Greece erupts into flames during “mother of all strikes”

by Jérôme E. Roos on October 20, 2011

Athens billows in smoke and teargas once more as hundreds of thousands take to the streets during some of the largest protests in modern Greek history.

Photograph: Milos Bicanski

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets all over Greece yesterday in the first day of a truly massive 48-hour general strike. Dubbed “the mother of all strikes” by the leading daily Ta Nea, it is the single biggest walkout since the beginning of the crisis almost two years ago.

As Greek Parliament debated a crucial vote on the EU/ECB/IMF-imposed austerity and reform package (it is due to complete the vote on Thursday), more than 200.000 people assembled at Syntagma Square, with dramatic scuffles breaking out between riot police and a small group of protesters.

Photograph: Yannis Behrakis

The Guardian ran a truly dramatic report today:

Greece‘s great economic crisis turned into a massive showdown between the little man on the street and lawmakers in Athens’s 300-seat parliament when tens of thousands of protesters marched on parliament in a day marked by fury, defiance and ultimately violence.

A demonstration that will be remembered as one of the biggest in modern times – with around 100,000 Greeks taking to the streets ahead of a crucial vote on stinging austerity – ended in ferocious street fighting on Wednesday after riot police fired teargas into the crowd and youths responded with a volley of rocks and petrol bombs. A heavy security operation by a government that appears increasingly under siege did little to stop protesters pushing their way up to the great marble steps of the parliament building itself.

By nightfall, as the two main squares of Syntagma and Monastiraki went up in flames – black smoke billowing into the sky, the boom of stun grenades rending the air as police chased black-clad protesters past archaeological sites – there was a sense that two years into this “war”, the battle lines had been finally drawn.

Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis

Earlier during the day, the Greek journalist Theodora Oikonomides shared a Tweet that neatly indicated the extreme tension on the streets of Athens: “when I see the behaviour of the riot police,” she wrote, “I feel the same fear I felt facing the military police in Congo.”

Helena Smith of the Guardian, meanwhile, shared the following eyewitness account:

It’s difficult to estimate how many Greeks have responded to union calls to participate in the strike but what can safely be said is that the anti-austerity protests now taking place in Athens have to be among the biggest demonstrations seen in the capital for decades.

There is a ritual to Greek demonstrations: they start out peaceful before turning increasingly ugly. Back from the barricades, I can safely report that protesters in Syntagma Square, Greece’s rallying point par excellence, were spoiling for a fight long before the mood was due to shift gear. Thousands gathered alongside the steel fences erected by police to keep protestors at a safe distance from the parliament.

Many came equipped with gas masks and swimming goggles – de rigueur in a city where riot police have become increasingly tear gas trigger happy – and many had backpacks filled with rocks which they openly said they intended to throw at police ahead of the vote in parliament on new belt-tightening measures.

Young, old, hip, staid, they represented a cross-section of Greek society, all bonded by a burning rage after 18 months of relentless tax increases, benefit losses, wage and pension cuts.

Photograph: Panagiotis Tzamaros

One man, Giorgos Kamkeris, a municipal employee, was quoted as saying that “the men and women whom we elected to power were not given a mandate to reduce us to poverty. This is about people power. It is about the masses persuading politicians to think again. Our hope is that when they come to vote on these very unfair measures, they will be too scared to endorse the package knowing that we are here outside.”

See more photos of the protest here and here.

via roarmag.org