9/ ASYMMETRICAL VIOLENCE AND LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT NECESSARILY ULTRA-RIGHT BUT POTENTIALLY LEADS THERE A 1995 report by the Council of Europe Commission for the Prevention of Torture disclosed complaints about torture against immigrants inside police departments. An increasing number of press reports tell of extremely violent methods of containment and torture of immigrants, mostly at the Greek-Albanian border, where the Greek military is also involved. As we have seen, during the 1990s Greek society came face to face with racism against foreigners, and the vanguard of this encounter was the Hellenic Police, whether or not the foreigners were criminals, since mere entry into the country was oicially a crime. As a result, it is no accident that even today racist ideology is comparatively more widespread within the police than in the population at large, with the Hellenic Police claiming (correctly) that “it was let all alone to do the dirty work” without an even elementary preparation. It took until the late 1990s before the irst efort to legally arrange the undocumented population of immigrants in the country, ater presidential decrees concerning their legalization in 1998. Only then, for the irst time, did services other than the Hellenic Police begin to deal systematically with immigration, and only then did Greece irst appear to acknowledge that there was also a legal population of immigrants. When immigration is illegal, immigrant populations are exposed to organized crime, which comes to substitute for the absent State. Technological restructuring, new equipment, the creation of new special task forces and the like unfortunately could not prevent a spectacular rise in crime during those years. The changes in some types of crime compared to the 1980s are astonishing. This increase in criminal activity, which is at the same time a typical and sometimes misleading leitmotif in various interpretations of the Greek 1990s, is not unrelated to immigration, precisely because the way of (non) reception of immigrants throughout the 1990s permits organized crime to act in an open ield. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in crimes against property, a consolidation of the leisure industry, prostitution, human traicking and, of course, drug traicking. These years also mark a rearrangement of the traditional Greek underworld, which naturally caused trouble in the ailiations traditionally entertained between these circles and the security forces. The change brought to the human geography of crime in Greece, through the emergence of foreign circuits and links in the chain of organized crime, disorders whatever equilibrium there had been in the internal market between the underworld and the police. In this way, dominant racist views of a possible connection of immigration and criminal behaviour that had been (and still are) inherent in major parts of Greek society are even more accentuated within the Hellenic Police, because these were the people who immediately and personally faced the problem in its most acute form. The widely recognized achievement of the Hellenic Police in 2002, when, ater years of failures in combating terrorism, it succeeded in arresting the members of the organization “17 November” and later of the Revolutionary People’s Struggle 34 | ROSA LUXEMBURG STIFTUNG