Greek government politician slanders refugees

From EnetEnglish in Greece:

Refugees are ‘unarmed invaders’ sent by the Turks, says govt MP

Comments follow minister’s complaints of low ‘quality’ of Greece’s migrants

15:05 Friday 31 January 2014

Sofia Voultepsi, a New Democracy MP for Greater Athens, says ‘refugees … are, ultimately, unarmed invaders, weapons in the hands of the Turks’

While these Turks are officially NATO allies of the Greek government, which helps ruining the Greek economy by spending so much on weapons from NATO countries like Germany and France. But you won’t hear Ms Voultepsi on that.

Migrants are “unarmed invaders, weapons in the hands of the Turks”, a New Democracy MP has alleged, less than two weeks after 12 women and children drowned in a controversial coastguard operation near the islet of Farmakonisi in the eastern Aegean.

Sofia Voultepsi, who has represented the Greater Athens constituency for the conservative party since 2004, singled out Farmakonisi, during a live panel discussion on Mega television.

Attacking Syriza for its involvement in the case, she said the main opposition party has “driven us crazy since the Farmakonisi shipwreck. They’ve shut down Athens. They’ve paraded Afghans, Pakistanis (and) Bangladeshis around.”

“They haven’t even published one statement on the Kefalonian earthquake. All day, they deal with the “refugees“, in quotation marks, who are, ultimately, unarmed invaders, weapons in the hands of the Turks,” she continued.

Voultepsi, who worked as a journalist before being elected, alleged that in 1995 Turkey claimed the island was under Greek occupation and that since then “there have been dozens of landings [of migrants], and according to the law of probability, there was bound to be an accident”.

“These people are brought over by Turkish human smugglers. They don’t come by accident. Why don’t they go elsewhere, like Vathy on the [island of] Samos?

“There was an accident. Syriza came out and said they were calculated murders without having seen how our coastguard don’t do anything but get battered at sea,” the New Democracy [MP] said.

Leading international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN refugee agency UNHCR have called for a full investigation in the circumstances surrounding the Farmakonisi incident.

Appointed a deputy health minister after the last government shuffle in June, Voultepsi resigned two hours later citing “personal reasons”.

Many linked that decision to the controversy she had courted earlier that month when she claimed the BBC was owned by arms dealers and that the international press had been sold to “Rothschild bankers”.

Her comments on Friday came day after her fellow New Democracy MP and public order minister, Nikos Dendias, bemoaned the “quality” of migrants Greece attracted.

“The quality, the difference in cultures of migrants that we receive is tragic. I’m not denigrating anyone but they are people who come from a totally different world. The migrant from the Soviet Union that goes to Sweden has some kind of level. We have to deal with migrants from Bangladesh and Afghanistan, who have a different culture, who come from a different world. That is our misfortune,” he [said to] Skai TV.