We Spent Last Night Watching Greek Antifascists Clash with the Police

Last night, more than 5,000 people stormed the streets in Keratsini, a working class neighborhood in western Athens. They were there to protest against the first political homicide in Greece since the early 1990s: the murder of Pavlos Fyssas—a 34-year-old antifa activist and rapper, known locally as Killah P—who was stabbed twice on Tuesday evening, reportedly by 45-year-old suspected Golden Dawn member.

According to police and news reports, a group of at least 20 far-right thugs in military uniforms and Golden Dawn T-shirts watched and ambushed the rapper and six of his friends as they left a local coffee shop.

George's wife claims that the suspect was at home while the game was on and only headed out after receiving a phone call. It also appears that, right after plunging the knife into Pavlos—twice into his stomach and once into his chest—the suspect called his wife and instructed her to get rid of all the Golden Dawn paraphernalia he had lying around at home.

A group of neo-Nazis murdering an innocent man in cold blood is clearly an abhorrent act worthy of a public response. But what really aggravated the protesters that, according to eye-witnesses and CCTV footage from a shop in the area, police were present at the time of the murder and didn't even try to intervene.

"Pavlos was alive for 20 minutes and managed to point out his murderer to the policemen, who arrived once the thugs had fled. An ambulance arrived 50 minutes later, when it was already too late," said a witness.

Following the murder, the police started searching Golden Dawn offices throughout Athens. At the same time, the Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias cancelled his trip to Rome and called on parliament to reform the penal code and redefine what entials a criminal organization, aiming to delegitimize Golden Dawn's activity.

In the largest social mobilization in the country this year, students, lefties, anarchists, and antifascists—as well as a load of people who just don't think that stabbing people on the streets is an acceptable thing to do—from 18 cities all over Greece took to the streets to protest, with many of those marches resulting in clashes with police.

Photographer Vassilis Mathioudakis and I arrived at the Athens demonstration at around 7 PM, while people were still gathering. The police were showing scant regard for protest etiquette; right after the protest started, they too started beating the shit out of the assembled mass of demonstrators, with riot cops laying into people all around us. Before long, a policeman fired a tear gas canister straight into the crowd, hitting one unfortunate young man in the face. The guy lost his eye.

A little later, residents of the neighboring working-class district of Perama—where nine members of the Communist Party (KKE) were attacked a few days ago—appeared en masse, some of them under the KKE's banners. This was the first time that the KKE had demonstrated with other leftist marchers since the 2011 national strike protests, which saw clashes between members of PAME (the Communist Party's trade unionists) and anarchists, resulting in one death.

I approached one of the teenagers to ask why he'd felt he should come out to protest. "This is our neighborhood and we're not gonna accept fascist motherfuckers running it," he told me. He and his friends are graffiti artists involved in the local hip-hop scene, and told me they had been fans of Killah P.

Despite all the violence from the cops, the marchers eventually managed to gather and head off. The feeling among protestors was ambiguous: on the one hand, people seemed to realize that a bunch of lefties having a ruck with the cops would be exactly what the Golden Dawn wanted; on the other, some were already pissed off and felt that a clash with the cops might be just the right thing for the occasion. Inevitably, some people succumbed to their rage and started chucking stones when the demo marched past a police station.

For their part, the police were pretty brutal. In the middle of the march, riot policemen showed up from the surrounding streets and began firing tear gas at the crowd, splitting it into two parts and pushing the largest group back to its starting point. I saw cops on motorbikes charging into the crowd, batons flailing, smacking people as they passed.

The local elderly men were beaten while trying to help the protesters, and 40 people were arrested in the terrace of a block of flats as hundreds were fleeing the scene in whatever direction seemed the least populated by uniformed men. As the cops and protesters brawled, people in plain clothes were throwing stones at the lefties from behind the police line, unhindered by the police. People at the scene suspected that the guys in plain clothes were Golden Dawn supporters, though this hasn't been confirmed.

According to the police, 130 people were detained after the clashes in Athens, with 34 arrests made and 31 people ending up in a nearby hospital.

Chrysanthos Lazaridis, an advisor to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, appeared live on television yesterday to state that political violence comes from many directions, including the rhetoric of the main left-wing opposition party, SYRIZA. Protesters I spoke with weren't too happy with this analysis, given that they were out demonstrating against a politicized murder when the blood of a left-wing activist had barely dried.

This morning, thousands attended Pavlos Fyssas' funeral in the Schistos cemetery. While the young man was being buried, people chanted, "Death to fascism," and, "one in the coffin, thousands still in the fight"—slogans commonly used during anti-fascist protests. Golden Dawn, which denies any responsibility for the crime, was planning on staging a rally tonight at the location of the murder but cancelled this morning.

After a period of relative calm in Europe's most riotous country, it looks like Greece is hurtling toward another bout of instability and tension. And with public sector strikes organized for next week, we probably won't have to wait too long to see it.

Follow Matthaios on Twitter: @tsimitakis

Previously:

A Golden Dawn Member Murdered an Antifascist Rapper in Athens Last Night

More Greek fascists:

Immigrants Are Being Stabbed to Death on the Streets of Athens

Are Golden Dawn Are Turning to Terrorism to Get Their Message Across?

Greek Neo-Nazi Beach Party!