On July 25, at five in the morning, unknown persons placed a firebomb at the gate of the squatted social centre, Fabrika Yfanet. People standing guard at the squat quickly put out the fire. In a suspiciously short amount of time, multiple police vehicles arrived at the scene and began provoking the squatters. Later two riot police squads parked nearby.
Four days earlier, several assailants with molotov cocktails attacked the station of Radio Revolt, a pirate radio station broadcasting from an occupied space in Thessaloniki’s Aristotelious University The attack was also thwarted thanks to the resistance of people guarding the station, and damages were minimal.
In Athens, the summer was stained with the appearance of fascists, walking openly in the streets in areas where they had never been seen before, forming groups to patrol their neighbourhoods. Police conducted massive raids to clear the undocumented immigrants out of Omonia, sweeping them off the streets where they had once thronged in the thousands, and the fascists held a march in the same neighbourhood, protected by police from the anarchists trying to attack them. In Patras the police destroy a major refugee camp, full of people waiting as they try to get on a boat for other parts of Europe and the greater chances of survival they offer. As the police raids mounted, immigrants in Athens protested and rioted for several days, and the anarchists organised a protest in solidarity with them, attracting more than 4,000 people. In the neighbourhood of Aghios Panteleimonos, the fascists took over a park with a playground where immigrants and their children had been hanging out, and they forced the local police station to lock the park. In their attempt to segregate the park, they viciously beat up a father in front of his child for violating the boycott.
In August, in the midst of all these clashes and contradictions, the struggle takes a recess. The heat drives everyone out to the islands, and the cities close down for the month. The squatted social centres put up posters inviting nazis and police to get acquainted with their security teams, which are staying throughout the summer to defend these spaces. The fascists decline to take them up on the offer. But the temperature goes up even more as forest fires are set just north of Athens to illegally clear land for real estate development. Even in the midst of a political crisis of legitimacy and popular rebellion, the capitalists are so greedy that they cannot refrain from rocking the boat for just a few months.
At the end of the month the Greek anarchists and anti-authoritarians continue a recent tradition of making a summer camp at Acheloos, a river in eastern Greece that is being diverted for hydroelectric dams and commercial cotton irrigation in a construction mega-project that is destroying one of the Greek mainland’s most important wilderness areas.
On August 25, in Belgrade, Serbia, two molotov cocktails are thrown at the Greek Embassy in solidarity with the Greek prisoner Thodoros Iliopoulos, on hunger strike at the time. On September 4th, five anarchists, Tadej Kurep, Ivan Vulović, Sanja Dojkić, Ratibor Trivunac, and Nikola Mitrovic, are arrested and threatened with international terrorism charges. A sixth person goes on the run.
Early on the 4th of September,police spark a small riot in Exarchia when they pursue two people spraying graffiti into the anarchist stronghold. Residents run to stop police from making the arrests, and the cops pull their guns on the crowd, which reacts aggressively. Delta Force arrives on motorbike in several groups, cutting off streets and arresting five people, kicking them savagely with their jackboots. Subsequently riot police provocatively attack the liberated park on Navarinou, just above the spot where Alexis was murdered. The arrested are charged with throwing molotovs, even though none had been thrown that night. One of the arrested is seriously injured, suffering a ruptured lung. Three cops are also injured, and two cop cars damaged. The next night, a riot police position nearby is attacked with real molotovs, and residents set up burning barricades to hinder the entrance of police reinforcements. Charges against the five arrested in the park are later dropped.
On September 5, during the International Expo in Thessaloniki, PEKOP the cleaners’ union to which Konstantina Kuneva belongs, leads a protest of thousands of workers. PEKOP declares:
In the dark days that they are preparing for us, let’s get ready let’s organise and let’s hit back without delay with a warm autumn and a hot winter. We do not forget December! We do not forget the bullets that killed Alexis, nor the acid that burned K. Kuneva, PEKOP’s general secretary! We live social war everyday here. And Konstantina is the flag of our social struggle.
[...]
We shall not be the tail of the bureaucrats who constantly team up with the bosses and the State, allotting like "parties of power" the privileges of class collaboration, having the audacity to speak in our name, in the name of the Working class, stabbing our struggles in the back. Nor will we give ground to those who constantly want to control us, to transform our struggles to votes, and when December comes they cross to the other side of the river... The workers must march and struggle against the bosses without false mediators and good-willers of this or that bureaucracy. The emancipation of the Working class is the work of the working class itself!
Along the march protesters destroy several CCTV surveillance cameras and launch flares at the police. Police respond with tear gas, and after the march attempt to arrest a dozen members of Alpha Kappa, meanwhile gassing an Alpha Kappa social centre. A large crowd of protesters comes and unarrests the AK members.
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