LIBERA TUTTO

Under these circumstances of crisis and poverty pawnbrokers are opening massively all around the country offering some very much needed cash for valuables like golden jewellery etc. Yesterday 7 such shops got their windows broken and paint-bombs on their façade in Pagrati and Vyronas neighbourhood of Athens. A communiqué titled: ” For a Bottle of Oil they take your house – Break the shop of every black-marketer” was issued claiming responsibility for these attacks, it ends: “Let’s crash those who get richer from poverty and misery.”

Sailors are on strike after the minister failed to satisfy their demands for decent payment and decent pension.  Sailors like every other employee in the country experience enormous loss in their income since 2010. This is good Tuesday for Orthodox countries, so a period of school break etc. and a country with so many islands has absolute need of ferries this period, but the sailor unions is very strong and coherent and they manage to freeze marine travel within the country but also overseas where boats with members of the union travel. The government declared that will force the sailors to go back to work. more as they come.

Words acquire meaning through the tangible and the concrete but at the same time, they can give new meaning and change what we thought to be concrete in return.

For many of us, Syntagma (‘Constitution’) Square is no longer. As anarchists, anti-authoritarians, members of the broader antagonist movement, we could have never found any meaning in the naming of a square after a piece of legislation — how can one name an open, lively space of interaction and intermingling after words in a piece of paper, an abstraction meant to divide and to rule?

The death of Dimitris Christoulas was not just another near-unnoticeable rise in the gruesome statistics of death. With every suicide, every police murder, every horrible death that we have reported in ‘Little Stories from IMF-run Greece’, we made a conscious effort to provide as much information as possible for the deceased. To give them a name, a face and a story; to show that beneath the uniformity of technocratic world of statistics there are once tangible, real lives transformed, crushed, ended.

Dimitris’ death was yet another financial murder. As the old world sets, it unleashes a carnage against those wishing to see its demise and, by now, everyone who perhaps thought they would live through it. Who knows? Perhaps in the world shyly rising, the land plot opposite what will have once been the parliament of the previous regime (at that time known as Syntagma Square) will be named after Dimitris.Piazza Dimitri Christoula. A piazza, not a ‘square’, because public spaces must be open and fluid to be truly public. And it will be named after him, the first entirely public martyr of our struggle, adding to more than 2,000 people that have already committed suicide in this time, the time of the vultures. Undeclared murders, shoved into the oblivion of the private, casualties of the undeclared war authority has waged against the people.

We don’t need to wait for a new world to start declaring, to start using words to change around the concrete. In the time of the vultures, ‘suicides’ are financial murders. Those who die are martyrs of the war unleashed by power against the people. And for us, the spaces of our meeting, our struggle and the death of our own are already ours. Syntagma is dead — long live Piazza Dimitri Christoula.

The famous haircut of the Greek state’s bonds in fact it is translated into public cuts. The state had transformed various amounts of money that it administrates into Greek state’s bonds. So when all the big bankers agreed for the celebrated 70% haircut in the Greek bonds (virtual cut in their case since they do not really loose any money) institutes like the public universities (whose budget had been transformed into bonds) got a 70% “cut” in their bank accounts overnight. At the same time various pension funds that had been transformed without the agreement of the unions into bonds were “cut” by 70% as well. One of these funds is the dockworkers fund, who suddenly saw 70% of the money that are paying their entire life (and the dockworkers of the previous generations have paid) to vanish, with direct effect on the amount of pensions.

Dockworkers concentrated this morning in front of the Bank of Greece which administrates these accounts and their union committee asked to meet with the bank’s officers, when their committee was in the bank, police attacked to them without any reason injuring two of them.

The dockworkers in front of the bank of Greece

 

On the day of the funeral of Dimitris Christoulas, the 77-year old pensioner who killed himself on Syntagma square, people attacked a special forces policeman nearby; they removed his clothes (but not his weapon) and the hanged them by the tree next to which Christoulas committed suicide on Wednesday.

http://youtu.be/yOlRNrVXkWM

The footage below shows an anarchist intervention at a local TV station in the city of Ioannena, NW Greece.

Today, the anarchists S. Antoniou, G. Karagianidis, A. Mitrousias and K. Sakkas announced that are going on huger strike, starting today (Stella Antoniou will start one week later due to her health problems). The 4 wrote a communiqué explaining that in mid-March they were invited to give testimonies about several arsons and bombs attributed to the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire. But from the very first moment of their arrest, 16 months ago, police and the system of justice have not provided any explicit evidence and the 4 have refused their participation to this or any other armed group. Initially they were arrested charged for participation to “an unknown group with unknown actions” based on their politics and their relationships with people. In a couple of months K. Sakkas and S. Antoniou would have the right to apply for release until their trial, so while no new evidence was added, suddenly there is a new series of actions that were not attributed to them back 16 months ago, when they were arrested, but since mid-March they are suddenly questioned about them, so now they do not have the right to apply for release.

Today at 18:00 several groups are calling for a rally and march on Syntagma Square in solidarity to Stella Antoniou, who is eligible for release on health grounds but her 4 applications for release were turned down.

Simultaneously other calls for anti-austerity rally at Syntagma at 18:00 are circulated. Yesterday, the rally at Syntagma -protesting for the public, political suicide of Dimitris Christoulas and against austerity- was attacked without any reason by the police, who beat up dozens of people and detained 20 (including a 13-year-old who was charged for “resistance against the authorities”). Police targeted demonstrators but also photo-journalists who covered police brutality. The president of the photo-journalists union Marios Lolos was attacked by riot police and got a crack on his scull yesterday on Syntagma, he is undertaking brain surgery at the moment. The photo-journalists union on 12th of Feb. 2012 issued a condemnation of police and mass media bosses for using/providing media photos and video footage for police purposes, making clear that the union do not permit police to use their work for its purposes.

Two days ago an 18-year-old man was transferred urgently with a C-130 aircraft from Crete to Athens, Tzaneio hospital to be operated for severe injuries in his lug and pancreas. The young man was detained by the police in Irakleio of Crete together with his friends after a night out, police stopped and searched the company and transferred them to the HQ of Police station to “confirm their ID information”. In the HQ of Police in Crete, police officers beat the company of young people up. However, the 18-year old was isolated in another room where two police officers in balaclavas, beat him up for several minutes then they release him. The 18-year old had a broken ribs and injuries in his intestines.