Issue 101: Winter 2009

"(Un)hooding" a Rebellion: The December 2008 Events in Athens

By Rania Astrinaki on May 12, 2010
Abstract: This essay is a personally and politically implicated account of the December 2008 youth uprising in Greece, by an academic who, along with a group of her colleagues, participated actively in "street action" and followed closely the discourses articulated around it, struggling to make the events intelligible to themselves and debating the main issues that this rebellion raised: the absence of political claims and the production of violence against material symbols of the current regime of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the "events" while they were still resonant with the puzzlement, predicament, and ambivalence of the moment. It is also part of the effort by a section of Greek intellectuals of radical and leftist background to oppose the attempt by dominant political forces and social science to classify these events as a moment of disorder produced by small groups of troublemakers to be repressed and condemned to oblivion. It is part of the effort to provide a witness for them, instead, as a rebellion, as a story telling us something about Greek youth, politics, and society that must be listened to, understood, and interpreted, and as an "event" creating new potentialities in Greek political processes that remain to be revealed.

Excerpt

On Saturday, 6 December 2008, at nine o'clock in the evening, a fifteen-year-old boy named Alexis Grigiropoulos was shot dead by Greek police in a narrow street of Exarcheia, a densely inhabited and much-frequented quarter in the center of Athens. Exarcheia is also a highly politicized and tightly policed quarter, considered the central territory of the "anti-authoritarians," groups of anarchists who cover their heads and faces with hoods as they carry out small-scale hit-and-run attacks against police and other state and capitalist symbols.

Before the government and TV news had the time to process the event, SMS, mobile phone, and Internet communications flashed across Exarcheia, Athens, and Greece, while people threw flowerpots from the balconies at the police summoned to impose order. Within an hour, more than a thousand youths, many of them "hooded," had gathered at the Polytechnic School near Exarcheia, symbolic center of resistance since 17 November 1973, when the historical rebellion against the military dictatorship was violently crushed there. Shouting antipolice slogans, many attacked police officers with stones and petrol bombs, made barricades with burning garbage cans and cars, took over three universities in the center of Athens, and marched in protest in the central streets, breaking into and burning banks and big commercial firms. Similar eruptions occurred simultaneously in other Greek cities as well. By midnight, private TV channels were transmitting an unreal spectacle of cities in flames.

For the right-wing New Democracy (ND) governing party, the murder was deemed an arbitrary act by an individual policeman. For the leading opposition socialist party (PASOK), it was proof of ND's failure in running the state. To political forces on the Left and to us older radicals, the murder objectified the process of (re)building an authoritarian state (launched in the wake of the 2004 Olympics and Greece's international engagements in the "war against terror") that endangers the people and their rights. Recurring police abuse carried out with impunity signals institutionalized hostility to citizens and immigrants alike. Instead of generating political dialogue, reactions and protests against government policies are dealt with as problems of order; protesters are indiscrimi- nately teargassed during demonstrations. Young people, political activists, immigrants, Gypsies, and other categories of population are viewed as suspect criminals, often arrested, beaten up, even shot at by the police for no reason.

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