We should also add that there is a definite turn to adopting various authoritarian measures and attitudes in Greece, with Police given the green light to use all sorts of hard tactics against protesters. In one case they arrested, insulted and put in prison for 24 hours a 60 year old citizen who was complaining to the policemen for beating the students. They have refused for hours to provide him with the necessary health care, they did not take any measure to protect him from COVID transmissions and they were crying to him “We are facking the leftists”. («Εμείς τους γαμάμε τους αριστερούς»: Ξύλο και ύβρεις εναντίον 60χρονου συλληφθέντα από το συλλαλητήριο της Τετάρτης – The Press Project – Ειδήσεις, Αναλύσεις, Ραδιόφωνο, Τηλεόραση)
After the bloody suppression of the Polytechnic students’ uprising in 1973, universities became a symbol of Greek democracy — and for decades, police were banned from even entering campuses. But on Thursday, parliament voted to create a special police force to patrol universities, as the right-wing government mounts a troubling crackdown on supposedly “dangerous” student groups
Greece has been also in the past, from 1947 to 1974, a US protectorate, sometimes disguised into some sort of parliamentarian democracy and some times functioning as an open, CIA-imposed dictatorship (1967 – 74). A lot of crimes were committed in the name of defense of the “free world”. It was such the extent of those criminal activities and the enormous anti-American backlash they provoked, the then US President William Clinton, while visiting Greece, was compelled, in a very rare gesture for a IS President, to ask for pardon from the Greek people. It was the only way to smooth somehow Greek – US relations. But, it seems history never ends. Some observers are suspecting the actual US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt (former ambassador to Kiev) to exercise a huge pressure to the Greek government to act in the direction it is moving (although the Greek government is probably capable of moving to it by itself).
Mr. Pyatt is an extremely active diplomat. During his staying in Athens, he has visited the Defense Ministry more often and for more time than the PM himself, to hold talks with the Greek military leadership, without the political leadership of the country being present!
It is also in this context that erupted the Koufontinas scandal. Koufontinas is a convicted member of the terrorist organization “17th of November” serving his life sentence. He begun a hunger strike in prison asking for the government to apply the law on the treatment of prisoners, which it had voted itself but it refuses to apply! Now he is in danger of imminent death. One wonders if there are people who want him dead and for what purpose.
Dimitris Georgopoulos
The New “University Police” Shows Greece’s Authoritarian Turn
By Moira Lavelle
Feb.13, 2021
photo: Moira Lavelle
Policing Students
Until August 2019, it had been all but illegal for Greek police to enter universities. For almost forty years, a university asylum law forbade police from stepping foot onto campus without explicit permission from the student body and the dean. The law was created to protect student protest and political organizing, in memory of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, when Greek students demonstrated against the military junta that then ruled the country.
During the three-day uprising in November 1973, students occupied the Polytechnic University of Athens in protest of proposed changes to the education system. The occupation soon became a symbol of revolt against the dictatorship, and thousands of people flooded the streets of Athens in solidarity. The protest infamously ended with the military sending tanks down the city’s main highways, with one crashing through the gates of the Polytechnic. Dozens of people were killed, and hundreds were beaten or arrested by police.
The Polytechnic uprising is broadly understood in Greece as the beginning of the end of the dictatorship, and the onset of the return to democracy. The crushed Polytechnic gates remain as a memorial inside the campus, and still today, November 17 is a national school holiday. When it was first passed into law in 1982, the asylum law barring police from campus was accepted as an obvious and necessary protection for student organizing.
Lawless Campuses?
But in the decades since the Polytechnic uprising, opponents have attacked the university asylum law as a cover for lawlessness and dangerous activity. Amid national protests against post-crisis austerity measures in 2011, the center-left PASOK government repealed university asylum. In 2017, Tsipras’s Syriza administration pointedly reinstated it.
When the measure was reintroduced, center-right newspapers were furious. They ran headlines such as “Universities Are Surrounded by Extremists and Traffickers” — pointing to graffiti on university buildings, or to the sale of illegal cigarettes and knockoff sneakers on campus. But there were some complaints within universities, too. In 2018, students from across Greece created a petition that garnered more than 1,400 signatures calling for “universities without violence” after a professor was beaten and threatened for making comments on anti-authoritarian graffiti. Professors argued that the frequent occupation of university buildings disrupted education.
The ruling New Democracy party particularly focused on the supposed climate of lawlessness in the universities. From 2018, it began campaigning on a law-and-order platform buttressed with promises of repealing university asylum. Indeed, this was one of the party’s first legislative actions when elected in summer 2019. New Democracy prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis argued, “We don’t want police officers in universities. We want to expel the hoodlums who police the lives of students from [the universities].”
However, in recent months, New Democracy has run a further campaign insisting that dissolving asylum was not enough — and that establishing university police is the only way for Greece to have “functioning” universities. In late January, it published a video with photos of drug dealing, broken university windows, and protests with the tagline: “Vandalism, intimidation, thefts, trafficking, beatings, illegal trade, depreciation. We agree, these are not the universities we want. They are a place of creation, freedom, and knowledge, not delinquency and lawlessness.”
As the law was discussed in parliament on Thursday, Mitsotakis stated that it would solve problems of “delinquency” and establish the universities as a place for education and the exchange of ideas. For him, this is not a matter of “the police entering the schools” but of “democracy entering.”
But the student movement is not so sure. “This is not a measure that is happening to ensure the security of students; the police will be there to repress the political movements that have flourished inside the university,” said Makari. “For me, this is proven by the historic role of the police in Greek society and by the police’s recent actions, including today.” At student demonstrations in Athens and Thessaloniki on Wednesday, police beat protestors and arrested dozens. Videos circulated online of police chasing students with batons and throwing them to the pavement. Journalists’ unions, leftist politicians, and protesters have all accused the police of excessive force during the demonstrations.
Evelina Kontonasiou, nineteen, a pharmaceutics student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, worries that the law will impact her studies and her political activism. “I think I will see the university as a space of colonialism and political oppression,” she said. “I will come and study anxiously.” For her, the risk is that students won’t be able to cope with this climate — for “there will be cops in our heads at all times.”
Published at jacobinmag.com
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