It began as a fiesta, a mass march in the sun against
the deflationary programme the Greek people are being
told can alone save their country. At 10 on Wednesday
morning, Klathmonos Square in Athens was filling with
protesters. A union official was making an interminable
speech (Greeks never use one word when 300 will do),
and music was blaring out of vans - those Chilean-style
revolutionary songs without which no demo is complete:
"The people, united, will never be defeated." Not
today, anyway.
People had said there would be no violence - or at
least if there was, it would be "ritual" violence: a
broken window here, a wrecked ATM there. One Greek
journalist had told me the protests so far had been
subdued - "equivalent to what would normally happen
here if the electricity board sacked a few people". He
said the public were resigned to the economic hardships
to come - salaries of state employees cut by 25%,
pensions to fall by 15%, unemployment likely to rise to
18% - and that they recognised the only alternative was
national bankruptcy; not just junk bonds but a junk
country.
A few hours later, three bank workers, one a woman who
was four months pregnant, lay dead in a burnedout bank
on Stadiou Avenue, the victims of anarchist firebombs.
Ritual violence this was not, and by Wednesday evening
Athens feels drained and lifeless. "This will make
people stop and think," teacher Anna Tsiokou tells me,
as we stand beside the police cordon on the edge of the
area where the firebombing had occurred. "The
demonstrations will have to stop for the moment. We
have legitimate grievances, but the anarchists are
using the crisis for their own ends."
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