by
Markos Vogiatzoglou on
November 14, 2014
Schools in Greece have been
occupied for a week. After today’s student protest, riot police blocked
access to the university and attacked the students.
It’s
been some time since we last heard from the Greek movement. But, thanks
to the Greek government and its riot police, today became a day of
large student demonstrations, clashes with the cops, injuries and rising
tension. First, let’s see what happened. Early in the morning, the
Athens Law School students arrived at their university in order to carry
out their assembly decision, which included a symbolic occupation of
their university until the 17th of November — commemoration day of the
1973 student revolt against the military dictatorship.
The
problem was that the school was already occupied by the riot police.
The Athenian Universities’ rectors had decided to apply a peculiar “lock
out” of the students and employees, supposedly for “security reasons”.
The government gave a helping hand by sending in hundreds of cops, in
riot gear, to carry out the decision. The cops assaulted the students,
seriously injuring a couple of them and dispersing the rest. The news
circulated, public outrage was expressed about the police blockades and
violence, hundreds of students demonstrated in the center of Athens
during lunchtime, and another protest — involving thousands — took place
in the evening around the universities, confronting a total police
blockade of the city center.
A
question I guess the international reader would pose is why this mess,
and why now? November is the traditional month of student mobilization
in Greece. Yet, in the last years, the protests seldom — if ever — went
beyond the symbolic level, as the movement was too preoccupied with the
country’s current problems to seriously devote itself to commemorations.
This school year, though, started with incredible problems for both
schools and universities due to underfunding and lack of teaching and
administrative personnel. Hundreds of schools were occupied in the
previous weeks and soon enough the universities joined the struggle.
The
mobilization, if we want to be sincere, seemed quite weak until now. In
a collapsed country, where everyone appears to be waiting for the
government to collapse as well and for the elections that will bring the
left-wing SYRIZA to power, a few hundred occupied schools do not make a
real difference. It is also noteworthy that the student population of
Greece, which was traditionally at the vanguard of the movements and had
led all major mobilizations since the 1990s and up to 2008, was largely
absent from the large anti-austerity protests of 2010-’12.
But,
as it seems, our surrealist government is doing its best to reverse the
situation. As I am concluding these lines, the student protest arrived
at the Polytechnic University of Athens in Exarchia (where it all
started back in 1973), the students forced open the doors and entered
with the purpose of holding yet another assembly. The police immediately
attacked. Eye-witnesses report several injuries among protesters;
hundreds are barricaded inside the Polytechnic. The burning smell of
tear gas is spreading, once again, in Athens.
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