In restricting civil liberties, Athens is simply following the Western paradigm

By Nikolas Leontopoulos

When the Greek government was shutting down the center of Athens to celebrate, without the Athenians of course, the start of the Greek EU Presidency, the German government was doing something quite similar in Hamburg: the Gefahrengebiet dogma was fully put in force. Gefahrengebiet means ‘danger zone’. In an unprecedented decision the German authorities, applying a 2005 law, temporarily classed as danger zones whole areas of the city in which special rules would be enforced. The police now had the right to perform checks and body searches on citizens purely on the basis that they had moved inside the ‘danger zone’.
 
The pretext was given by the decision of the authorities to close down Rote Flore, a social space that had been occupied by activists. In a city with Hamburg’s libertarian tradition, this was expected to provoke protests. There were riots, with injuries among the anarchists – but also among other groups with a much more moderate agenda – and the police forces.
 
The US State Department issued a special travel warning (a “security message“), urging American citizens to stay out of the ‘danger zones’. “If stopped without proper identification, persons may be detained by police without further justification”.
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Some analysts reached the point of describing the measure as “martial law”. The measures reminded some of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (with curfews and checkpoints) or Middle Eastern regimes. But they took place in the heart of Europe.
 
German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine referred to an atmosphere of civil war, a comparison Greek observers have also made in the past about riots in Athens.
 
Following the same thinking, in Athens Greeks were kept out of the celebrations for the inauguration of the Greek presidency. We saw snipers aboard helicopters and on the roof of the Acropolis museum, returning the ancient monument its initial role of citadel.

This trend in Greece has been present for quite a long time. The area of Exarchia in the center of Athens, famous as a bohemian neighborhood but also the stronghold of violent anarchist groups, has been subject to a security cordon: anyone moving inside the cordon is considered a suspect. In that sense Exarchia is a Gefahrengebiet. On the area’s perimeter, police officers stand guard on a 24-hour basis, equipped with heavy weapons that would be more suitable for the military. They come from a multitude of security forces and their duty is to preemptively control those who move inside the “zone”.

But this is also not a Greek exception. The German and the Greek Gefahrengebiet are nothing more than symptoms of a wider new policy of restricting civil rights where they are most important: in the hearts of cities. This is a policy promoted not by Middle Eastern despotic regimes, as one might expect, but by the EU democracies.

The trend goes beyond Europe’s borders. It concerns the West as a whole, it even reaches some famous islets of liberties, such as Canada, as Richard Seymour has noted in his Guardian piece with the telling title: “From Quebec to Spain anti-democracy laws put in test the real democracy”.

In Spain the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy passed a law that would forbid demonstrations near government buildings and the Parliament. Fines would reach 600,000 euros (!) for those who organize “illegal” demonstrations through social media, and up to two years imprisonment for those who simply participate in them. Covering one’s face or chanting “anti-Spain” slogans would bring along a fine of 30,000 euros. The law, decried by the opposition parties and human rights organizations led to massive demonstrations in Spain.
 
Around the same period Britain was discussing a draft law on the edge of surrealism.  It was yet again about controlling crowds, but the crowds in the British case included people as young as ten years old. A few might remember that in 1998 the British parliament created ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) that were meant to punish behaviors that were seen as annoying by the “average” Brit. (Four days ago, such an ASBO was issued for a 14 year old teenager prohibiting him from hanging out with his two younger brothers on the basis that together they were “terrorizing” the neighborhood). Now the lawmakers went one step further and introduced IPNAs. The ‘Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance’, according the British Children Commissionner, “will punish children for being… children” – for instance by prohibiting them from playing ball or skating. IPNAs would be applicable to all people over 10 years old! A piece  by George Monbiot for the Guardian had the title: “At last, a law to stop almost anyone from doing almost anything”. The law was rejected by the House of Lords but its promoters are already plotting to put it back on the table with less Orwellian wording.

According to Monbiot, the idea of public space was not always obvious. Until the end of the 19^th century, the biggest part of a city’s space was under the authority of the landlords. The squares were locked and private, access to streets was conditioned. Those who were unwanted were simply kept out of many areas of cities.

The Victorian era has supposedly ended. In New York there is only one private (fenced-in and locked) park. On the other hand, London still boasts a high number of “private squares”.

In practice, space in the last decades in the big cities of the West has stopped being public – if the definition of public is access to all. The possibility for “marginal” groups of people to walk in the center of the big city for fun or in order to protest is only theoretical in the center of Manhattan, London or Paris since those areas are informally considered no-go areas for those who are not tourists or inhabitants. (In New York’s case, immigrants are allowed if they are Chinese or Russian millionaires.)

For how many hours would the liberal democracies of the West tolerate protests such as those in Tahrir Square in Cairo, or Gezi Park in Istanbul, before the security forces intervene to re-establish order? How would they react to protests that push for the reversal of an elected government, as happened in Ukraine?
 
The reason for this absence of protest in western capitals, some will argue, is that here people are not raging out of a sense of injustice and oppression as is the case in the despotic regimes of the East. This explains why they don’t take the streets and they don’t occupy the squares. Without expressing any doubt about the obvious iron fist of regimes in the Middle East or other developping nations, just a look at inequality and poverty statistics in the US is sufficient to cast doubt on that interpretation.

In the US (“the land of the free”) where civil liberties are sacred not just for the left but also for the right, there is the relatively recent Occupy Wall Street example. The peaceful protest ended with the police using force to clear Zuccotti Park in New York. Despite subsequent attempts by activists to return to the square, the police intervened, in some cases making use of excessive violence.
 
So, today, for as long as democracy in Athens is suspended, let’s be positive: At least in this, we are all Europeans.