On 6 December 2008 the Greek government armed the mind and hand of the policeman who murdered the 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, sending the message that the State will do anything to prevent the youth from questioning its policies. Alexandros’ friend, Nikos Romanos, watched him dying right in front of him.

In February 2013, at the age of 20, Nikos Romanos was arrested together with five other young men for a double robbery on a bank and a post office in Velvento, northern Greece.

Last May, he succeeded at the final exams he sat for inside the prison, under the procedure specified by the law. However, he is not granted the exit permits he is entitled to in order to attend classes at the faculty he was admitted to. Since the 9th of November, he has been claiming this right with hunger strike. On the 19th day of his hunger strike, his lawyer and doctor warned that “it is no longer his health that is in danger, but his life.” Since then, the prosecutor has ordered compulsory feeding, which the doctors refuse to perform.

Today N. Romanos’ appeal was rejected by court for the second time. As a result, he decided to continue the hunger strike.

A few days before the 6-year anniversary of Alexandros Grigoropoulos death, the same power-bloc is now targeting the life of his friend. Now the government no longer needs “executioners”. Execution is directly performed by the Ministry of Education, judiciary, president of Democracy. No guns and blood are needed. It is enough to just refuse someone their right to education while in prison, although they meet all legal requirements and have every legal right to it — also meaning to refuse them the only window to the world they can have. It is enough to just violate the law and ignore them even when they go on hunger strike. It is enough to just order compulsory feeding when death threatens their life — violating their personal freedom and medical ethics. It is not just about cruelty. It’s about a message sent out to various recipients:

To teachers, students, and education itself. There is no better feeling than the one that teachers share with their students when they manage to overcome the difficulties posed by a highly competitive exam system and succeed at the final exams. The satisfaction of N. Romanos and his teacher should have been enormous. But of course the government has different priorities: Only obedient students should win. Education is becoming a privilege for the few, while losing its value. Only business initiatives matter and only profit-making activities are labelled “creative”.

To the youth once again. Especially now that the “lazy sponges” have taken to the streets — as the Greek Prime Minister characterized the higher education students massively protesting against the government policies and authoritarianism. The right to education is not really a right. It is a privilege granted by the government, the ministries and their business and EU partners. Whenever the government wishes, it can write it off.

To everyone else. Freedom and laws, rights and justice are defined by the power-bloc. Whoever dares to stick their tongue out at this power-bloc should disappear from the sight of humans.

They want to spread fear and the feeling that nothing can be achieved without their permission. But why? Just a few people would have known anything about this whole matter if N. Romanos was granted his legal right to attend classes, like with all other detainees up to now. Because their fear is bigger. Because the cries and expectations of the living people who challenge their power are growing stronger. The squares may not be full of people but the sound of forthcoming events can be heard from the backstage of the crisis.

Source of the article (written in Greek by educator Giota Ioannidou and translated into English by ReINFORM):  http://www.pandiera.gr/%CE%BD%CE%AF%CE%BA%CE%BF%CF%82-%CF%81%CF%89%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%BD%CF%8C%CF%82-%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%BB%CF%8D%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B1-%CE%BD%CE%B5%CE%BA%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%82-%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%AC-%CE%BC%CE%BF/

Source of the featured image: http://www.thepressproject.net/article/69869/Time-is-running-out-for-young-anarchist-on-hunger-strike

]]> http://www.reinform.info/?feed=rss2&p=7687 0 http://www.reinform.info/?p=6953 http://www.reinform.info/?p=6953#comments Wed, 27 Nov 2013 15:43:56 +0000 disorderisti http://www.reinform.nl/?p=6953 In modern Greece we often deal with little or large semiological civil wars or with a semiological poly-phrenia since different institutions employ the same language for very different processes. For example ancient Greek words referring to hospitality may either refer to e.g. touristic industry’s slogans (i.e. philoxenia, xenia hotels etc.) or to refer to the most brutal and xenophobic police operation that Greece has ever seen, named by the commanders ‘Xenios Dias’ after the ancient Greek god of hospitality.

Indeed the contradictions involved in the process cause complications since there are not only white people who come as tourists in Greece. So plenty of non-white tourists were brutally detained and beaten up by the Greek police since August 2012 that ‘Xenios Dias’ started. Moreover, the mainstream Greek perceptions of Europe and the West these days are shifting once again, since Greek government officials and their corporate media often blame the evil North Europeans for the austerity. Indeed the same governmental officials make also statements about the benefits of austerity.

Within such confused socio-cultural context, since the 1980s, the ideological elevation of a ‘Europe-ness’ took place, peaking in the 1990s in the name of the so-called European integration. Under this slogan on the one hand, the policies of European integration correctly led to a loosening of the internal borders for people living within the EU. On the other hand, this was accompanied with the militarisation of the external European borders leading to ‘Fortress Europe’, a continent where non-Europeans are often condemned to death for their effort to cross the sealed common border. Frontex, national borders police forces, and coastguards are just some of the apparatuses dedicated to the militarization of the European border.

So along the so-called ‘Europeanization’ of Greek state’s institutions we had the ideological upgrading of the Greek borders into European ones. Greece was located very much on the margin of that undetermined Europeness as the most south-eastern EU (and previously EEC) member country. Surrounded by non-members for decades. So it became the favoured territory for the application of at least two xenophobic projects: the Greek one and the European one, often in tension with each other, but usually in collaboration. This process in ideological level was confirming a much desired admission of Greece to the European family and even worse as a significant player in the European securitisation project.

This anti-migratory dogma did not limit itself to the borders; it was soon matched with the ongoing process of the militarization of public-space policing in European cities. The case of the Greek border guards symbolizes perfectly this extension of border-control security tactics to urban spaces; in 2010, it was reported that out of the 510 border guards employed in the country, 473 were, in fact, serving in Athens.6 Indeed, deployment of border guards in cities has become standard practice these days; for example, in the summer of 2013 UKBA organized a large-scale operation in London’s underground stations stopping and checking migrants and people of migratory origin. So security and military techniques developed supposedly to protect the borders of a nation-state from a military attack (from the organized army of another nation-state) have been applied against unarmed migrants on the borders or on the city centres.

It is not simply the deployment of border guards in the cities; the urban policing itself targets the ethnic Other. In the case of Greece, the semi-military police operation ‘Sweep’, in the early 1990s, targeted migrants in the Omonoia7 area of central Athens and elsewhere. However, this paled in comparison to what was to follow. In 2005, operation ‘Polis’ led to over 200,000 people across the country being stopped and searched, and although the emphasis was on youths and migrants, they were not the only victims. Today the ongoing operation ‘Xenios Zeus’ has resulted in over 84,000 migrants being detained between August 2012 and February 2013, targeting everyone who appears to be foreign.[2]

Such operations imply and apply a state-directed exclusion of the population of the cities, which takes spatial characteristics since it displaces people from where they live and locks them in police stations temporarily until their documents are checked or detention camps if they are arrested. The Other is gradually exiled or declared as undesired from parts of the city and more generally public spaces. Officially, this phenomenon is not based explicitly on racial criteria – as neo-Nazis demand; rather, the formal state authorities’ claim is that they are trying to tackle the ‘crime’ of living without proper permission. In the case of UKBA operations or the operations of the respective French police, some of the officers stopping and searching non-white passers-by are themselves non-white, precisely because the European state authorities are aware of the racism involved in the process, and there is the hope to give the idea that it is not racist since non-white people are the physical agents of racism.

However, as Kassidiaris’ case [3] suggests, you do not have to be white in order to apply fascism. By extension, as the example of police and border police forces physically targeting migrants en masse implies, you do not have to be explicitly and openly a neo-Nazi state apparatus in order to apply policies of racial discrimination in the streets and pave the way for the actual neo-Nazis. The cases of migrants who have been stopped and checked for their papers by Golden Dawn members, often in order to be beaten up afterwards, are not rare. The distance between anti-migratory policing in Athens and the Golden Dawn’s ban of migrants from certain public spaces was not that long.

by Dimitris Dalakoglou

A longer version of this article was published as: Dalakoglou. D. (2013) ‘From the Bottom of the Aegean Sea’ to Golden Dawn: Security, Xenophobia and the Politics of Hate in Greece. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 3

Notes

[1]: One of the main slogans of Anarchists in Greece is ‘On the mines of Evros River (the river that marks the land border between Greece and Turkey) and on the bottom of Aegean Sea is built the security of each European’ (‘Στις νάρκες του ′Eβρου, στον πάτο του Aιγαίου, χτίζεται η ασφάλεια του κάθε Eυρωπαιου’).

[2] Given that this operation was implemented, ostensibly, with the intention of tackling crime level (implying a direct link between migrants and criminality) it has had very poor results indeed, as scarcely any of those detained was guilty of any offence other than lacking proper documents. Then the approximately 5,000 (by 9 September 2013) migrants who were arrested as part of Xenios Zeus have been transferred to and locked in new detention centres that were opened by the debt-ridden state. It is worth noting that another big public work completed by Greece during 2012 was the fence along the Turkish-Greek border in order to prevent migration.

[3] When the extreme-Right online forum ‘Stormfront’ published his photograph, in August 2013, setting the question to its users whether they felt he looked like a white man. Kassidiaris’ fellow Nazis were quite vocal on the subject; most of them concluding that he does not look like a white man.

Source Link allegralaboratory

ALLEGRA: Dimitris, you are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. In the past you have studied highways and infrastructures and currently you are carrying out a research project entitled « The City at the Time of Crisis », funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Can you briefly introduce yourself to those who are not familiar with your work and describe your projects?

DIMITRIS: For my PhD I studied anthropologically political transition via infrastructures and vice versa. More precisely I studied the main cross-border motorway between Albania and Greece and via that peculiar -at the time- ethnographic site I studied in a new way -via the road and its flows- the postsocialist conditions in the Balkans. By extension this study of infrastructure provided an insight into the materiality of the wider European neoliberalisation project.

We have to understand that the project of European neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s passed precisely via a mass development of built environment in the continent. Moreover an additional element of that process was the re-determination of European boundaries and a related inter-European movement of populations which crossed these re-determined borders. Indeed, the replacement of State-run economies by market-based capitalism in half of the continent and the parallel expansion of Western European capitalist interests in Eastern Europe had a crucial role in this neoliberalisation project. So given this context the cross-border road between postsocialist and non-socialist peripheral European states looked like an ideal ethnographic locus for analysing such process anthropologically.

Today we are seeing one more stage of that neoliberalisation process with a capitalist crisis centered on the periphery of Western Europe.

In 2012, together with a team of colleagues, we started the ‘City at the time of Crisis’ project funded by ESRC. In this project we study the new forms of governance implemented in that periphery of Western (as political determination rather than geographic) Europe. A basic idea is that one of the most important parts of this new form of governance is the transformations of the notions of public. So ethnographically we study political transitions and social change in the form of socio-spatial changes in the public urban and infrastructural materialities of Athens.

ALLEGRA: You seem to suggest that Athens is the ideal ‘laboratory’ from which to observe the global financial crisis. In their recent book, Theories from the South, the Comaroffs argue that it is rather the global South that is best placed to help us understand contemporary world transformations. The obvious fact that you are Greek put aside, can you tell us why you chose Athens as your primary site of inquiry?

DIMITRIS: The Commaroffs are right, but they are also wrong. The reality is that we first saw extreme capitalism being applied in the global South. Gradually, more advanced and elaborated versions of capitalism were applied there. However, a very similar version of extreme neoliberalism -like the one that emerged in the 1970s in the South- was then applied in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Now it is the turn of the Western European periphery to experience a similar regime.

The anthropologists who happen to have ethnographic knowledge of both the postsocialist and non-socialist European periphery would be able to confirm the similarity between e.g. the loan and “aid” agreements between EU and postsocialist states and the current agreements between e.g. the Greek or Spanish governments and EU institutions.

So in the current historical stage it is not only organisations like the IMF:  there are other institutions involved in the shaping of the world political economy. For instance the EU leadership and especially the European Central Bank along with several other European banks play a crucial historical role in the expansion of an extreme neoliberalist form of governance that is applied in the crisis-ridden euro-zone countries. More and more populations are subjected to that regime and what we used to call Global South governance extends well beyond the South. So the category itself is a bit problematic.

As I mentioned in the previous question Greece is centrally located in a process of global proportions that is unravelling at this very moment. Greece’s centrality in this project starts from the re-definition of Greek borders which changed radically after 1990, given that it was surrounded by socialist European countries. Phenomena like migratory flows, big construction projects and capitalist expansion of Greek capitalist entreprises in Eastern Europe just complete this picture.

Under such circumstances the anthropology of Europe and European politics keep asking the same questions since the 1990s: How did the continent change after the collapse of socialism? What will come next? These questions are very similar to the ones we ask about e.g. China or India and especially North African countries.

The end of the cold war has led to radical transformations globally and we are still seeing them in front of our eyes. If European communism had really been the point of reference for the Left everywhere we would not have the squares movements occuring around the Mediterranean. So it is not a process that is detached from what is happening in the so-called Global South. Overall I think that unless anthropology starts including more substantially Europe and the West in its own perception of the world we will end up running behind change.

ALLEGRA: A few weeks ago, ALLEGRA launched a discussion on the future of universities, and tried to define the nature of the ‘space’ that current movements against cuts are seeking to preserve. Some of our conclusions were relatively optimistic, in the sense that we also tried to highlight the regenerative potential of the public to achieve positive change. In the past when ASA asked you to write a text on the crisis of higher education you jumped to similar conclusions. However, seeing your more recent work you seem to suggest that the current global crisis has deeply transformed notions of ‘public space’, ‘public good’, ‘public interest’ and so on…to the extent that the public as we used to know (or fantasize?) it seems to be slowly disappearing. To a certain extent, one is left with an impression of Athens as a city under a permanent state of exception, to use an Agambian expression. What has changed?

DIMITRIS: Since you used the term of a political philosopher I will respond with a political answer. In that ASA article I concluded that higher education in Britain does not deserve to be defended for what it is or what it was, but for what it may potentially become. I guess this applies in the case of Athens and Greece as well.

In the last two decades, as  European neoliberalisation reached a more intensified form,  we saw some of the resistance movements in the Western world romanticise or imagine a capitalism with better public social provisions. Much of the Occupy movement in the US had such demands, while many of the European movements suggest a return to a recent past of better social provisions. While I see the value of these benefits for the better quality of life of many, as a political proposition I think that implies a crucial mistake. If the middle classes of the Western World had a better life during the recent past, the majority of the world, the poor in the West or globally had very bad time.

The issue is that the current crisis is quite crucial for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and probably globally, and as we know in anthropology crises signify a transition while they also provide a window for anti-structural events to take place. This is our case at the moment and unless societies come up with a radical alternative (way forward from just better social policy) the future of European people will look very bad.

I think that the potentialities of the crisis are visible to economic elites and state authorities who are trying to make sure that no anti-structural events will occur. This is the reason why they employ some of the most violent apparatuses, like e.g. extreme police violence or armed neo-Nazi groups.

For example when the large anti-austerity and anti-governmental movement in Greece appeared in the summer of 2011 the police brutality was profound. Soon the neo-Nazis were funded with huge amounts of money and were activated on the streets of Athens but also electorally.

Neoliberal governance since its birth was ready to employ fascists such as Pinochet or go to fascistic extremes such as declaring national wars out of the blue like e.g. Margaret Thatcher did in the case of the UK or her social democratic offsprings did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Researching the use of extreme violent apparatuses in Greece these days might make you pessimistic. In order for the austerity experiment to work, in order for the bankers’ interests to be protected, the current form of governance in Greece is ready to spill a lot of blood. A similar escalation in state’s violence has been seen in Britain in the last couple of years when the student movement emerged: police brutality against the protesters has been profound in recent British history. We even saw the police being invited on campus to arrest protesting students:  I personally saw it twice in my university, Sussex, and I have worked there only for only five years!

ALLEGRA: Your work brings an important contribution to the scholarship on statehood, by documenting changing everyday experiences in public spaces. With the mass privatization of public infrastructures, it seems like the only means left for the state to manifest itself is through violence, symbolic or real. What do you think is remaining of the state in Greece today?

DIMITRIS: Well, violence is a crucial part of statecraft anyway. Even the most democratic socialist or mild state mechanisms have used and/or use apparatuses of death and pain. For example, one of the most quoted of such examples: the Swedish state was force sterilising women until the 1970s. For another example, we have to remember that every state apparatus discriminates against people: citizens and non-citizens alike.

As the history of Europe shows in the best case scenario such division just implies less rights for the non-citizens and in the worst case scenario it implies exterminating non-citizens massively.

Even the most democratic states are still states and have the monopoly of legal violence, so potentially the state authorities or their agents can crash, kill, torture, and imprison any of us at any moment they will decide. They do not have necessarily to do it, but the fact that apparatuses are ready to do so is violent enough. And indeed these days they have a nice army of journalists, academics and so on who will provide good excuses about public order and social peace that need to be restored.

When the revolt of 2008 happened in Greece you had people like Greek Yale professors up to famous journalists supporting the government and indirectly excusing the police assassination of a teenager, and this is precisely what triggered the revolt.

Within this barbaric mechanism modern states provided various things to their citizens and selected citizens from other states to become part of the national body. That happened for many reasons, which I do not have the time to analyse at the moment. However, such provisions maintained some kind of social peace and consent between the State (or what we imagine to be the state) and a critical mass of state residents.

So in our case, EU citizens and migrants with visas probably had a better life at some point, but a substantial part of the population was faced with a state that did not even give them the right to exist, that arrested them, deported them and killed them. The same dynamics stands for the new poor, for example: many young people in Europe mainly experience the state as an apparatus that deregulates labour and that makes sure that the majority will work like slaves for small salaries, will have no job or social security etc. If they protest, the state will beat them up or in some cases may even kill them just for being around a protest, as Metropolitan Police did with Ian Tomlinson a few year ago. It is just that today we see this state of exception expanding towards social groups who have not had direct experience of state as violence before.

And certainly we are in a very difficult position, because the state and the capitalist market have ended up being the main controllers of social provisions, so now that state policies enforce poverty and austerity and fewer and fewer can afford private provisions, we see suffering of important proportions of the European population. This has been a usual phenomenon outside Europe though and among the non-citizens within Europe!

What one should stress is that the last few decades when the state has been as social provider have been nothing more than a happy break in the history of capitalism, based on the fear of social unrest.

Today that states have achieved so advanced repression and silencing mechanisms, is probably what allows them not to find it necessary anymore to provide social provisions. Anyhow, Western European middle classes as consumers of the products of global capitalism lose their significance given that we have new consuming classes emerging in other places of the planet. So their future is that of most Eastern Europeans: lots of work for peanuts, extreme inequalities etc. When it was happening there very few Western Europeans complained or protested against the barbaric form of postsocialist capitalism.

Indeed while European states decrease social provisions to the citizens in a drastic manner and provide only violence for non-citizens, simultaneously great proportions of state’s wealth is chanelled to global financial institutions and other corporations through various paths.

To end this answer with a final note though. I think that when the elites start busting their cards one after the other, namely when the police violence is not anymore enough to control social disappointment and rage and they have to use the para-state neo-Nazis apparatuses, we are in a situation where they are running out of legal responses, running out of cards, while running towards a potential dead end.

ALLEGRA: Michael Herzfeld, in his now famous books The Social Production of Indifference, argues that Greeks have always maintained some kind of indifference or at least, some kind of distance towards the state. In which ways does your work confirm or contradict this argument? How has the current crisis transformed citizens relationship towards the state? Is this pattern illustrative of broader transformations taking place in European/Western democracies?

DIMITRIS: Herzfeld’s question was phrased in the right way, one could summarise it like this perhaps: If Greeks are generally polite and welcoming people how comes when they become civil servants they are so unhelpful? My take on that phenomenon can be summarised like this: generally people are polite and nice until State and other power apparatuses intervene. For example when the civil servant’s role provides them with e.g. three options to the way s/he will treat a citizen and all three are nasty options, going for the least nasty one is actually a good option. At the same time remember that the official state does its best to create obedient people who will follow the rules.

It is like the banality of the evil argument of Hannah Arendt who suggested that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust were just civil servants who saw the mass extermination of people as just doing their job, like they would do any other job. They were good civil servants.

Back in 2011 when the people in Greece rose against the government, more than 500 people were hospitalised only in Athens due to police brutality.

Last summer when I was in Gezi park in Istanbul, I saw how Turkish policemen attacked the camp beating up people while, in the meantime, they were chatting and having cigarette breaks. Similarly in London, when Occupy London started in front of St Paul, the riot cops brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators without any reason, when 10 minutes before they were queuing next to each other in front of the same toilet in a nearby cafe. While I do not consider police or Nazi officials as simple civil servants, the reality is that the modern state apparatus filters and fractures its violence so much that the actual state’s employees/attackers often feel that they are merely serving the state and the government that feeds them. Indeed the state makes sure that they can do whatever they want, that they are fully potected and that they will never have to face the consequences. Most Nazi officials never paid for their crimes and quite a few of them were happily integrated in capitalist post-war state apparatuses. This does not imply that police officers who beat up demonstrators or shoot migrants are innocent. Only certain kinds of people can remain silent under such circumstances or blindly obey orders. So this is not an excuse: it is just an analysis of the production of indifference.

The reality is that civil servants (with the exception of riot police!) are on the forefront of salary and personnel cuts in Greece these days. The same mechanism that was programming them to misbehave, by e.g. giving them few resources, poor training, unjust promotion or employment system, poor and misleading explanation of tasks and roles etc. is the same mechanism that now blames them for doing what they were told to do. In other words everyone, even the cops are just consumable for the political and financial elites. So people do come to a realisation with great potentialities, as far as insecurity and state violence reaches one of the most secure social class such as permanent civil servants, there is a discontinuity in the continuums that have made the system sustainable so far.

Ahmet Yüksel and Erdğan Çakır are facing the danger of extradition in Germany and France respectively and Hasan Biber and Mehmet Yayla in Turkey. All of them have asked for a political asylum. For Ahmet Yüksel and Erdğan Çakır arrest warrants are issued for pending decisions regarding their solidarity actions for Turkish people.

These political prisoners were arrested in 30/7/2013 after a police raid in the offices of solidarity committee for Turkish and Kurdish political prisoners.

Solidarity Committee for Turkish and Kurdish political prisoners, is organizing days of solidarity action and distributes information materials about the 4 political prisoners and their extraditions. Authorities respond to their mobilization with prosecutions and detentions. In the last 24 hours, 7 solidaritarians have been detained at least three times with the accusation of “Environmental pollution”.

Düzgün Yüksel, as a lawyer back in Turkey, he used to take over murder and human rights cases, as a result he was targeted by fascists and he immigrated in Germany. In Germany, with accusations including democratic activities such as the 1^st of May protest, organization of concerts, solidarity actions for political prisoners, distribution of information materials, he was arrested and kept as prisoner in solitary confinement for 4 years. Due to the unsanitary conditions of solitary confinement he got sick and then paroled. In order to not get arrested again in Germany, he immigrated in Greece, asking for a political asylum, but got arrested and his extradition back in Germany was decided. In Germany he will be sentenced to 3 more years in solitary confinement. Ahmet Düzgün Yüksel, in order to stop this injustice against him, is on a hunger strike to the death since 24/9.

Erdoğan Çakır, is a worker in France and has been a rebel for 36 years. He was sentenced to prison for 7 years, because he took part in democratic activities such as the organization of concerts with  the band “yorum”, selling political magazines and going for camping on summer. In order to not serve the 7 year sentence, he immigrated in Greece. When he came to Greece, he was arrested and his extradition to France was decided. Erdoğan Çakır in order to stop this injustice against him, is on a hunger strike to the death since 24/9.

Hasan Biber, was arrested in 30/7/2013. He was a president of a trade union, and because of his syndicalist activities in Turkey, he’s been arrested many times in the past. On September 26, his trial took place at the court of Piraeus, where his extradition to Turkey was decided. Hasan Biber’s file included also an official document of USA. USA asked Greece for every information they have about Hasan Biber, Mehmet Yayla and the rebel from Turkey Bulut Yayla, who was abducted, not long ago, in front of many people in Athens, and then handed over the fascist Turkish Government that asked FBI to take part in the interrogation of the arrestees. This document proves that Greece has handed over even her justice to USA. Today, the decision of Hasan Biber’s extradition is in other words, the validation of his execution in Turkey.

Hasan Biber stated that: “Fascism is not a threat just for our country, but for the countries near Turkey as well. Especially Greece. Your ships, your airplanes, are being harassed. Greek people are underestimated. We are fighting against all these things. And for this reason, I believe that this decision is unjust.” and announced he is going on a hunger strike to death.

Mehmet Yayla was arrested in 30/7/2013. USA asked from Greece every single information they have about him. He started a hunger strike in 29^th of Septemper in solidarity with his comrades’ struggles.

 

http://omniatv.com/blog/3756-few-words-about-the-political-prisoners-from-turkey

Last December, the eviction of Villa Amalias brought ten thousand people to the streets of Athens.  A social centre, a radical base, venue for alternate culture, community resoure and base for anti-fascist activity was unceremoniously evicted.  This eviction of a popular, central and well utilised social space was followed by multiple other attacks and raids on occupied community facilities throughout Greece, under the cloak of combatting “lawlessness“, all the while the Golden Dawn with the collusion of the police were engaged in urban terrorism.  Empros was also targetted at the same time as the eviction of Villa Amalias, although managed to survive with only its water system being removed.

Thoughout the year the attacks on social centres and squats have continued throughout Greece. Multiple evictions have followed.  This month however the police have turned their attention from the overtly political social centres to medical and cultural solidarity projects.  At the start of the month four medical solidarity centres have been raided, depite the dire state of healthcare in Greece, and the difficulty of undocumented peoples safely receiving treatment including treatment for injuries sustained by the street violence that targets them.

Yesterday, the Empros Theatre was raided with two arrests, and actor and a director who were rehersing a future performance.  Empros has been a cornerstone of the radical movement against austerity.  One of the most progressive organisations I’ve encountered in Greece it attracted international attention from radical theatre companies, writers and musicians who need space.  The internationalism saw it host several festivals of minority culture within Athens, its feminism  and its solidarity with LGBTQ causes saw several events aimed at breaking down the rigidity of gender within the movement.

Empros released a statement following the raid.

Today, October 30 2013, police officers from the Acropolis police station arrested two young actors who were holding rehearsals at the free self-managed EMBROS Theater. The two arrested actors were led to the prosecutor, where they were charged with the breaching of seals, disrupting domestic peace, and repeatedly occupying a public building. They are currently detained, and will be tried tomorrow 31/10/2013 with a flagrante process.

For the last two years, EMBROS has been functioning as a non-commodified cultural and social space in the sensitive area of Psyrri, in the center of Athens. The action of today’s arrest is undeniably part of a bigger scheme of a political wipe-out of “lawlessness”, in other words of the freedom of expression, of social solidarity, of self-management and the creation of culture outside the norms of the vulgar market. The attack on EMBROS, a few days after the invasion of social infirmaries, and perhaps a few days before the threatened raid of the occupied ERT public television-radio station, leaves no doubt about the intentions of a government which appears determined to “redeem itself” of all kinds of social solidarity, after having already dismantled state structures.

Statement (extract): Empros Theatre, 30/10/13

Raoul Vaneigem, the Philosopher and writer associated with the French situationist movement, author of “The Revolution of Everyday Life” gave a talk at Empros the night before the raid and arrests.  He made this statement.

When a government represses the freedom of art and the freedom of expression, it no longer has he right to appropriate the name of democracy, it becomes the expression of totalitarianism which is legal for you to fight against. The arrest of the members of EMBROS Theater reveals the intention of an obscurantism incompatible with the right we all have to education and culture. It remains for each of us to show opposition and to promote cultural spaces as spaces which need to be saved from the mafia companies of the privatization, the influence and the empire of the commodity.

That night the assembly of Empros marched from the theatre to the Acropolis Police Station, today, there was a gathering for the first hearing for the director and actor arrested to show them support and resistance towards authoritarianism of power.   There was a good crowd gathered at the police station including those who were less heavily associated with Empros yet who wished to offer it solidarity.  As a space which had been associated with the marginalised, it reached out beyond the narrow confines of “politics” and material conditions to the ideological structures which shapes peoples lives.  As a theatre it was a space where assumptions were challenged and people were shown viewable, semi-tangable insight into a different reality from the one in which they are steeped, encouraging them to look beyond conditions, but to the ideas that perpetuated those conditions.

And thats why its especially poigniant that a woman who turned up to support the theatre, heard the statement “look, the cops and security here, the whole court system here are prostitutes”.

This is a country where the sex industry operates with free abandon.  Where women, primarily Eastern European were paraded on television as drug riddled and diseased, yet where in a country which is facing starvation, the sex industry is booming.  Where immigrant women find themselves stuck in survival situations and where Greek women are under pressure to find additional income to maintain their homes and keep their heads above water.  Many women find themselves drawn to an expanding industry, at a time when the economy is contracting, and a shift manifested by the diversion of income towards the sexual interest of (primarily) cis white males.

Transgender folk find themselves in a situation where they cannot have identification under the real names or gender, but instead must continually officially present as their birth name and gender, obtaining a job, a flat, an electrictity bill becomes a challenge in a country where the bureaucracy seems ever intricate and never ending, not to mention the police harassment and the consequent revealing of their transgender status as soon as their papers are produced.    The health system in Greece is creaking, marginalised parts of the population with specific health needs are deprioritised as the crisis reaches clinics and hospitals.  The medical solidarity centres that may have acted as support and provision are raided and closed.  Trans women are in a particularly acute situation, with both the status of the outcast and the generalised pressure on women; the sex industry provides a deeply unsafe safety net.

It is no surprise that the feminist and queer movement found a home in Empros, as art challenges hegemonic ideas; equally the stereotype of the struggling artist making ends meet by providing “company” is not unfounded.  Creative people live precarious lives even under the best of circumstances, and in times of crisis, precarity can turn to scarcity all too quickly.

Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth.

Our Invisible Revolution

Until Greece can cast off the shackles of sexism and racism, that saw a section of society drawn towards the Golden Dawn, as a virile hero rising from the chaos, the revolution we want, the revolution we need will be ever distant.  EMPROS continues, necessary now more than ever.  To claim public space and challenge the ideas constraining the people, to let them imagine other futures and to be able to view other realities and other perspectives.

The programme at Empros (Ρήγα Παλαμήδη 2, Ψυρρή) ) continues despite the raid with

31st October
21:00 Blood Enemies by Arkas , Buffonata

1st November
18:30 Persians by Aeschylus , Tsiritsantsoule
21:00 The accidental death of an anarchist (and some other subversive ) by Dario Fo , Engineers of cheap Melodrama

2nd November
21.00 Interrogation of Peter Weiss , Facta non Verba

The conservative government of Antonis Samaras claims to be cracking down on “extremism”. But what skeletons does the Prime Minister hide in his closet?

Video by Ross Domoney, Klara Jaya Brekke and Dimitris Dalakoglou for the City at a Time of Crisis research project. Illustration by Latuff.


The Greek Prime Minister, Mr Samaras, is currently visiting the USA. He arrived here in the immediate aftermath of the arrest of the leadership of Golden Dawn, the notorious Greek neo-Nazi party. But what skeletons does Mr Samaras have in his closet?

Mr Samaras’ speech on October 2 at the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC gives us a first answer to that question. There, the Prime Minister claimed that his government crushes extremism, he talked about the leadership of Golden Dawn which had been, at that time, driven to jail. However, later during the Q&A session he also added that his government was not quite done; that he would also deal with the other extreme, the one that talks of leaving the EU and NATO — directly implying the Left opposition.

His statements pose at least three issues. One, Mr Samaras makes clear that his government had accepted the illegal activity of Golden Dawn so far, or that it did not have the will to deal with it. Two, he admits that the government intervenes in the system of justice which supposedly is independent. Three, he promotes once again his plan to crush the Left opposition which disagrees with his government and which protests in public.

The incident that triggered the arrests of Golden Dawn’s most prominent members was the assassination of the antifascist musician Pavlos Fyssas in Nikaia, Athens. Fyssas was the first Greek to be killed by Golden Dawn since the group launched its violent campaign against migrants and — to a lesser extent — against antifascists in 2009. Less than 24 hours after Mr Samaras’ speech at the Peterson Institute, the majority of the arrested Golden Dawn members were released from detention, awaiting trial. On their way out from the court, they kicked and abused journalists under the eyes of the police.

The simplistic theory of the “two extremes” has been promoted by the Greek nexus of power ever since Mr Samaras came to office. On that very same day on September 16, 2012, two of the country’s largest newspapers (the pro-government To Vima and Kathimerini), published two texts by their key editors with very similar titles, making an identical argument. Even if this is a total coincidence, their argument was a dangerous legitimization of the far-right. In sum, the articles suggest that the emergence of Golden Dawn provides an “opportunity” for the state to eliminate the “two extremes” of Greek politics.

According to the opinion of government officials, the antifascists comprised that hypothetical other “extreme”. So the minister of public order, Mr Dendias, as part of Mr Samaras’ government, attacked those who stand up to racism and fascism. In 2012, a political action called the antifascist motorcades began. These were big groups of people on motorbikes riding around the areas of Athens where most attacks against migrants were occurring, aiming to stop them, since police did little to help the victims. In September 2012, DELTA motorbike police attacked the antifascists, arresting, beating and later torturing them.

Allegedly DELTA and the riot police force (MAT) are the two police units with the closest links to Golden Dawn. On the day following the arrests, MAT attacked those who had gathered at Athens’ courthouse to express their solidarity to the antifascists, arresting even more of them. This series of arrests brought to a temporary halt an action that was aimed at stopping what were, by then, daily racist attacks in those parts of the city. From that time on, the lives of several immigrants — and now one local antifascist — have been claimed by neo-Nazis on the streets of the Athens.

A few months later, in December 2012 and January 2013, some of the most prominent social centers in Athens were evicted by police. These had been the physical and cognitive cornerstones of the city’s antifascist struggle. Additionally, they were located in those parts of the city center where Golden Dawn and other neo-Nazi groups systematically attack migrants. Soon after these evictions, similar raids occurred in such antifascist centers throughout the country.

Since Mr Samaras became Prime Minister the city has been subjected to the police operation “Xenios Zeus”. Since its inauguration in August 2012, the operation has seen the detention of over 80.000 migrants, the vast majority having broken no law according to police press releases. Eventually, most of the innocent migrants have been released with the exception of around 5.000 who were imprisoned, mostly due to lack of documents, in new detention centers built across the debt-ridden country.

Targeting a substantial proportion of the population of Greek cities simply due to their skin color marks the adoption of Golden Dawn’s agenda by Mr Samaras’ government. Golden Dawn claims that migrants are dangerous and Mr Samaras’ New Democracy (ND) has followed this logic, detaining innocent migrants in the thousands. In his pre-election campaign, Mr Samaras claimed that illegal migrants have become “the tyrants of society” and that Greeks subsequently have to “liberate our cities from illegal migrants”, once again repeating the Golden Dawn rhetoric.

Mr Samaras’ party in May 2013 made a gift to Golden Dawn by blocking the anti-racist bill, which would criminalize racism and the denial of the Holocaust. Golden Dawn on the other hand provided aid to Mr Samaras’ government on at least two debatable decisions since June 2012: first, when the government shut down overnight the Public Television, and second when it applied further tax exceptions to the Greek ship-owning companies.

Just one week before Fyssas’ assassination in Nikaia, Babis Papadimitriou, a renowned pro-ND journalist, suggested that we need to discuss a conservative coalition government with the participation of a “more serious” version of Golden Dawn. Simultaneously, prominent ND members, including Vyron Polydoras and Failos Kranidiotis, have expressed their positive feelings toward the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn. This may come as little surprise to those familiar with Greek politics. By this point in time, the Greek government is at its furthest right position since the fall of the military dictatorship back in 1974. Note, among others, the inclusion of Adonis Georgiadis or Makis Voridis in the current parliamentary team of New Democracy — both are best described as ultra-right.

Clearly, the assassination of Pavlos Fyssas and the charges brought against the Golden Dawn leadership have dramatically altered the political atmosphere in Greece, indefinitely postponing, one would think, such collaboration. Mr Samaras might portray himself as a combatant against the extremism of Golden Dawn. But how, then, can he explain the very strong ideological and practical links between his own party’s rhetoric and policies, and those of the neo-Nazis?

Dimitris Dalakoglou is member of the crisis-scape.net research team and a member of Occupied London collective.

Of course no weapons or ammunition have been found in their possession, nor have they been laundering money and blackmailing for cash as the Nazi gang. Without any specific action being linked with specific persons in the prosecutor’s call, the activists are accused for “through illegal means aiming to prevent or postpone mining or other activity by the company Hellas Gold [a subsidiary of Canadian company Eldorado] in the area of Skouries”.

Without documenting the first, the accent is put on the latter, thus entering the waters of criminalising a political position which is the opposition to the gold mine. There’s no “evidence” on these 27 individuals other than having participated in anti-mine rallies and having publicly expressed their opinion against the mines.

The 3,500 pages of the case file contain recorded phone conversations of the activists containing encouragement to other individuals to join the anti-mine movement.

Golden Dawn leaders were interrogated in the courts.

The activists will be interrogated in the Thessaloniki police Headquarters as if they were dangerous criminals.

No investigation has been called on well documented police abuses against the inhabitants in the area, or on the security of the company illegally fencing public land. Four activists are already imprisoned before trial for several months.

Text translated by Yiorgos Va from Greek report:

http://soshalkidiki.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/τα-χρυσά-και-τα-συμφέροντα/