
Siavash Shahabi’s testimony at a feminist meeting in Sofia
Siavash Shahabi
On 10 September 2022 a panel on migration took place in the Artchitects’ Club in Sofia within the conference an international feminist meeting, which was organized by the Bulgarian feminist organization LevFem and Transnational Social Strike Platform (8-11 September 2022). Below you can read a slightly edited version of Siavash Shahabi’s speech within the panel. Siavash Shahabi is an Iranian political refugee, living in Athens and blogging at “The Fire Next Time”.
Hello. I am Siavash, a political refugee from Iran. At the moment I live in Athens and have been there about 6 years. I wanted to talk about the situation in Greece, in Athens.
Generally speaking, in Greece, the capacity of the refugee camps is just 17,000 refugees. Of course, the number of refugees in the region is much bigger. At the moment we start with Athens and immigration and asylum body wants to close the last camp in the city – Eleonas. In spite of the health situation in the camp, many of the migrants want to stay there because they have easy access to medical care, schools are near and access to any work. It is something that they cannot have access to, while they are living in other camps because all of them are so far from the cities and there is no proper provision of the services inside the camps for them, especially medical services.
Speaking about the other camps, I have to mention that most of the people that are living there come from the vulnerable groups, like pregnant women, mostly people from African countries. The majority of whom have been living in Greece for five or six years without documents.
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