The Justice

Media Credit: Tahl Mayer Athens, Greece erupted in riots last December after the police killed teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Above, a street in Athens is blocked by a car that was flipped and set on fire during a riot.

Media Credit: Tahl Mayer Protestors, rioters, and bystanders look at the destruction caused by the riots in Athens.

Media Credit: Tahl Mayer A car that was flipped and torched during the riots lies burning on an Athens streetcorner.

There were smashed storefronts, burning roadblocks made of dumpsters and canisters of flash grenades. A crowd of 5,000 pushed through the streets of Athens, wrecking everything in its path. It was Dec. 6, 2008. After years of minor violence and rising tensions between Athenian citizens and the police, Athens was rioting, and I was in the midst of it.

I studied abroad in Athens, Greece during the fall semester. My apartment was located in central Athens, the Pangrati neighborhood, near the old Olympic Stadium.

When I heard that riots had broken out in Athens, I was shocked but somehow felt compelled to watch. On the first night everything shocked me. I saw shattered glass on every block and storefront after storefront smashed. Even the rock throwing was exciting-I guess that would be the word-to see. Greeks often use public protest and riots similar to the way that Americans use petitions and complaints, and what I saw confirmed it.

In 1973, the U.S.-backed military junta invaded the National Polytechnic University in Athens after students began to protest the regime. The invasion caused many student casualties. Since then, most Greek citizens have been suspicious of the Greek justice system. Furthermore, police and army forces are still forbidden to enter university or school campuses.

Police do not go in certain neighborhoods in Athens, such as Exarheia (adjacent to the Polytechnic) for fear of being attacked by mobs of students and anarchists. It is not uncommon for the police to be drawn into the neighborhood by false phone complaints only to be pelted by bottles or rocks.

The country had not seen rioting on this scale since 1985, when 15-year-old Michalis Kaltezas' murder by police sparked months of violent riots.

On Saturday, Dec. 6, 2008, the police shot and killed Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a teenager who came from an affluent family and attended a private school. The official report states that the police were provoked and that the boy and a mob of young Athenians threatened to attack them. Witnesses later revealed that he had not actually attacked the police and was not killed by a ricochet, as was previously presumed, but by one of the police officers' direct shots. After the boy was killed in Exarheia, the neighborhood became the epicenter of much of protesting and rioting.

The riots started Sunday morning after insurgents marched from Exarheia to the police headquarters. There, they were confronted by riot police, who tried to disperse them.

There were several reasons behind the riots. Above all, protesters felt that the economic situation in Greece has been getting increasingly worse, especially now that Greece has joined the European Union. Other factors include the recent rise in immigration to Greece from Africa and the Balkans-which might have increased police brutality-and the scarcity of social services available to many Greeks.

The rioters used Grigoropoulos' death as a way to express their already established anger toward the government and the police.

On Sunday night, I went down to the Polytechnic, where I saw crowds of the students behind the university gates throwing rocks and marble fragments at the police. In an effort to disperse the rioters, the police threw canisters of tear gas into the crowds.

The riots continued into the next day. This time, the rioters started near the Parliament and worked their way around Athens. I found myself marching with the crowds in several riots. In one, the riot police found themselves trying to control a crowd of over 5,000 rioters and push them away from Syntagma Square, where the Parliament and Presidential Palace are located. Eventually, the police abandoned the mob and stood guard outside the Parliament building.

Free of police interference, the rioters became more frenzied than I had yet seen. They burned huge roadblocks of dumpsters and shattered storefronts. I saw computers thrown into the fires like they were logs. The fumes from the plastic filled everyone's nostrils and made it hard to breathe. The rioters broke into all the banks in the area and lit them on fire. They flipped and torched cars, lit car dealerships and burned ATMs, aiming to ruin every marker of capitalism.

As my friends and I sprinted away, canisters of tear gas and flash grenades fell around us. After the smoke subsided, the crowd was scattered all over the neighborhood. As we walked back, the neighborhood looked like a scene from some kind of twisted movie. There were entire buildings completely burnt, roadblocks still smoldering and the skeletons of gutted cars on every abandoned street corner.

Still, many Athenians continued to go about their daily routines. I saw an older couple walking their dogs by the car skeletons. They looked up in surprise when a protester threw a rock through a glass window to a shop that would soon be on fire.

I doubt that I will ever again experience the kind of violence and uproar I saw this semester in Greece.

This experience in Greece made me realize that the rioters -- whether they were anarchists, socialists or just leftist students -- wanted to avert the impact of capitalism and change the way their police behave in the only way they know how.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools