On the evening of April 19th, small groups of anarchists entered the metro stations of Sygrou-Fix and Halandri, in Athens. As corporate media report, they destroyed all vending and validation machines in both stations – the damages are estimated in “the hundreds of thousands, possibly up to 1m euros”, as the media report.
(via Occupied London) As announced a few hours ago, the ministry of citizen protection announced its plan to withdraw all police forces from Ovriokastro and Keratea. It has also been decided that the construction machinery will be withdrawn from the area and that the ministry of environment will enter into negotiations with the municipality.
At 17.08 GMT+2, the largest part of the riot police forces had withdrawn from Keratea.
There is a feeling of victory running across the barricades of Keratea as the police buses leave. Is this a victory for the people of Keratea? Or a tactical move on the side of the government, ahead of the easter break?
More information as it comes.
KERATEA, Greece — As explosions boom, the town’s loudspeakers blare: “Attention! Attention! We are under attack!” Air raid sirens wail through the streets, mingling with the frantic clanging of church bells. Clouds of tear gas waft between houses as helmeted riot police move in to push back the rebels.
This isn’t a war zone, but a small town just outside Athens. And while its fight is about a garbage dump, it captures Greece’s angry mood over its devastated economy.
As unemployment rises and austerity bites ever harder, tempers seem to fray faster than ever these days in Greece, with citizens of all stripes increasingly thumbing their noses at authority. Some refuse to pay increased highway tolls and public transport tickets, and there has been a rise in politicians being heckled – even assaulted – by constituents.
The anger is most palpable in Keratea, a town of about 15,000 people some 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Athens that appears to have spun completely out of control. The state’s attempt to start work on a planned garbage dump on a nearby hillside in December caused locals to set fire to construction vehicles and erect massive roadblocks on a highway that bypasses the town and runs to the capital.
It’s a fight that has galvanized the town, from the mayor and the local priest to shopkeepers, farmers, schoolteachers and teenagers.
“We live and breathe to finish our jobs for the day, to go to the blockades, to participate, to sacrifice ourselves in preventing the landfill from happening,” said Nikos Manolis, a local resident and bus owner.
Over the past four months, locals have developed increasingly inventive roadblocks to stop contractors from getting to the proposed dump site. They have parked trucks across the street and built piles of rubble and dirt. Apparently in it for the long haul, they have erected a wooden hut by the side of the road to serve as protest headquarters, complete with campaign posters, news clippings and children’s drawings of the riots.
Their latest move was a nighttime expedition to dig a shoulder-high trench across both lanes of the highway. That was one step too far for authorities, who on Thursday sent in road crews – protected by police – to repair the damage.
Within hours the confrontation had degenerated. Masked youths hurled firebombs and rocks at riot police who responded with rubber baton rounds and repeated volleys of tear gas. A police helicopter circled overhead.
“The town is out of control. Business activity has stopped,” said Yannis Adamis, a local resident and mechanical engineer. “The stores are closed. The sirens are blaring, the (church) bells are ringing, people are on the streets. This cannot continue.”
In nearby streets, gaggles of teenage girls, cut lemons held to their noses in a futile effort to ward off tear gas, mingled with young men in balaclavas stocking up on rocks to throw at police. An elderly man wielding a shepherd’s staff stormed past.
“We’ve learned at the age of 60 about Molotov cocktails,” he thundered through his gas mask – an accessory sported by young and old alike. He would only give his first name, Panagiotis.
By the end of the night, more than 20 people – including three riot policemen – had been treated in the hospital. Just after midnight, a police officer’s home in the area was attacked with firebombs, leaving three cars destroyed. The officer and his wife, who is also in the police force, and their four children were home at the time but unharmed, police said.
Greece is no stranger to riots, and demonstrations in Athens often end in scuffles with police. But the escalation of violence in Keratea is causing concern.
“The fact that we don’t have victims yet is sheer luck,” said Konstantinos Priftis, a local farmer and basketball coach. “Keratea is protecting its dignity, its history. … We’re not going to back down.”
A sense of paranoia has also settled over the town. Rumors abound that undercover police are at work, walking around town and gathering information. Journalists, with their cameras and notebooks, immediately arouse suspicion. A cameraman for an international news agency was beaten by locals during the clashes on Thursday, and his camera equipment destroyed.
Residents argue the landfill will devalue the region and pose a health hazard. The town’s mayor says local authorities have made a counterproposal for waste management, but that government officials refuse to listen.
“We have a very specific proposal. We accept to manage our proportion of the garbage in the manufacturing district with a small, modern factory that we want to build as a municipality,” said mayor Kostas Levantis.
Government spokesman Giorgos Petalotis condemned the violence on Thursday, and said the government had no intention of abandoning its plans to build the landfill, which it said would ease problems at Athens’ single garbage dump.
“We are the only authority that has a comprehensive plans for (greater Athens’) regional development … we will not abandon the effort that has been made and is currently being made to build this new facility,” he said.
But the residents are adamant.
“There’s no way we will back down. If they don’t accept that this project cannot happen, we will be here as long as it takes,” said Levantis.
Greek riot police clashed Tuesday with angry residents protesting against the construction of a new landfill site for the capital Athens near their community.
Residents of the town of Keratea, located south-east of Athens, hurled petrol bombs and stones at police, who retaliated by firing tear gas to disperse the angry crowd of both residents and hooded anarchists.Earlier authorities called in bulldozers to clear road blocks set up by residents, in the lastest series of violent demonstrations against plans to set up the dump in the area.Protesters set fire to a bulldozer sent to clear roads which they has blocked for more than a day with rubble.No arrests or injuries were reported.Residents have repeatedly clashed with police in recent months over the planned construction of the 38-acre landfill, which they argue would damage the area’s natural environment and fall within an area declared to be under archaeological protection.The government has repeatedly said that construction of the landfill would go ahead despite the residents’ protests.The European Commission has repeatedly said that Athens needs to build two new landfills to meet its needs, using more sophisticated waste management methods such as incineration.The Greek capital’s only landfill, Ano Liosia in the north-west of Athens, is at capacity and authorities do not know what to do with the 6,000 tons of trash produced daily by the city’s 4 million residents.
As residents of Keratea, southeast of Athens, continued to block the main road connecting the capital to the nearby port of Lavrio in an ongoing protest over the government’s plans to build a landfill in their area, police sources told Kathimerini that the cost of deploying hundreds of riot police officers in the area for more than three months had hit 2.5 million euros.
If the clashes in Keratea continue for much longer, the cost of policing will exceed the cost of building the landfill
a high-ranking police source said.
The cost of maintaining a force of some 300 officers to guard a couple of bulldozers that have yet to start digging is estimated to have exceeded 500,000 euros.
Much of this sum includes damage to equipment sustained during vehement clashes between police officers and residents wielding firebombs and stones. Another 2 million euros is believed to have been spent on the officers’ wages.
In comments to the Athens News Agency, Deputy Interior Minister Theodora Tzakri stressed on Sunday that the government would not back down on its plans to build a landfill in Keratea or anywhere else.
(via Signalfire) The ultimate object of social revolutionary practice is the destruction of the capital relation and the divisions of labor within it by the violence of the organized proletariat.
This entails the assertion of a clear line of demarcation between friend and enemy and the organization of structures and diffusion of practices which directly challenge the reproduction of capital in the here and now.
That is to say the appropriation of control over social wealth and space through a process of continual conflict with the state.
New forms of mutuality beyond commodity relations can only be generated through the seizure of the means of existence and terrain of habitation from the law of capital.
Outside of the approach towards this unavoidable confrontation, one is inevitably trapped in a losing struggle for survival. Acting as citizens and workers demanding the illusory actualization of the same rights whose real content is our utter degradation.
Thus the goal of any intermediate organizing or partial campaign is not to gain some substantially meaningless benefits or a temporary and precarious halt to further ravaging of living conditions, but the constitution of social forces capable of escalating the conflict into direct confrontation and rupture with the capital relation.
The enemy we face is not austerity or neo-liberalism but the totalistic violence of a life reduced to waged and unwaged labor by separation from the means of production.
A separation continually reimposed by the violence of the state.
The necessary response is the build up of affinities capable of initiating a politics of offensive expropriation. Seizure of land, buildings, food, electricity, machinery, seizure of the streets from police occupation; within a self reinforcing momentum of escalating conflict.
In our current state of extreme weakness and marginalization, the necessary intermediate step is consolidation of forces. Organization and coordination of disciplined and consistently active groups around the communist program with the ability to intervene in every area of tension.
A perspective less flailing around in a multiplicity of disconnected defensive struggles without cohesion around a common strategic orientation is a recipe for confusion, despair and stagnation.
“The Great Springtime of the Arab Peoples”; “revolution on the march”; “democratic transition”; “end of dictatorship.” The great discourse machines have been switched on, and they’ve got to be kept working full-time in order to present the overthrow of the pro-western regimes of the Maghreb as new victories for the West, as an unexpected victory for its values.
The revolutionary fervor that has recently overtaken the most prudent of editorialists first of all shows the intense immune-system reaction that the events have brought about within the dominant discourse. A violent paroxysm of pro-orientalism has popped up now, to put a kind of containment zone between us and the uprisings taking place as quickly as possible; and people marvel at these “revolutions,” so as to all the better sidestep the obvious facts they bring up so plainly – so as to all the better dissolve the unrest they stir in us.
Whatever illusions they’re trying to preserve must be pretty important to them for them to go making apologies about the insurrection as much as they have, glorifying the non-violence of a movement that burned 60% of Egypt’s police stations. What a nice surprise – the primary information channels are apparently now being run by friends of the people!
When the insurgents on the other side of the Mediterranean say: “Before, we were like the living dead; now we have awakened,” that means that we, who do not rise up in revolt ourselves are the living dead; we ourselves are asleep. When they say: “Before, we lived like animals, we lived in fear. Now we have rediscovered our confidence in ourselves, in our strength, in our intelligence,” that means that we ourselves are living like animals, we who are so obviously governed by our fears.
Those who today paint the pitiless dictatorship of the atrocious Ben Ali in such dark and gloomy colors found him to be quite pleasant company just yesterday. They were lying then and they’re lying now. Michèle Alliot-Marie’s mistake is right there: in a few sentences spoken at the National Assembly she revealed that behind all their schoolboy dissertations about the difference between their dictatorships and our democracies, is hidden the continuity of police power through all the regimes; it’s just that some are certainly more expert at it and less rough about it.
The brutality of the repression imposed under Ben Ali could be detailed ad nauseam. Yet nevertheless, that anti-insurrectional doctrine – the art of crushing uprisings – is now the official doctrine of western armies, whether they apply them in the ghettos or in the city centers, in Afghanistan or at Bellecour Square in Lyon. Ms. Alliot-Marie’s weekly soap opera of little lies and miserable schemes can’t erase the true scandal: the handling of a revolutionary situation as a “security situation.” If we weren’t so busy braiding crowns of jasmine and lotus to put on the Maghrebi revolts, perhaps we wouldn’t have already forgotten that just four days before he disappeared into the trash can of history, Ben Ali spoke of the riots in Sidi Bouzid as “unpardonable terrorist acts perpetrated by hooded thugs.” Or that his successor had thought he would be able to appease the people’s rage by announcing as his first act in office the abrogation of “all anti-democratic laws” — starting with the anti-terrorism laws.
If we refuse to consider miraculous the chain of events that led from the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi to the flight of Ben Ali, it’s only that we refuse to admit as normal, conversely, the muffled indifference that for so many years met the persecution of so many of those that opposed him. What we and a certain politicized youth have been living through these past three years certainly counts for something. In these last three years, we have seen around twenty comrades in France alone who, in a hodge podge of all the various political tendencies among them, all went into prison cells, mostly on the pretext of anti-terrorism and for pathetic reasons – caught in possession of smoke bombs, putting glue in ticket machines, failed attempts to burn cars, sticking up posters, or just kicking someone.
In January things got to the point where just having the magic word “anarcho-autonomist” in a police file got a young woman thrown in prison – just for tagging. This is happening in France, not in Russia, Saudi Arabia, or China.
With every passing month we hear about another comrade getting hauled away in the middle of the street, about some friend being asked to become a spy in exchange for impunity or for a salary, or to keep a position as a professor; that knowledge has in turn had its effect on the parallel dimension we live in now, with these seedy cells, these little judges full of vengeful hatred, bad faith, and resentment, with this insomnia, these prohibitions on our communication with each other, with these cops who become your lover so as to spy on you. And then the apathy wins you over: the apathy of those who live “normally,” and are surprised at all of this — organized apathy.
And it’s a Europe wide policy. The regular round ups of Greek anarchists made lately proves it. No regime can give up grinding at the legal action mill, when it’s a matter of doing away with everything that resists it. Guilt is a manufactured product. And that production work requires investments, finance, personnel. And if you’re prepared to put some extra effort into it, you can easily transform a series of false reports, false witness accounts, and the maneuvers of secret agents into a believable case.
In the so-called Tarnac affair, the recent reconstitution of the night the sabotage took place, requested for so long by the defense, gave the finest example of this. It was one of those supreme, culminating moments where the machinations of all judicial “truths” become stunningly obvious in all their most minute detail. On that day, the judge, Fragoli, did his best to artfully conceal everything that so clearly demonstrated the impossibility of the police version. He suddenly became blind, as soon as the undeniable, restless reality beneath it all contradicted his thesis. He even managed to keep those who wrote the false reports from the stalkers following us sheltered from the contradictions, by allowing them to be absent. And in effect that was unnecessary, because almost the whole of that little world had already gone down to tamper with the place a week before, privately and quietly.
Surely if they had to counterfeit the reconstruction it proves that the report itself was counterfeit. And that’s obviously what they were trying to keep everyone from becoming aware of when they blocked off the whole area with walls of cops, supported by police dogs, helicopters, and dozens of thugs from the anti-terrorism squad.
By today it must have cost millions of euros to transform the fantasies of a few cops into such a fine case against us. It’s of little importance to know to exactly whom the acts that were the pretext for our arrest will finally be imputed. As for us, we condemn the court for trying to pass off as terrorism the placement of a few harmless little hooks when blocking the flows has now become the elementary means of action for a whole mass movement against pension reform.
The cautious silence of European governments on the events in Tunisia and Egypt clearly show the anxiety they’re seized by. Apparently power is holding on by quite the thin thread. A plane takes off, and a whole tower of abused authority comes crumbling down. The doors of the prisons are thrown open. The police vanish. And people begin to honor what just yesterday was scorned, what was the object of all honors is now the subject of all sarcastic remarks. All power is precariously seated over this yawning abyss. What to us appears to be some kind of security-obsessed dementia is just the normal police pragmatism and reasoned anti-terrorism.
From the perspective of security-situation managers, public order would never have been shaken, and Ben Ali would still be tranquilly ruling over Tunisia if they’d just managed to neutralize a certain Muhammed Bouazizi in time.
It’s obvious, in the ghettos and in the movements of revolt: the hunt is on for all potential instigators of insurrection, for the Bouazizis of the world; and it’s a race against time, since from Ben Ali to Sarkozy, those that rule by fear expose themselves to fury.
Mister President, there are ranches for sale in Texas; your plane is waiting on the runway at Villacoublay.
