New repressive and legislative measures aim to create state of siege for the Greek capital.
riot police on guard
After holding meetings with the Scotland Yard as well as American security advisers, the frail Greek government with only one MP majority has announced the imposition of draconian measures aimed to halt the rising social antagonistic movement across the country. With the support of the corporate media, the government has announced it will not tolerate any more political violence on the streets, giving a carte blanche to the regime’s praetorian guard, as the ex-Minister of Public Order, Byron Polidoras, has called the riot police, to exercise unlimited force on demonstrators. In addition, the government has announced the formation of a rapid reaction force of 300 armed policemen mounted on fast motorbikes to patrol the heart of the Athens and the introduction of police dogs in pedestrian patrols. The Minister of Justice has also announced the introduction of a new law that will severely punish hoods, masks and other feature distorting clothing in protest marches. The corporate press has been ahistorically using the term “koukouloforos”, i.e. hooded man, to refer to anarchists and other radicals, trying to identify the social movement with the hooded Nazi collaborators of the German occupation in the 1940s, a tactic of psychological warfare endorsed by the Communist Party [KKE]. The corporate media, which are fanning the fears of conservative sections of the population with talk of an impeding civil war, have also been supporting the government and its allies to the far-right in their attempt to open up the issue of the university asylum, a clause in Greece’s Constitution. Earlier attempts to that cause were thwarted by the huge student movement in 2006-2007.
Left wing and independent media as well as a wide spectrum of the social movement have condemned the measures as a police state rehearsal aimed to impose a stage of siege in Athens and to repress social and labour struggles, pointing out that the State’s priority should be the dissolution of the neonazi parastate, the immediate release of the imprisoned insurgents of December, and that policemen should be disarmed (several thousands of them were estimated yesterday as unfit for carrying weapons) and be forced to wear numbers indicating their identity, something that does not happen today.
The new measures are expected to rise rather than dampen social tension, especially as the government has lately proved its propensity towards totalitarianism, amongst other things by appointing the old propaganda chief of the colonels’ junta as director of the state archives, thus placing the future of both academic and independent research at the hands of one of the darkest figures of recent Greek history. The current government is run by the Nea Dimokratia Party, the immediate successor of the junta and a transformation of the post civil war royalist party that filled the islands with concentration camps for communists in the 1950s.
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The government today, 18/3,
The government today, 18/3, announced the return of the 1936 law which makes "the insult of authority" a crime. The law, a fabrication of the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas, was abolished in the mid 1980s and is aimed to allow policemen to arrest citizens for calling them "cops". The Foreign Officer of Greece also reversed to civil-war discourse today by calling society to do its duty and marginalise and denounce the anarchists. The fascist parliamentary party, LAOS, has expressed its pleasure at seeing the government adopting its proposals on repression, and has pledged to support the frail majority of the ruling right-wing Party in legislation and in the case of impeachment.
another dead activist in
another dead activist in Greece: Prisoner Katerina Goulioni dies in police custody under mysterious circumstances
http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2009/03/18/46-1405-prisoner-katerina-goulioni-dies-in-police-custody-under-mysterious-circumstances-new-government-law-against-hoodies/
Quote: The government today,
When they criminalise colloquial language, which people use without thinking about it, most people automatically become criminals, so there's nothing left to lose by constant and constantly more militant direct action. All they've done is put the final nail in authority's own coffin.
The government's law
The government's law proposal on hoods was greeted with fury by parties of the opposition in the greek parliament where it was attacked as an extremely dangerous effort to "sharpen with technical means the phobic and insecure reflexes" of the population (acc. to the Socialist Party), as a contruction of a "police as a force of repression against the popular and labour movement" (acc. to the Communist Party), and as an act "that endangers the constitutional right of gathering and expression" (acc. to the Coalition of the Radical Left). At the same time the Lawyer's Union has condemned the legislation on 'insulting authority' as "a deeply undemocratic move which leads to dangerous paths for the freedom of press and for public expression".
As concerns the death of Katerina Goulioni, the female prison activist on the frontline of the struggle for prisoners' rights and the abolition of vaginal inspection, as is the usual case there have been no clear information about the conditions of her death yet. Keli, the leftwing journal for prison abolition and prisoners' rights writes that she during her transport between prisons she was handcuffed and isolated from the other prisoners, only to be found dead with blood on her face in the early morning. The ministry of justice claims she died of a heart attack. New information on what the left claims to be yet another state murder will be posted separately when available.