The recent riots in Athens reveal the underlying malaise of Greek society, writes Bronis Polychroniou* The killing on the night of 6 December of a 15-year-old schoolboy by an armed special patrol officer on duty in Exarchia, the bohemian district of downtown Athens and a home base to various self-styled anarchist groups, is simply the spark that produced the unprecedented student mobilisation and riots that immediately followed and engulfed part of Athens and other Greek cities in flames throughout, leaving Greek's rather conservative society in a state of shock and the political establishment in complete disarray. What really lies behind the demonstrations is the deep-seated frustration on the part of the nation's youth over a social system structured in a way that caters almost exclusively to the interests of the rich and powerful, unrestrained anguish over the direction of the country in the hands of a corrupt and incompetent government (the latest government scandal involves senior ministers illegally swapping public land with a powerful monastery on Mount Athos and pocketing the proceeds) and whose social agenda consists of dismantling public education and social services and privatising major and even profitable public enterprises in the name of neoliberal market efficiency. People suffer from fears about the future which the politicians are not addressing. The media and politicians blame hooliganism, but this is only a small part of the problem. For starters, Greece has the highest youth unemployment rate in the European Union, hovering between 28-29 per cent, with its young people being dependent on their parents well past their adolescent years. To be sure, it is common in Greece, given the state of the job market and the wage structure (700 euro is considered to be the average monthly salary for the new generation of the labour force), for young people to live at home with their parents even though they are in their late 20s, 30s or even 40s. So much for one's self-esteem living in a society that carries to great lengths the illusion that it is a developed Western European society. The high unemployment youth rate occurs against the background of a family culture which views education as a means of social and economic mobility. Parents are more than willing to make great financial sacrifices in order to help their sons and daughters gain a competitive edge in the job market. The provision of private educational services in Greece is a booming business. In the meantime, the system of public education is in ruins and it is through the problems of the educational system that generation after generation of students are initiated into political activism, which frequently involves converting the school and the university campus into occupied territories for symbolic resistance against the system. Further, Greece has a grim legacy of state administrative authoritarianism and police brutality which not only haven't been eradicated but, on the contrary, are recreated, manifested and reconstituted whenever the social conditions are unfavourable to the imposition of unpopular economic and social policies. Civil servants in all agencies, lacking training and professional skills, often display arrogance and a form of power that both alienates and angers the citizenry. This is especially the case with the police force which often resorts to brute force against students, immigrants and various marginalised elements in Greek society. In the eyes of the youth, the police are regarded as the personification of structural state violence even if in cold technocratic terms the Greek police officers tend to be, more than anything else, untrained, unskilled, and underpaid public officers, moonlighting in order to make ends meet, and are of course, like most civil servants in Greece, devoid of a sense of a duty towards the rights of citizens. In this surrealistic social and cultural environment, provoking the police is a game of sorts for many of the self- styled anarchists who are largely responsible for the fires and the destruction of property that follows whenever public demonstrations take place. Neofascist groups, which often act as a phalanx of the riot police in clashes with leftist groups, also occupy a central if shadowy role in the dramas that unfold in the streets of Athens, making the capital resemble at times a civil war zone. The ongoing student demonstrations and the riots in Greece that have captured the public imagination around the world reflect the country's deep political, social, economic and cultural crisis. It is the consequence of a deformed social system and the after-effects of a corrupt and incompetent group of politicians who rose to power for their own personal gains and at the expense of the public interest. It is also a story not unique to Greece, so to paraphrase the Economist's catch phrase about Greece's mayhem, "beware of youths bearing petrol bombs." * The writer is a Greek academic, author and columnist.
