Greek Riots

[shiels]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/09/greece-riots-papandreou

The third night of riots, spreading to 4 cities.
Christmas tree burnt in athens city centre! warms my heart.

In London about 50 protesters in balaclavas took down the national flag and set it alight, replaced it with a flag bearing an anarchists' logo and chanted in Greek: 'The police are pigs and killers.'

any on Dissensus involved?

 

[craner]

Christmas tree burnt in athens city centre! warms my heart.

Scrooge.

 

[shiels]

It's symbolically potent. This year, more than ever, i couldn't be fucked with christmas.

 

[john eden]

Sounds like it's really going off in Greece.

 

[matt b]

From what little i've read (and omitting info from the above article), a lot of seems to be due to the police being seen as a law unto themselves- a hangover from the years of dictatorship (you get a similar feeling of this in Spain too).

That the gvt dithered over the murder, seems to have set this off

on R4 this morning someone was commenting that these riots differ from normal Greek riots (which it appears happen every year) because the age of those involved is much lower than normal- around 15.

couldn't see that happening here.

The metro newspaper blamed 'anarchists and drug abusers' on monday

 

[jambo]

The kids getting angry with some focus.

The Scotsman - Fears of unrest spreading across Europe

Pictures from The Boston Globe.

 

[zhao]

that kind of thing (murdered teenager) happens in the US on an hourly basis but Americans had their balls cut off so long ago that nothing like these riots will ever happen there.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Compared to a lot of countries, even other EU members, the police in Britain have tended to be regarded as quite 'well-behaved' - but things like the de Menezes case and the arrest of that Tory MP just lately don't exactly inspire confidence in the way things are heading.

What happened in the case of that Greek teenager? Wasn't he run over by a squad car or something?

 

[scottdisco]

"A Greek riot policeman has been seriously injured after being shot in central Athens.
Greece's police chief says bullet cases matched the Kalashnikov rifle used in another attack on police in December...The policeman accused of shooting the teenager has been charged with murder."

still with Greece and this is a drum i've long beat but they are arguably the worst EU govt on the care of asylum seekers/migrants etc.

as you can imagine, that's saying an awful lot



e.g.

Foreigners shot on the border, asylum-seekers detained in metal containers, Roma forcibly evicted from their homes in Athens -- these are some of the examples of consistent pattern of human rights violations

that from this 2005 Amnesty report.

latest HRW report on that topic: "Some 1,000 unaccompanied migrant children who have entered Greece in 2008 without parents or caregivers struggle to survive without any state assistance"

Marko Hoare does know a fair bit about southeast Europe..

 

[Tomity]

Really good blog covering the protest and situation in Greece:

http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/

 

[crackerjack]

Had no idea this was ongoing, but this looks like something of an escalation.