Athen: Sextonåring skottskadad i natt
Torsdag 18 December, 2008 kl. 1:33 emLäser precis på Occupied London att ytterliggare en sextonåring skjutits i Athen i natt. “I går natt blev en sextonårig elev skjuten och skadad i Peristeri i Athen, i närheten av sin skola. Sextonåringen satt med ett tiotal andra elever och diskuterade framtida mobiliseringar. Skottet som skadade honom avfyrades av en okänd person, som förmodas vara endera civilpolis eller fascist. Polisen gjorde ett uttalande bara timmar senare. När sextonåringens klasskamrater återvände till platsen för attacken för att ta reda på hylsan, avlossades ännu ett skott mot dem.”
För idag planeras stundentdemonstrationer och solidaritetsaktioner, inte bara i Athen. För lördag är en internationell aktionsdag utlyst.
Upproret tilltar i omfattning och styrka – och kreativitet. I tisdags attackerades polishögkvarteret(!) i Zografou, Athen och en kravallpolisbuss och flera bilar brändes. Gång på gång genomförs aktioner i tunnelbanan som syftar till att rubba cykeln “produktion – transport – konsumtion”; biljettautomater limmas igen, övervakningskameror blockeras. Tevestationen NET ockuperades under några minuter av stundenter som höll upp en banderoll med texten “SLUTA TITTA PÅ TV – ALLA UT PÅ GATORNA!” Se inslaget här.
På Balkan Decentralized Network får man en uppfattning av det myller av aktioner som skett och fortsätter ske.
Här följer en text av Network for Political and Social Rights. Den visar hur mordet på Alexis Grigoropoulos utgjorde droppen som fick bägaren att rinna över, men att upproret i Grekland handlar om så mycket mer än polisvåldet. Landets största fackförbund spår att ilskan kommer växa ytterliggare när 100 000 jobb försvinner efter årsskiftet.
THERE’S NO PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE
The police impunity
Unfortunately, the brutal assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos was not a bolt out of the blue. It was a killing in cold blood, insane, unprovoked, and constitutes a foretold death, regardless of what the assassin cop and his ‘godfather’ atorney say. And this, precisely because the hand of the killer was armed by the pervasive, impune, and legalized police violence against immigrants, drug addicts, gypsies, “restless” youth, the indiscriminate police state, the consolidation of the policial cannibalism and the Rambo-cop figure, who bloats about how many immigrants he’s beaten up and how many “junkies” he has humiliated.
Unfortunately, Alexis was sacrificed upon the altar of “security”, that has the cities filled with uniform-clad assassins, that has immigrants drown in the Aegean, that tries to convince the employed and unemployed man, the potentially employed, the man who just got sacked, that no, he’s not threatened by the rich, the capital, the state and the multinationals, but by the poor, the hunted, the bulies, the homeless, the other.
However utopian and paradoxical, we insist:
-Dissolve Riot Police and Special Guards.
-Disarm the police.
The looting of our lives
Neo-liberalism does not just mean uncontrolled markets. Nor does it just constitute greater exploitation and repression of the poor. Above all, neo-liberalism is the rampant domination of the poor by the rich, the absolute contempt to the individual and collective human rights, and even worse, their demonisation, that constitutes in that they’re the reason of the poverty and abjection, that rule the earth.
Fortunately, the myth of “the End of History” has collapsed. The ideologeme of the “prosperity of the free markets” is ridiculed. The global economic crisis leaves no margin for illusions in the light of the masters’ lies.
The Karamanlis government took the public sector apart, let prices soar, looted the state property, robbed the social security funds, they doomed hundreds of thousands of people to insecurity, poverty and social disqualification. And to succeed in this, they worshipped the omnivoracity of the Church, the cannibalism of Justice and the Police. It is the government of looting everything, a government that deprived itself of the right to talk about “looting” and “protection of property”.
Off with this government, that damages the environment, that sells the public sector out, that dishonors human labor, that kills refugees and assassinates children! Not for the purpose of having it replaced with PASOK, that killed Kaltetzas and voted for the law against terrorism. But because we cannot stand them, because we deserve a decent life.
The uprising
The brutal killing of Alexis triggered off the greatest uprising since the political change-over of 1974. Broader, more massive, geographically more dispersed and harder than 25 May ‘76 against Law 330, than the eighties’ Polytechnic movement, the movement against the assassination of Michalis Kaltetzas in 1985, and the explosion that followed the assassination of Nikos Temponeras in January 1991. What stands before us is a majestic uprising against the police.
This is not just the result of the brutal execution of Alexis Grigoropoulos. It expresses the suffocation, the rage, the hate of a whole world (“precariato” they call it), that, on daily basis, goes through the reality of the virtuous world of the rich: Insecurity, employment roaming, daily humiliation, police violence at the square, in the stadium, in the streets, suppression of every hope for a better life.
Among the thousands of people that exchange stones (but also break anything from banks to – wrongly so, but, unfortunately so explicably, small shops) are to be found great parts of our youth, underemployed, unemployed, students, school children, native and foreign, public spirited or not, that find an opportunity to express their hate for the cops and the rich, the symbols of power, wealth and consumerism, but also for what they desire but do not possess in this system of false luxury and the “prosperous hypocrisy”.
To their credit, great parts of the radical Left, apart from the anarchist-antiauthoritarian gamut, that has been taking part in the confrontations out of principle, despite their disagreement to the damages and the destruction, they did not line up with the order, they did not condemn the riots, they got out in the streets, they protested together with the masked, they screamed “they talk about profit and loss, we talk about the life of a child lost”, they understood that “practice precedes theory” and raised their fists up high against police brutality. We hope they carry on….
When the young get shot, the Left apologizes not!
Disobedience and confrontation
From Brixton to Los Angeles to Genova, and the riots in the suburbs of Paris, in reality howsoever it is proved that the paths and ways of social resistance are determined by the general conditions of the society and the movement. What can we do? The state of the society, the movement and the Left (and all its constituent forces) propels us out in the streets by the thousands in rage for the assassination of the 15 year old boy but does not suffice for the development of a spirited movement with a coherent political plan. Would you prefer anniversary protests? Isn’t it better to consider how this social potential that is looted and suffocated can express itself in effective ways?
We, the Network of Civil and Social Rights, unconditionally support and take part in this uprising against the government, the rich and the police.
We salute the collective rage against the governmental looting and terrorism, the wrath of millions of people in the light of the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos, the participation of tens of thousands of teenagers and youngsters in the assaults against police stations.
Against the prime minister’s statements of power, and the oppositions’ worship of lawfulness, the “operations of virtue” by cops, “disgusted citizens” and fascists, the worker’s union bows to lawfulness and order, the “class-inexorable” Communist Party, the perversion of reality and defamation by the media, mainly television, we declare the there can be only one answer:
Social struggles are neither innocent nor guilty, social struggles are just.
When thousands wear hoods, they have a face!
Athens, 9 December 2008
/Network for Political and Social Rights