AN Athens court has sentenced three marchers of the 15 July demonstration against austerity. They were accused of throwing petrol bombs at the riot police and resisting police.
One of the demonstrators, an Albanian immigrant worker, was sentenced to 34 months in prison. Two other workers were sentenced to 13 months but were set free. Four other accused were acquitted. The arrests had taken place far away from the clashes between riot police and anarchist youths.
Antonia Legaki, a defence lawyer, issued a statement accusing the Greek riot police of ‘torture’ against all the arrested, and castigated Prime Minister Tsipras who said on television that the arrested were ‘foreign provocateurs’.
Legaki said that Tsipras had decided not to take into account the hundreds of trade unions’ calls against the trial and the thousands of protest letters to Greece’s European embassies. Legaki ended the statement by calling for ‘mass popular struggle which will fight and bring down any government that feeds fascism and maintains oppression and exploitation’.
Meanwhile the SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) Central Committee has accepted Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ proposal for an extraordinary party congress by a clear majority. SYRIZA’s Left Platform had proposed a recalled SYRIZA congress in the next two weeks before the Greek government signs a new third austerity agreement bail-out with the European Commission’s agencies (ECB and ESM) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Already the Greek government has backdated to 1 July 2015 pension cuts of between 5 and 10 per cent. The VAT rate for basic supermarket packaged foods – including bread, pasta, cheese, etc – is now 23 per cent. Young people employed in summer jobs – at hotels, restaurants, beaches – are being paid between 300 and 500 euros a month. At the SYRIZA central Committee meeting, Tsipras insisted that his ‘Left’ government would carry out the austerity programme with a far better sensitivity towards the working people!
Now the IMF has warned it will not participate in a third bailout for debt-laden Greece unless debt relief is granted to the country, raising concerns the aid package could be derailed. At a meeting on Wednesday, IMF staff reportedly told the fund’s board that Athens’s debt burden and poor track record of implementing reforms rule out further financial help from the fund, until there is an ‘explicit and concrete agreement’ on debt relief from Greece’s eurozone creditors.
