Exarchia: A battleground for would-be revolutionaries and riot squad officers
Evi, a resident of the inner-city district of Exarchia, relates a telling exchange with a taxi driver. «I asked him to take me to a taverna in Methonis Street and he asked me in surprise if there were still tavernas in Exarchia. ‘I thought they had all closed because of the violence,’ he said. How can you explain that Exarchia is a district like any other?» Sitting in a cafe in Kallidromiou Street, Evi said Exarchia was special and that the image of it that has been projected in the media was misleading. The cafe where we are sitting, the Mouria, is the only one that has retained some of the atmosphere of old Exarchia. It is full of locals drinking a tsipouro or a coffee after shopping at the local street market that has just closed up for the day. It looks no different from any other cafe, yet the conversation is not about the previous day’s soccer match or the political situation, but about a neighbor who was stopped by police asking to see his identity card, about the smell of tear-gas infiltrating homes after the most recent clash between riot squad police and anarchists around the corner, about the book just published by another neighbor or about what happened at the latest meeting of the local residents’ committee. Exarchia has always had a greater turnover of people and ideas than any other area in Athens, but in recent months, one subject has been monopolizing conversations and that is the prevalence of police and their continuing clashes with anarchists. A few years ago, locals would have been more willing to defend the anarchist crowd but now they appear to be sitting on the fence and are just as angry with both sides. «A few days ago, the police stopped a friend of ours walking along Mesolongiou Street and humiliated her. They told her to lower her eyes when she walked past them,» said Eleni, a 30-year-old resident. «My friend isn’t an anarchist. The police only make things worse with that kind of behavior.» «The police presence certainly isn’t helping,» said Vangelis, 40. «But these kids who think they are revolutionaries should be ready to face the consequences of their actions and not to demand bourgeois-democratic rights when they are arrested.» At the next table, Sakis, a man in his 50s who used to run a bar in the district and knows the people and their ways, interrupts. «The police don’t really want to catch them. They know who they are and where to find them. They go into any cafe in the district and discover dozens of violations, reasons to close it down. But they don’t do that at the places anarchists frequent. Why is that?» he asks. The same question is heard all over the district, leaving a sense that locals are collateral damage in an ongoing and immature dispute. That evening, on the corner of Solonos and Souliou streets, the riot squad has set up a roadblock of sorts. Four police officers are smoking and keeping half an eye open, across the road a plain-clothes officer looks over suspicious passers-by. On Academias Street an armored bus is parked and on Mesolongiou Street another small group of four riot squad officers is standing at the intersection of two pedestrian streets where there are only closed bookshops, bars and cafes. All the officers are young, with heightened reflexes and nerves on edge. The same scene is repeated on Bouboulinas Street, on Harilaou Trikoupi Street in front of PASOK’s headquarters and on Stournari Street next to the National Technical University. Small groups of officers who have spread out into narrow side streets give the impression they are acting as bait for any hothead who wants to lash out. Since 2004, Exarchia has been patrolled by police, sometimes intensively, at other times less so. Of course, the patrols are not to protect the local residents’ lives and property. Labeling the district a «high crime» district cannot be easily justified by the statistics. It has its fair share of drug rehabilitation centers and methadone distribution points, which to some extent explains the drug trade. It even has a reception center run by most of the organizations supporting ex-prisoners. Yet for all that it has one of the lowest rates for crimes such as robbery, burglary and rape. Protection rackets avoid the area for fear of trouble with anarchist groups. And that is not because of the police presence but because of action by local residents. What is on the rise is the abhorrence felt by many groups of youths for urban institutions. «There is the view that Exarchia is for extremists. But those who live here think that image is manufactured,» says Dimitris Papachristos, a member of a local citizens’ movement who in 1973 was one of the broadcasters from the National Technical University’s illegal radio station during the uprising against the junta. «In fact, it is a district with a large number of politically committed people, a large number of publishing houses, students, intellectuals and politicians. Traditionally, it has always been a place where ideas circulated freely.» As for the violence, Papachristos is critical. «The young people are rebelling but don’t really have any political or anarchistic beliefs, at least not as I know them. They are playing cowboys and Indians with the police. Their rage, which is a significant social phenomenon, leads them to clash with police who are in fact about their own age. Their rage is something that is exploited politically whenever someone wants to dust off issues such as political asylum or neighborhood policing. But it is not a nihilistic reaction.» Many local residents agree that if police officers from the local precinct (who have a good reputation for their behavior toward perpetrators) kept order, the situation might not be as bad. They believe that the riot squad’s presence is deliberate provocation. Men wearing helmets and gas masks, whose behavior is inflammatory, even toward older people, make even indifferent bystanders react. «You can’t watch a police officer arrest someone, make him lie down, handcuff him and drag him along the ground without even knowing who he is. I’ve witnessed scenes like this and have been to the police station to protest,» said Papachristos. There is also the sense that the riot squad’s presence perpetuates the tension (if it doesn’t actually cause it). Despite the hundreds of arrests since 2004, Exarchia still has more social tension than anywhere else in Attica.
