ESF final demonstration

Charly's universal flag

The clown army

On Saturday afternoon, the final demonstration of the 4th ESF took place in the centre of Athens. I was almost asleep when Marc (Maes) entered the tramway and woke me up. I was on the wrong tram line and he did not know where to go. Somehow, switching from trams to metros, we found our way to the meeting place of the demonstrators… but we were already half an hour late and we did not see any sign of demonstration. We looked around for half an hour (and were mislead by policemen twice; I think they gave us wrong indications on purpose) when, realizing we were heading to the opposite direction of the demo, we decided to take the metro again and to stop at the station where the rally would finish. It was then 16:00h and the demo had kicked off at 15:00h… We then tried to find Thierry (Kesteloot) in the mass of demonstrators since he was carrying the S2B banner. We never found him.

The demo was composed of the various groups which participated to the ESF, from World Women Marches feminists to Middle East (Muslim?) activists against the wars in Iraq, Palestine and the threats in Iran. You could also see some of the famous rainbow-coloured peace flags, flags of Maoist Kurds, all kinds of Greek and European leftist parties, no vox, Euromarches, a few Attac people, Amnesty and its campaign for “torture free skies”, unionists from Belgium (a group of 133 people from the Christian trade union ACV-CSC), etc. Friends from Oikologi Prasinoi (the Greek green party) and the French Rouge & Vert/Alter Ekolo were among the few representatives of the green movement in the rally.

Since I arrived in the demo on Victoria Park, I felt the atmosphere was somehow different from all the other demos I had participated in. Comparing to the usual drumming and shouting of Northern European demos, people today were relatively silent and so quiet… something was not right… a few hours later I realised that these were in fact the signs of tension.

We knew something was happening when we crossed a dense black smoke from burning tyres and then when our eyes started to prickle because of tear gases. Black dressed youngsters appeared from everywhere to throw Molotov cocktails towards the police, to break banks, stores and cars and a confrontation was going on in front of the America embassy, heavily protected by two rows of policemen.

It were obviously “black block” guys who had infiltrated the demonstration to create turmoil. They also started to confront with other demonstrators, especially the Italians standing at the front of the demo who tried to calm them down. Black blocks began to throw objects into the crowd and aggress people verbally and physically. But the demonstrators kept their calm and stood united… and the police seemed only to react by throwing tear gases, which was surprising given the proportion that the events were taking (I would not be surprised if these guys were actually supported by the police, with the objective to decredibilise the whole movement... we all share that kind of uneasiness since Genoa). A cameraman who had filmed the black blocks saw his camera violently smashed down. Terror was growing in the demo, as everybody feared that this could degenerate in a bigger confrontation they could not escape, and some people (including me) started to panic when they saw a new group of “casseurs” arriving. After taking refuge from the confrontations and tear gases in a park, Marc and I decided to go back into the streets as demonstrators seemed determined to march until the end of the rally.

A few minutes later, the images of property destruction and police confrontation had already travelled around the world (when I came back to my hotel room, I saw a full coverage on CNN and Greek TV stations). This is really disappointing because now, as usual, it will be the only image that the general public will remember from this ESF: ANTI. TV channels again talked about the "anti-globalisation” movement, when a lot of us had struggled to change this image into the more positive one of “alter-globalisation”.

I don’t know really who these black blocks are. People say they are anarchists but I doubt they are as, from what I know of anarchism, non-violence is really a key principle (at least in its modern forms). What could be is that they are using the anarchist ideology as a “political legitimisation” or as a “political excuse” while in fact their only agenda is negative and violent. I personally think they are nothing but a group of youngsters who get a huge kick of adrenaline from breaking symbols of capitalism and authority. I find it a very selfish behaviour in the end. I suspect that some of them are actually fascists or people with no political education. They just take advantage of massive mobilisations to fight with the police, break banks and then hide in the crowd to avoid being caught.

Luckily there were also A LOT of much more relaxed and peaceful forms of expression during the Athens demonstration, my personal favourite being the Clown Army which was present with 6 or 7 people but triggered a lot of photo shoots!

Without the S2B banner, I carried my own personal universal multi-slogan flag (see picture: Attac people were laughing at me saying that my flag could also be interpreted as a riot tool… pfff they have no imagination those Attacs!).