10 L. KARAMANIDOU Downloaded by [82.28.181.28] at 02:36 18 February 2016 5. Denying that violence against migrants is racist A second narrative involves disengaging racism from the exercise of violence. A few days after collective violence against Albanian immigrants following a football game in 2004, MPs of left-wing opposition parties referred to the racism and xenophobia that informed these violent encounters (HP 2004). Ministers and MPs of the governing party did not respond, but the government stated elsewhere that the clashes ‘should not be attributed to racial motivation, but rather to the fact that unfortunately football games are worldwide often accompanied by clashes between fans’ (ECRI 2009, 59). Similarly, the shooting of migrant agricultural workers by their employers in 2013 was constructed by the MPO and MPs of the governing New Democracy party as an assault related to labour grievances and not, as left-wing MPs claimed, as underlined by racist attitudes towards migrants (HP 2013c). The racialized nature of these events, related to the unequal position of migrants in Greek society, was thus elided from official narratives. The racial dimension of violence by security agencies is often implicitly rather than explicitly refuted through references to the human rights and anti-discrimination training received by security personel, and to the commitment of the Greek state to ‘combatting racism and xenophobia’ and respecting human rights (CERD 2001, 2011; Government of Greece 2002, 2009; HRC 2011; HP 1997a, 1998a, 2005a, 2008b, 2013d). Equally it is refuted through a pattern of condemning racist violence (HP 2008c, 2012). Explicit refutations do occasionally occur. When questioned on the shooting of an Albanian migrant in 1997, the then MPO stated that ‘there are no racist attitudes’ among the police (HP 1997b, 419). Similarly, observations by ECRI on racist and anti-semitic attitudes among politicians and judicial personnel were refuted as ‘unsubstantiated and therefore unacceptable’, based on allegedly unreliable information provided by human rights NGOs in Greece (ECRI 2009, 59). The same strategy of denial also occurs in relation to operation Xenios Zeus, which according to the MPO, had ‘no racial motive for action (MPOCP 2012c)’. By emphasizing in the same document that ‘we don’t care about the colour, origin, nation or religion of the illegals [sic]’ (MPOCP 2012c), the minister explicitly rejected both biological and cultural forms of racism, reflecting the disavowal of racism in modern democracies (Goldberg 2002; Herzfeld 2007). At the same time, however, migrants are racialized on the basis of the illegalized status. These denials of racism mirror the extensive use of this trope in Greek political discourses on migration (Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2014). Statements such as ‘the Greek society has proven that it is not racist towards foreigners’ (HP 2000, 540, a PASOK MP) or ‘the Greek people cannot accept unfounded and unjust accusations of racism and xenophobia’ (HP 2005b, 651–652) are illustrative of perception of the non-existence of racism in the Greek