[R-G] Uprising in Greece: Protests, Riots, Strikes Enter 6th Day Following Fatal Police Shooting of Teen

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/11/greek_uprising_protests_riots_strikes_enter

December 11, 2008
Uprising in Greece: Protests, Riots, Strikes Enter 6th Day Following  
Fatal Police Shooting of Teen

Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken Greece for the  
sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy in  
Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday’s massive general  
strike over pension reform and privatization shut down the country,  
more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen university campuses  
remain occupied by student demonstrators. A major rally is expected  
Friday, and as solidarity protests spread to neighboring Turkey, as  
well as Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands,  
dozens of arrests have been made across the continent. We speak to a  
student activist and writer from Athens. [includes rush transcript]


AMY GOODMAN: Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken  
Greece for the sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a  
teenage boy in Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday’s  
massive general strike over pension reform and privatization shut down  
the country, more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen  
university campuses remain occupied by student demonstrators. A major  
rally is expected on Friday. And as solidarity protests spread to  
neighboring Turkey, as well as Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Denmark  
and the Netherlands, dozens of arrests have been made across the  
continent.

On Wednesday, two police officers involved in Saturday’s shooting were  
arrested, and one was charged with murder. But anger remains high over  
the officers’ failure to express remorse at the student’s death. The  
police officers claim the bullet that killed Alexandros Grigoropoulos  
was fired in self-defense, and the death was an accident caused by a  
ricochet.

The unrest this week has been described as the worst since the end of  
the military dictatorship in 1974 and could cost the already weakened  
Greek economy an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s also  
shaken the country’s conservative government that has a narrow one- 
person majority in Parliament. The socialist opposition has increased  
calls for the prime minister to quit and call new elections, ignoring  
his appeals for national unity.

I’m joined now on the telephone by a student activist and writer from  
Athens. He’s with the Greek Socialist Workers Party. He’s a graduate  
student in political philosophy at Panteion University in Athens.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you lay out for us exactly when  
this all began and how the protests have escalated and what they’re  
about right now, Nikos Lountos?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yes, Amy. I’m very glad to talk with you.

So, we are in the middle of an unprecedented wave of actions now and  
protests and riots. It all started on Saturday evening at around 9:00  
p.m., when a policeman patrolling the Exarcheia neighborhood in Athens  
shot and murdered in cold blood the fifteen-year-old schoolboy Alexis.

The first response was an attempt to cover up the killing. The police  
claimed that they had been attacked. But the witnesses all around were  
too many for this cover-up to happen. So, all the witnesses say that  
it was a direct shot. So even the government, in just a few hours, had  
to claim that it will move against the police, trying to calm the anger.

But the anger exploded in the streets. In three, four hours, all the  
streets around Athens were filled with young people demonstrating  
against the police brutality. The anti-capitalist left occupied the  
law school in the center of Athens and turned it into headquarters for  
action. And on Sunday, there was the first mass demonstration.  
Thousands of people of every age marched towards the police  
headquarters and to the parliament. And the next day, on Monday, all  
this had turned into a real mass movement all around Greece.

What was the most striking was that in literally every neighborhood in  
every city and town, school students walked out of their school on  
Monday morning. So you could see kids from eleven to seventeen years  
old marching in the streets wherever you could be in Greece, tens of  
thousands of school students, maybe hundreds of thousands, if you add  
all the cities. So, all around Athens and around Greece, there were  
colorful demonstration of schoolboys and schoolgirls. Some of them  
marched to the local police stations and clashed with the police,  
throwing stones and bottles. And the anger was so really thick that  
policemen and police officers had to be locked inside their offices,  
surrounded by thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys and girls.

The picture was so striking that it produced a domino effect. The  
trade unions of teachers decided an all-out strike for Tuesday. The  
union of university lecturers decided a three-day strike. And so,  
there was the already arranged, you know, the strike you mentioned for  
Wednesday against the government’s economic policies, so the process  
was generalizing and still generalizes.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, when you have this kind of mass protest,  
even with the beginning being something so significant as the killing  
of a student, it sounds like it’s taken place in like a dry forest  
when a match is thrown, a lit match, that it has caught on fire  
something that has been simmering for quite some time. What is that?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yeah, that’s true. Everybody in all of this, that even  
the riots, the big riots—you may have seen the videos—they are a  
social phenomenon, not just the result of some political incident.  
There were thousands of angry young people that came out in the  
streets to clash with the police and smash windows of banks, of five- 
star hotels and expensive stores. So, that’s true. It was something  
that waited to happen.

I think it’s a mixture of things. We have a government that’s—a  
government of the ruling party called New Democracy, a very right-wing  
government. It has tried to make many attacks on working people and  
students, especially students. The students were some form of guinea  
pigs for the government. When it was elected after 2004, they tried— 
the government tried to privatize universities, which are public in  
Greece, and put more obstacles for school students to get into  
university. The financial burden on the poor families if they want  
their children to be educated is really big in Greece. And the worst  
is that even if you have a university degree, even if you are a doctor  
or lawyer, in most cases, young people get a salary below the level of  
poverty in Greece. So the majority of young people in Greece stay with  
their families ’til their late twenties, many ’til their thirties, in  
order to cope with this uncertainty. And so, this mixture, along with  
the economic crisis and their unstable, weak government, was what was  
behind all this explosion.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos is a Greek activist and writer. Nikos, the  
protests have been picked up not only in Greece, but around the world.  
We’re talking about the Netherlands, talking also about Russia and  
Italy and Spain and Denmark and Germany. What does it mean to the  
workers and the students in Greece now? How significant is that? Has  
that changed the nature of the protests back in Greece?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: It’s very good news for us to know that many people  
around the world are trying to show their solidarity to us. And I  
think it’s not only solidarity, but I think it’s the same struggle  
against police brutality, for democracy, against war, against poverty.  
It’s the same struggle. So it’s really good news for us to hear about  
that.

I think you should know that the next Thursday will be the next day of  
action, of general action. Every day will have action, but next  
Thursday will be a day of general action. The students will be all  
out. And we’re trying to force the leaders of the trade unions to have  
a new general strike. So I could propose to people hearing me now that  
next Thursday would be a good day for solidarity action all around the  
world, to surround the Greek embassies, the consulates, so generally  
to get out in the streets and express your solidarity to our fight.  
And I think workers and students in Greece will really appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the issue of civil liberties overall in  
Greece? Has this been a matter of controversy over time?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yeah. This government has a really awful record on  
civil liberties. It all began during the Olympics of 2004, aided also  
by the so-called anti-terrorist campaign started by George Bush after  
9/11. During the Olympic Games, we had the first cameras in the  
streets of Athens. And there are now proofs that many phones were  
tapped illegally at that period, among them the phones of the leaders  
of the antiwar movement here in Greece, such as the coordinators of  
the Stop the War Coalition.

And then came the biggest scandal of all. In 2005, tens of Pakistani  
immigrants were abducted from their homes by unknown men. They were  
hooded and interrogated and then thrown away after some days in the  
streets of Athens. The Greek police, along with the British MI5, had  
organized these illegal abductions in coordination with the then- 
Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf.

During the student movements and the workers’ strikes all these years,  
hundreds of beatings and more police brutality have covered up. Just  
one month ago, a Pakistani immigrant called Mohammed Ashraf was  
murdered by riot police in Athens when the police dispersed the crowd  
of immigrants waiting to apply for a green card. And the immigrants in  
Greece in general are mainly from regions hit by war—Iraq,  
Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan. And they are treated in awful  
conditions by the Greek state and police. Many people have died by  
shells in the borders or in the DMZ, trying to get into Greece and  
then Europe. So it’s really an awful record for the government on  
civil liberties.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, finally, as we travel from Sweden to  
Germany, one of the things we’re looking at is the effect of the US  
election on the rest of the world. In a moment, we’ll be joined by the  
editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, the largest magazine in Europe. When  
President-elect Obama was elected, their headline was “President of  
the World.” What is the effect of the election of Barack Obama on  
people you know in Greece? What has been the reaction?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Well, you know, all these years we had a slogan here in  
the antiwar movement and the student movement that George Bush is the  
number-one terrorist. So, many people were happy when they learned  
that these will be the final days of George Bush and his Republican  
hawkish friends like John McCain. But, of course, people in Greece  
have experienced that having a different government doesn’t always  
mean that things will be better. If the movement doesn’t put its stamp  
on the changes, changing only persons will have no meaning. But people  
have appreciated the change in the US administration as a message of  
change all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, I want to thank you very much for being  
with us, Greek activist and writer. He’s with the Socialist Workers  
Party in Greece and a graduate student in political philosophy at  
Panteion University in Athens.