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One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils."I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her," it read. "Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother."In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city's poor, has found four children on his doorstep - including a baby just days old.Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable - they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.One of the children cared for by Father Antonios is Natasha, a bright two-year-old brought to his centre by her mother a few weeks ago.The woman said she was unemployed and homeless and needed help - but before staff could offer her support she had vanished, leaving her daughter behind.
I'm bracing for a tidal wave of human exploitation to occur in Greece. A helpless population will do anything for anybody. It will become the new hunting grounds for mafia's all over the world.
Organized crime syndicates in Greece have been expanding steadily over the past decade. The existence of an abundance of illegal firearms and illicit market for them, the concentration in certain locales of illegal immigration populations, and the severe economic crisis gripping the country have provided an ideal climate in which criminal groups are able to arm themselves, recruit “foot soldiers” and generally increase their clout. Greek authorities estimate that some 1.5 million firearms exist in the country; however, the number of licensed owners of hunting rifles does not exceed 300,000 people, meaning that the rest of the weapons are illegally owned.
