Lauded for its swift action to contain the pandemic – with 2,700 confirmed cases and 150 deaths as of May 12 – the Greek government under the conservative New Democracy party began lifting its lockdown on May 4, with one eye on the coming tourist season and its importance to an economy struggling to turn the corner from years of grinding austerity.
After weeks of quarantine, during which permission was required to run the most basic errands such as visiting the bank or buying groceries, young Greeks moved quickly to reclaim public spaces central to the social and political life of the country.
“This is a social release, a break-out after long weeks of self-isolation,” said Alkistis, a 26 year-old speech therapist among those drinking on St George’s Square.
Her Kenyan-Greek friend, Kevin, agreed: “For six weeks I followed the lockdown rules to the letter, and now we’re here hugging friends, sharing beer bottles, and all the anti-virus efforts have been forgotten. We’ve reached the I-don’t-give-a-shit stage.”
But by the early hours of Saturday, 37 people had been detained and five eventually arrested in what authorities said had been an ambush on police lured to the scene by a false report of a stabbing. Officers made “limited use of teargas,” they said, only after a patrol car was attacked.
The general secretary of the police’s Attica Special Guards Union, Stratos Mavroidakos, said those involved were trying to subvert public squares and export Exarcheia’s revolutionary climate to other parts of the capital. Those arrested were well-known anarchists, he said.
“They have caused trouble in the past,” he said. “It’s not like some carefree local went to the area and was detained.”
The story was different on social media, where witnesses spoke of broken teeth, officers spitting in a woman’s face and the detained being bundled off, five to a patrol car, in clear violation of social distancing rules. Fragments of mobile phone video showed motorbike-riding police sweeping through the square and down surrounding streets for a long period after the initial raid, firing teargas and detaining fleeing groups of people.
Public Order Minister Mihalis Chrysochoidis said Greece’s Ombudsman was looking into allegations of police violence. One person detained said he had been stopped by police simply after coming down from his apartment to the street in his pyjamas to see what was going on.
“The police have no reason to be in the squares,” Chrysochoidis said, striking a more conciliatory tone.
St George Square was not the first, however. Two days earlier, police fired teargas at a crowd of drinkers gathered on a square that has long been a meeting point for politicised youths from across the capital’s northeastern suburbs.
Critics of the strategy said it was counter-productive.
“It’s pretty clear that sending the riot police to attack small groups of youngsters will create the conditions for hundreds to protest, carrying a multiplied risk of infection,” said Sotiris Roussos, associate professor of international relations at the University of the Peloponnese in the city of Tripoli to the southwest of Athens.
“So why does the government continue to entrust them with applying health restrictions? It’s a form of health discipline employing state violence or the threat of it to exert social control.”
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In Pandemic-Era Greece, Fighting for Control of the Square - Balkan Insight
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