Fortres Europe: Greek police chief to tackle Kurd influx at Rome me

[english at ozgurluk.xs4all.nl]

   ATHENS, Jan 5 (AFP) - The Greek government announced Monday it  
was sending its top police officer, Athanase Vassilopoulos, to Rome 
for an international meeting on the current influx of Kurdish 
refugees from Turkey. 
   Yannis Papadoyannakis, general secretary in the ministry for  
public order, said Vassilopoulos would lead the Greek delegation to 
the Wednesday meeting, which will also include police chiefs from 
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. 
   "For us, the Kurdish immigration problem is mostly a political  
problem and European cooperation is necessary," Papadoyannakis said, 
adding that he believed Turkey should be encouraged to take back the 
illegal immigrants. 
   He said that while Greece was concerned by illegal immigration,  
it was not faced with arrivals on the same scale as that facing 
Italy. 
   More than 1,200 illegal immigrants arrived in Italy aboard two  
Turkish ships on December 26 and January 1. 
   Most of them were Kurds from Turkey's troubled southeastern  
region where government forces are engaged in a conflict with 
militant Kurdish separatists. 
   Papadoyannakis said immigrant-smugglers to Greece had now turned  
to new tactics of abandoning the ships with their human cargo in 
Greek waters or dumping the immigrants on remote islands. 
   He said 8,000 Kurds who had arrived in 1996 and 1997 were now  
living in Greece. 
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