In Athens, middle-class rioters are buying rocks. This chaos isn't over

IndianaGreen

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Dec-13-08 11:27 PM
Original message

In Athens, middle-class rioters are buying rocks. This chaos isn't over

In Athens, middle-class rioters are buying rocks. This chaos isn't over

Helena Smith has reported from Greece for two decades, but had never seen anything like the riots that swept the country last week. Here she tries to make sense of an eruption of anger

Helena Smith

The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008

How much tear gas can a nation take? How many stones can it collect? To ask such questions of an EU member state that is supposed to be as sophisticated as it is modern might seem far-fetched, even silly.

To ask them four years after that country basked in the glory of staging one of the most successful Olympic Games might be considered absurd. But yesterday, as Greece entered a second week of pitched battles between rock-throwing protesters and riot police - with security forces turning to Israel and Germany to replenish depleted reserves of toxic gases to contain the angry crowds - such questions did not seem foolish. Or, I'm sad to say, remotely absurd.

Athens is in a mess and it's not just the rubble or burned-out buildings or charred cars and firebombed rubbish bins and smashed pavements that now stand as testimony to unrest not seen since the collapse of military rule in 1974. Twenty-two years after I moved to Greece I have looked into eyes full of anger and despair. At night, as marauding mobs of Molotov-cocktail wielding youths have run through the city's ancient streets, I have closed the shutters of the windows to my home. My friends have done the same.

Those of us who live here - who have seen how frayed the fabric of public order can become - now know, in no uncertain terms, that the orgy of violence that has gripped this beautiful land masks a deeper malaise. It is a sickness that starts not so much at the top but at the bottom of Greek society, in the ranks of its troubled youth. For many these are a lost generation, raised in an education system that is undeniably shambolic and hit by whopping levels of unemployment (70 per cent among the 18-25s) in a country where joblessness this month jumped to 7.4 per cent. If they can find work remuneration rarely rises above �700 (this is, after all, the self-styled �700 generation), never mind the number of qualifications it took to get the job. Often polyglot PhD holders will be serving tourists at tables in resorts. One in five Greeks lives beneath the poverty line. Exposed to the ills of Greek society as never before, they have also become increasingly frustrated witnesses of allegations of corruption implicating senior conservative government officials and a series of scandals that have so far cost four ministers their jobs.

With these grievances in mind, young people (who would not normally see themselves as revolutionaries and are a far-cry from the 'extremists' Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis says are behind the disturbances) have begun stockpiling stones, rocks and crushed marble slabs from Salonika in the north to the resort islands of Corfu and Crete in the south.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/14/greece-riots-youth-poverty-comment