Greece: ‘Cops, pigs, murderers’

When two cops gunned down 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in central Athens, the Greek people greeted this assault with an uprising from northern Salonika to the southern island of Crete. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets for the next four days, burning garbage barrels to make barricades and trashing anything connected to the Greek state.

The cops’ killing an unarmed youth intersects a workers’ struggle to defend their interests during the economic crisis. On the defensive from the mass rebellion, the center-right government has charged one of the cops with murder. The Police Association apologized to the Grigoropoulos family. But this has not stopped the righteous people’s rebellion.

The organized workers’ movement is backing up the spontaneous uprising of the masses of people at this cop outrage. The Communist Party (KKE), with a revolutionary history and a mass base, organized a protest on Dec. 8 along these lines that led to further clashes. A general strike called for Dec. 10 to raise general workers’ demands has now added demands regarding the killing of the Greek teenager.

With the memory of Sean Bell and the dozens of African-American, Latin@ and other oppressed and working-class youth gunned down in the U.S., the progressive movement here and the workers’ movement in particular should express its solidarity to the Greek workers, youth and people who are demanding justice following the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. We say along with the Greek demonstrators, “down with the cops, pigs, murderers.”