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Greek government defends handling of riots
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-11 11:36 Despite general public grumbling, the occasional Molotov cocktail and tear gas volley during a protest march is considered normal. Groups of youths march under the black-and-red anarchist flag, with the gasoline bombs in their backpacks.
But the unprecedented scale of destruction has horrified Greeks. The conservative daily, Eleftheros Typos, lamented that the very foundation of the country's democracy was at risk. "What we have been living these days is the revelation of how imperfect and deeply wounded is the democracy for which we brag about," it said in an editorial, which accused police of being incapable of dealing with the riots. The paper's front page bore a single quote from the ancient Greek rhetorician Isocrates: "Our democracy is self-destructing, because it abused the right to freedom and equality, because it taught people to consider impudence as a right, illegality as freedom, rudeness as equality and anarchy as happiness." After the near anarchy of Monday night, when the centers of several cities were essentially taken over by masked youths, the level of violence lessened. By Wednesday night, relative calm had returned to most areas. But the streets surrounding university campuses, particularly in Athens and Greece's second-largest city of Thessaloniki, still simmered with tension. Under Greek law, police are barred from entering universities, a regulation that gives the self-styled anarchists and rioters a safe base from which to prepare and launch their attacks and stockpile gasoline bombs. Papasotiriou, the political scientist, argued that until this sometimes zealously guarded right to "university asylum" is abolished, occasional outbursts of violence will continue. "The lynchpin to the rioters' tactics is the asylum provided by universities. If it were to be abolished, things would be very different," he said. |
