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Your anger is too high. Calm down. You should have noticed by now that inreact to such low level insults with laughter.

According to Aristoteles Persians are unciviliced barbarians. Herodotus dismissed this and said they can be teached and learn. For me Iran is not barbarian, just the mullah regime.
Was not the only measure of being civilized according to greeks were being able to talk Greek:coffee:
Do you knew the tribes who lived north of Greek were laughing at your concept of Heirarchy of Gods and were laughing at you for that.
Can a christian become leader in Iran? In a true democracy that should not be an issue
Well it seems in England a Muslim can't marry a former member of royal family . How you categorize that.
 
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Was not the only measure of being civilized according to greeks were being able to talk Greek:coffee:
Do you knew the tribes who lived north of Greek were laughing at your concept of Heirarchy of Gods and were laughing at you for that.

Well it seems in England a Muslim can't marry a former member of royal family . How you categorize that.

The royal family has no power on the state. As christian you have no rights in Iran. Imagine greeks would live in Iran, no matter how good or how much try...one could not get elected in high offices.
 
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The royal family has no power on the state. As christian you have no rights in Iran. Imagine greeks would live in Iran, no matter how good or how much try...one could not get elected in high offices.
Well on that you are wrong. There is some post you can't but you can be elected in city council you can be parliament member you can be on industrial manager . You can be a minister a deputy to president or minsters. You have the right to use your religion rules in your personal affair . Your property is protected under the law. Your guaranteed two member in parliament which give you a ratio around more than 5 time the percentage of your population here also you can be head of IRIB, you can even be part of guardian council..........
 
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Well on that you are wrong. There is some post you can't but you can be elected in city council you can be parliament member you can be on industrial manager . You can be a minister a deputy to president or minsters. You have the right to use your religion rules in your personal affair . Your property is protected under the law. Your guaranteed two member in parliament which give you a ratio around more than 5 time the percentage of your population here also you can be head of IRIB, you can even be part of guardian council..........


Do you have examples for high ranked christians in iran?
 
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Im not hostile to Iran. Our nations share thousands of years of history. We had good and bad times. I dont trust the mullahs, i believe Iran deserves better than that.

Take note, everyone. This is how they "respect" you. They will ascribe themselves the "right" to determine how and by whom your country should be ruled. They will accept Iran only under the condition that it turns into a slave of zionist lobbies, cut-throat capitalist corporations, international banksters and masonic secret societies, like their own buried zombie nations. If Iran is sovereign and independent, if Iranian civilization and culture are palpable, alive and well, rather than confined to American comic books, "Hollywood" films and other consumer goods, they will have a problem with it. They will express sympathies only if Iran is governed by a regime similar to the pre-revolutionary monarchy, when the country was under the thumb of US imperialists, zionists and Haifan Bahai globalists. This is how they "appreciate" Iran and her civilization. Don't fall for it.
 
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Take note, everyone. This is how they "respect" you. They will ascribe themselves the "right" to determine how and by whom your country has to be ruled. They will accept Iran only under the condition that it turns into a slave of zionist lobbies, cut-throat capitalist corporations, international banksters and masonic secret societies, like their own buried nations. If Iran is sovereign and independent, if Iranian civilization and culture are alive and well, not confined to comic books and "Hollywood" films, they will have an issue with it. They will express sympathies only if Iran is governed by a regime similar to the pre-revolutionary monarchy, when the country was under the thumb of US imperialists, zionists and Haifan Bahai globalists. This is how they "appreciate" Iran and her civilization. Don't fall for it.

No, i appreaciate an Iran:

- where women have same rights as men

- an iran that makes no difference to what religion one has

- an iran that respects its neighbours

- an iran that does not taken hostages

Some simple points
 
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France is a civilized country and not Iran. So thats a nonissue.

France is no sovereign country. And in comparison to Iran, it's nowhere "civilized", but a dog eat dog hell hole.

According to Aristoteles Persians are unciviliced barbarians. Herodotus dismissed this and said they can be teached and learn. For me Iran is not barbarian, just the mullah regime.

Iran is never going to return to pre-revolutionary conditions, ie will never become a NATO and zionist vassal again. Unlike Greece. I know it's hard to accept, but live with it.

Yawn. Italy has no muslims. Spain has little to none. In Greece its zero.

The Germans will deal with theirs like they always did and so on.

Its like Iran, which is flooded by Afghans, Kurds and so on. Will adjust itself.

Newsflash! Afghans are an Iranian people. So are Kurds. Also, there are less than some 40.000-60.000 Kurds from other countries residing in Iran - hardly a "flood" whatsoever. As opposed to European nations, which are literally being stormed by immigrants from completely alien geographical and civilization horizons.

And nothing will "adjust itself" in Europe in the sense you're suggesting. What's actually happening, is that European nation-states are the ones adjusting themselves to the zionist-, bankster- and freemason-controlled one world regime which is going to be imposed on them. Or rather, which they are going to be gobbled up by, which they will dissolve into. Right now as we speak, EU member states have already lost their national specificities (ruled as they are by anti-national, globalist forces).

As it stands, Iran as opposed to Greece and other EU regimes is:

- A nation enjoying her sovereignty and independence.
- Not member to a supranational organization like the European Union, where an unelected "Commission" dictates much of the policies affecting the daily lives of her citizens.
- A state whose central bank is neither privatized nor independent from the government and will not follow guidelines set by the Rothschilds and other thieving banksters.
- A nation where masonic secret societies have no say on state affairs.
- A nation not subject to US imperial dictates.

On a sidenote, be careful what you wish for. Whenever Europe takes on a new religion, it always twists and bends it to extreme levels. Could well be that an islamic europe would conquer Iran to bring true Islam there. You know us. 😅

You mean like the social outcasts, thugs, pimps and drug dealers criminal NATO regimes sent over to join "I"SIS in Syria? Hahaha, no chance whatsoever. The Resistance crushed and eradicated them to the last terrorist, with the exception of a few who made it back to Europe, and which NATO intelligence agencies are keeping in reserve for future false flag terrorist attacks against their own citizens, or for overseas operations.

The royal family has no power on the state. As christian you have no rights in Iran. Imagine greeks would live in Iran, no matter how good or how much try...one could not get elected in high offices.
Do you have examples for high ranked christians in iran?

We don't need to. There are merely 300.000-500.000 Christians in Iran, a tiny percentage of the overall population, and they enjoy outstanding rights. There is no discrimination against Christians. Armenian Iranians love their motherland and enjoy living there. So do Assyrian Iranians. Hacoupian, one of the main local clothing brands, is owned by Armenians. That's just one example of Christian business elites in Iran.

Furthermore it was Iran and her allies like Hezbollah who saved Oriental Christians from slavery and mass-murder at the hands of "I"SIS and other NATO- and Isra"el"i-backed terror grouplets in Syria and Iraq. But what do you expect from someone who doesn't care about the repression of Orthodox Christians in Occupied Palestine, but will try and portray Islamic Iran as somehow repressive against Christians? What a sad joke.

Hezbollah, which user Apollon is chastising by extension as hostile towards Christians, saluting a Christian church in Syria:

B9W4DfAIYAAKriL.jpg


Christian church defaced by zionists in Occupied Palestine, zionist colonialists which user Apollon wholeheartedly supports and has never been seen complaining about:

F140509YS01-e1399627752881-640x400.jpg


No, i appreaciate an Iran:

- where women have same rights as men

Women have it better in Iran than in the west where they are alienated from their very biological essence. Legislation in Iran reflects Natural Law, not some perverted, twisted (post-)modernist feminist ideal meant to eliminate the nuclear family structure and thus the nation itself, while turning women and mothers into commodified objects of mercantile trade.

- an iran that makes no difference to what religion one has

Religious minorities in Iran are not discriminated against socially, nor legally save for some specific government positions, owing to the fact that Iran is a religious democracy and therefore governed by the principles of the majority religion.

Rest assured, antics like these aren't fooling anyone here. Readers can see through zionist loyalties, which lead their bearers to stay quiet about the desecration of Orthodox churches at the hands of zionist extremists, while singling out Iran, the country in the region where Christians have enjoyed the highest levels of safety and integration over the past decades.

- an iran that respects its neighbours

Iran respects her neighbors, has not started a war in some 150 years. Western and zionist imperialist regimes respect noone (until slapped very hard, something the Iran-led Resistance Axis is pretty proficient in).

- an iran that does not taken hostages

Huh?
 
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Some simple points

First teach Greece to respect children and innocent babies, then come lecture others.

Now, even a summary research will reveal that Greece has not just been a major source for the sale of children, but also a nauseating hub and consumer market for this barbarian criminal practice... Reading the below both makes me want to cry and to puke, honestly.

High time for regime change in the uprooted, zionist- / bankster- / freemason-controlled nation formally known as Greece, I would say. Honest Greek patriots (not zionists masquerading as such) can ask the IRGC's Quds Force for assistance anytime, I'm sure they'll be able and glad to help.

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Mothers forced to sell their children: Mail reveals the distressing human toll of Greece's Euro meltdown

Published: 23:32 GMT, 11 May 2012 | Updated: 12:13 GMT, 15 May 2012

The economic crisis across Europe has perhaps been most keenly felt in Greece, where people have taken to the streets in violent and emotional protests against the austerity measures imposed on the nation.

In this heartbreaking dispatch from the streets of Athens, SUE REID finds mothers who have been forced to sell their own children in the battle for survival.

Once a month, usually on a Saturday, Kasiani Papadopoulou packs a bag with children’s presents and takes the bus from her one-bedroom flat in a dusty suburb of Athens up into the cool hills outside the Greek capital that overlook the sea.

The 20-mile journey is an emotional one for her, but she would not stop making it for anything in the world.

A young widow of 30, she travels to see her two daughters and son — aged 14, 13 and 12. Kasiani was forced to give them away a year ago when her money ran out and she was unable to pay for their food, her rent or send them to school with shoes or books.

Effects of austerity: Juliana Tsivra with her mother Maria. Maria used to work in a bakery but lost her job more than a year ago

Effects of austerity: Juliana Tsivra with her mother Maria. Maria used to work in a bakery but lost her job more than a year ago

At the charity home where the three are now cared for, the children excitedly shout ‘Mama’ as they run down the steps to greet her. Her eldest daughter, Ianthe, hugs her tightly and gives her a kiss.

When, a few hours later, it is time to say goodbye, Kasiani is always close to tears. The youngest, Melissa and Markos, cling to her before she leaves to go home alone.

‘It is not easy for a mother to leave her kids,’ she says to me, her voice cracking with emotion when I spoke to her this week in Athens.

‘At Christmas, at Easter, on their birthdays, I am always so sad because I do not see them. Some people judge me over what I’ve done — even my own family and neighbours — but they do not understand the truth. I’ve done what is best for my children.

‘I cannot count the number of doorbells I have rung of government departments, asking officials to help me and my family. They make promises but do nothing. They have no money either. Our country is in crisis.’

Tough times: Maria Tsvira, pictured with her daughter Juliana, is now forced to use the charity medical centre set up in Athens

Tough times: Maria Tsvira, pictured with her daughter Juliana, is now forced to use the charity medical centre set up in Athens

Kasiani’s children were born in a country which has been brought to its knees by crushing debt. This was built up by Greece’s huge profligacy after joining the European Union and then milking the system for everything it could get.

The public sector wage bill doubled in the past decade as perks and fiddles reminiscent of Britain in the union controlled 1970s flourished. Paying taxes became optional for the middle and upper classes and corruption was rife.

Until two years ago, the big fat Greek gravy train carried on racing towards the buffers. Even pastry chefs and hairdressers were listed among the 600 ‘professions’ allowed to retire at 50 (with a state pension of 95 per cent of their final year’s earnings) on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work.

Now drastic austerity measures imposed by Eurozone finance leaders mean that benefits, state pensions and pay rates have been pared to the bone as taxes are hiked heavenwards in a last ditch attempt to balance the books and stop the country going bankrupt.

For example, the threshold at which personal tax has to be paid has been reduced to £3,000 a year, while Vat has soared to 23 per cent. There is a new annual levy on private property which costs the average homeowner £1,000 a year.

Sad: Sophia, a child who is now being looked after at the SOS children's refugee in Athens after being abandoned

Sad: Sophia, a child who is now being looked after at the SOS children's refugee in Athens after being abandoned

Even charities, including the one running the complex for 55 children where Kasiani Papadopoulou’s three now live, have been forced to hand over some of their donations to the empty Greek state coffers.

The price of such austerity, say many here in Greece, is too high to pay, because whatever tough measures are introduced, they will never cover the massive national debt of £366 billion, even with the help of the two bailout packages worth a combined £184 billion coughed up by other EU countries, including Britain.

A sign of the Greeks’ belligerent refusal to face up to reality is the rise of a grassroots movement called ‘We Won’t Pay’ that encourages the middle classes to break the law by taking public transport without validating their ticket or driving through tolls without paying. ‘We have already paid through our taxes so we should be able to travel for nothing,’ claims Konstantinos Thimianos, a 36-year-old activist protesting on the streets of Athens.

He wears a yellow vest with ‘total disobedience’ emblazoned on his back and, with other activists, chants: ‘We won’t pay for their crisis.’

Such opposition to the austerity measures is growing. In this week’s parliamentary elections, Greeks rejected the moderate parties that support the hard-line policies imposed by the EU.

Already, one in five adults is out of work, a fifth of Greek firms have closed, the standard of living has fallen by 20 per cent in two years, and the country which created the Olympic Games in 700 BC can only afford to send half of its athletic team to compete in the London Games.

In the leafy suburbs of Athens this week, I watched two smartly dressed elderly men rifling through rubbish bins at the side of a busy road.

One, who said his name was Georges, told me that their state pensions had been cut to £220 a month. He said: ‘We are looking for anything we can sell.’

He walked away sheepishly with a dented silver picture frame he had found in the bin.

Meanwhile, Government health spending has been slashed by a third. This means that medical care is no longer free for those who have not paid full national insurance contributions. Half of routine prescription drugs are in short supply.

No wonder that the queues at the Social Mission, a charity clinic set up this year by volunteer doctors and the Archbishop of Athens in the centre of the city, lengthen each day. In three months, 650 uninsured patients, many of them children, have come for treatment.

Protests: Political instability has resulted in huge social unrest and civil disturbance

Protests: Political instability has resulted in huge social unrest and civil disturbance

One regular visitor is Maria Tsivra, 37, a divorcee and mother of a five-year-old girl called Juliana who needs routine vaccinations and fortnightly doctor’s appointments to treat a throat infection.

Maria is the daughter of an Athenian shopkeeper and used to work in a bakery. She comes from a hard-working family but lost her job more than a year ago, as the crisis started, and she took time off to care for her ill daughter.

‘The financial crisis was just an excuse to sack me. The bakery was facing more taxes and had less customers.

‘I was a victim like thousands of others in other jobs,’ she says in a solemn voice.

She and Juliana are staying for free in a friend’s house. She has no national insurance and no money to pay £40 for an appointment with a private doctor. ‘I cannot afford for Juliana to see the doctor or get her medicines. That’s why I’ve come to the Social Mission.’

More dramatically, she says: ‘I need help, but not as much as some who are even selling their children on the streets.’

Crisis: Greece has been brought to its knees by crushing debt which has plunged it into political and economic turmoil

Crisis: Greece has been brought to its knees by crushing debt which has plunged it into political and economic turmoil

She tells of a friend, a single mother who lived in a charity shelter with her baby daughter because she had no money and the State would not help.

‘She could not afford to keep her own child and gave her away to a couple who did not have a family of their own.

‘These kinds of things are happening now in Greece. There are many who are suffering and I wonder what the future holds for children of my daughter’s generation.’

The fate of once-booming Greece is changing fast. Soup kitchens are commonplace. The destitute wander the streets.

At three in the afternoon, on the sizzling Wednesday this week, I watched Father John, a 34-year-old priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, presiding over a long queue of Athenians, mixed with African and Arab migrants, in a square off Sophocles’ Street.

Women are ringing churches begging for money to help pay to have their children delivered

They were each waiting for charity workers to give them a bowl of lentils and a piece of bread. This area of Athens was, until a few years ago, a thriving financial sector. It is now home to cheap take-away food stalls and shabby shops offering to buy impoverished Athenian’s gold trinkets and jewellery.

Father John says he has never witnessed such poverty. ‘Only today I was helping a young couple, both 24, who are having their first baby. It is due any time now,’ he explains.

‘They went to the hospital this morning and the doctors said they had to pay a fee for the birth of their child. But they have no money, and can barely pay their rent at a small flat they share with friends.

‘The father used to be a professional footballer, the mother an office clerk. Now they are jobless. The mother suggested to doctors that she had a Caesarean.’

Father John, a priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, says he has never witnessed such poverty

Sad: Father John, a priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, says he has never witnessed such poverty

Such operations are considered emergencies (because they are done to save a baby’s life) and are therefore carried out without charge. So their request for a Caesarean was a way of getting round the rules. However, the doctors refused.

‘They said the Caesarean was unnecessary and she should have a normal birth and pay for it herself. They also warned that she would have to leave the hospital in labour if she did not find the cash to pay.

‘She rang our church in horror and distress. We sent money to the hospital so she can have her baby.’

Church charity workers hand out 2,500 free meals a day in central Athens. Among the throng waiting for Father John’s hand-outs last week was Maria Sissmani, a beautifully dressed 82-year-old wearing designer glasses and with tinted hair.

She worked in Germany as a seamstress in the fashion industry for years and her only income is 208 euros (£172) a month, a pension paid by the Government there.

She gets nothing from her native Greece. Yet she counts her blessings. Her father, who ran a carpentry business, left her an office in a building near Sophocles’ Street where she sleeps on a mattress next to the empty desks. ‘I want to rent the office out, but because of the crisis that is difficult.

No one is doing business so no one needs an office. I have nothing, only debts, and the church told me not to be too proud to join the food queue. I do not feel so bad about it, for I am not alone,’ she says with a sad smile as she looks at the Greek men, women and children, hungrily waiting too.

Across the city, a shelter run by a charity called Klimaka provides meals and an occasional bed to the homeless. Many here are middle-aged and middle class like George Barkouris, a former radio producer and computer engineer.

A divorcee, George worked all his life until the Greek troubles began. When he lost his job because of the cutbacks, he soon ran out of money to pay his rent on a flat in Patissia, a middle-class neighbourhood of Athens. He was reluctant to ask his daughter, a doctor, for help.

‘I walked out of the flat with nothing. For the first week I slept in the park on a bench. It was a terrible shock. Like many Greeks, I felt angry, then depressed. I am 60, and need to work for another five years before I qualify for even a small State pension,’ he says.

‘When I plucked up courage and came here for help I got a big surprise. I found doctors, scientists, all the professional classes, were here, too.

‘Now this charity gives me a bed, and in return, I run their website. But there are plenty like me still sleeping in the park. They are called the ‘new homeless’ who once had money, a lifestyle, a career. Now they are ruined.’

Civil unrest: Pensioners burn emergency tax notices during an anti austerity protest

Civil unrest: Pensioners burn emergency tax notices during an anti austerity protest

Just what will happen next is anyone’s guess. At the SOS Children’s Villages, a worldwide charity with a network of homes and social centres in Greece, which cares for Kasiani Papadopoulou’s three children, they believe things will get worse.

Over the past year, 1,000 Greek families have turned to SOS for help, two-thirds with huge money problems.

The numbers are way up and the families from every walk of life. One toddler attending a nursery school where the fees had always been paid by her mother, was recently abandoned in with a note saying: ‘I will not return to get Anna. I don’t have any money. I can’t bring her up. Sorry.’

It is the sort of case where SOS picks up the pieces. The national director of SOS, George Protopapas, predicts: ‘Next year I fear that more middle class families will fall into poverty here. I think this is just the beginning and we will have many knocks on our door.’

As for widow and mother Kasiani, she prays that one day she will be able to afford to get her children back. Her decorator husband, Angelo, died at the age of 47 of pneumonia — at exactly the same time as Greece’s economic problems began.

She took two jobs to make ends meet, one in the local Town Hall and another in a shop owned by a middle-class family in the town. She was cleaning all hours God sent.
Then the work ran out. Cleaners became a luxury.

‘I had to tell my children that I could not afford to keep them. I buy them those little things that only a mother knows they want. I do my best for them when I see them, although I have next to nothing.

‘But my life has no meaning without my children. I blame the Greek government for the catastrophe that has struck our family.’

www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/donate

Since 1949 SOS Children has been working to ensure that children who have lost their parents through conflict, famine, natural disaster, disease and poverty - can enjoy a family life. Where possible, this is done by working to prevent family break up, but in addition over 78,000 orphaned or abandoned children are cared for by SOS mothers in clusters of family homes in 518 of our unique Children's Villages, in 125 countries around the world. SOS Children's outreach support includes education, vocational training, medical care and community development programmes.


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Lives for sale: Booming market for Bulgarian babies in Greece

  • Dolno Ezerovo quarter, Burgas, south-east Bulgaria: Cutbacks in health and education had damaging effects in rural communities where many Roma live (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

By Juliana Koleva and Kostas Kallergis

SOFIA, BURGAS, ATHENS, 22. Dec 2015, 09:30

"Ah, don't even ask, in our village almost everybody has left a baby in Greece. I at least managed to buy myself this little house with the bloody money, so we'd have somewhere to live with the kids. I haven't squandered a single lev. But many people here give away babies for the easy money - they drink, they eat, they party. When the money runs out, they just sell the next baby."

This is Stanka, a woman in her 30s from Bulgaria's marginalised Roma minority who admits she sold a new-born boy in Greece a few years ago for €3,500 ($3,700), a crime for which she is currently on trial.

"I regret it all the time and can't stop thinking of that boy, but I was young and stupid. I couldn't imagine any other way to earn some money to feed my other two children, I had no hope," she says, her voice trembling.

"You should have seen where we lived, with my mother and the rest of the family, more than 10 in a room with no glass in the windows, no doors, a dirt floor, no electricity or water. You wouldn't even want to house an animal there."

She starts crying as she recalls how people came to her home from the nearest big town and offered to sell her third baby, which was on the way. Everyone else was doing it. She thought it was the answer to her problems.

Now she lives with her husband and two boys, 10 and 12, in a single-storey house in the same small Roma town of Ekzarh Antimovo, about 40 km inland from the Black Sea port of Burgas. The home is run-down and basic, but for her a huge step up.


Stanka's house in Ekzarh Antimovo, south-east Bulgaria. Bought for €3,500 from sale of newborn boy. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

Hundreds of women

Stanka is one of dozens of Bulgarian women each year who are known to have sold new babies to couples in Greece desperate for a child of their own, officials say. They suspect the real number is in the hundreds.

Mothers can earn up to €5,000, but sometimes less than €1,000, according to court documents seen by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN. Middlemen take the biggest cut of what the adopters actually pay.

As Stanka points out, the practice appears to attract little social stigma among Romas, who make up the vast majority of known cases.

A distinct regional ethnic minority with their own culture and language, Romani, they are often poor, jobless and ill-educated. Many live apart in run-down "ghettoes," and face pervasive discrimination.

Anti-trafficking police and prosecutors say it is rare for the mothers, who usually have other children already, to regret their actions, or for them to invest the money in something lasting like a house.

Usually the women, often only 18-19 years old and rarely over 25, decide to sell during an unwanted pregnancy, but more recently police have noticed some who conceive with the sole purpose of selling.

Velichka, a mother of three from the Roma ghetto in the eastern provincial city of Sliven, is perhaps more typical than Stanka. She has no home of her own and no money left from the €1,500 she received for her child - only half what she had been promised.

She earned a two-year suspended sentence in Bulgaria in 2009 for selling her baby in Thessaloniki, Greece, after police were tipped off. She has no qualms in telling her story, though the details she relates paint her as more of a victim than did the account she admitted to in court.

Velichka, who says her only employment has been as a prostitute, now blames her father for forcing her to sell her baby and says he spent the money on gold jewellery and a television. She still lives with her parents.

In Greece she sold a kidney, and in that way, according to police, made the contacts that led her to sell her child a year later.

She reveals her deepest secrets, then asks for money to help her buy medicines for herself and daughter, but finally gives up.

Bulgarian police say they suspect the baby trade with Greece may go back as far as the 1990s, when the collapse of communism in eastern Europe suddenly opened up the borders, but has been growing steadily in recent years, especially since Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, making those borders all but vanish.


Roma quarter in Nikolaevo, central Bulgaria, where people live isolated from Bulgarian society: no running water; no electricity; no education; people sleep on the floor, in the mud. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

Hundreds of women

The traffickers here are mostly Roma men and women who lived for many years among ethnic kin in Greece and have good contacts.

They focus on the Roma ghettoes around the Black Sea ports of Burgas and Varna and in the relatively poor east - the towns of Sliven, Yambol, and Stara Zagora between the coast and the more affluent capital Sofia.

A ready market awaits them across the southern border in Greece where often childless couples are willing to pay to bypass a state adoption system which can leave them waiting seven or eight years.

Greece, unlike Bulgaria, permits private adoptions and thus makes this kind of deal easier.

The Mitera Infant Centre in Athens, Greece's biggest state institution for adoptions, says only one in five of some 500 annual adoptions involve the state. Each year the centre arranges around 35 adoptions but receives 150-200 applications.

Bulgarian authorities say Greeks have been paying up to €30,000 for a girl and €40,000 for a boy. Greek police say adopters pay anywhere from €3,000 to €30,000, with prices down slightly in recent years because of the economic crisis. Four out of five babies up for sale were boys.

"It's not just that the parents want to have a boy, boys are more expensive and therefore the criminal rings prefer them too," said an officer from the Greek police anti-trafficking unit who declined to be named as he takes part in undercover operations.

The young mothers, however, get only a meagre share of this money, Bulgarian police say. The rest goes to traffickers and other intermediaries.

"It is not uncommon afterwards for the traffickers to cheat the women out of their promised money, throwing them €500 or so or even just a ticket home to Bulgaria," says one investigator.

The road routes south to Greece are easy and well-worn.

Traffickers drive the pregnant women across the inner-EU border without passport checks, and if guards do ask the purpose of their trip, they usually cite seasonal agricultural work.

The women, mostly treated as suppliers of goods, are then put up in lodgings they are not allowed to leave until it is time to give birth. After that they return to the lodgings while the deal is finalised.

Doctors, lawyers involved

Stanka relates her experience.

"I was in an apartment with two other pregnant women. I don't even know where they took me, it was a city that began with R I think. I was told not to leave the house as it would awaken suspicions.

But during my stay they didn't treat me badly, perhaps they didn't want me to give up and betray them," she says, in faltering Bulgarian - like many of her peers she attended school briefly and has contact with almost only Roma speakers in her daily life.

"When the time came they took me at the hospital, it looked as if they were familiar with the medical team. After the birth they became rougher - they made me sign some documents that were incomprehensible to me, almost threw the money at me - just half of what we had agreed - took the child and sent me back to Bulgaria."

She and other mothers told BIRN that teams in the hospitals seemed to have been specially organised by Greek members of the trafficker group, and knew what they were involved in.

Bulgarian police and prosecutors say this tallies with their findings.

"The network cannot be organised without doctors, local lawyers and prosecutors sometimes," one officer told BIRN.

The dozen Bulgarian prosecutors and police from the organised crime division who helped with this article all declined to be named because rules forbade them to talk to the media and because exposure might harm future operations.

Once the pregnant woman is in Greece, it seems very easy for her to leave the baby behind without anyone knowing.

One method that Bulgarian investigators have encountered for legalising the adoption is for a Greek man to claim he is the father of the child. A few months later the mother relinquishes her parental rights in his favour.

But the most common path is private adoption. A lawyer or an obstetrician helps a couple find a woman who wants to give up her newborn. All they must do is sign a private agreement. That was that - although since 2013 the adoption must also be ratified by a court.

No money is supposed to change hands. But the absence of regular checks has created a fertile black market, authorities acknowledge.

Bulgarian supply, Greek demand

One Greek couple told BIRN of their daughter's experience a decade ago.

Unable to have her own child, Elena (not her real name) had tried for years to adopt through from a state-run children's home but in vain. Eventually she and her husband gave up and decided to pay.

They found out about an Athens lawyer who could find babies from Bulgarian mothers.

The couple paid €25,000 and soon the lawyer arranged a meeting outside one of Athens' main hospitals. Elena waited in the car with her father. One of the traffickers who had arranged the adoption opened the door and placed the baby in her lap. "Elena was glowing with happiness," her father remembers. She was a mother, at last.

The couple later completed all the legal paperwork for the private adoption of their daughter. Theoretically, social services should make scheduled and spot visits to check up on the child. But no one ever did.

A few years later the little girl saw a pregnant woman and asked her mother: "Were you like that too before I was born?". And Elena replied: "You are not a baby from my belly, but you are a baby from my heart," her mother recounted.

Away from the Balkans few people know of this contemporary trade in the region.

One story that did make global headlines in 2013 was when Greek authorities seized Maria, a blonde five-year old living with a Roma family near the town of Larissa, on suspicion she had been abducted. It turned out she had been unofficially "adopted" and was an albino Bulgarian Roma from Nikolaevo, near Stara Zagora. She is now in care pending an official adoption elsewhere.


Nikolaevo, central Bulgaria: Maria's family house. People shocked by Maria story two years ago. Nothing has changed, except a new family now lives in Maria's old home. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

Bulgarian authorities and Roma leaders agree that dire poverty and lack of opportunity drive women to sell their babies, and that within their community, there seems to be little objection to the practice on moral grounds.

"For them the child is not a big value, they don't feel the sale of a baby as a problem, just a livelihood," says Michael Stefanov from A21, a foundation that fights human trafficking.
Gancho Iliev, a Roma who heads a foundation to help his community in the Stara Zagora region, says conditions in the ghettoes are dire.

"There is no 21st century, no water, no power. People sleep on the floor in the dirt with the chickens and other domestic animals. They are isolated from other Bulgarians."

"There is no proper education, medical health care, or religion," he says. "Nearly everyone is unemployed, just a few make a living in agriculture or clean the streets for petty cash. There is nothing to give them values, morality."

He says the authorities do little to help and that there is no real political will to improve their lot.

No emotion

A policeman from Sofia's anti-trafficking unit recalls his first cases.

"I met a girl - she came into this very office with her mother and they both cried so much and regretted selling the baby. They couldn't stop crying," he says.

"That is why I'll always remember the woman who was next. There was nothing, no emotion of any kind. She talked about the sale as if it was of no importance, as if she had sold a watch or a TV set."

The attitude of the second woman, he says, is the more typical.

Police from both countries said most trafficking probably goes undetected. Even when they uncover a case, making a prosecution stick can be a nightmare, particularly since cross-border coordination of investigations does not prove easy.

A Greek anti-trafficking policeman said that apart from tracking the criminal rings down, the biggest challenge was to prove a financial transaction.

"That's what makes a private adoption illegal," he said.

Months of investigation and surveillance might be inadequate unless the gang is caught red-handed. Without that, cases ran a risk of being very weak when brought to court.

One human trafficking expert from Bulgaria's General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime estimated that only about one in 10 such crimes in Bulgaria was ever solved.

The low risk of detection, difficulty of prosecution and often mild sentences in Bulgaria make it a profitable easy business for all involved.

Bulgaria tightened up its trafficking laws a decade ago and has some of the toughest penalties in Europe. Anyone who convinces a woman to sell her baby or transports or houses her during the process can face up to 15 years in jail, and the mother can also be prosecuted.

However, evidence is hard to collect, since all involved have an interest in remaining silent.

The biggest success in cross-border efforts to combat the trade, the so called Lamia case, came after one mother changed her mind and sought police help to recover the child she had just parted with. But such cases are few.

More usually traffickers, aware of dangers as in that case, just let the women go, as one mother, Fana, told BIRN.

Suspended sentences

As a result prosecutors often cut deals with traffickers who agree to plead guilty and in return often receive suspended sentences of less than three years.

This is why only three people are serving sentences in Bulgarian prisons for the baby trade, according to justice ministry figures.

Although there have been cases involving mothers from nearby Albania and Romania, it seems Bulgaria is the centre of the trade.

A tally of Greek police statements show that from 2010 to 2015, more than half of the people, mainly traffickers, arrested for illegal adoptions were Bulgarian citizens. Greek police sources told BIRN most were Romas.

"We think Bulgaria is leading this type of traffic. It is much closer to Greece and transporting a pregnant woman there is quite easy. Albanian women face tighter border controls," says the NGO worker Stefanov.

"Another reason could be religion … especially among the Albanians, who are highly religious."

Prosecutors and police say widescale impunity is simply persuading more women to follow suit.

One young Roma girl from Kameno, a poor village near Burgas with a big Roma quarter, tells how her friend and other close relatives were tempted into a sale.

"When you are on the brink of survival and can't provide for your children, and you see more and more families travel to Greece with a pregnant woman and return without the baby … After which they start celebrating and partying the same night because they have come by some money … That is when you begin to consider it," she says.
She once asked an acquaintance if she missed the twins she had sold.

The young woman just shrugged her shoulders, motioned to her other children, and said: "It was their turn, how otherwise would I be able to feed these here."
In her village the traffickers live well, she says.

"I'll tell you where to go and look for them, but I won't come with you, I am afraid even to be seen speaking with you," she says.


Village of Kameno, southeast Bulgaria: Locals and police believe up to 10 well-to-do homes in Roma quarter built with baby trafficking money. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

We visit the street she indicated. On one side are run-down shacks, where the locals and police say the pregnant women are recruited from. On the other are a dozen or so flashy new multi-storey houses, freshly painted, surrounded by high walls with wrought-iron grilles, and smart cars in the yards where men with gold chains, rings and chunky bracelets hang out.

Locals and police say about half of these houses were built from the proceeds of baby trafficking. Many residents of Kameno, Roma and Bulgarian, say they are surprised the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to it.

Burgas police told BIRN they were very aware of the source of this wealth but had little hope of compiling evidence that would stick in court.

In May this year, for example, members of two of the families owning lavish houses in Kameno appeared before the district court in Burgas.

The three traffickers - Stanka Raycheva and spouses Racho and Silvia Dinkovi - confessed to taking a pregnant woman to Lamia in Greece in 2010 and getting her to sell her baby. The mother, who faces a separate trial, testified against them.

Despite this, and comprehensive evidence from Bulgarian and Greek police, two of them got a suspended sentence of just under three years, and the other a fine.
A police officer from Burgas who worked on the case told BIRN such light sentences would never serve as a deterrent.

"The traffickers lack any respect for the system and it becomes virtually impossible to prevent the spread of this crime," he said, banging a fist on the table in frustration.
He said the investigation took over 18 months and he and his colleagues had become demotivated by such an outcome of all their hard work.

Bulgarian officials say they can find out nothing from Greece about what happens to the babies after they are born.

Experts from Bulgaria's Commission for Combating Human Trafficking say Greece's National Adoption Registry is even more secret than the records of the Bulgarian anti-terrorist services. Every time they try to locate a baby, they get the same response: We have no Bulgarian babies here, and we do not give information on Greek citizens.


Burgas district court: Silvia Dinkova (middle), her husband Racho Dinkov and their neighbour Stanka Raycheva (her parents in the picture) were charged with baby trafficking. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

What should be done?
Ersi Fotopoulou, a lawyer from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki who has dealt with numerous adoptions, said Greece should reconsider the ban on money changing hands - a rule that ensures that when money is involved, the lion's share goes to the traffickers.

"In the United States, the law is more honest and allows for a financial transaction as long as it's visible," she says. "In Greece, we cover up the issue. There will always be money involved."

Many Bulgarians, among them the families involved, argue that adoption in Greece will give the children a much better life than their siblings have amid the dust and poverty of the ghettoes. But aid workers say with no follow-up controls, no one really knows what kind of lives these children live.

A senior anti-trafficking aid worker in Sliven, who declined to be named, said Bulgaria and Greece could not stop the trade.

"If the rewards remain as high and the risks as low as they are now, it's just too tempting and it's likely to carry on and maybe grow," she said.
She suggested a partial solution that seems likely to fall on deaf ears.

"Perhaps both countries should consider some kind of legalisation - to impose clear rules for payment to the mother, for her support during pregnancy, for payment of medical examinations, accommodation. At least this would stop the black market, which mainly benefits traffickers and middlemen."


Juliana Koleva in Sofia, Burgas, and in Bulgaria's Roma communities, with Kostas Kallergis in Athens. This article was produced as part of the Alumni Initiative of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation and Open Society Foundations, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or, BIRN.


__________

In Greece, babies are for sale on the black market

In Greece, the trade in eggs and babies is flourishing, as poor young women from Bulgaria and Romania are blackmailed into handing over infants. Perpetrators can often rely on accomplices within the local government.

a baby

In Greece, babys are available for 15,000 euros

Elektra Koutra is fighting to help foreign women get their children back. The young lawyer is convinced that criminal networks in Greece are blackmailing poor women from Bulgaria and Romania into selling their babies to childless couples. Koutra, who is representing a Romanian mother in court, says the Greek authorities have been slow to respond to the fight against the baby trade.

In January, Bulgarian and Greek police arrested 14 people over allegations that they trafficked newborn babies to Greece. According to Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov, most of the babies were of Roma origin.

Baby trafficking is a thriving black market industry in Greece, which does not regulate private adoptions. Pregnant women from Bulgaria or Romania are brought across the border to give birth. According to Greek media reports, the price for a baby from Bulgaria or Romania ranges from 15,000 to 25,000 euros ($20,000-$34,000). The mother won't get more than 3,000 euros, and is threatened with violence should she change her mind.

Indifferent officals

a syringe

Hormone shots ensure more eggs will be ready

Alexandros Zavos, director of the Institute for Migration Policy in Athens, suspects many human traffickers have accomplices among the state officials.

On the islands, says Zavos, it is believed that citizens act as helpers to the smugglers by informing them of upcoming police checks, he added. In some cases, police even take advantage of victms.

"In the city of Patras, two port police officers were accused of having robbed refugees," he adds.

In another case cited in a 2009 UN Trafficking in Persons Report, a trafficking victim was allegedly raped while in police custody, and the three police officers suspected of the crime remained free on bail as their court case continued.

Egg donations

Traffickers aren't just limited to selling babies. On the northern border of Greece, there is now a flourishing illegal trade in donor eggs, according to Athens lawyer Elektra Kourta. Poor women from Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia come to Greece for a few weeks and are treated with hormone injections to produce as many eggs as possible, says Kourta.

"Many of these women are victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution, but they are not subject to health controls. And they are hardly aware of possible complications."


Offering help

a woman and a wallet

Many women who sell their eggs are victims of forced prostitution

The best way to help the victims is in their home country, says migration researcher Alexandros Zavos. In 2008, Zavos led a reintegration program for female victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution in Moldova.

"In the beginning they need a lot of psychological support, because many suffer from severe disturbances and suicidal thoughts," Zavos said.

Another important component of the program is the training. Zavos's program didn't give the women cash, but offered to finance job training and to help with career placement.

Reintegration programs are important, he says, because human trafficking isn't going anywhere. The trade in human beings will be a part of everyday life, says Zavos, as long as criminal gangs can make a lot of money off it.

Author: Jannis Papadimitriou / sh
Editor: Andreas Illmer

 
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France is no sovereign country. And in comparison to Iran, it is nowhere "civilized", but a dog eat dog hell hole.



Iran is never going to return to pre-revolutionary conditions, ie will never become a western and zionist vassal again. Live with it.



Newsflash! Afghans are an Iranian people. So are Kurds. Also, there are less than 50.000-60.000 Kurds from other countries residing in Iran. That hardly qualifies as a "flood". As opposed to European nations, which are literally being stormed by immigrants from completely alien geographical and civilization backgrounds.

And nothing will "adjust itself" in Europe in the sense you're suggesting. What is actually happening, is that European nation-states are the ones adjusting themselves to the zionist-, bankster- and freemason-controlled world regime which is going to be imposed on them. Or rather, which they are going to be gobbled up by, which they will dissolve into.

As it stands, Iran as opposed to Greece and other EU regimes is:

- A nation enjoying her sovereignty and independence.

- Not member to a supranational organization like the EU, where an unelected "Commission" dictates much of the policies affecting the daily lives of her citizens.

- A state whose central bank will not follow guidelines set by the Rothschilds and other thieving banksters.

- A nation where masonic secret societies have no say on state affairs.

- A nation not subject to US imperial dictates.



You mean like the social outcasts, thugs, pimps and drug dealers your criminal regimes sent over to join "I"SIS in Syria? Hahaha, no chance whatsoever, the Resistance crushed and eradicated them to the last terrorist, with the exception of a few who made it back to Europe, and which NATO intelligence agencies are keeping in reserve for future false flag terrorist attacks against their own citizens, or for overseas operations.




We don't need to. There are merely 300.000-500.000 Christians in Iran, and they enjoy outstanding rights. A tiny percentage of the overall population. There is no discrimination against Christians in Iran. Armenian Iranians love their motherland and enjoy living there. So do Assyrian Iranians. Hacoupian, one of the main local clothing brands, is owned by Armenians. That's just one example of Christian business elites in Iran.

It was Iran and her allies like Hezbollah who saved Oriental Christians from slavery and mass-murder at the hands of "I"SIS and other NATO- and Isra"el"i-backed terror grouplets in Syria and Iraq. But what do you expect from someone who doesn't care about the repression of Orthodox Christians in Occupied Palestine at the hands of the zionist regime, but will try and portray Islamic Iran as somehow hostile to Christians? What a sad joke. Zionists will remain a zionists, and they will gladly sell out their own nation to their political masters.



Women have it better in Iran than in the west where they are alienated in their very biological essence. Legislation in Iran reflects Natural Law, not some perverted, twisted (post-)modernist feminist ideals meant to eliminate the nuclear family structure and thus the nation itself.



Religious minorities in Iran are not discriminated against socially, nor legally save for some specific government positions, owing to the fact that Iran is a religious democracy and therefore governed by the principles of the majority religion.



Iran respects her neighbors. Western and zionist imperialists respect noone.



Huh?

Women are absolute and 100% equal to men. They can be prime minister, general, admiral, pilot. In Iran they are just slaves and even get beaten on the streets when wearing wrong clothes.


Christians suffer massive discrimination in Iran and are classified as dhimmis, basicly on animal level.

Iran is a dictatorship where one person decides evrything. Its current president is a convicted murderer.

When that iranian general was liquidated, our PM congratulated and our embassy warned Greeks to travel Iran because the high risk to be taken hostage for political reasons.

Again and again did Iran take people as hostages to achieve political goals. There is no free press, no freedom of speech. Its led by extremly corrupt Mullahs who waste money on their own luxury.

And btw your 10 year old leftist propaganda article about Greece is funny to read. Shit like this was written back then to push the "default" agenda.
No matter what experience show what would happen if a Muslim want to marry a former member of royal family

I posted the posts they can get you want me name:undecided:

How many christian generals serve in iranian military?
 
.
First teach Greece to respect children and innocent babies, then come lecture others.

Now, even a summary research will reveal that Greece has not just been a major source for the sale of children, but also a nauseating hub and consumer market for this barbarian criminal practice... Reading the below both makes me want to cry and to puke, honestly.

High time for regime change in the uprooted, zionist- / bankster- / freemason-controlled nation formally known as Greece, I would say. Honest Greek patriots (not zionists masquerading as such) can ask the IRGC's Quds Force for assistance anytime, I'm sure they'll be able to help.

- - - - -

Mothers forced to sell their children: Mail reveals the distressing human toll of Greece's Euro meltdown

Published: 23:32 GMT, 11 May 2012 | Updated: 12:13 GMT, 15 May 2012

The economic crisis across Europe has perhaps been most keenly felt in Greece, where people have taken to the streets in violent and emotional protests against the austerity measures imposed on the nation.

In this heartbreaking dispatch from the streets of Athens, SUE REID finds mothers who have been forced to sell their own children in the battle for survival.

Once a month, usually on a Saturday, Kasiani Papadopoulou packs a bag with children’s presents and takes the bus from her one-bedroom flat in a dusty suburb of Athens up into the cool hills outside the Greek capital that overlook the sea.

The 20-mile journey is an emotional one for her, but she would not stop making it for anything in the world.

A young widow of 30, she travels to see her two daughters and son — aged 14, 13 and 12. Kasiani was forced to give them away a year ago when her money ran out and she was unable to pay for their food, her rent or send them to school with shoes or books.

Effects of austerity: Juliana Tsivra with her mother Maria. Maria used to work in a bakery but lost her job more than a year ago

Effects of austerity: Juliana Tsivra with her mother Maria. Maria used to work in a bakery but lost her job more than a year ago

At the charity home where the three are now cared for, the children excitedly shout ‘Mama’ as they run down the steps to greet her. Her eldest daughter, Ianthe, hugs her tightly and gives her a kiss.

When, a few hours later, it is time to say goodbye, Kasiani is always close to tears. The youngest, Melissa and Markos, cling to her before she leaves to go home alone.

‘It is not easy for a mother to leave her kids,’ she says to me, her voice cracking with emotion when I spoke to her this week in Athens.

‘At Christmas, at Easter, on their birthdays, I am always so sad because I do not see them. Some people judge me over what I’ve done — even my own family and neighbours — but they do not understand the truth. I’ve done what is best for my children.

‘I cannot count the number of doorbells I have rung of government departments, asking officials to help me and my family. They make promises but do nothing. They have no money either. Our country is in crisis.’

Tough times: Maria Tsvira, pictured with her daughter Juliana, is now forced to use the charity medical centre set up in Athens

Tough times: Maria Tsvira, pictured with her daughter Juliana, is now forced to use the charity medical centre set up in Athens

Kasiani’s children were born in a country which has been brought to its knees by crushing debt. This was built up by Greece’s huge profligacy after joining the European Union and then milking the system for everything it could get.

The public sector wage bill doubled in the past decade as perks and fiddles reminiscent of Britain in the union controlled 1970s flourished. Paying taxes became optional for the middle and upper classes and corruption was rife.

Until two years ago, the big fat Greek gravy train carried on racing towards the buffers. Even pastry chefs and hairdressers were listed among the 600 ‘professions’ allowed to retire at 50 (with a state pension of 95 per cent of their final year’s earnings) on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work.

Now drastic austerity measures imposed by Eurozone finance leaders mean that benefits, state pensions and pay rates have been pared to the bone as taxes are hiked heavenwards in a last ditch attempt to balance the books and stop the country going bankrupt.

For example, the threshold at which personal tax has to be paid has been reduced to £3,000 a year, while Vat has soared to 23 per cent. There is a new annual levy on private property which costs the average homeowner £1,000 a year.

Sad: Sophia, a child who is now being looked after at the SOS children's refugee in Athens after being abandoned's refugee in Athens after being abandoned

Sad: Sophia, a child who is now being looked after at the SOS children's refugee in Athens after being abandoned

Even charities, including the one running the complex for 55 children where Kasiani Papadopoulou’s three now live, have been forced to hand over some of their donations to the empty Greek state coffers.

The price of such austerity, say many here in Greece, is too high to pay, because whatever tough measures are introduced, they will never cover the massive national debt of £366 billion, even with the help of the two bailout packages worth a combined £184 billion coughed up by other EU countries, including Britain.

A sign of the Greeks’ belligerent refusal to face up to reality is the rise of a grassroots movement called ‘We Won’t Pay’ that encourages the middle classes to break the law by taking public transport without validating their ticket or driving through tolls without paying. ‘We have already paid through our taxes so we should be able to travel for nothing,’ claims Konstantinos Thimianos, a 36-year-old activist protesting on the streets of Athens.

He wears a yellow vest with ‘total disobedience’ emblazoned on his back and, with other activists, chants: ‘We won’t pay for their crisis.’

Such opposition to the austerity measures is growing. In this week’s parliamentary elections, Greeks rejected the moderate parties that support the hard-line policies imposed by the EU.

Already, one in five adults is out of work, a fifth of Greek firms have closed, the standard of living has fallen by 20 per cent in two years, and the country which created the Olympic Games in 700 BC can only afford to send half of its athletic team to compete in the London Games.

In the leafy suburbs of Athens this week, I watched two smartly dressed elderly men rifling through rubbish bins at the side of a busy road.

One, who said his name was Georges, told me that their state pensions had been cut to £220 a month. He said: ‘We are looking for anything we can sell.’

He walked away sheepishly with a dented silver picture frame he had found in the bin.

Meanwhile, Government health spending has been slashed by a third. This means that medical care is no longer free for those who have not paid full national insurance contributions. Half of routine prescription drugs are in short supply.

No wonder that the queues at the Social Mission, a charity clinic set up this year by volunteer doctors and the Archbishop of Athens in the centre of the city, lengthen each day. In three months, 650 uninsured patients, many of them children, have come for treatment.

Protests: Political instability has resulted in huge social unrest and civil disturbance

Protests: Political instability has resulted in huge social unrest and civil disturbance

One regular visitor is Maria Tsivra, 37, a divorcee and mother of a five-year-old girl called Juliana who needs routine vaccinations and fortnightly doctor’s appointments to treat a throat infection.

Maria is the daughter of an Athenian shopkeeper and used to work in a bakery. She comes from a hard-working family but lost her job more than a year ago, as the crisis started, and she took time off to care for her ill daughter.

‘The financial crisis was just an excuse to sack me. The bakery was facing more taxes and had less customers.

‘I was a victim like thousands of others in other jobs,’ she says in a solemn voice.

She and Juliana are staying for free in a friend’s house. She has no national insurance and no money to pay £40 for an appointment with a private doctor. ‘I cannot afford for Juliana to see the doctor or get her medicines. That’s why I’ve come to the Social Mission.’

More dramatically, she says: ‘I need help, but not as much as some who are even selling their children on the streets.’

Crisis: Greece has been brought to its knees by crushing debt which has plunged it into political and economic turmoil

Crisis: Greece has been brought to its knees by crushing debt which has plunged it into political and economic turmoil

She tells of a friend, a single mother who lived in a charity shelter with her baby daughter because she had no money and the State would not help.

‘She could not afford to keep her own child and gave her away to a couple who did not have a family of their own.

‘These kinds of things are happening now in Greece. There are many who are suffering and I wonder what the future holds for children of my daughter’s generation.’

The fate of once-booming Greece is changing fast. Soup kitchens are commonplace. The destitute wander the streets.

At three in the afternoon, on the sizzling Wednesday this week, I watched Father John, a 34-year-old priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, presiding over a long queue of Athenians, mixed with African and Arab migrants, in a square off Sophocles’ Street.

Women are ringing churches begging for money to help pay to have their children delivered

They were each waiting for charity workers to give them a bowl of lentils and a piece of bread. This area of Athens was, until a few years ago, a thriving financial sector. It is now home to cheap take-away food stalls and shabby shops offering to buy impoverished Athenian’s gold trinkets and jewellery.

Father John says he has never witnessed such poverty. ‘Only today I was helping a young couple, both 24, who are having their first baby. It is due any time now,’ he explains.

‘They went to the hospital this morning and the doctors said they had to pay a fee for the birth of their child. But they have no money, and can barely pay their rent at a small flat they share with friends.

‘The father used to be a professional footballer, the mother an office clerk. Now they are jobless. The mother suggested to doctors that she had a Caesarean.’

Father John, a priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, says he has never witnessed such poverty

Sad: Father John, a priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, says he has never witnessed such poverty

Such operations are considered emergencies (because they are done to save a baby’s life) and are therefore carried out without charge. So their request for a Caesarean was a way of getting round the rules. However, the doctors refused.

‘They said the Caesarean was unnecessary and she should have a normal birth and pay for it herself. They also warned that she would have to leave the hospital in labour if she did not find the cash to pay.

‘She rang our church in horror and distress. We sent money to the hospital so she can have her baby.’

Church charity workers hand out 2,500 free meals a day in central Athens. Among the throng waiting for Father John’s hand-outs last week was Maria Sissmani, a beautifully dressed 82-year-old wearing designer glasses and with tinted hair.

She worked in Germany as a seamstress in the fashion industry for years and her only income is 208 euros (£172) a month, a pension paid by the Government there.

She gets nothing from her native Greece. Yet she counts her blessings. Her father, who ran a carpentry business, left her an office in a building near Sophocles’ Street where she sleeps on a mattress next to the empty desks. ‘I want to rent the office out, but because of the crisis that is difficult.

No one is doing business so no one needs an office. I have nothing, only debts, and the church told me not to be too proud to join the food queue. I do not feel so bad about it, for I am not alone,’ she says with a sad smile as she looks at the Greek men, women and children, hungrily waiting too.

Across the city, a shelter run by a charity called Klimaka provides meals and an occasional bed to the homeless. Many here are middle-aged and middle class like George Barkouris, a former radio producer and computer engineer.

A divorcee, George worked all his life until the Greek troubles began. When he lost his job because of the cutbacks, he soon ran out of money to pay his rent on a flat in Patissia, a middle-class neighbourhood of Athens. He was reluctant to ask his daughter, a doctor, for help.

‘I walked out of the flat with nothing. For the first week I slept in the park on a bench. It was a terrible shock. Like many Greeks, I felt angry, then depressed. I am 60, and need to work for another five years before I qualify for even a small State pension,’ he says.


‘When I plucked up courage and came here for help I got a big surprise. I found doctors, scientists, all the professional classes, were here, too.

‘Now this charity gives me a bed, and in return, I run their website. But there are plenty like me still sleeping in the park. They are called the ‘new homeless’ who once had money, a lifestyle, a career. Now they are ruined.’

Civil unrest: Pensioners burn emergency tax notices during an anti austerity protest

Civil unrest: Pensioners burn emergency tax notices during an anti austerity protest

Just what will happen next is anyone’s guess. At the SOS Children’s Villages, a worldwide charity with a network of homes and social centres in Greece, which cares for Kasiani Papadopoulou’s three children, they believe things will get worse.

Over the past year, 1,000 Greek families have turned to SOS for help, two-thirds with huge money problems.

The numbers are way up and the families from every walk of life. One toddler attending a nursery school where the fees had always been paid by her mother, was recently abandoned in with a note saying: ‘I will not return to get Anna. I don’t have any money. I can’t bring her up. Sorry.’

It is the sort of case where SOS picks up the pieces. The national director of SOS, George Protopapas, predicts: ‘Next year I fear that more middle class families will fall into poverty here. I think this is just the beginning and we will have many knocks on our door.’

As for widow and mother Kasiani, she prays that one day she will be able to afford to get her children back. Her decorator husband, Angelo, died at the age of 47 of pneumonia — at exactly the same time as Greece’s economic problems began.

She took two jobs to make ends meet, one in the local Town Hall and another in a shop owned by a middle-class family in the town. She was cleaning all hours God sent.
Then the work ran out. Cleaners became a luxury.

‘I had to tell my children that I could not afford to keep them. I buy them those little things that only a mother knows they want. I do my best for them when I see them, although I have next to nothing.

‘But my life has no meaning without my children. I blame the Greek government for the catastrophe that has struck our family.’

www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/donate

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_________

Lives for sale: Booming market for Bulgarian babies in Greece

  • Dolno Ezerovo quarter, Burgas, south-east Bulgaria: Cutbacks in health and education had damaging effects in rural communities where many Roma live (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

By Juliana Koleva and Kostas Kallergis

SOFIA, BURGAS, ATHENS, 22. Dec 2015, 09:30

"Ah, don't even ask, in our village almost everybody has left a baby in Greece. I at least managed to buy myself this little house with the bloody money, so we'd have somewhere to live with the kids. I haven't squandered a single lev. But many people here give away babies for the easy money - they drink, they eat, they party. When the money runs out, they just sell the next baby."

This is Stanka, a woman in her 30s from Bulgaria's marginalised Roma minority who admits she sold a new-born boy in Greece a few years ago for €3,500 ($3,700), a crime for which she is currently on trial.

"I regret it all the time and can't stop thinking of that boy, but I was young and stupid. I couldn't imagine any other way to earn some money to feed my other two children, I had no hope," she says, her voice trembling.

"You should have seen where we lived, with my mother and the rest of the family, more than 10 in a room with no glass in the windows, no doors, a dirt floor, no electricity or water. You wouldn't even want to house an animal there."

She starts crying as she recalls how people came to her home from the nearest big town and offered to sell her third baby, which was on the way. Everyone else was doing it. She thought it was the answer to her problems.

Now she lives with her husband and two boys, 10 and 12, in a single-storey house in the same small Roma town of Ekzarh Antimovo, about 40 km inland from the Black Sea port of Burgas. The home is run-down and basic, but for her a huge step up.


Stanka's house in Ekzarh Antimovo, south-east Bulgaria. Bought for €3,500 from sale of newborn boy. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

Hundreds of women

Stanka is one of dozens of Bulgarian women each year who are known to have sold new babies to couples in Greece desperate for a child of their own, officials say. They suspect the real number is in the hundreds.

Mothers can earn up to €5,000, but sometimes less than €1,000, according to court documents seen by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN. Middlemen take the biggest cut of what the adopters actually pay.

As Stanka points out, the practice appears to attract little social stigma among Romas, who make up the vast majority of known cases.

A distinct regional ethnic minority with their own culture and language, Romani, they are often poor, jobless and ill-educated. Many live apart in run-down "ghettoes," and face pervasive discrimination.

Anti-trafficking police and prosecutors say it is rare for the mothers, who usually have other children already, to regret their actions, or for them to invest the money in something lasting like a house.

Usually the women, often only 18-19 years old and rarely over 25, decide to sell during an unwanted pregnancy, but more recently police have noticed some who conceive with the sole purpose of selling.

Velichka, a mother of three from the Roma ghetto in the eastern provincial city of Sliven, is perhaps more typical than Stanka. She has no home of her own and no money left from the €1,500 she received for her child - only half what she had been promised.

She earned a two-year suspended sentence in Bulgaria in 2009 for selling her baby in Thessaloniki, Greece, after police were tipped off. She has no qualms in telling her story, though the details she relates paint her as more of a victim than did the account she admitted to in court.

Velichka, who says her only employment has been as a prostitute, now blames her father for forcing her to sell her baby and says he spent the money on gold jewellery and a television. She still lives with her parents.

In Greece she sold a kidney, and in that way, according to police, made the contacts that led her to sell her child a year later.

She reveals her deepest secrets, then asks for money to help her buy medicines for herself and daughter, but finally gives up.

Bulgarian police say they suspect the baby trade with Greece may go back as far as the 1990s, when the collapse of communism in eastern Europe suddenly opened up the borders, but has been growing steadily in recent years, especially since Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, making those borders all but vanish.


Roma quarter in Nikolaevo, central Bulgaria, where people live isolated from Bulgarian society: no running water; no electricity; no education; people sleep on the floor, in the mud. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

Hundreds of women

The traffickers here are mostly Roma men and women who lived for many years among ethnic kin in Greece and have good contacts.

They focus on the Roma ghettoes around the Black Sea ports of Burgas and Varna and in the relatively poor east - the towns of Sliven, Yambol, and Stara Zagora between the coast and the more affluent capital Sofia.

A ready market awaits them across the southern border in Greece where often childless couples are willing to pay to bypass a state adoption system which can leave them waiting seven or eight years.

Greece, unlike Bulgaria, permits private adoptions and thus makes this kind of deal easier.

The Mitera Infant Centre in Athens, Greece's biggest state institution for adoptions, says only one in five of some 500 annual adoptions involve the state. Each year the centre arranges around 35 adoptions but receives 150-200 applications.

Bulgarian authorities say Greeks have been paying up to €30,000 for a girl and €40,000 for a boy. Greek police say adopters pay anywhere from €3,000 to €30,000, with prices down slightly in recent years because of the economic crisis. Four out of five babies up for sale were boys.

"It's not just that the parents want to have a boy, boys are more expensive and therefore the criminal rings prefer them too," said an officer from the Greek police anti-trafficking unit who declined to be named as he takes part in undercover operations.

The young mothers, however, get only a meagre share of this money, Bulgarian police say. The rest goes to traffickers and other intermediaries.

"It is not uncommon afterwards for the traffickers to cheat the women out of their promised money, throwing them €500 or so or even just a ticket home to Bulgaria," says one investigator.

The road routes south to Greece are easy and well-worn.

Traffickers drive the pregnant women across the inner-EU border without passport checks, and if guards do ask the purpose of their trip, they usually cite seasonal agricultural work.

The women, mostly treated as suppliers of goods, are then put up in lodgings they are not allowed to leave until it is time to give birth. After that they return to the lodgings while the deal is finalised.

Doctors, lawyers involved

Stanka relates her experience.

"I was in an apartment with two other pregnant women. I don't even know where they took me, it was a city that began with R I think. I was told not to leave the house as it would awaken suspicions.

But during my stay they didn't treat me badly, perhaps they didn't want me to give up and betray them," she says, in faltering Bulgarian - like many of her peers she attended school briefly and has contact with almost only Roma speakers in her daily life.

"When the time came they took me at the hospital, it looked as if they were familiar with the medical team. After the birth they became rougher - they made me sign some documents that were incomprehensible to me, almost threw the money at me - just half of what we had agreed - took the child and sent me back to Bulgaria."

She and other mothers told BIRN that teams in the hospitals seemed to have been specially organised by Greek members of the trafficker group, and knew what they were involved in.

Bulgarian police and prosecutors say this tallies with their findings.

"The network cannot be organised without doctors, local lawyers and prosecutors sometimes," one officer told BIRN.

The dozen Bulgarian prosecutors and police from the organised crime division who helped with this article all declined to be named because rules forbade them to talk to the media and because exposure might harm future operations.

Once the pregnant woman is in Greece, it seems very easy for her to leave the baby behind without anyone knowing.

One method that Bulgarian investigators have encountered for legalising the adoption is for a Greek man to claim he is the father of the child. A few months later the mother relinquishes her parental rights in his favour.

But the most common path is private adoption. A lawyer or an obstetrician helps a couple find a woman who wants to give up her newborn. All they must do is sign a private agreement. That was that - although since 2013 the adoption must also be ratified by a court.

No money is supposed to change hands. But the absence of regular checks has created a fertile black market, authorities acknowledge.

Bulgarian supply, Greek demand

One Greek couple told BIRN of their daughter's experience a decade ago.

Unable to have her own child, Elena (not her real name) had tried for years to adopt through from a state-run children's home but in vain. Eventually she and her husband gave up and decided to pay.

They found out about an Athens lawyer who could find babies from Bulgarian mothers.

The couple paid €25,000 and soon the lawyer arranged a meeting outside one of Athens' main hospitals. Elena waited in the car with her father. One of the traffickers who had arranged the adoption opened the door and placed the baby in her lap. "Elena was glowing with happiness," her father remembers. She was a mother, at last.

The couple later completed all the legal paperwork for the private adoption of their daughter. Theoretically, social services should make scheduled and spot visits to check up on the child. But no one ever did.

A few years later the little girl saw a pregnant woman and asked her mother: "Were you like that too before I was born?". And Elena replied: "You are not a baby from my belly, but you are a baby from my heart," her mother recounted.

Away from the Balkans few people know of this contemporary trade in the region.

One story that did make global headlines in 2013 was when Greek authorities seized Maria, a blonde five-year old living with a Roma family near the town of Larissa, on suspicion she had been abducted. It turned out she had been unofficially "adopted" and was an albino Bulgarian Roma from Nikolaevo, near Stara Zagora. She is now in care pending an official adoption elsewhere.


Nikolaevo, central Bulgaria: Maria's family house. People shocked by Maria story two years ago. Nothing has changed, except a new family now lives in Maria's old home. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

Bulgarian authorities and Roma leaders agree that dire poverty and lack of opportunity drive women to sell their babies, and that within their community, there seems to be little objection to the practice on moral grounds.

"For them the child is not a big value, they don't feel the sale of a baby as a problem, just a livelihood," says Michael Stefanov from A21, a foundation that fights human trafficking.
Gancho Iliev, a Roma who heads a foundation to help his community in the Stara Zagora region, says conditions in the ghettoes are dire.

"There is no 21st century, no water, no power. People sleep on the floor in the dirt with the chickens and other domestic animals. They are isolated from other Bulgarians."

"There is no proper education, medical health care, or religion," he says. "Nearly everyone is unemployed, just a few make a living in agriculture or clean the streets for petty cash. There is nothing to give them values, morality."

He says the authorities do little to help and that there is no real political will to improve their lot.

No emotion

A policeman from Sofia's anti-trafficking unit recalls his first cases.

"I met a girl - she came into this very office with her mother and they both cried so much and regretted selling the baby. They couldn't stop crying," he says.

"That is why I'll always remember the woman who was next. There was nothing, no emotion of any kind. She talked about the sale as if it was of no importance, as if she had sold a watch or a TV set."

The attitude of the second woman, he says, is the more typical.

Police from both countries said most trafficking probably goes undetected. Even when they uncover a case, making a prosecution stick can be a nightmare, particularly since cross-border coordination of investigations does not prove easy.

A Greek anti-trafficking policeman said that apart from tracking the criminal rings down, the biggest challenge was to prove a financial transaction.

"That's what makes a private adoption illegal," he said.

Months of investigation and surveillance might be inadequate unless the gang is caught red-handed. Without that, cases ran a risk of being very weak when brought to court.

One human trafficking expert from Bulgaria's General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime estimated that only about one in 10 such crimes in Bulgaria was ever solved.

The low risk of detection, difficulty of prosecution and often mild sentences in Bulgaria make it a profitable easy business for all involved.

Bulgaria tightened up its trafficking laws a decade ago and has some of the toughest penalties in Europe. Anyone who convinces a woman to sell her baby or transports or houses her during the process can face up to 15 years in jail, and the mother can also be prosecuted.

However, evidence is hard to collect, since all involved have an interest in remaining silent.

The biggest success in cross-border efforts to combat the trade, the so called Lamia case, came after one mother changed her mind and sought police help to recover the child she had just parted with. But such cases are few.

More usually traffickers, aware of dangers as in that case, just let the women go, as one mother, Fana, told BIRN.

Suspended sentences

As a result prosecutors often cut deals with traffickers who agree to plead guilty and in return often receive suspended sentences of less than three years.

This is why only three people are serving sentences in Bulgarian prisons for the baby trade, according to justice ministry figures.

Although there have been cases involving mothers from nearby Albania and Romania, it seems Bulgaria is the centre of the trade.

A tally of Greek police statements show that from 2010 to 2015, more than half of the people, mainly traffickers, arrested for illegal adoptions were Bulgarian citizens. Greek police sources told BIRN most were Romas.

"We think Bulgaria is leading this type of traffic. It is much closer to Greece and transporting a pregnant woman there is quite easy. Albanian women face tighter border controls," says the NGO worker Stefanov.

"Another reason could be religion … especially among the Albanians, who are highly religious."

Prosecutors and police say widescale impunity is simply persuading more women to follow suit.

One young Roma girl from Kameno, a poor village near Burgas with a big Roma quarter, tells how her friend and other close relatives were tempted into a sale.

"When you are on the brink of survival and can't provide for your children, and you see more and more families travel to Greece with a pregnant woman and return without the baby … After which they start celebrating and partying the same night because they have come by some money … That is when you begin to consider it," she says.
She once asked an acquaintance if she missed the twins she had sold.

The young woman just shrugged her shoulders, motioned to her other children, and said: "It was their turn, how otherwise would I be able to feed these here."
In her village the traffickers live well, she says.

"I'll tell you where to go and look for them, but I won't come with you, I am afraid even to be seen speaking with you," she says.


Village of Kameno, southeast Bulgaria: Locals and police believe up to 10 well-to-do homes in Roma quarter built with baby trafficking money. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

We visit the street she indicated. On one side are run-down shacks, where the locals and police say the pregnant women are recruited from. On the other are a dozen or so flashy new multi-storey houses, freshly painted, surrounded by high walls with wrought-iron grilles, and smart cars in the yards where men with gold chains, rings and chunky bracelets hang out.

Locals and police say about half of these houses were built from the proceeds of baby trafficking. Many residents of Kameno, Roma and Bulgarian, say they are surprised the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to it.

Burgas police told BIRN they were very aware of the source of this wealth but had little hope of compiling evidence that would stick in court.

In May this year, for example, members of two of the families owning lavish houses in Kameno appeared before the district court in Burgas.

The three traffickers - Stanka Raycheva and spouses Racho and Silvia Dinkovi - confessed to taking a pregnant woman to Lamia in Greece in 2010 and getting her to sell her baby. The mother, who faces a separate trial, testified against them.

Despite this, and comprehensive evidence from Bulgarian and Greek police, two of them got a suspended sentence of just under three years, and the other a fine.
A police officer from Burgas who worked on the case told BIRN such light sentences would never serve as a deterrent.

"The traffickers lack any respect for the system and it becomes virtually impossible to prevent the spread of this crime," he said, banging a fist on the table in frustration.
He said the investigation took over 18 months and he and his colleagues had become demotivated by such an outcome of all their hard work.

Bulgarian officials say they can find out nothing from Greece about what happens to the babies after they are born.

Experts from Bulgaria's Commission for Combating Human Trafficking say Greece's National Adoption Registry is even more secret than the records of the Bulgarian anti-terrorist services. Every time they try to locate a baby, they get the same response: We have no Bulgarian babies here, and we do not give information on Greek citizens.


Burgas district court: Silvia Dinkova (middle), her husband Racho Dinkov and their neighbour Stanka Raycheva (her parents in the picture) were charged with baby trafficking. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)

What should be done?
Ersi Fotopoulou, a lawyer from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki who has dealt with numerous adoptions, said Greece should reconsider the ban on money changing hands - a rule that ensures that when money is involved, the lion's share goes to the traffickers.

"In the United States, the law is more honest and allows for a financial transaction as long as it's visible," she says. "In Greece, we cover up the issue. There will always be money involved."

Many Bulgarians, among them the families involved, argue that adoption in Greece will give the children a much better life than their siblings have amid the dust and poverty of the ghettoes. But aid workers say with no follow-up controls, no one really knows what kind of lives these children live.

A senior anti-trafficking aid worker in Sliven, who declined to be named, said Bulgaria and Greece could not stop the trade.

"If the rewards remain as high and the risks as low as they are now, it's just too tempting and it's likely to carry on and maybe grow," she said.
She suggested a partial solution that seems likely to fall on deaf ears.

"Perhaps both countries should consider some kind of legalisation - to impose clear rules for payment to the mother, for her support during pregnancy, for payment of medical examinations, accommodation. At least this would stop the black market, which mainly benefits traffickers and middlemen."


Juliana Koleva in Sofia, Burgas, and in Bulgaria's Roma communities, with Kostas Kallergis in Athens. This article was produced as part of the Alumni Initiative of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation and Open Society Foundations, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or, BIRN.

__________

In Greece, babies are for sale on the black market

In Greece, the trade in eggs and babies is flourishing, as poor young women from Bulgaria and Romania are blackmailed into handing over infants. Perpetrators can often rely on accomplices within the local government.

a baby

In Greece, babys are available for 15,000 euros

Elektra Koutra is fighting to help foreign women get their children back. The young lawyer is convinced that criminal networks in Greece are blackmailing poor women from Bulgaria and Romania into selling their babies to childless couples. Koutra, who is representing a Romanian mother in court, says the Greek authorities have been slow to respond to the fight against the baby trade.

In January, Bulgarian and Greek police arrested 14 people over allegations that they trafficked newborn babies to Greece. According to Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov, most of the babies were of Roma origin.

Baby trafficking is a thriving black market industry in Greece, which does not regulate private adoptions. Pregnant women from Bulgaria or Romania are brought across the border to give birth. According to Greek media reports, the price for a baby from Bulgaria or Romania ranges from 15,000 to 25,000 euros ($20,000-$34,000). The mother won't get more than 3,000 euros, and is threatened with violence should she change her mind.

Indifferent officals

a syringe

Hormone shots ensure more eggs will be ready

Alexandros Zavos, director of the Institute for Migration Policy in Athens, suspects many human traffickers have accomplices among the state officials.

On the islands, says Zavos, it is believed that citizens act as helpers to the smugglers by informing them of upcoming police checks, he added. In some cases, police even take advantage of victms.

"In the city of Patras, two port police officers were accused of having robbed refugees," he adds.

In another case cited in a 2009 UN Trafficking in Persons Report, a trafficking victim was allegedly raped while in police custody, and the three police officers suspected of the crime remained free on bail as their court case continued.

Egg donations

Traffickers aren't just limited to selling babies. On the northern border of Greece, there is now a flourishing illegal trade in donor eggs, according to Athens lawyer Elektra Kourta. Poor women from Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia come to Greece for a few weeks and are treated with hormone injections to produce as many eggs as possible, says Kourta.

"Many of these women are victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution, but they are not subject to health controls. And they are hardly aware of possible complications."


Offering help

a woman and a wallet

Many women who sell their eggs are victims of forced prostitution

The best way to help the victims is in their home country, says migration researcher Alexandros Zavos. In 2008, Zavos led a reintegration program for female victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution in Moldova.

"In the beginning they need a lot of psychological support, because many suffer from severe disturbances and suicidal thoughts," Zavos said.

Another important component of the program is the training. Zavos's program didn't give the women cash, but offered to finance job training and to help with career placement.

Reintegration programs are important, he says, because human trafficking isn't going anywhere. The trade in human beings will be a part of everyday life, says Zavos, as long as criminal gangs can make a lot of money off it.

Author: Jannis Papadimitriou / sh
Editor: Andreas Illmer

That brings back a lot of traumatic memories for him, back when his parents sold him to his new Israeli owner for money. 😁
That explains his obsession with Iran-Israeli relations as well.
 
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Women are absolute and 100% equal to men. They can be prime minister, general, admiral, pilot.[In Iran they are just slaves and even get beaten on the streets when wearing wrong clothes..

Nominal on-paper rights don't mean much. Women in the west are enslaved by corporations and alienated from their natural essence. Vulgar merchandise is what they've been turned into.

But as I said, the Quds Force is willing to assist anyone, even oppressed non-Muslims (including Yazidis in northern Iraq, which it saved from extinction at the hands of NATO's "I"SIS proxies). It's enough to ask politely.

In Iran they are just slaves and even get beaten on the streets when wearing wrong clothes..

...according to the zionist propaganda sources you consult. But not in Iranian day to day reality.

Christians suffer massive discrimination in Iran and are classified as dhimmis, basicly on animal level..

Hahahahaha, the notion of "dhimmi" is not even a word in common use in Iran. No offense, but you don't seem familiar with the topic at hand.

Christians enjoy outstanding safety and rights in Iran. Much more than in your dear Isra"el", where their places of worship are regularly desecrated by your zionist friends, among other forms of discrimination and humiliation.

Iran is a dictatorship where one person decides evrything. Its current president is a convicted murderer.

Iran is a democracy where one of the two main political factions is bent on "regime change" from within, and advocates capitulation to the country's existential geostrategic enemies. Something unheard of in any western so-called "democracy". EU regimes by contrast are democracies only in name, controlled as they are from top to bottom by private oligarchic interests, secret societies, zionist lobbies, EU bureaucrats and American deep state magnates.

President Raisi, a "convicted murderer"? Haha, "convicted" by whom, exactly?

When that iranian general was liquidated, our PM congratulated and our embassy warned Greeks to travel Iran because the high risk to be taken hostage for political reasons.

And? Who cares what the vassal PM of a EU regime has to say to please his American and Isra"el"i bosses?

Again and again did Iran take people as hostages to achieve political goals..

Errr, no, she didn't.

There is no free press, no freedom of speech.

Freedom of press and speech in the so-called "democratic" west pales in comparison to Iranian standards.

Its led by extremly corrupt Mullahs who waste money on their own luxury.

Maybe that's why the Supreme Leader in Iran is living in an extremely simple house in the middle of a working class area of Tehran right next to the local railway station, with no luxury items whatsoever. Same goes for the founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini (r.a.), whose most worthy possession was probably his short-wave radio receiver with which he used to monitor international news reports about Iran... Any naysayer can visit Imam Khomeini's modest residence at the Jamaran neighborhood of Tehran to convince themselves.

And this here is the dwelling of the current Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, seyyed Ali Khamenei (h.a.):

https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1392/06/12/131950/

Very "luxurious", indeed!

Even an exiled dissident like Ata'ollah Mohajerani, a former leading reformist politician and supporter of the western-backed attempt at a colored revolution (the 2009 "Green movement") and a staunch adversary of seyyed Khamenei, publicly admitted on camera that the latter can certainly not be accused of having accumulated any personal wealth.

In fact, it's mostly western-apologetic reformists and moderates such as former president Rohani who reside in upscale places. Not authentic revolutionaries like the Supreme Leader, IRGC officers and so on.

So I'm sorry to reiterate, but you don't seem to be familiar enough with Iranian domestic affairs to issue such accusations.

And btw your 10 year old leftist propaganda article about Greece is funny to read. Shit like this was written back then to push the "default" agenda.

Ah, but that's western "free press" for you. Now western-style "freedom of speech" is no good anymore? Western-style "freedom" only good when demonizing true independent, sovereign nations like Islamic Iran?

Oh, and the Daily Mail, a notoriously right-wing paper owned by British aristocrat Jonathan Harmsworth, is "leftist" all of a sudden... Sure thing, buddy.

And I shared three papers, not just one. One of these being from Greece's German "friends and helpers".

How many christian generals serve in iranian military?

Christians represent just about 0,5% of Iran's population. We don't do positive discrimination in Iran, because there's no need for it, unlike America with its history of institutionalized racist discrimination.

But speaking of military affairs, this is how dearly Islamic Iran cherishes her Christian martyrs of the Imposed War (1980-1988) at Tehran's Paradise of Zahra (a.s.) central cemetary, on par with Muslim Iranians:

Armenian_victims_of_Iran-Iraq_war_graves_in_Tehran_139411152117119837041854.jpg


Armenian_victims_of_Iran-Iraq_war_graves_in_Tehran_139411152117143397041854.jpg


Oppression of local Christians is what western- and zionist-backed criminal terrorists do in West Asia. It's what NATO-sponsored, human organ-devouring, child-beheading monsters have been busying themselves with in places such as Syria and Iraq. Not very surprising though, considering the deep-seated zionist and freemason contempt for authentic, historically rooted Christian tradition. Thank God Islamic Iran and general Soleimani were there to break the backs of NATO's patsy terrorists.
 
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Nominal on-paper rights don't mean much. Women in the west are enslaved by corporations and alienated from their natural essence.



Hahahahaha, the notion of "dhimmi" is not even a word in common use in Iran. No offense, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.

Christians enjoy outstanding safety and rights in Iran. Much more than in your beloved Isra"el", where their places of worship are regularly desecrated, among other forms of discrimination and humiliation.



Iran is a democracy where one of the two main political factions is bent on "regime change" from within. Something unheard of in any western so-called "democracy". Greece by contrast is a democracy only in name, controlled as it is from top to bottom by private capitalist interests, secret societies, zionist lobbies, EU bureaucrats and American decision makers.

President Raisi, a "convicted murderer"? Haha, "convicted" by whom, exactly?



And? Who cares what the Greek regime's vassal PM has to say to please his American and Isra"el"i bosses?



Errr, no, she didn't.



Freedom of press and speech in the so-called "democratic" west pales in comparison to Iranian standards.



Maybe that's why the Supreme Leader in Iran is living in an extremely simple house in the middle of a working class neighborhood of Tehran right next to the local railway station, with no luxury items whatsoever. Same goes for the founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini (r.a.), whose most worthy possession was probably his short-wave radio receiver with which he used to monitor international news reports about Iran. Any naysayer can visit Imam Khomeini's modest house at the Jamaran neighborhood of Tehran to convince themselves.

And this here is the dwelling of the current Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, seyyed Ali Khamenei (h.a.):

https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1392/06/12/131950/

Very "luxurious", indeed!

Even an exiled dissident like Ata'ollah Mohajerani, a former leading reformist politician and supporter of the western-backed attempt at a colored revolution, the 2009 "Green movement", and a staunch adversary of seyyed Khamenei, publicly admitted on camera that the latter can certainly not be accused of having accumulated any personal wealth.

Sorry to reiterate, but you aren't familiar enough with Iranian domestic affairs to issue such accusations.



Ah, but that's western "free press" for you. Now western-style "freedom of speech" is no good anymore? Western-style "freedom" only good when demonizing true independent, sovereign nations like Islalmic Iran?

Oh, and the Daily Mail, a notoriously right-wing paper owned by British aristocrat Jonathan Harmsworth, is "leftist" all of a sudden... Sure thing, buddy.

And I shared three papers, not just one. One of these being from Greece's German "friends".



Christians represent just about 0,5% of Iran's population. We don't do positive discrimination in Iran, because there's no need for it, unlike America with its history of institutionalized racist discrimination.

But speaking of military affairs, this is how dearly Islamic Iran cherishes her Christian martyrs of the Imposed War (1980-1988) at Tehran's Paradise of Zahra (a.s.) central cemetary, on par with Muslim Iranians:

Armenian_victims_of_Iran-Iraq_war_graves_in_Tehran_139411152117119837041854.jpg


Armenian_victims_of_Iran-Iraq_war_graves_in_Tehran_139411152117143397041854.jpg


Oppression of local Christians is what western- and zionist-backed criminal terrorists do in West Asia. It's what NATO-backed, human organ-devouring, child-beheading monsters have been busying themselves with in places such as Syria or Iraq. Not really surprising though, considering the deep-seated zionist and freemason contempt for authentic Christian tradition. Thank God Islamic Iran and general Soleimani were there to break the back of the west's patsy terrorists.

So in other words, no matter how good a christian is, he can never be general. Thanks to admit that.

As a citizen i dont just want rights and security. I want full participation. We have that in Greece, Iran has not.

And the natural "essence" of women is equality to men. I have two sisters. They are equal to me and can do evrything i can.
 
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So in other words, no matter how good a christian is, he can never be general. Thanks to admit that.

Is this what I said? Not at all. Much rather, I pointed to the fact that the amount of Christian generals is not an adequate benchmark by which to gauge the position of Christian Iranians, considering how small a minority they are, and considering the limited number of generals in an army.

Now the question remains, why stay silent on the humiliation of Christians in Occupied Palestine, why not utter a word about how NATO regimes sponsored actual anti-Christian terror groups in Syria and Iraq, and single out Islamic Iran instead? I think the reply is obvious to readers. Zionist persuasions always lead to a skewed appreciation of political facts on the ground.

As a citizen i dont just want rights and security. I want full participation. We have that in Greece, Iran has not.

Christians greatly participate in Iranian public life. In EU regimes, no citizen participates in what truly matters, for that is beyond their reach.

And the natural "essence" of women is equality to men.

No it's not. There are biological differences between genders and no amount of feminist propaganda will change that. Furthermore western civilization, in particular Roman Law, has always been based on this evident premise. What we're witnessing right now in so-called "democracies" of the west has nothing to with European culture. It's pure globalist, zionist, capitalist and masonic subversion intended to destroy the nuclear family structure and thence, the nations themselves.
 
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Is this what I said? Not at all. Much rather, I pointed to the fact that the amount of Christian generals is not an adequate benchmark by which to gauge the position of Christian Iranians, considering how small a minority they are, and considering the limited number of generals in an army.

Now the question remains, why stay silent on the humiliation of Christians in Occupied Palestine, why not utter a word about how NATO regimes sponsored actual anti-Christian terror groups in Syria and Iraq, and single out Islamic Iran instead? I think the reply is obvious to readers. Zionist persuasions always lead to a skewed appreciation of political facts on the ground.



Christians greatly participate in Iranian public life. In EU regimes, no citizen participates in what truly matters, for that is beyond their reach.



No it's not. There are biological differences between genders and no amount of feminist propaganda will change that. Furthermore western civilization, in particular Roman Law, has always been based on this evident premise. What we're witnessing right now in so-called "democracies" of the west has nothing to with European culture. It's pure globalist, zionist, capitalist and masonic subversion intended to destroy the nuclear family structure and thence, the nations themselves.


That is rubbish. In Greece women always played a powerful role, as scientists, warriors, sailors, leaders.

One of our highest gods:

pallas-athene-picture-id915586016
 
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