Syrian
protesters sit with their mouths taped shut, during a protest outside
parliament in central Athens. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
Maria Margaronis on December 5,
Syrian
protesters sit with their mouths taped shut, during a protest outside
parliament in central Athens. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
The
images dissolve, match and mismatch, across continents and time zones, St.
Louis, New York, Athens: police violence, protests, blazing cars; men in suits;
sleeping bags laid out on rainy streets at night. We are experts now at
fragments. Here and there a glitch in the matrix forces a connection.
Two
hunger strikes are happening in Athens this week. One is in plain view, in
Syntagma Square, where Syrian refugees—perhaps 500 at the protest's peak—have
been camped out for two weeks now, some of them refusing food. The other, under
guard in the Gennimata Hospital, is far more visible. The 21-year-old anarchist
prisoner Nikos Romanos hasn't eaten for twenty-six days and his condition is
worsening. #NRomanos is trending on Greek Twitter, with updates about his
health and solidarity protests.
The
Syrians, who have fled civil war and survived a dangerous journey, want to be
allowed to seek asylum elsewhere in Europe, where they can find shelter, food
and dignity. Their presence has attracted gifts of food and clothing, ritual
declarations of support from other demonstrations that pass by, and almost no
coverage in the mainstream media, inside or outside Greece. One of the
protesters, the young doctor Ayman Ghazal, has just died of exposure trying to cross
the border to Albania. His death has hardly been reported anywhere.
Romanos,
sentenced to fifteen years for armed robbery last month, is demanding a study
furlough to exercise his statutory right to education at a technical college.
He's been refused, on the grounds that he's still awaiting trial on two counts
and may abscond. His hunger strike has sparked huge demonstrations and riots in
Athens and solidarity protests in many other towns. The headquarters of the
private-sector union federation in Athens is under occupation; so is a central
cinema in Thessaloniki. Alexis Tsipras, president of Greece's left party Syriza
(and likely future prime minister), has said that Romanos' case concerns the
whole of society.
The
dark thread of Romanos' story begins at the moment when the crisis erupted in
Greece. On December 6, 2008, an auxiliary police officer shot and killed his
friend the 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, while they were out celebrating
Romanos's nameday—two middle-class boys from the suburbs hanging out downtown.
The shot broke a tidal wave of frustration and pent-up rage: thousands of young
Athenians who saw no future in their parents' rotten world walked out of school
and blocked the roads and set Athens on fire for weeks. Not long afterwards, the
ratings agencies downgraded Greece for the first time: it had begun to smell to
them like a failed state. Romanos gave a statement to the police, saying,
"My friend was executed in cold blood." He helped to carry the white
coffin at the funeral. Then he disappeared.
He
surfaced four years later on Greece's TV screens, his face retouched to hide
the swollen bruises inflicted by police. By then the crisis was in full swing:
jobs lost, salaries slashed, families broken, lives aborted. Police brutality,
on the streets and in the cells, had become routine, targeting protesters and
immigrants. The neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn was riding high, beating up
dark-skinned people with impunity. Few people had much faith in the state, the
police or the justice system any more.
Romanos
was arrested with three other young men in northern Greece for armed robbery,
possession of heavy weapons and taking a hostage. Like a modern Gavrilo
Princip, he confessed to the weapons, the hostage and the robberies (in which
no one was hurt), and declared his political motives—"We are urban
guerillas"—while denying membership in the terrorist organization Nuclei
of Fire. In prison awaiting trial, he married his girlfriend and passed the
national exams for Greece's technical colleges.
The
power of Romanos's story is as a parable of the crisis, the social and personal
breakdown so many Greeks have lived. For his supporters he has become an almost
mythic figure, the hero of a real-life Hunger Games. A boy with his life ahead
of him derailed by a bullet from a policeman's gun—a bullet that shattered a
country's sleep in a shower of splintering glass. A white, bewildered face that
disappeared for years to resurface battered and bruised as a dark Robin Hood,
armored now with an angry ideology. A boy who swallowed the sanctioned
lawlessness and chaos of the state and mirrored it back again like a rogue
Robocop. A young man whose hunger strike echoes the many suicides of the last
few years, but in slow motion on the public stage. A young man easily
assimilated to the Greek left's pantheon of young men murdered by the right,
the state or the police.
Romanos
says he won't eat until victory or death. The government is under pressure from
all sides—the lenders, the left, its gaping internal splits—and has waited too
long to back down without seeming to bend to blackmail. It's the eleventh hour,
the eve of December 6—the anniversary of Grigoropoulos's death. Athens will be
in lockdown for the Turkish prime minister's visit; there will be protests and
thousands of riot police blockading the city center. At the moment, it looks
like a stalemate.
The
Syrian refugees have no such public narrative to draw on, no authority to
threaten with their martyrdom. Supporting them is in no one's political
interest, nor does their plight form part of anyone's myth. Most of their
stories are unknown, or circulating only on social media. The journalist Damian
Mac Con Uladh has been spending time with them in Athens and posted this on
Facebook:
What
do you tell a Syrian father stuck in Athens who is so desperate that he's
thinking of trying to walk—at night and in winter—through the forests of the
Republic of Macedonia and beyond in his attempt to bring his 9-year-daughter,
Mariam, to safety in Sweden? What do you say to a man who has lost his wife and
a girl her mother three years ago in a bombing? To a man who only has a
"travel document" but not a passport because he is officially a
Palestinian refugee whose grandfather was uprooted from Palestine in 1948? Last
month they got as far as the third village in Macedonia but had to give up when
the daughter nearly died of the cold. Some weeks before that they were six
hours in the water after their boat sank en route from Turkey to Greece. His
money is running out and they are staying in a flea-infested hotel in Athens.
Both of them are covered in bites but he can't get medicine unless he goes to
the doctor. He's so anxious that he cannot sleep at night, while his daughter,
when no one is looking, cries for her aunt in Sweden, who looked after her when
her mother was killed. The daughter was the best student in her class in Syria
and in Lebanon, where they fled initially, and would be an asset for any
country. They could get asylum in Greece but would get no help in starting a new
life here, and may never be allowed reunite with their relatives elsewhere.
These people are war refugees. They have lost everything. All they want is to
be able to restart their lives in peace and security. Is that too much to ask
for?
Thousands
of refugees have died trying to enter Europe. Now they are also dying trying to
move inside it, from Greece and Italy where most of them first land to
countries where they have a chance of a decent life. Under EU rules refugees
must claim asylum in the first country they reach; Greece is legally bound to
prevent them from going elsewhere in Europe. Three and a half million people
have fled the Syrian civil war. According to Amnesty International, Turkey is
hosting at least 1.2 million; Germany has taken 20,000. Britain has taken
ninety.
Please
support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
"Malakes!
You are the refugees of Europe," read a slogan near the Athens University
Library at the height of the crisis. Some strikers and protesters in Athens
have stopped by the Syrians' camp, brought them sandwiches, exchanged
solidarity slogans. For the most part it's been little more than a rhetorical
exercise. It's hard to watch the videos of the riots in Athens this week
alongside footage of the Syrians sitting quietly in the rain a few hundred
metres away. But it's also hard to connect. People in trouble are inevitably
caught up in their own dramas.
A
hunger strike touches on the things all human beings share: the way pain and
deprivation are written on the body. By tomorrow, no doubt, the Syntagma
Syrians will be displaced again, moved on by the same riot police who will
battle the supporters of Nikos Romanos.
No comments:
Post a Comment