Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets

• Ian Traynor, Europe editor
• The Guardian, Saturday 31 January 2009
• Article history

Arcellor Mittal workers demonstrate during a protest march in Marseille. Photograph: Jean-paul Pelissier/Reuters

France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.

It's a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.

Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.

Europe's time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.

Athens

Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old middle-class boy going to a party in a rough neighbourhood on a December Saturday, was the first fatality of Europe's season of strife. Shot dead by a policeman, the boy's killing lit a bonfire of unrest in the city unmatched since the 1970s.

There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilised to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future.

This week it was the farmers' turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.

Riga

The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th-century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.

After Iceland, Latvia looks like the most vulnerable country to be hammered by the financial and economic crisis. The EU and IMF have already mounted a €7.5bn (£6.6bn) rescue plan but the outlook is the worst in Europe.

The biggest bank in the Baltic, Swedbank of Sweden, yesterday predicted a slump this year in Latvia of a whopping 10%, more than double the previous projections. It added that the economy of Estonia would shrink by 7% and of Lithuania by 4.5%.

The Latvian central bank's governor went on national television this week to pronounce the economy "clinically dead. We have only three or four minutes to resuscitate it".

Paris

Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows, and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace.

Sarkozy has spent most of his time in office trying to fix the world's problems, with less attention devoted to the home front. From Gaza to Georgia, Russia to Washington, Sarkozy has been a man in a hurry to mediate in trouble spots and grab the credit for peacemaking.

France, meanwhile, is moving into recession and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.

Budapest

A balance of payments crisis last autumn, heavy indebtedness and a disastrous budget made Hungary the first European candidate for an international rescue. The $26bn (£18bn) IMF-led bail-out shows scant sign of working. Industrial output is at its lowest for 16 years, the national currency - the forint - sank to a record low against the euro yesterday and the government also announced another round of spending cuts yesterday.

So far the streets have been relatively quiet. The Hungarian misery highlights a key difference between eastern and western Europe. While the UK, Germany, France and others plough hundreds of billions into public spending, tax cuts, bank bailouts and guarantees to industry, the east Europeans (plus Iceland and Ireland) are broke, ordering budget cuts, tax rises, and pleading for international help to shore up their economies.

The austerity and the soaring costs of repaying bank loans and mortgages taken out in hard foreign currencies (euro, yen and dollar) are fuelling the misery.

Kiev

The east European upheavals of 1989 hit Ukraine late, maturing into the Orange Revolution on the streets of Kiev only five years ago. The fresh start promised by President Viktor Yushchenko has, though, dissolved into messy, corrupt, and brutal political infighting, with the economy, growing strongly a few years ago, going into freefall.

Three weeks of gas wars with Russia this month ended in defeat and will cost Ukraine dearly. The national currency, at less than half the value of six months ago, is akin to the fate of Iceland's wrecked krona. Ukrainians have been buying dollars by the billion. In November the IMF waded in with the first payments in a $16bn rescue package.

The vicious power struggles between Yushchenko and the prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, are consuming the ruling elite's energy, paralysing government and leaving the economy dysfunctional. Russia is doing its best to keep things that way.

Reykjavik

Proud of its status as one of the world's most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution.

Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world's oldest parliament. The yoghurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.

An openly gay prime minister takes over today as head of a caretaker government. The neocon right has been ditched. The hard left Greens are, at least for the moment, the most popular party in the small Arctic state with a population the size of Bradford.

The IMF's bailout teams have moved in with $11bn. The national currency, the krona, appears to be finished. Iceland is a test case of how one of the most successful societies on the globe suddenly failed.

(orignal article)

Did Greek “Anarchist” Agents Provocateurs Torch Police?

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
September 12, 2008

It looks like government agents provocateurs are out in force in Greece, attempting to discredit legitimate protesters outraged over the murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the police.  

The demonstrations quickly transcended the murder and now encompass the plight of average Greek citizens as they endure economic hardship under the reign of PM Costas Karamanlis, a globalist stooge who has brought “privatization” and “structural reforms” to the country, in other words allowed the banksters to loot Greece. “The new generation of privatizations will accelerate growth and improve state revenues,” Karamanlis declared in 2006. In fact, this “new generation” of thievery has resulted in the current crisis. 

Karamanlis has rejected calls to step down and hold early elections and insists the country needs his “steady hand” to deal with the financial crisis engineered by the international bankers. “There should be no confusion between the emotions felt by young students over the tragic death of a colleague … and this destructive mania,” Karamanlis told the Associated Press. He quickly ran off to Brussels to consult his globalist masters after the demonstrations threatened his rule at the behest of the international elite.

It is no mistake this “destructive mania” has spiraled out of control. As the Pentagon’s Field Manual FM 30-31B states, the most dangerous moment arrives when political activists “renounce the use of force” and embrace the democratic process. It is precisely at this moment that “U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger,” that is to say the danger of non-violent democratic action. 

In Italy, this strategy worked perfectly under Operation Gladio, the CIA and NATO effort to sow violence and blame it on communists and socialists. “Many members of Operation Gladio were also in a shadowy organization known as P-2,” writes Mark Zepezauer, “it too was financed by the CIA…. One of P-2’s specialties was the art of provocation. Leftist organizations like the Red Brigades were infiltrated, financed and / or created, and the resulting acts of terrorism, like the assassination of Italy’s premier in 1978 and the bombing of the railway station in Bologna in 1980, were blamed on the left. The goal of this ’strategy of tension’ was to convince Italian voters that the left was violent and dangerous – by helping make it so.” 

Is it possible the Greek government is employing this very “strategy of tension” to discredit the growing calls for new elections and the ouster of the bankster stooge, Karamanlis? 

Obviously, torching police and attacking banks along Athens’ central Syntagma Square will only prompt the government to send out shock troops to deal with the “anarchists” who have stolen the momentum of the demonstrations from the people. “One protester walked up to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside Parliament and threw a black-and-red anarchist flag at it,” reports the Associated Press. It is no mistake the corporate media is concentrating on this provocateur “anarchist” element, likely dispatched to discredit the opposition. No doubt sensational photographs of supposed anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails at cops will help in this effort.

Banks gas-bombed in Athens

ATHENS (AFP) — Five banks were attacked overnight in Athens, police said Saturday as youths prepared to assemble at the scene of a teen's killing by police one week ago.

The attacks, using gas canisters, also targeted a local party office operated by Greece's ruling conservative party.

There were no victims, but firefighters were called out to extinguish blazes with neighbouring stores also suffering damage to property.

Two cars were also burnt out in the busy Guizi and Exarchia areas of Athens . A week of unrest was triggered in Exarchia with the fatal shooting of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos.

There were no organised rallies planned for the day, but youths occupying nearby university buildings have said they will gather over the weekend at the spot where the schoolboy died.

Peaceful tributes are to be paid to Grigoropoulos, although authorities remain on alert.

Riot police again clashed with youths on Friday, the seventh day of Athens street protests, as Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis dismissed opposition calls to quit.

"At this time the country faces a serious financial crisis... a steady hand on the helm is needed to deal with it," Karamanlis said. "That is my concern, that is the priority of the government, not scenarios about elections and successions.

"The compassion with which all of us ought to treat the distress of young people cannot be confused with blind violence, with the activities of extreme elements."

The offices of lawyer Alexis Kougias, representing two policemen awaiting trial over Grigoropoulos' death, were trashed, while in Paris, demonstrators blocked traffic on the Champs-Elysees after security was beefed-up at the Greek embassy.

In Berlin 1,500 people, about 150 of them Greeks, joined a peaceful march late Friday protesting the boy's death, organisers said. Police put their number at 500.

In Greece hundreds of banks, stores and public buildings have been destroyed, badly damaged by fire or looted in a week of violence mainly involving youths. Statistics show one in four aged 15-24 are officially unemployed.

And while normal life has returned to most of Athens, with protests falling off across provincial Greece, prominent university sites -- beyond the reach of law enforcement -- remain occupied.

The officer who shot Grigoropoulos says he was defending himself from a gang of youths and killed the boy by accident due to a bullet ricochet. A ballistics report, said to confirm that the handgun was not pointed at him, has yet to be released.

(original article)