LAST Tuesday, in a visit that was kept quiet, the American Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland (she oversaw the pro-imperialist coup in the Ukraine), visited Athens and met with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, and Defence Minister Panos Kammenos.
The Athens American Embassy stated that Nuland discussed ‘security and defence issues, Ukraine, the anti-ISIL coalition, and energy issues’.
The USA is putting the pressure on Greece to firmly line up with the sanctions against Russia.
Greek Prime Minister Tsipras is to visit Moscow on April 8.
Students and unemployed youth, in the main declaring themselves as anarchists, on Wednesday afternoon ended the occupation of the Athens University Law School following negotiations with Rector.
The occupying students have accepted assurances from the Justice Minister that their demands for the closing down of the high security prisons and the release of accused persons’ relatives will be met.
The Greek Justice Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos said that Savas Xiros, convicted on terrorist charges, would be released from prison on health grounds.
Early on Wednesday, riot police who had surrounded the Law School snatched a group of students who had left the occupation. This led to a gathering of some 500 students outside the school demanding that the riot police be withdrawn. Once this was done and the eight students released, the occupation ended.
Earlier, the Law School’s student union executive, on the insistence of Greek Communist Party (KKE) student supporters, issued a statement that the occupation ‘had nothing to do with the students’ and ‘it defames students’.
The reactionary stand of the KKE against any occupation is the cause of much conflict in the Greek universities.
In the early hours of last Thursday, the Vouli (Greek parliament) passed the government’s Social Humanitarian Bill that provides free electricity and health care as well as food coupons to about 30,000 families in absolute poverty.
This is a drop in an ocean compared to an estimated three million people living in Greece on the verge of poverty unable to pay the household bills and buy all the food they need.
The Bill was voted on by the opposition conservative and social-democratic parties as being in line with the requirements of the austerity agreements with the troika of the EC-IMF-ECB. The KKE voted against the Bill as being too little.
The Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, in his speech for the Bill condemned the intervention against the Bill of the European Commission’s representative Declan Costelo.
This was the first Bill introduced by the Greek government, a coalition of the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) with the right-wing Independent Greeks party (ANEL) since the general election of 20 January.
SYRIZA is still to honour its election promises to reinstate the sacked Finance Ministry cleaners, school guards, teachers and universities’ administrative staff and to reopen the state ERT TV and radio corporation. These promises ‘will have to wait’, as Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has stated.
