Hundreds of students threw fire bombs at police in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki on Monday in a third day of riots triggered by the fatal shooting of a teenager by police and fuelled by rising economic hardship.
Dozens of people have been injured and scores of businesses destroyed in Athens and Thessaloniki during Greece’s worst rioting in decades.
The streets of Thessaloniki filled with tear gas on Monday as police chased some 300 left-wing protestors, detaining two youths.
More trouble is expected later in the day in Athens, where the Greek Communist Party has called a protest rally despite the arrest of two police officers for the boy’s killing.
Cars and pedestrians returned to Athens’ streets as locals went back to work, but the mood was tense.
In the main shopping street, Ermou, a police team began to assess the damage.
”It is quiet now but I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Yiorgos Ganatsikos, 52, a kiosk owner. ”I hope they don’t continue. Otherwise, God help us.”
With a 24-hour general strike scheduled for Wednesday against pension reforms and the government’s economic policies, many Greeks fear the demonstrations could last for days.
‘Devastating effect on government’
The shooting angered Greek youths, already resentful about a widening gap between rich and poor.
Violence at student rallies and fire-bomb attacks by anarchists are common, especially in Athens’ Exarchia district where the boy was shot.
”This comes at a very difficult moment for the government,” said Anthony Livanios of pollster Alpha Metrics.
”If this continues, it could have a devastating effect on the government and on stability.”
University professors started a three-day walkout on Monday and many school students stayed away from classes in protest.
”He could have been our brother. He could have been our fellow student, he could have been one of us,” said Vangelis Spiratos, 13.
Ignoring government appeals for calm, leftist demonstrators and anarchists staged running battles with police after the teenager’s killing late on Saturday, which shocked the nation.
Two police officers have been charged over the shooting — one with murder and the other as an accomplice.
A police statement said one officer fired three shots after their car was attacked by 30 youths in Exarchia.
A police official said the officer had described firing warning shots, but witnesses told TV he took aim at the boy, identified as 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
Holiday festivities on hold
Violence spread across the country, as far as Thessaloniki and the tourist islands of Crete and Corfu, leaving at least 34 injured. Police detained 20 in Athens.
On Sunday, protesters chanting ”Cops, Pigs, Murderers” rained petrol bombs down on rows of Athens riot police, while helicopters hovered overhead and tear gas choked the city.
Scores of shops and more than a dozen banks were torched in the capital’s busiest commercial districts ahead of the busy Christmas period. The mayor of Athens postponed the launch of holiday festivities.
Analysts say Greek Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis’s already shaky position has been further weakened by the demonstrations.
The head of the right-wing government, which is embroiled in a property scandal and trying to tackle the financial crisis, faces his first serious challenge from the opposition socialist party in five years, experts warn.
The clashes ”have given an impression of the state’s absence and tarnished Caramanlis’s reputation and his government”, said Georges Sefertzis, a columnist for the centre-left Ethnos newspaper.
Despite trying to defuse mounting discontent over Grigoropoulos’s death with a letter of condolence to the teenager’s family in which he promised to bring those responsible to justice, Caramanlis’s conservative government faces heavy criticism on a number of fronts.
‘Image of chaos’
A corruption scandal into a property deal with the influential Vatopedi Monastery saw the government’s majority reduced to just one seat in the 300-member Parliament last month after Caramanlis axed a dissident lawmaker.
The move marked the second time in two months that the ruling party had been reduced to 151 deputies, the bare minimum to form a government.
Experts say the scandal, implicating several government officials in the property deal in which the state lost millions of euros, has cost Caramanlis heavily.
The prime minister has also taken flak over a $36-billion support package extended to Greek banks against the financial crisis at a time when the banks do not seem to need the money, unlike thousands of Greek households facing rising food prices.
Against this backdrop, the socialist Pasok party, which was itself discredited after an 11-year period of rule, has surged ahead in popularity for the first time in five years.
Experts say Caramanlis’s problems stem back further than the current rioting over the police killing.
Due to the Vatopedi affair and the effects of the financial crisis, Caramanlis ”has lost the support of a proportion of the middle class for moral and economic reasons”, Sefertzis said.
Opposition newspaper Eleftherotypia said ”the scale of the young people’s anger reveals the enormous standoff facing Caramanlis’s government”.
”After the Vatopedi nightmare, the government faces another nightmare over the death of a 15-year-old and presents an image of chaos. Greece is like a rudderless ship,” the left-wing newspaper said in a comment piece. — AFP, Reuters