Greece, a single bullet

[Joanne98]

Recent explosive events in Greece were not a revolution. Nor were they a half-revolution. But they were in their own way a quarter-revolution. And all sparked by a single bullet.

On December 6 2008 a police ‘special guard’ shot and killed Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the infamous Exarcheia area of Athens. The 15-year-old was the son of a bank manager, attended a private school and lived in the pleasant suburb of Psychiko.

Within minutes protests had erupted in Athens. Pitched battles with riot police, combined with attacks on banks, police stations and other buildings, quickly spread to other Greek cities over the following days. Solidarity demonstrations across Europe and beyond frequently ended in confrontations with the police.

During the week following Grigoropoulos’s death the Greek police used close to 5,000 canisters of tear gas, almost exhausting their supplies. TV screens across Europe projected images of hooded youths lobbing petrol bombs and the remains of burnt out cars and buildings. Hundreds of people were arrested, dozens injured and damage costing billions of euros inflicted.

Yet the riots are not the totality of what has occurred. Greece has also seen hundreds of demonstrations, school walkouts and occupations, which have received, unsurprisingly, less attention in the bourgeois press. It was only in the closing days of December, for example, that the occupation of university buildings in Athens and Thessaloniki came to an end.

http://mkcommunists.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/greece-a-single-bullet/