thousands of immigrant workers live in Greece, underpaid and often undeclared, with little or no possibility of escaping their exploitation in intensive farming businesses. Charalambos Kassimis is a professor and research director of rural sociology with the Athens University of Agriculture. In this interview with Amélie Poinssot, he explains the rural evolution which created the need for foreign labour, and details how many migrants became trapped in an organised "state of slavery" made possible by a “law of silence” enforced by politicians.
French interior minister Manuel Valls last week presented the findings of a damning official police internal investigation into the handling of the case of Toulouse gunman Mohammed Merah, a self-confessed jihadist who shot seven dead in a ten-day rampage in south-west France in March, and in which France’s intelligence services have been accused of deliberately hiding their role. Louise Fessard examines the report’s findings.
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