The intensity and frequency of these incidents demonstrates that, contrary to the oicial credo of the police and governments, the use of illegal force is not a series of “individual incidents” by low-ranking and uneducated police oicers, but rather continues a consolidated and longstanding culture in a direct link with the past, now centered on new target groups. The PASOK governments of 1981 to 1989 instituted a new system to recruit police oicers with strong party ailiations, which remained in place through 1993. The clientele system aimed at supporting the incomplete cleansing of the police from ultra-right elements and junta collaborators. The problem was inally solved in 1994 with Law 2226/1994, which established a long awaited system of admission to the Hellenic Police through national examinations. Recruitment mechanisms until then had been altogether political and arbitrary. 7/ THE POLICE AND IMMIGRATION: THE NEW ENEMY OF THE 1990s The 1990s brought many changes to Greek society and new challenges for the Hellenic Police, the most important of which was immigration. The collapse of the Balkan socialist regimes fuelled extremely intense immigration lows to Greece, a country still airily living the myth of a unicultural society – re-fuelling this myth with all sorts of ideologies. Violence and repression by the security forces in northern Greece became the indispensable means for attaining an ethnically uniform society. The end of the cold war radically changed the scenery. Experiencing unprecedented capitalist growth by Greek and Balkan standards, Greece became a leading destination for immigrants from neighbouring countries. For nearly a decade, the State let the Hellenic Police to handle almost all immigration issues singlehandedly. The State’s irst reaction to intensiied lows of immigration (Law 1975/1991) was, practically, to outlaw immigration. This assessment may seem extreme, but it is the plain truth. This 1991 law realistically let no legal means to enter Greece as an immigrant. Having shut of all possibilities for legal entry, stay and work in Greece, the State itself efectively encouraged illegal immigration while giving the Hellenic Police carteblanche to contain immigration if possible. Immigrants (mostly from Albania) entered Greece in conditions of total deprivation and lack of human dignity. Faced with these people, whose presence loats in a perfect legal void, the Hellenic Police recalls from its institutional memory practices that are seemingly extinct in its relations with the Greek population (or at least were treated as “individual incidents”, according to the now-famous oicial formulation; as they indeed were to a certain degree). We are talking about brutal torture and refoulement among the wild paths and mountains of the Greek-Albanian borderlands, where even shooting and murders took place.29 29. 32 | Regarding that period and the various incidents of torture recorded in reports by human rights organizations, see http://www.iospress.gr/ios2006/ios20060409.htm. ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG