GREEKS REJECT NATO
Massive, militant protests hit Clinton visit
By Bill
Wayland
Athens, Greece
Bill Clinton arrived in Greece Nov. 19 like a thief in the
night. His motorcade moved down darkened boulevards carefully
cleared of people. Armies of police guarded him against any
contact with ordinary Greeks. But the voice of the people could
not be silenced.
While the U.S. president wined and dined with Greek Prime
Minister Costas Simitis, police loosed barrages of tear gas
against thousands of workers, students and retirees trying to
march to the U.S. Embassy. Among those gassed were elderly
veterans of the Greek anti-Nazi resistance in World War II.
Despite the gas and repeated police attacks, protesters
regrouped again and again and marched through downtown Athens
to the city's central Omonia Square. Over 80 people were
arrested, many of them at pharmacies where they had gone for
medical aid. As of this writing, they are still being held.
In the aftermath of the protest, the Greek government has
mounted a violence-baiting campaign against the Greek Committee
for Peace and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), which was a
major force in the demonstration. But it was the state and its
heavily armed police that unleashed the violence that
night.
Clinton leaves trail of repression
The media have played up Clinton's carefully scripted
comment about the "right to protest as long as it's peaceful."
But at every stop on his Balkan tour, protests have been met
with fascist-like violence.
While he was in Turkey, police beat and arrested hundreds of
protesters in Ankara, the capital. They had not been released
as of Nov. 22.
In Sofia, Bulgaria, where Clinton went after leaving Athens,
protests were also banned and over 100 people arrested.
Blagoesta Doncheva, a former anti-communist "dissident" who has
written eloquently about the Bulgarian people's suffering under
the new capitalist regime, including a recent op-ed piece for
the New York Times, was thrown into a mental ward.
Clinton will also visit the NATO-occupied Yugoslav province
of Kosovo. There, Serbs, Roma people, Turks and other
minorities are being systematically murdered and driven from
their homes by NATO-sponsored gangs, even as the imperialist
occupiers claim to be combating national oppression.
Long history of Greek resistance
In Greece, too, the regime tried to stifle protest. In the
week before Clinton's arrival, a masked gang attacked a
Communist Party neighborhood office in Athens, beating three
people. Another KKE office was firebombed. Officials and the
media also created a climate of fear with constant warnings
about violence. But their efforts at intimidation failed.
The Greek people hate NATO. Nearly 700,000 Greeks were
murdered by Nazi occupiers during World War II. When the
Communist-led Greek resistance, in alliance with Yugoslav and
Albanian partisans, succeeded in driving Hitler's armies out of
the Balkans, the imperialists feared a revolution and sent
British troops to occupy the country.
Britain, a supposed ally, imposed on Greece a regime of Nazi
collaborators headed by a hated royal family that had spent the
war under British protection. In 1948 and 1949, tens of
thousands of Greek anti-Nazi fighters were murdered, imprisoned
or driven into exile by mercenary forces armed, trained and
financed by the U.S. and British imperialist governments.
The Truman administration created NATO in conjunction with
this war against Greece. The U.S. military's first use of
napalm bombs was against Greek villages. U.S. planes also
bombed Yugoslavia in this period. Over 100,000 anti-Nazi
fighters were held in concentration camps for the next 20
years.
In 1967, when the Greek left had regained its strength,
Greece's NATO military carried out a coup. Col. George
Papadopoulos, leader of the fascist junta that would rule the
country for the next seven years, was on the direct payroll of
the CIA. This was finally revealed by the New York Times in
1976.
Fascist terror did not crush the people's resistance. On
Nov. 17, 1973, tens of thousands of university students defied
tanks and guns to challenge the junta, which fell the following
year.
That same spirit was very much alive in the streets of
Athens and other Greek cities before and during Clinton's
visit.
10,000 accuse U.S./NATO
of war crimes
On Nov. 8, 10,000 people had stood in the rain in Athens's
Constitution Square for a mass trial of the U.S. president and
other NATO leaders. The judges were 20 justices of the Council
of State--the Greek Supreme Court. Famous entertainers served
as other officers of the court.
Clinton had ignored a subpoena delivered to the U.S. Embassy
a week earlier by a march of several thousand people.
After hours of eyewitness testimony about the U.S. bombing
of Yugoslavia, the presiding judge asked if Clinton were guilty
of war crimes. The entire crowd responded "Guilty!"
On Nov. 17, the anniversary of the 1973 student uprising,
tens of thousands of marchers, mostly youth, filed past the
U.S. Embassy. They loudly denounced Clinton as the butcher of
the Balkans, called for an end to NATO and demanded that the
U.S. military get its bases out of Greece and its troops out of
Yugoslavia. The march was organized by the communists, but even
youth from PASOK, the social-democratic governing party, felt
compelled to join.
And then on Nov. 19, the night of Clinton's arrival, tens of
thousands of protesters, many waving red flags, gathered in
three squares in downtown Athens in defiance of a police
ban.
The main rally, in Constitution Square, was opened by Bill
Doares of the International Action Center. Doares saluted the
Greek people's history of resistance to fascism and war and
their solidarity with the people of Yugoslavia.
"The profits of Wall Street depend on wars of destruction,"
he said, "and only mass action can stop the Pentagon's drive
toward new and bigger wars. In this great task, the Greek
people are leading the way." Doares also condemned Clinton's
hypocrisy in preaching about "human rights" when the "U.S. has
more people in prison than any other country--70 percent are
Black and Latin--and the biggest companies profit off their
slave labor." He drew loud applause when he called for
international action to stop the execution of U.S. political
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Pictures of Mumia dotted the
crowd.
The main speaker was Thanassis Pafilis, secretary of the
Greek Committee for Peace and KKE central committee member.
Pafilis condemned the "stability pact" signed at the conference
of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in
Istanbul. The pact asserts the "right" of the U.S. and NATO to
intervene in any country where they deem there are "human
rights violations."
Pafilis spoke of the long and bloody history of U.S.
intervention in Greece and honored some of the country's
anti-fascist martyrs, including Grigoris Lambrakis, a vice
president of the Peace Committee, who was assassinated in
1963.
Pafilis asserted that the police had no right to stop the
people of Greece from marching in protest down their own
streets.
At 6:30 p.m., the moment Clinton's plane touched down, the
minister of public order still refused to allow a march. The
lead contingent of the demonstration, made up of construction
workers and shipbuilders, then forced its way through police
lines. The authorities responded with volleys of gas bombs.
Despite the police attack and arrests, the Greek people's
opposition to NATO and the Pentagon's war plans was heard
around the world. [Ed. note: The U.S. media have minimized this
extremely important political development, but the
demonstrations were top news in Europe.]
Clinton came to Greece from Turkey, where he had dominated
the conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe. Why the United States, which is not part of Europe,
should have been there at all the president did not explain.
But the reason is clearly that the continent is under U.S.
military occupation. NATO is the justification for this
relationship.
At a press conference, Clinton appealed to Greece's elite
with visions of a partnership with U.S. corporations in robbing
the rest of the Balkans. But for the Greek people, U.S.
military and economic domination has meant high prices and a
13-percent unemployment rate.
It also means a $2-billion military budget, much of which is
spent on U.S. arms. The Nov. 21 International Herald Tribune
admitted that military spending "exacts a heavy toll" on the
Greek economy.
Clinton admitted that 94 percent of the Greek people opposed
NATO and the war against Yugoslavia. He said that was "an
example of democracy." He didn't explain why it was democratic
for the U.S. to impose its war policies on Greece despite this
overwhelming opposition.
Clinton also made the amazing statement that "southeast
Europe is undivided and at peace for the first time in 50
years." Only a few months ago the U.S. launched the first war
this region has seen since Washington's 1948 intervention in
Greece.
Filip Karamalis, a young Communist worker who took part in
the Nov. 19 protests, told this writer, "U.S. imperialism will
not pass. We shall stand fighting. All the Greek people are
against NATO, against the European Union and U.S. policy.
Clinton is trying to act like Hitler. But Hitler could not
conquer the Balkans and neither will NATO."
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