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The fatal police-shooting of a 15 year old boy in Greece earlier this month has sent shock waves throughout the country with thousands of mostly young people revolting. The protests began in an Athens district called Exarchia — described by one commentator in Spiegel as “a traditional haunt of artists, anarchists and left-wing intellectuals.” The protests then spread to most of the country and continue to this day. Shops have been vandalized, police stations and banks have been fire bombed, officers have been doused with red paint, and unions have initiated mass work stoppages. Police have responded with tear gas and flash grenades against demonstrators. There have been demonstrations in solidarity with the protesters in various European cities including London, Moscow, Paris, and Berlin. While the death of the school boy sparked off the protests, the main underlying issues facing Greeks, particularly youths, include government corruption and the poor state of the economy.

GUEST: Pavlos Stavropoulos, Greek-American activist

Rough Transcript:

Kolhatkar: Joining us this morning on the line to help explain what exactly is going on in Greece is Greek-American activist Pavlos Stavropoulos. Welcome to Uprising, Pavlos.

Stavropoulos: Thank you, Sonali. I appreciate you having me on.

Kolhatkar: First why don’t we start with the historical significance of the place where these protests started, sparked off by the by the killing of this boy. How significant is this Athens district where it all began?

Stavropoulos: It’s actually the district that is often referred to in the mainstream media as “lawless,” which actually may be a fairly accurate description but in a very different meaning than most people associate with it. This is an area that has been, in many respects, self-managed for a very long time. And it’s an area where police are generally are not welcome by the residents, by the shopkeepers, as well as the people who are around there.

I visited the area on several occasions, and it is not uncommon that if a police cruiser tries to pass through the area, that it will be welcomed but with chairs, and bottles, and everything else that can be around. So the very presence of the police there will be perceived as provocative by people who hang around in the area, especially around the square.

Kolhatkar: And historically, in the ’60s and ’70s, how active were people there?

Stavropoulos: Well one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that while in the ’60s we saw a tremendous amount of progressive activity in Western Europe, between 1967 and 1974 Greece had a military government. Therefore, the level of social and political activity was severely repressed. The Polytechnic, the main school where the student rebellion took place in November of 1973, is right outside of Exarchia. Exarchia is behind it. So this is an area that is traditionally known as having a lot of student activism. But again, things like 1968, we had tanks in the streets.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk a little bit about the police repression before and after the shooting of this young man, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, outside of Exarchia and in the rest of Greece. How strong has police repression been in general, particularly of young people?

Stavropoulos: Well this repression has been fairly severe throughout the years. One of the things that’s very interesting today is that the Greek police have never really been accepted by very large segments of Greek society and Greek population, partially because of the reputation that it acquired during the military government but also because of its behavior ever since. There have been multiple incidents of very, very severe police brutality targeted towards immigrants. There was a young Pakistani immigrant who was basically bludgeoned to death by the police while he was standing in line outside of immigration offices to petition for asylum. There were other incidents at a local protest against a landfill in Lefkimi. A 16-year-old boy who was driving his motorcycle was hit by the police. He lost control of his motorcycle, the motorcycle crashed. An age of 43-year-old woman who subsequently died of brain injuries and also lost a baby. Those are two not atypical events that happened relatively recently that can give you an idea of what’s going been on in Greece in terms of police brutality.

However, outright lethal force—pulling out a gun and shooting—is something that is considered socially and legally unacceptable in Greece, which is why we see the response to the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos precipitate this kind of social uprising.

Kolhatkar: And it’s interesting because here in the United States that is a type of incident that occurs every other day, it seems, and people may not understand the significance of the Greek reaction to this police shooting. Police shootings are so much more common here. But thank you for putting it into perspective.

I want to ask you, Pavlos, to talk about who are the people, what are the movements that are involved in the current revolt within Greece today? Is it mostly young people, is it the unions? Who are they?

Stavropoulos: And I appreciate you calling it a revolt because a lot of times the mainstream media outside of Greece refers to it as the riots. And I think it is very important to put that into context—mobs riot, but people rise up. And this is a social uprising. The Greek word that gets used gets used in Greece is eksegersi, which can be translated as either insurrection or uprising. And that’s very, very important to understand of what’s going on there.

It starts out with a reaction from predominately anarchist groups. Exarchia and that area is an area where anarchists hang out a lot, but it very quickly evolved into a much broader social uprising. For one thing, it is not just university students; but it is also high school students that came out en masse, particularly on the Monday following the shooting; but you also have a lot of other social groupings that emerged–you have unemployed people; you had retired people; you had housewives; you had many, many different sectors of society that began to emerge.

At the same time, you also have some political organizations, political parties, specifically the Communist Party of Greece and of a lot of the unions that are under very, very tight party control in Greece that began to try to control the uprising and control what’s going on because the situation was very much out of control. There was nobody who was particularly in charge. And you see the opposition to that attempt, by particularly the Communist Party, to control the situation in the fact that in the last several days we have seen the Communist Party offices being firebombed in multiple cities as well the takeover of the GSEE building in Athens. That is the equivalent of taking over the headquarters of the AFL-CIO in the United States. This was taken over by anarchists, and by workers, and by people in the community who decided to liberate it and create it as a free space space for all workers—free not just from state control but also from party control.

Kolhatkar: So there is a lot of sort of internal wrangling, if you will, between the various political movements?

Stavropoulos: One of the things that you see is , I think, is the uprising is in many respects starts off as anarchist, but it begins to attract anybody within society who is interested in having a direct relationship, a direct control over their lives and over their destinies. So it becomes an opposition against the state, against the police, against the banks, but also against those political entities who are attempting to control social movements and to shape them to fit their own agenda. So it’s really a demand for a direct control, for an unmediated control, of people’s lives; and of people’s destinies; and of people’s social relationships; and an opposition against any kind of movement, agency, organization, or authority that attempts to dictate what people’s lives should be like—whether that’s the government or whether that is the Communist Party.

Kolhatkar: My guest is Pavlos Stavropoulos, a Greek-American activist. We’re talking about what’s happening in Greece and what has been happening since the beginning of the month. Pavlos, what exactly is motivating all of these various movements and ordinary Greeks as well? I mentioned government corruption and the poor state of the economy. Those are the two things that are cited, at least, in the mainstream media. What is your analyses of the underlying motivation for people to want to take control of their lives and to want to rise up against the government?

Stavropoulos: Well, I think that to a large extent we have to understand that in this kind of a spontaneous social uprising, there’s probably as many reasons for why people are in the streets as there are people in the streets. And in a sense, as I said, I’m giving my own perspective and my perspective from the outside. I think this is real important to state because all to often analyses is provided as if this is a definitive analysis, and I will make no such claim.

I think that what starts out of the first few days is sheer rage, is just pure, raw rage, that this is something that is socially unacceptable—you do not kill one of our kids. Period. That’s it. And if you do, there will be massive retaliation and massive repercussions for that. And that’s what we see initially. What is interesting is that this begins to evolve into a broader setting where people are beginning to say, “This insurrection creates an open space, and within that space we can now begin to think of what would social relationships look like when they are direct, when they’re not mediated, when they’re not controlled.” I’ve talked to a lot of people who have been inside occupied city halls and inside other occupied or liberated buildings, and I think that’s one of the very interesting and exciting processes that happened, particularly in the latter part of the week, especially last week into the beginning part of this week.

And I asked them: “What are your demands? What are your expectations?” And they say: “We don’t know yet. Our first plan is to create the space where popular assemblies can constitute, where people can come in, and it is within that free and open space that we can even imagine what our demands are. Because living daily lives–going to work, watching TV, having to deal with the mundane and the controls and the mediated social relationships that people are accustomed to—the imagination what what would arguments be could not even find room to express itself. So this is what, to me, is one of the very intriguing thing: the insurrection is its own demand in some respects. It is to say that “we want to be able to imagine a live different than what we’ve got. But we can’t for as long as we live the way that we do.” So the open spaces, the liberated spaces, the popular assemblies create those conditions upon which those demands can begin to express themselves.

Kolhatkar: Now I understand that as part of the organizing strategies, and I’d like to talk about that for a little bit, is a very innovative and exciting use of media—various forms of media, new media as well as traditional media. What can you tell us about how many of the organizers of the demonstrations are getting the word out?

Stavropoulos: Well, the interesting thing is that I don’t think we can really think of organizers in the very traditional sense—events happen. The word that gets used in Greece a lot by groups is [inaudible word] which means “initiative.” The groups that take initiative, and some of those initiatives resonate within the people, and those become events. So people use very diverse means of getting the word out, from the very typical flyers, posters, putting things up, handing things [out] at the market, to text messaging—especially among the younger generation–text messaging has been very commonly used. It was notified hundreds and thousands of people of what was going on in the first few hours. The Greek IndyMedia, Athens.IndyMedia.org, and to a lesser and more local extent Patras.IndyMedia.org have also been very active means of communicating with people. But there are also some tactics that have been utilized because a lot of the mainstream media, even in Greece, has tried top bury or completely disinform and disorient the situation around the social uprising.

Kolhatkar: Now I understand the state television station was also stormed a few days ago?

Stavropoulos: Yes, and this is what happened: initially people started doing short-term takeovers, 30 minutes to 45 minutes, of radio stations. They would just take over a radio station that would do a short broadcast of their message. They would read their statements, they would tell people what’s going on, and of course they would have to give it back. The main state TV station, NET, was taken over for a short period of time just a couple of days ago. Literally at 3pm local time, in the middle of the news broadcast—right at the time when the news broadcast was effectively saying to people how wonderful the prime minister had been doing about everything. People walked in, dropped a banner in front of the cameras, and started chanting and telling people, “shut off your television, get out into the streets, that’s where you’ll find the truth.”

It’s very interesting to see what the response of the state TV channel was. Initially they dropped the sound; and then they cut off the video; and about two or three minutes later, when people were escorted out, they went back on the air giving zero explanation as to what had happened, and proceeded as if nothing had gone on. This gives you an idea of the level in which definitely the state-owned media but even a lot of the mainstream media in Greece is trying to ignore what’s happening because they don’t want to give voice to the people. The people are saying: “We will give voice to ourselves. We don’t need anybody else. We will utilize whatever medium is available to us at any moment that it might be available to us.”

Kolhatkar: My guest is Pavlos Stavropoulos, a Greek-American activist, talking about the ongoing revolt in Greece. We were talking also about how people have been getting the word the word out: the takeovers of radio and TV stations. Very exciting and amazing events unfolding in Greece.

Pavlos, how is the government responding, and what has the government’s justification been, what have they been saying in press conferences, and how are they trying to get the situation under control from their perspective?

Stavropoulos: The initial government response was in many respects very hands-off, given that [in the] first couple of days we see a tremendous amount of anger because of the murder of Alexandros. They were going to make sure there wasn’t going to be another shooting. In many respects that may have been a miscalculation on their part because they thought the people were going to blow off steam and things were going to calm down, which, of course, historically doesn’t pan out. In 1985, the last time that a 15-year-old student was killed by the police, the incidence and the reaction lasted for months and years in some respects.

So I think the police lost control both because they backed off a little bit and because of the ferocity of the social response. Ever since then they’ve been trying to say—and this is not just the government party; this is also PASOK, the socialist, main opposition party; this is also the Communist Party of Greece, which is the third largest part in Greece. All three have been condemning the violence, condemning what’s going on and have been jockeying for political position, trying to say that “no, this should be peaceful protests, and there should be reforms, and effectively as long as you have me—whether ‘me’ is PASOK, or Koo-koo-eh [KKE] the communist party— in power, then things will be better.”

Synaspismos and SYRIZA, the left coalition, which is the fourth largest political presence in parliament (but it is a coalition of smaller parties) has been the only one that has not explicitly condemned the actions in the streets. While it has definitely spoken out against what it refers to blind violence and it has called for peaceful protest, it has stopped short of condemning the actions in the streets. And I think that even though they may not like exactly what is happening, they recognize it for what it is. But it is out of control–nobody controls it, no political party, no union, the government, the police. This is a true uprising in the sense that the people get to determine what is happening. Nobody is organizing it in any grand fashion, nobody’s directing. It’s very spontaneous and very organic. And as such, relatively difficult to both predict and to fully analyze and understand at the moment because every moment changes.

Kolhatkar: Finally, Pavlos, let me ask you what you think will happen. I know it is difficult to predict from what you have been saying, but just from looking at Greek history, where do you think this is going to go?

Stavropoulos: Well, there’s a couple of interesting things. Two specific things that we have noted that at this point, at last count that I have, over 800 high schools have been taken over, effectively shut down by high school students and over 200 universities and higher education departments around the country that have been taken over and shut down by university students. That is fairly massive. That’s also going to run its course relatively soon as we get into winter beak and into Christmas break. To what extent that will start again when school starts on January 7 is very much an unknown.

The other thing that is really interesting is that yesterday—it may have been the day before yesterday. Because of the time difference, things change sometimes—there was a 16-year-old student who was shot…

Kolhatkar: In his hand, right?

Stavropoulos: In [inaudible word] in Athens, and it’s unclear as to who who did it and for what purposes. There’s conflicting reports, and honestly I don’t have a definitive sense of exactly what happened. But that has created or injected as you say, a level of tension. Right as things were calming
down they’re things are beginning to get very, very hot again, and that it rather unpredictable. Had it not been for the shooting—and the boy appears to be out of danger after surgery in the hospital, fortunately—I would have said that a lot of it would have died down over break as a lot of the student actions calmed down a little bit and took a break. Things would have continued for months, probably for the duration of 2009, but in far less spectacular and dramatic fashions. But incidents would have continued to go on. One of the things that is really, really clear is that there’s a tremendous amount of hostility that has been unleashed towards the police. And the whole dynamic of police versus protesters and police versus society is very, very different. How that’s going to play out is unclear. The obvious thing also is that most of the violence or the property destruction that took place in the streets was very targeted. It was targeted towards police stations, towards government offices, later on towards political parties, towards union buildings, but also towards banks. I’m getting reports from people in some smaller cities in Greece that will tell me there’s not a single bank in the entire city that has not been hit in one fashion or another. One of the slogans that emerged early on in the uprising in the uprising that summarizes very well the feeling that a lot of people have about what government policy has been is “Money for the banks, bullets for the youth.”

Special Thanks to Ross Plesset for transcribing this interview