On July 8th, 2019, the New Democracy government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis assumed power in Greece, after campaigning on a promise to ‘clean up’ the central Athens neighbourhood of Exarcheia, and ‘take it back’ from the anarchists. Since then, the Greek state has launched a renewed attack against the anarchist and self-organized migrant movements, targeting squats and promising future raids. Against this threat, Greek anarchists have responded with characteristic resolve and determination.
Featuring interview with Pangiotis Varthalis of the squat Lelas Karagiannis 37
Translated by Boubouras (Act For Freedom Now) [Read More]
Athens: Hands off Exarcheia. New Democracy’s War on Anarchists
Greece: New Democracy, the new face of state violence
A view from Exarchia as the showdown looms. Interview with an anarchist in Athens about current situation.
he neighborhood of Exarchia in Athens, Greece is known worldwide as an epicenter of combative anarchism. For many years, anarchists and refugees have worked together to occupy buildings, establishing housing collectives and social centers that provide a variety of services outside the control of the state. Starting in August, the new government has carried out a series of massive raids targeting immigrants, anarchists, and other rebels, while revoking the autonomy previously granted to universities and introducing a wide range of new repressive measures and technologies. Now the government has given all the remaining occupations in Greece two weeks to conclude lease agreements with the owners or face the same fate. This deadline coincides with December 6, a day that anarchists have observed for ten years as the anniversary of the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos and the uprising that followed it.
The new governing party of Greece, aptly named New Democracy, is described by some media outlets as “center right,” in contrast to outright fascist parties like Golden Dawn; in fact, New Democracy has adopted much of its repressive and xenophobic agenda directly from the fascist right, while pursuing a neoliberal agenda in service of international finance capital. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mytsotakis, a hereditary representative of the capitalist class whose father was also prime minister, exemplifies the political caste that seeks to destroy the last safeguards protecting workers and poor people while scapegoating those who resist. [Read More]
Athens: Demonstration on 14th of september. Solidarity will win!
[an update on the repressive campaign by the state and call for international mobilizations in solidarity with the squats and the anarchist movement in Greece]
At dawn on August 26th, strong repression forces evicted four squats in the neighborhood of Exarcheia, arrested three squatters and detained 143 refugees and immigrants. While men, women and children refugees were piled in police vans by the armed hooded men of the Special Repression Counter-Terrorist Unit, institutional fascism released its ideological propaganda through the media: a representantive of Greek Police compared the repression forces to a “vaccum” of new technology that will wipe out from Exarcheia “the disturbing dust”, the refugees and immigrants, and afterwards the real “trash”, the anarchists, announcing the continuation of the repressive operation and their declared target.
The recent police invasions are a first manifestation of the repressive campaign, announced by state officials, against the anarchist movement, the squats, the self-organized structures of housing immigrants and refugees, the world of solidarity, social and class resistance in general. A repressive campaign that consists the spearhead of the state and capitalism’s attack on the plebeians of society, aiming to terrorize them and neutralize resistance, in order to proceed uninterruptedly to the onslaught of state and capitalist brutality. The elections of July 7th marked the continuation of the imposition of suffocating living conditions for the workers and the unemployed, the imprisonment of immigrants and refugees in concentration camps and the deaths in the borders, the intensification of the looting of social wealth and nature, the attempt to establish the state of emergency. The government of New Democracy is building on the attempted neutralization of social and class struggles and the tens of repression attacks against squats during the administration of Syriza, promising to crush the people of the struggle – to all those that have stood and are still standing against the plans of the authority. [Read More]
Athens: Police raid Greece’s oldest anarchist squat. Lelas Karagianni re-occupied
On January 15th, at about 12.00pm, cops raided Greece’s oldest anarchist squat, Lelas Karagianni 37. Solidarians and neighbours gathered at Amerikis square and then outside the squat, trying to prevent the eviction. There were several comrades on the rooftop of the building chanting slogans, who were caught by the police. Also, two solidarians were beaten by cops on the street and detained as well. Heavy repressive forces were deployed downtown, plus a police helicopter.
Soon thereafter, more people were assembled near the evicted squat. A gathering was called for 15.00pm outside the police headquarters on Alexandras Avenue, in solidarity with the 14 squatters who were arrested from inside Lelas Karagianni, and a discussion was announced for 19.00pm in the Athens Polytechnic (entrance from Stournari street).
All of the arrested comrades were released at about 17.00pm, cops left the vicinity of the squat, and Lelas Karagianni 37 was reoccupied! [Read More]
Greece : Communique by the squat Lelas Karagianni 37 about the reoccupation of Villa Amalias
Repression can’t bend the militants
We are experiencing historical moments. Let’s act accordingly. A swarm of political lackeys of the local and international capital, consisted of fascists, thieves and impostors of all sorts, from the extreme right to the so-called democratic left – assisted by the controlled mass media and the parastate gangs -, has been shamelessly looting, oppressing and terrorizing the people. In order for their plans to succeed without a hitch they have imposed a state of emergency which is nothing but a political dictatorship camouflaged with a parliamentary cloak. The bankrupt political-economic system, in order to perpetuate its miserable existence or at least to buy itself time before its upcoming decomposition, wants to force the silence and submission of the plebian social layers by means of either manipulation and compulsion by the media propaganda or brute force and terrorism used on resisting people by state repression and parastate gangs.
Athens (Greece): From Lelas Karagianni 37 squat, solidarity with Rozbrat squat in Poznan, Poland
SOLIDARITY WITH ROZBRAT SQUAT -IN POLAND- THREATENED WITH REPRESSION
Rozbrat squat, active for 16 years now in the city of Poznan, the longest occupied space in Poland, houses social, political and cultural activities that oppose the world of Authority and profit, of social and class divisions. Today it is one more of the self-organized spaces of resistance which are facing repressive plans. Some of the projects being housed in the squat -connecting it with struggles against globalization, class exploitation, State repression, persecution and imprisonment of strugglers, pillage of nature, racism, war etc.- are the Anarchist Federation and the Anarchist Black Cross of Poznan, the Workers’ Initiative, the Anarchist Library and Trojka publishing house.
On March 26, 2010 an auction has been scheduled for the purchase of the premises where the largest part of the squat is situated so that the debts of the previous owning company can be paid out. It is a process which started in January 2008, when the squat was “visited” by a bailiff with the assistance of the police in order to estimate the value of the ground.
Athens, Greece: LK37 squat attacked by fascists
On the 19th of April, before the beginning of a film show in Lelas Karayanni squat that was celebrating its 17th anniversary with a 2-days festival, a gang of fascists, armed with knives, attacked and tried to invade, throwing petrol bombs to cause fire to the building.
The attack was repelled. During the scuffles outside the squat, two comrades were stabbed by the fascist thugs of the state. Minutes after, the area was surrounded by riot and civil police.
This attack to an open political event is a provocative escalation in a series of fascist assaults that have taken place the last months, against political and social spaces, antiauthoritarian comrades and immigrants. They’re nothing else but assaults by the state itself. They’re part of a wider repressive project with the purpose to terrorize the people engaged in the social-class struggle and destroy the self-organized spaces. Where the state can’t let its mechanisms act directly, the fascist gangs are called to take action, free of any restriction that the official authorities have. In any case, the fascist thugs and their bosses, the state, will always find us ready to confront them. With solidarity as our weapon, we will defend massively, collectively and with every means not only our space, but every space of social and class resistance as well. We will always be in the streets, together with all the people who fight against the state and capitalist brutality, against nationalism and racism, sending the fascists vampires back into their holes from where the state has dug them out.
BACK OFF VAMPIRES. GO ON COMRADES !
for freedom, anarchy and communism
SOLIDARITY DEMONSTRATION, LELAS KARAYANNI 37, TUESDAY APRIL 26, 17:30
Go to the L.K.37 squat website.
comrades from the occupied territory of L.K.37, Athens, Greece
Athens (Greece): Lelas Karayanni 37 Squat under repression
| ATHENS – LELAS KARAYANNI 37 SQUAT UNDER REPRESSION |
Since the end of July, the squat of L.K. 37 is confronted with a repressive project that, not accidentally, is taking place in the middle of the summer and within a period of intensified state terrorism and guided “anti”terrorist hysteria cultivated by the media. The chancellors’ council of the university, commissioned instruments of state policies, decided to cut off the water supply in the occupied building, while they gave same orders for the electricity. The aim of this cheap action is to render intolerable our living in the squat, so that we will abandon it, besieged by thirst, and in case we refuse they threaten with a police operation of violent eviction. This is happening in the name of utilizing the building for the speculative business enterprise which is called “Olympic Games 2004”.
The building of L. Karayanni 37 was bequeathed to the University, the Polytechnic and the Beaux-Arts Schools of Athens, with the inviolable condition to make it house for homeless and poor students. Despite that, it was abandoned since 1960, until April of 1988, when it was occupied by a collective of young students, workers and jobless, who transformed it into a place for housing and self-organizing, in a city suffocating by the blackmail of survival and alienation. From then on, more than an answer to the unbearable economic and social status that turns housing into merchandise, the squat became a collective self-managed space that works in the base of comradeship and solidarity, against the dominant model of property relations and isolated private lives in the apartment-cages, against the slogan of authority “everyone for himself”. Far from restricting ourselves in organizing life inside the squat, L.K. 37, through open assemblies, publications and social interventions became a workshop and base for radical criticism against the housing issue that thousands of people have to deal with, but also against all aspects of social and class oppression. As an antiauthoritarian and anti-institutional project it was found in the sight of state repression, in 1994 and 1995, resulting in cops’ invasions in the house and arrests of the squatters.
L. Karayanni squat may be the most recent but it’s not the only social space that is threatened by the storm of the Olympic Games; by this operation to upgrade capitalist exploitation and state control, and to construct a sultry land-planning and social environment that affects every aspect of our life. So, let’s talk about these Games that represent the new “national idea”. – About this skilful state propaganda that presents them as a social property, in order to extract the consent of those who are only going to pay for and suffer them, while the only ones profiting will be the multinationals, contractors, advertising and construction corporations, state officials who will manage the subsidies, the traders of any useless consuming product and of course those who trade security equipment… – About cementing everything, about the “huge construction works” and the foreign and local workers who continue to die there, in so-called “working accidents”, when the bridges collapse or due to insufficient security measures in the worksite of the olympic village, expendable people who are sacrificed in the name of spectacular capitalist achievement. About their colleagues go on strike after every such “accident” and then they get back to work again, under the same lousy working conditions, because nobody is allowed to demand, to strike and revolt, otherwise the “national goal” will fail. – About transforming the city into a sterilized and dead place. About police “sweeping” operations against immigrants and the overall expulsion from the center of every spontaneous, uncontrolled element of life. About the permanent occupation police army in every central street and installing new surveillance cameras everywhere in the name of law and order. – About the entire speculative market with all the appropriations and subsidies that will be absorbed by the public sector, in the name of covering the needs of 2004 Olympics. About the case of the Students’ House in Ilisia suburb that the rectors’ council demand all students should leave in order to use it for the journalists’ accommodation in the Olympics, and about the struggle of the students who have refused and occupied the premises for more than two months. – About the “anti”terrorist crusade and emergency laws, the criminalization of every social and class struggle and the well-designed cleansing operation against any space of resistance, in the name of realizing the grand “national idea”.
We, the squatters of L.K. 37, having created for years such a space of resistance against the exploitation of our housing and other social needs, which is now under repression, we have every reason to defend it, categorically rejecting the vile blackmail and the speculative pursuit of the university authorities. This choice of struggle is not only about defending the squat itself as a living attempt of self-organization and direct action, it’s also because through this fight we want to contribute to an attempt to expand and intensify every form of resisting to the overall attack of the state against society within the project of the 2004 Olympics.
HANDS OFF THE SQUAT OF LELAS KARAYANNI 37
SOLIDARITY WITH THE TWO OCCUPIED STUDENTS’ HOUSES AND WITH ALL SQUATS
RESIST THE OLYMPIC GAMES OF PROFIT, CONTROL AND REPRESSION
NO PASARAN!
Comrades from the occupied grounds of L.K.37
L.K. 37 squat (Athens) under repression – No pasaran !
| L.K. 37 squat (Athens) under repression – NO PASARAN! |
Since the end of July, the squat of L.K. 37 is confronted with a repressive project that, not accidentally, is taking place in the middle of the summer and within a period of intensified state terrorism and guided “anti”terrorist hysteria cultivated by the media. The chancellors’ council of the university, commissioned instruments of state policies, decided to cut off the water supply in the occupied building, while they gave same orders for the electricity. The aim of this cheap action is to render intolerable our living in the squat, so that we will abandon it, besieged by thirst, and in case we refuse they threaten with a police operation of violent eviction. This is happening in the name of utilizing the building for the speculative business enterprise which is called “Olympic Games 2004”.
The building of L. Karayanni 37 was bequeathed to the University, the Polytechnic and the Beaux-Arts Schools of Athens, with the inviolable condition to make it house for homeless and poor students. Despite that, it was abandoned since 1960, until April of 1988, when it was occupied by a collective of young students, workers and jobless, who transformed it into a place for housing and self-organizing, in a city suffocating by the blackmail of survival and alienation. >From then on, more than an answer to the unbearable economic and social status that turns housing into merchandise, the squat became a collective self-managed space that works in the base of comradeship and solidarity, against the dominant model of property relations and isolated private lives in the apartment-cages, against the slogan of authority “everyone for himself”. Far from restricting ourselves in organizing life inside the squat, L.K. 37, through open assemblies, publications and social interventions became a workshop and base for radical criticism against the housing issue that thousands of people have to deal with, but also against all aspects of social and class oppression. As an antiauthoritarian and anti-institutional project it was found in the sight of state repression, in 1994 and 1995, resulting in cops’ invasions in the house and arrests of the squatters.
L. Karayanni squat may be the most recent but it’s not the only social space that is threatened by the storm of the Olympic Games; by this operation to upgrade capitalist exploitation and state control, and to construct a sultry land-planning and social environment that affects every aspect of our life. So, let’s talk about these Games that represent the new “national idea”.
– About this skilful state propaganda that presents them as a social property, in order to extract the consent of those who are only going to pay for and suffer them, while the only ones profiting will be the multinationals, contractors, advertising and construction corporations, state officials who will manage the subsidies, the traders of any useless consuming product and of course those who trade security equipment…
– About cementing everything, about the “huge construction works” and the foreign and local workers who continue to die there, in so-called “working accidents”, when the bridges collapse or due to insufficient security measures in the worksite of the olympic village, expendable people who are sacrificed in the name of spectacular capitalist achievement. About their colleagues go on strike after every such “accident” and then they get back to work again, under the same lousy working conditions, because nobody is allowed to demand, to strike and revolt, otherwise the “national goal” will fail.
– About transforming the city into a sterilized and dead place. About police “sweeping” operations against immigrants and the overall expulsion from the center of every spontaneous, uncontrolled element of life. About the permanent occupation police army in every central street and installing new surveillance cameras everywhere in the name of law and order.
– About the entire speculative market with all the appropriations and subsidies that will be absorbed by the public sector, in the name of covering the needs of 2004 Olympics. About the case of the Students’ House in Ilisia suburb that the rectors’ council demand all students should leave in order to use it for the journalists’ accommodation in the Olympics, and about the struggle of the students who have refused and occupied the premises for more than two months.
– About the “anti”terrorist crusade and emergency laws, the criminalization of every social and class struggle and the well-designed cleansing operation against any space of resistance, in the name of realizing the grand “national idea”.
We, the squatters of L.K. 37, having created for years such a space of resistance against the exploitation of our housing and other social needs, which is now under repression, we have every reason to defend it, categorically rejecting the vile blackmail and the speculative pursuit of the university authorities. This choice of struggle is not only about defending the squat itself as a living attempt of self-organization and direct action, it’s also because through this fight we want to contribute to an attempt to expand and intensify every form of resisting to the overall attack of the state against society within the project of the 2004 Olympics.
HANDS OFF THE SQUAT OF LELAS KARAYANNI 37
SOLIDARITY WITH THE TWO OCCUPIED STUDENTS’ HOUSES AND WITH ALL SQUATS
RESIST THE OLYMPIC GAMES OF PROFIT, CONTROL AND REPRESSION
NO PASARAN!
http://www.geocities.com/lelas_k
http://www.athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=23482
Lead by the energy of passions, the only one able to upset the old world and give back to the forces of life their creative freedom, we threw ourselves into this adventure. It is perceptible that our cause was not a philological school, neither an expressional renewal nor a modernism. It is a matter of a way of life that passes through many explorations and transient shapes and by itself it tends to be experienced only in temporariness. The nature of this project prescribes us to work collectively and to reveal ourselves only a little, to wait for many people and events that will come. We also have this other great source of strength: to wait nothing from a crowd of known activities, individuals and institutions.
http://www.geocities.com/lelas_k/gr/af_lk10x.htm
http://www.geocities.com/anar_gr/en/s_13.htm
http://www.geocities.com/lelas_k/gr/af_lk06x.htm
OUR NAME IS OUR SOUL, ANARCHY
Comrades from the occupied grounds of L.K.37
Some informations from Greece
Villa Varvara was closed some time ago. But there are now two squats in Athens
- Villa Amalia is squatted since 1993
- Lelas-Karagianni since 1988.
The squats have a different character – the first is a punk squat (with main focus on organizing partys and concerts – non commercial always) – the second is a squat from anarchists and has a more political character, what means that they are active – on demonstrations – posters (political) – and on other things.
In Thessaloniki there are two new squats
- Black cat and
- Punks attack.
They exist since 1999. At time there are no “BIG” problems in the present with the police but this can change every day.
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