Greek concessions fail to stop the riots

Greek rioters were back in action this weekend, firebombing five banks and a branch office of the New Democracy party. There were no injuries, though nearby shops suffered damage. And one week after the shooting death of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropolous, his schoolfriends and family, wearing white and carrying flowers, gathered peacefully yesterday at the spot in the Exarchia quarter of Athens where he died.

"We're here to show our grief and sorrow, because no one understands us," said 16-year-old Irini, a pupil at the same school as the victim. "They are killing children for no reason."

The Prime Minister, Costas Karamanlis, defended his government's reaction to the revolt. "The country needs a steady hand on the wheel," the daily Ekathimerini reported him saying. "Attempts by the young to express their concerns must not be confused with the activities of extremists."

His preoccupation was understandable. Within less than two hours of Alexis's death last Saturday, the anarchists of Exarchia, alerted by texts and the internet before the conventional media had even reported the shooting, were staging their first protest. Within 24 hours they had brought in their train an unprecedentedly broad spectrum of outraged citizens.

"People from 12 to 70 have taken part in the revolt," claimed an anarchist website yesterday. "People who would never have expected to find themselves in such a situation. Fashionable youth, respectable family men, elderly ladies, all those normally labelled 'the common people'."

What have been dubbed the first credit crunch riots thus took on the features of a new and ominously effective social revolt that relegated all the conventional forces of the left to the sidelines. Greece's anarchists, pejoratively known as the koukoulofori (balaclava-wearers), have been a force since they emerged during the violent clashes that accompanied the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. Today they are a presence in both university areas such as Exarchia and many other urban neighbourhoods, and their numbers include not just students, but the local plumber or electrician, unemployed youths living at the corner and football hooligans. They have a foothold right across the country.

The different groups vary, from studiously political ones who hark back to 19th-century anarchist pioneers such as Kropotkin and Proudhon, to groups involved in squats and those committed to violent action. Some talk in moderate tones, others rob banks. What they share is the willingness to come together with great speed behind a common cause.

In a state where the police are despised for their arbitrary violence, and are increasingly incapable of carrying out normal law and order functions, these lawless groups have acquired extraordinary influence. They attack people and property identified with the state and with capitalism, yet they take pains not to cause serious injury or death. As they subscribe to none of the discredited ideologies of the past, the state has its work cut out demonising them.

The Greek anarchists' power was confirmed on Friday when, despite the violence in the streets, the Justice Ministry said it would go ahead with the release of about 40 per cent of the prisoners in Greece's jails to relieve overcrowding. The government's concession was the victorious conclusion to a hunger strike by prisoners and a month-long campaign outside the prisons by anarchists. They have also fought against proposals to create private universities.

"If all this doesn't bring the revolution," commented the anarchist site about the present clashes, "at least we should enjoy ourselves in this process of humanisation" – by which they mean wrecking banks and other "dehumanising" capitalist institutions.