DIRTY GREEKS

In March 1998, the village council of Paleo Keramidi, a small village in northern Greece, forbade Albanian immigrants from going outside after sunset. The curfew was imposed to restrict the crime rate which had been on the rise. Many months later, a TV crew visited Paleo Keramidi and invited the villagers to a public discussion. At first, almost all the members of the community defended the decision made a year earlier. Journalist Stelios Kouloglou and his colleagues then showed the villagers a documentary about the treatment of Greek immigrants in the USA in the early 20th century. The way survivors of those times tell it, the Greeks were victims of race discriminations and prejudice ̄just like Albanians in modernday Greece. "They never said Greeks; they always called us Dirty Greeks". The discussion following the screening was most revealing: apparently, when the curfew was imposed, no serious incident or robbery had been committed by Albanians. Will the villagers admit that they have been treating Albanians just like the Americans treated the "Dirty Greeks" years ago, and that the curfew was a mistake?