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Roma-Golden Dawn Conflict At Kalamata Hospital

Roma-Golden Dawn incident Eleftheria newspaper Kalamata’s Roma community and members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party almost battled at the Kalamata General Hospital after the extreme right-wingers came into the facility demanding to know whether there were foreign nurses or workers there.
Golden Dawn, which was elected into Parliament in June on a rabid anti-migrant platform, has been raiding hospitals around the country in a bid to locate foreign workers and apply pressure on hospital administrations to ban them from working.
On April 8, a group of Roma men brought a 22-year-old member of their community into the  hospital with injuries, which, they said, had been the result of a racially-motivated attack.
When they saw the Golden Dawners, who inluded MP Dimitris Koukoutsis, they accused them of inciting the attack and nearly came to blows with the far-rightists, the newspaper Kathimerini reported. Hospital security staff called in the police to help break up the scuffle.
The altercation came days after a leading member of a Roma settlement in Komotini in northern Greece challenged Golden Dawn to open combat following statements by a member of the ultra-nationalist group that the Roma are not Greeks. Golden Dawn members have been accused of roaming in gangs and singling out lone individuals instead of facing equally opposing forces.
A video posted on YouTube in late March showed Roma men wielding guns, axes and chainsaws, and challenging Golden Dawn to conduct a raid on their settlement, which is on the outskirts of Komotini.
“I have a lot of crazy guys behind me Michaloliakos,” a man on the video says as he pats another man pointing a gun at the camera on the back, addressing the head of Golden Dawn, Nikos Michaloliakos. “You will have to send a lot of guys to my camp.” The Roma man, standing his ground, said, “Michaloliakos, round up your mongrels.”.
Golden Dawn denied any intention to attack the Roma. But MP Dimitris Koukoutsis told reporters that, “We won’t regard them as equal citizens until they stop their involvement in delinquency.” He said that would be impossible because, “Gypsies are delinquent in their DNA”.
Two months ago Golden Dawn invaded a hospital in Tripoli, with the permission of the hospital’s director, demanding identification papers, in order to detect private foreign nurses employed by families to look after their patients. The hospital director was fired.
The news site Enet reported that this time Golden Dawn was rebuffed, with the Kalamata Hospital Director Yiorgos Bezos saying what they tried to do was “unacceptable,” and he wouldn’t allow it. He reportedly notified the incident to the Regional Health Authority and  to the Ministry of Health in Athens. “Under no circumstances can anyone, whatever the reason, substitute the legal bodies of a democratic state,” he said.
 

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