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Society

Rouvikonas Anarchists Take the Battle to Police, New Democracy

January 18, 2020

ATHENS – Showing no signs of giving up despite repeated police raids in the Exarchia neighborhood they dominate, the Rouvikonas anarchist group said it was behind attacks on the offices of two newspapers and the Australian consulate in Thessaloniki.

The Athens offices of the Dimokratia and Espresso newspapers were vandalized late on the night of Jan. 16 when a group of 10 to 15 hooded people roared into the building where the offices of both newspapers are located, climbed up to the third floor, threw paint, shouted slogans and smashed computers and other equipment before leaving.

In a statement posted on an anti-establishment website, Rouvikonas claimed responsibility saying the newspapers “should be careful what they write about,” without explaining what that meant and why it was upset either.

The Australian Consulate in Thessaloniki was hit the same night in an apparent protest against Australian environmental policies, said Kathimerini, with assailants breaking into the seventh-floor office and spray painting walls and scattering fliers calling for the destruction of capitalism “before it destroys the planet.”

There was no clarification by the group as the attack came as Australia has been struggling with record fires that environmental groups partially blamed on global warming which that country’s Prime Minister Scott Morrision, is dubious about.

A Trump-like figure who’s trying to jail journalists and clamp down on media freedom, Morrison denied climate change but backtracked fast after being booed and heckled while at a fire-destroyed site.

As a lawmaker, he once brandished a lump of coal in parliament as a totem of how the ruling conservative coalition planned to keep the lights on and power prices low before now saying that climate change is real.

“I think we want to have a high level of confidence that as a nation we are improving our resilience and our adaptation to respond to the reality of the environment in which we live,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra, said the Reuters news agency.

Australia’s Science Minister Karen Andrews told the Sydney Morning Herald in an interview that climate denial was a waste of time, as she echoed Morrison’s “adaptation” mantra, the Conservatives reacting after massive destruction and record temperatures.

Police DIAS motorcycle riding units in which officers ride in tandem, a force reinstated by the New Democracy government after being disbanded by the former ruling Radical Left SYRIZA were attacked outside the Athens University of Economics and Business.

Police said unidentified assailants wielding clubs emerged from the university grounds and attacked the officers, leaving them with minor injuries, said Kathimerini, after the government has kept up raids on squats operated by Rouvikonas.

Rouvikonas has also gone after embassies, political party offices, banks, the Parliament, Defense Ministry, doctors and has been in a running battle with the government that is trying to root them out of Exarchia.

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