#rbnews weekly bulletin 06-12 July 2013

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

Police attack on a demonstration for K. Sakkas (and my arrest for a video) - by @_giant_

By @_giant_, re-posted from Omnia TV and translated from Greek by @potmos

On Wednesday, July 10, a demo near the Acropolis was arranged in order to inform people about Kostas Sakkas’s hunger strike.

During the march, in which were about 150 people, slogans were written and leaflets were distributed, mostly in English, since the place is mostly a tourist destination.

When the march was stopped from continuing towards the Acropolis by police forces, it went on to Thissio through the pedestrian road, without an incident.

After a while, under the pretext that slogans were being written on walls, the march was attacked by a motorbike-mounted police force (DELTA), and arrests were made.

People protested the arrests and were attacked with flash-bang and teargas grenades.

Guest post: ‘Days of Junta’ in the University of Athens

By Panagiotis Sotiris[1]

For anyone watching what was happening at the central building of the University of Athens on July 8 2013 the feeling was one of reliving images from the 1967-1974 military dictatorship, especially if we take into consideration that collective memory in Greece is still haunted by the image of a military tank crashing the gate of the National Polytechnic University during the November 1973 student uprising.

Tens of riot policemen and special police units in full gear surrounded and stormed the building and arrested 31 students who were peacefully protesting against changes in the administration of Greek universities and especially the introduction of ‘University Councils’ as the main governing bodies of Greek Higher Education, as part of the latest wave of university reforms.

University Councils, modeled after the new forms of academic management spreading all over Europe, are comprised of academics and representatives of ‘society’ and the ‘business community’ and have been criticized as undermining academic democracy and enhancing an aggressively entrepreneurial conception of Higher Education. Both University Teachers’ Unions and Student Unions have waged a long battle against university councils and the July 8 protest was part of this battle.

However, this time the president of the University of Athens Councils, Prof. Dimitri Bertsimas, an MIT professor, chose to call the police, stating that he and the other members of the council were in danger. The call to the police was made by Vaso Kinti, a philosophy professor well known for her support to aggressive neoliberal reforms.

Since the Right of Asylum in Universities, the explicit ban on forces of order to enter University premises has been lifted, as part of the latest wave of university reforms, there was no legal obstacle to the police invasion. The police stormed the building and arrested the students. Police were even ready to use an angle grinder to open another door and arrest the rest of the protesting students, when under the protests of union representatives and members of parliament they were ordered to withdraw. In the end all students were set free and no charges were pressed against them, but the problem of a brutal police attack against a legitimate student protest remains.

This case highlights the motivation behind the decision to abolish University Asylum. For many years those supporting giving police the right to intervene inside university premises (including the US Ambassador in Athens!) insisted that this is a necessary measure to prevent violent rioting. In contrast, supporters of the university sanctuary warned that such a measure would lead to the police invading universities in order to arrest protesting students and striking professors. It is now becoming obvious that we are witnessing an authoritarian institutional transformation of Greek Higher Education, aiming at restricting the ability of the student movement and the university movement in general to raise obstacles to the shift towards a more entrepreneurial Higher Education.

The Greek Student Movement has a long history of successful struggles in the past 35 years, governments have been forced to repeal laws or even the 2007 constitutional reform under the pressure of mass student movements, and all these can explain why radical student practices are now being targeted as part of the broader undemocratic and authoritarian turn that has accompanied the austerity packaged and the EU-IMF-ECB supervision.  It is the same authoritarian turn that led to shutting down Greek Public Radio and Television (ERT) and keeps hunger striker Kostas Sakkas in prison for more than 30 months without trial.

Hopefully, students, university teachers and other higher education personnel have insisted that they are not intimidated  by such developments and that they will continue struggling against the neoliberal transformation of Higher Education, including struggling against any attempts to make ‘University Councils’ the main governing bodies of Greek Universities. The fight is far from over.

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[1] Panagiotis Sotiris teaches social theory and social and political philosophy at the Department of Sociology of the University of the Aegean. He can be reached at psot@soc.aegean.gr

#rbnews weekly show 06 July 2013 - The failure(s) of democracy in Greece

This week on the #rbnews international show, we asked lawyer Crystali Bourcha from the Movement for the Liberties and Democratic Rights of our Times (Greek acronym KEDDE) and journalist Mariniki Alevizopoulou from Unfollow Magazine to comment on the items that we included in our news bulletin of the week, which all seem to point towards the failure of democracy in Greece.

You can listen to the podcast and read the news bulletin after the jump.
The interviews were taken by phone. We apologize for the poor quality of the sound, especially in the case of our interview with Crystali Bourcha. For some unexplainable reason, the recording device was particularly intent to add parasites to her speech. 

#rbnews weekly bulletin 22-28 June 2013

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

#rbnews weekly bulletin 15-21 June 2013

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

An "unsolved" case of violence

By Ada Psarra for the Editors' Newspaper, summarized/translated by @rebeloskilo

Anaxagora street, 11 May 2008. A 24-year-old man is immobilized by 4 special guards [1]. “He was handcuffed, he was made to kneel while one police officer held him in a headlock him and two others were beating his head. They were accompanied by a female officer”, says the eyewitness. Nikos Sakellion falls into a coma at the hands of the police officers and the video captured by the eyewitness depicts them abandoning their victim after removing his handcuffs.

The eyewitness states that the officers dragged him for 8 metres, turned him upside down and then left him. A police officers called the national ambulance service, EKAB, through the State organization against drugs, OKANA, in order to link Sakellion’s death to substance abuse.

#rbnews international show 08 June 2013: Freedom of the press in Greece (or lack thereof)

This week, on the occasion of the upcoming appeals trial of Kostas Vaxevanis, the journalist who was arrested and tried once already in November 2012 for publishing the Lagarde list in his magazine HOT DOC, the #rbnews international show focused on the issue of freedom of the press in Greece. We were able to interview Kostas Vaxevanis himself, but also Dimitris Trimis, chairman of the Athens Daily Newspaper Editors’ Union, Marios Lolos,  chairman of the Greek Photojournalists’ Union, and his colleague Tatiana Bolari, and Angélique Kourounis, a correspondent for various French-speaking media in Athens, who also acts as the local representative of Reporters Without Borders. This show is part of a series prepared by the radiobubblenews team, which will carry on across the coming week and will seek to discuss the various impediments to the realization of this essential democratic liberty.

You can listen to the podcast, as usual, after the jump.

Amnesty International: the situation of human rights in Greece is deteriorating

Posted by @IrateGreek

The Greek chapter of Amnesty International organized a press conference to present the organization's annual report in front of the Aliens' Department in Athens today. This symbolic choice reflects Amnesty's key findings about the situation of human rights in Greece in 2013:

"Allegations of human rights abuses by police, including torture and excessive use of force continued throughout the year. Migrants and asylum seekers faced impediments in registering their asylum applications and were often detained in substandard conditions. Hate crime on the basis of race and ethnicity escalated dramatically."

Initiative against the detention hellholes of Piraeus

Source: Anti-Nazi Initiative of Piraeus

Posted by @csyllas, translated from Greek by @anarresti


After the petition below was approved by the 16 May 2013 plenary of the Council of  Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) in the framework of a discussion on the subject of human rights,  it was decided to set up a team of European lawyers which will visit the  police departments where immigrants and refugees are being held under appalling conditions.

The petition, which was drafted by a group of lawyers and citizens from Piraeus and approved by the Board of Directors of the Piraeus Bar Association, is yet another enlightening testimony on the State's arbitrary treatment of foreign immigrants.

Developments in Skouries 12 May 2013

Posted by @IrateGreek

Clashes took place again this morning in north-eastern Halkidki where residents are protesting against logging activities by mining company Hellas Gold in the basin of the Karatzas stream near the Skouries forest.

According to the antigoldgreece blog, these new developments come ahead of a planned meeting tomorrow morning between the Residents' Committees Against Mining and the leadership of the regional police to examine the validity of operational permits held by the mining company for logging activities in the Karatzas area. Also invited to the meeting are the head of the municipal forestry authority and the head of the department of urban planning, who still have to reply to a denunciation of possibly illegal construction activities by the company in the Skouries forest.

Residents opposed to mining plans have been protesting every day this week in the Karatzas area where lumberjacks are working under police guard. This morning, a group of protesters asked the head of the Halkidiki police force to suspend logging activities until the meeting tomorrow. The police officer agreed to take it up with the regional police leadership and left. Approximately one hour later, a group of riot policemen circled the protesters and assaulted them with tear gas. It seems that 4 people were wounded in the clashes that followed, three of them policemen. There have been claims that one policeman was shot but the Polygyros hospital administrator spoke only of scratches and did not mention any gunshot/buckshot wounds.

Also this morning, a group of women who were walking up to the Skouries worksite were assaulted by the riot policemen guarding it. Three were detained and taken to the Halkidiki police HQ in Polygyros. Reports indicate that the police were not allowing lawyers and the local SYRIZA MP inside to see the detainees. @SaveSkouries reported that one woman was beaten by the riot police and had to be taken to the hospital as well.

As of 17:00 EEST reports from residents indicate the presence of a strong police force on the two main roads out of Ierissos.

Update 17:30: Prime Minister Samaras's Director of Communications George Mouroutis is claiming that 7 policemen were wounded  by a "dispersion weapon". Greek social media are awash with ironic comments on this blatant exaggeration.

A timeline of fascist activity in Greece over the past year

On the occasion of the anniversary of the May 2012 elections, in which Greece's neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn entered parliament with 7% of the vote, @galaxyarchis prepared a timeline of the most important events related to the rise of fascism in modern Greece.

The #MAT1236 photo exhibition in Finland (videos)

Posted by @IrateGreek

The photo exhibition #MAT1236 about the brutality of the Greek police opened on 02 May 2013 in Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Greek activist Anna Gartagani sent to us videos from the inauguration and the panel discussion that took place after the opening. You can watch them after the jump.

The #MAT1236 photo exhibition in Finland

Source

By @Polyfimos, translated from Greek by @IrateGreek


Angela Merkel's visit to Athens in October 2012 went down in social media history under the code name #ΜΑΤ1236, after the registration number of the riot policeman [MAT in Greek] who, during clashes with protesters, used a young woman as a human shield. This action by the policeman, whose identity details are unknown, was the inspiration for an original, timely photo exhibition in the Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.

#rbnews weekly bulletin 20-26 April 2013

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

#rbnews "weekly" bulletin 6-19 April 2013

Prepared by the #rbnews international team, translated by @IrateGreek

The text companion to this week's and last week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

#Skouries : two citizens from Ierissos arrested

Two citizens from Ierissos were arrested in the night of 11th April, accused for having taken part in the arson  attack against Eldorado Gold worksite at Skouries in Chalkidiki, which happened on 12th February. The two people were kept until Sunday 14 April in the Thessaloniki Police headquarters, when they went through judicial interrogation.

Their lawyer denounced several irregularities in the process; the interrogation took place in the Police Headquarters instead of the Court, as designed by the law.

During the interrogation, about 3000 people demonstrated in front of the Police HQ. The two citizens were finally officially arrested. Further to this decision, another demo was called in Thessaloniki in the evening of 14 April.

A reminder about the Skouries case here, here and here.

And a storify of the #rbnews tweets below:

#rbnews international weekly bulletin 23-29 March 2013

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

The police assault on Ierissos near the Skouries forest - 07 March 2013

The police campaign to intimidate and even terrorize the anti-mining movement in north-eastern Halkidiki took a new turn this morning when several platoons of riot police entered the village of Ierissos, allegedly to summon witnesses to the regional police HQ in Polygyros and to conduct house searches. Residents initially reported 6 platoons, but later concluded that the number of riot policemen was much, much higher. Officers from national security and anti-terrorism units also participated in the raid.

Residents quickly gathered at the entrance of the village. The riot police marched into the village, throwing large quantities of tear gas (video 1, video 2, video 3). Multiple eyewitnesses, including the headmaster, report that tear gas was thrown inside the secondary school, which had to be evacuated. One student was wounded after taking a hot from a tear gas canister. Several people are reported to be suffering from breathing problems and need medical care.

Skouries: from intimidation to terror

For background on the issue of ore mining in Halkidiki, see here and here.  

The human rights situation in north-eastern Halkidiki (also spelled Chalkidiki) is still deteriorating since the arson attack on the work site of mining company Hellas Gold in Skouries on 17 February 2013. There have been dozens of random detentions of local residents by the police, without any result so far and most importantly without any charges being pressed against any of the detainees.

The latest - and most shocking - case of detention is a 15-year-old female student from the Ierissos high school, who was summoned today to the regional police HQ in Polygyros for interrogation. The entire village of Ierissos went in an uproar, with church bells ringing and schoolchildren staging a protest in front of the local police station together with their families. The police decision was condemned by the Coordination Committee of Associations in Stagira-Akanthos as well as local attorneys, who specifically denounced the fact that "witnesses" or "detainees" summoned by the police have no access to legal assistance during their interrogation and that the police essentially force them to give a DNA sample, which is illegal as no charges have been pressed against them.