The Dominance Of Capital: Part 2 - Bangladeshis In Greece

On the jade end of July a Greek court in the western port city of Patras acquitted local farmers responsible for shooting 28 Bangladeshi strawberry pickers. The magistrates, guardians of “justice”, allowed two of the farmers including the owner of the farm who had also been accused of human trafficking, to walk free. Two others, accused of aggravated assault and for possessing illegal firearms, were handed prison sentences; 14 years and seven months to one, and 8 years and seven months to the other. But both were also freed pending appeal.

The Bangladeshis were shot at in April 2013 at a Peloponnese farm as they demanded six months of unpaid salary. It was the workers’ “sin”. Media investigations showed the migrant workers work in subhuman conditions without access to proper hygiene or basic sanitation. However, the farmers engaged senior criminal lawyers to defend them in the drama named Justice in Court.

In disbelief, scores of migrants, many sobbing, protested the verdict outside the court house. The verdict has sparked outrage in entire Greece. Politicians, unionists and anti-racist groups have condemned the verdict as a “black mark for justice” in a case that brought the spotlight on the migrant workers’ appalling working and living condition in Greece.

Moisis Karabeyidis, the victim’s lawyer, said after the ruling was delivered: “I feel shame as a Greek. This decision is an outrage and a disgrace. The court showed an appalling attitude toward the victims.” Politicians standing for labor rights said the verdict set an unwelcome example for other employers to follow. “It sends the message that a foreign worker can die like a dog in the orchard,” said Vassiliki Katrivanou, an MP with the main opposition radical-left Syriza party. “It leaves room for new victims by closing eyes to the brutal, inhuman and racist character of the exploitation suffered by workers on the land,” she said, pointing out that the ruling had been made on the World Day against Trafficking in Persons.

Anti-racism organizations denounced the judgment as scandalous, and said it raised questions about the impartiality of the Greek justice system. The organizations planned to step up protest action against the verdict. In a statement Petros Constantinou, coordinator of the Movement against Racism and the Fascist Threat, said: “We call upon unions and human rights movements to react against this unprecedented racist scandal. The hundreds of millions of profit made in the strawberry industry cannot come about by shooting laborers in strawberry fields.”

It’s an irony! The irony is of time. Greece, the country that organized the greatest game event on the planet, Olympic, with a lot of money a few years ago went down to the stage of the Third World poverty and desperation, experienced regime change without an armed intervention, bankers’ dictation that the Third World experiences almost everyday. Sometimes, it appeared, Bangladesh, once despised as simply a humanitarian case, was in a better position compared to the state of the poor in Greece. A part of the sick European economy has to rely on migrant labor to make profit. Then, it shoots and maims migrant labor and fans far-right, Nazi forces. The economy is sick, but its power to influence judiciary and to assault labor is not weak.

What do the “stories” tell?

It tells tales of capital’s character, and it tells tales of collaboration that capital crafts, and it tells tales of justice that capital delivers, and it tells tales of state that capital commands.

The Bangladesh workers, still politically unorganized, are passing a particular phase. It will gradually evolve. A quote from Marx and Engels is worthy to refer here:

“To begin with, the workers fight individually; then the workers in a single factory make common cause; then the workers at one trade combine throughout a whole locality against the particular bourgeois who exploits them. Their attacks are leveled not only against bourgeois conditions of production, but also against the actual instruments of production …

“At this stage the workers form a disunited mass, scattered throughout the country, and severed into fragments by mutual competition.” (The Manifesto)

The Bangladesh labor will pass this phase, where NGO-driven labor mobilization, politicization of de-politicization, plays a role.

from here by Farooque Chowdhury