Athens: Squat evacuation, the “gentle” arm of the Left’s repression

We can see clearly how SYRIZA is managing power. That’s why we ought to prepare ourselves for the next stages of this repressive offense.

[Originally published by Athens Indymedia.]

There is an undeniable fact. Counting the evacuated squats during the last few days in Exarcheia by police operations, the total number of evacuated squats in all of Greece during the last three years of Siriza’s administration far surpasses those evacuated by the governments of Nea Demokratia and Pasok during many past terms. Still, this kind of effective repressive policy maintains the mantle of “tolerance”, even that of “impunity”. This is convenient for both SYRIZA who maintains a leftist foreground and the right wing, which depends on the doctrine of “law and order”. Yet, above all, this is convenient for the state. The state continues to neatly intervene, while making it seem like it is not so.The social-democratic repression has always been thus way. We need just remember what elected government violated the academic asylum in 1995 with 520 arrests, or which government committed the atrocitious arrests of the “17 of November” .Exarcheia is the next target, the rest of the squats everywhere are the next target and even organizations and individual fighters.The evacuation of these last five squats in Exarcheia comes at a time when two facts converge. On the one hand the immigrant problem has left the spotlight and as a result the possibility of social outcries (eg immigrants in syntagma square) are reduced, on the other hand exarcheia is in the eye of the storm. This is due to the very real crisis the neighborhood is experiencing and also due to it being continuously targeted by the governmental forces.But we should not fool ourselves. Aside from the excuses the state uses to attack, the target remains the same, to silence every voice of resistance inside and outside Exarcheia or Athens. Evidently, squats are being threatened in other cities like Thesaloniki. At the same time, in the sidelines, the immigrants’ hardships continue with people still being stacked atop each other in concentration camps while others roam about -paperless- in the metropolitan ghetto, part of which is also Exarcheia. The creation of disheartening conditions is what the state offers to the social base of locals and immigrants. This functions as the basis of illegal capitalism, meaning drug cartels, trafficking rings, and antisocial illicitness.Aside from the main governmental narrative of “crime hubs”, we chose to remember the most prominent narrative of the state. That which talks of a welfare state that ensures that people who have reached here evading either starvation and/or war do not live like rodents.

That second narrative is the one anarchists were never convinced of. The answer on behalf of a large part of the movement to the emergence of the immigration crisis was to house thousands of desperate people who would otherwise be dying in the city parks, utilizing self organization and zero resources. That is the answer that should never be ignored when talking about exarcheia today and the so-called “crime hub”.

We can see clearly how SYRIZA is managing power. That’s why we ought to prepare ourselves for the next stages of this repressive offense. Anarchist struggle encompasses this front as well. As it also encompasses the front of solidarity for our working class brothers and sisters uprooted from their home, now living imprisoned either behind barbed wire or in the metropolitan ghetto. It also contains the fight against illegal capitalism and the dystopic conditions it produces at local level.We have to do all that is necessary in order to chop off the “gentle hand” of the left government’s repression.

Anarchist Federation, Athens district, May 6, 2019

Anarchist Federation: Squat evacuation, the “gentle” arm of the Left’s repression