Lessons from Greece: It’s Right to Rebel

by Zaps
Basics Issue #12 (Jan/Feb 2009)

And the riot be the rhyme of the unheard
– Rage Against the Machine

For nearly all of December of last year, and continuing into 2009, Greece has been experiencing an event that happens far too infrequently in our world: a youth-sparked rebellion that has led to a revolutionary upsurge gripping the entire country.


The fuse for the rebellion was lit when Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old-student, was killed in cold blood by police in the Greek capital, Athens, on December 6th, 2008. Alexandros had been hanging out with friends in the Exarcheia district when a verbal confrontation started with police. In a flash, one of the cops went pig and pulled out his gun and fired, killing Alexandros.

Exarcheia is well known as a hang-out for leftists, artists, and radical-minded people, and within minutes of the shooting, people from the neighbourhood were pouring in the streets. With news quickly spreading by text-messages, that night thousands gathered and began confronting and fighting the police. People also struck out at banks and other symbols of the system.

The rebellion was clearly fed by deeply-felt resentment and rage against the brutal character of Greek police – demonstrated by the fact that word of the killing sparked demonstrations and rioting in other major Greek cities. On December 7th and 8th, large demonstrations were organized in Athens, popularly attended by middle, secondary school, and university students who had walked out of classes to protest the killing. These protests led to large-scale street-fighting with the police, the cops attacking with rubber bullets and tear gas and the demonstrators responding with Molotov cocktails, rocks, and anything else they could get their hands on.

December in Greece continued with a dizzying array of protests and riots – quickly creating a movement that inspired radicals around the world – especially in Europe. Solidarity demonstrations were held in most other European countries. This outpouring of internationalism was reflected in slogans taken up by Greek rebels, such as “Greece - France : Insurrection Everywhere.”

Just as with other police terrorism provoked rebellions, like the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, the French rebellion of 2005, or the rebellions in Montreal North in August 2008 or Oakland this January 2009, the events in Greece show the potential for upheaval that is ever-present in what on the surface appear to be stable societies. The fact remains that the deep discontent people feel under this system cannot always be contained by official channels like elections. The police brutality and disrespect, the shitty jobs, the racism, the stress of studying non-stop for a career that may or may not be there for you when you graduate... sometimes this smoulders under the surface, and sometimes it explodes.

The Bloody Birth of Kosovo: How the United Nations Created One of the World’s Leading Narcotics and Terrorist States

by Steve da Silva

With the exception of the U.S., there is no country in the world today whose connections to the international drug trade and international terrorism is more clearly documented than Kosovo. Type into google.com “heroin”, “terrorism”, and “K.L.A.” (Kosovo Liberation Army) and you get 18,000 web hits that detail the links of the corrupt Kosovar political elite to international drug trade, human trafficking, terrorism and al-Qaida – all of these illicit activities in a region that hosts a massive 1000-acre U.S. military base.

Yet, when the mafia-state of Kosovo and its Prime Minister Hashim Thaci declared independence from Serbia on February 17, countries like America, France, Britain, and Germany rushed to recognize Kosovo’s independence.

The movement towards Kosovo’s independence began back in the 1990s when the U.S., Canada, and the Europe were supporting a number of right-wing military organizations throughout Yugoslavia in order to break up the socialist federation and create a number of smaller capitalist states that the Americans and their allies could easily dominate. The formula was simple: to smash socialism, divide and conquer the multinational peoples of Yugoslavia.

The result of foreign destabilization in Yugoslavia resulted in a decade of “civil wars” and ethnic cleansing between Croatians and Serbians, Bosnians and Serbians, and Kosovar Albanians and Serbians.

In order to create many little nation-states out of the large multinational Socialist Yugoslavia, the Americans and Germans especically funded right-wing nationalist, religious, and criminal organizations in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in order to drive Serbians out of the regions that they lived in. Meanwhile, to draw attention away from the bloodshed that the West was responsible for, everything was blamed on the Serbians and their elected leader Slobodan Milosevic. This is not to say that casualties and war crimes were not committed by people on all sides; however, the pertinent questions to ask are: ‘Who started these wars?’ and ‘Who stood to gain the most from them?’.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (of which current Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was once a commander of) was created in the 1990s to violently separate Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Important to note is how KLA fighters were shipped in from all around the world to fight for Kosovo’s liberation – just as the Americans did in Afghanistan with the mujahadin fighters (which became the Taliban). Not surprisingly, hundreds of these same mujahadin fighters from Afghanistan, alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, were sent to Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s to dismantle socialist Yugoslavia. These fighters routinely attacked and raped Serbian civilians, which led to a spiral of retributive violence on all sides, but mostly against Serbians.

It is well documented that Osama bin Laden helped actually helped train some of these KLA fighters, which makes perfect sense: Afghanistan’s warlords produced the heroin whiled Kosovo’s mafias distributed it.

And when the KLA forces were almost completely wiped out in 1998 the response of the West was to intervene to beat back the Yugoslav army and punish the Serbian people. NATO bombed Serbia and regions of Kosovo for 78 days straight. Serbia was bombed back into the stone, with the complete destruction of Serbia’s civilian infrastructure, including bridges, hospitals, schools, and factories. Thousands of cluster bombs were laid down to terrorize the civilian population for years to come, as Israel did in 2006 in Lebanon. The Canadian Air Forces dropped 10% of all of NATO bombs in the aerial war.

The consequence in each of the country’s that broke away from the formerly socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s has been right-wing economic policies that has led to the mass privatization of the public wealth in those societies, often by Western companies. The Balkan wars made the rich richer and poor poorer.

The fact that Western countries rushed to recogize the independence of a state whose participation in the international heroine trade and the international terrorism shows that it is the Western countries themselves that are the biggest supporters of drugs and terrorism. Western countries talk about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror out of one side of their mouths; but they fund and support the drug trade and terrorism while the Western public is not looking.

Furthermore, what makes the independence of Kosovo so dangerous in today’s world is the geographical importance of the Balkan region to the superpowers. Russia, who has been staunchly opposed to the independence of Kosovo, has now declared that it is going to support the independence movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Georgia is currently governed by an extremely corrupt pro-American governemnt. So we see how imperialist governments, like the U.S. or Russia, stir-up “independence” movements through terrorist and criminal organizations.

All the while, legitimate and massively popular peoples’ liberation movements from Palestine to Philippines, from Six Nations to Kurdistan, are demonized as terrorist and extremist, but yet they struggle on unrecognized…




From Left to Right: Kosovo’s Mafioso Prime Minister Hashim Thaci with France’s Bernard Kouchner, U.K.’s Sir Michael Jackson,
Former KLA Commander Agim Ceku,
and U.S. General Wesley Clarke

French Youth Continue Uprising Against Police Brutality, Poverty

On the first anniversary of the riots which spread across Europe against the police brutality, racism and poverty faced by African and Arab immigrants, French youth have again brought these issues to the forefront.

On October 27th, French youth from poor suburbs of France rioted against the state oppression which last year claimed the life of two teenagers and set off country wide uprisings against racism, chronic unemployment and poverty faced by African and Arab immigrants in France. On October 27, 2005 two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore were electrocuted after climbing into an electrical sub-station in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Friends and locals say that this was an attempt to hide from police.

Just two days earlier, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy says that a Paris suburb mostly comprised of immigrants of African and Arab descent says that crime-ridden neighbourhoods should be "cleaned with a power hose".

Responding to this continued violence and oppression, youth from across working class neighbourhoods in France took to the streets to express their unwillingness to live under these conditions. In the two week urban uprising that ensued, more than 10,000 cars were set ablaze and 300 buildings firebombed.

The uprisings spread across France and even into Belgium
and Germany, vividly connecting the common issues faced by immigrants of various nations living in Europe. These uprisings were successful in bringing the world’s attention to the condition of immigrant people in Europe and in providing an important lesson to the emerging movements for immigrant rights which have sprung up all over Europe and North America.

Not surprisingly, the French governments’ pledge to address the core issues have largely been empty words and little has changed for working people. Nevertheless, their example and that of the Latino movement in the United States which organized a work, school, buying stoppage and mass demonstration last year in the United States demonstrates that the rights of working people can only be upheld by the people militantly asserting themselves.

As we head into a recession, Harper’s government is likely to try and increase its targeting of immigrant workers in order to distract and divide working people as a whole. People need to unite in order to prevent this from happening, and assert that the right of all working people to jobs, education and inclusion is non-negotiable!