Millions of Greeks Participate in Massive Strike

Below, we publish an unofficial translation of a report published by A Nova Democracia. Following the translation, we have added a series of photos and videos found from various sources.

More than 300,000 Greeks went on strike across the country, and protesters held demonstrations in Athens and other cities in Greece today, February 28, against the two years of impunity following the Tempi massacre, when 57 people died in a train collision on February 28, 2023.

The uprising was fueled by the release of a report from the Hellenic Authority for Air and Rail Safety Investigation on Thursday, February 26, which confirmed that the accident was caused by outdated and precarious infrastructure and human error.

Banks and businesses were closed, ships and trains stopped running, and planes were barred from entering the country due to the mass uprising. The Greek state attempted to suppress the demonstrations, but the people confronted police troops with stones and Molotov cocktails.

“The government did nothing to seek justice,” said 57-year-old musician Christos Main to Reuters during the demonstration in Athens. “This was not an accident; it was murder,” he asserted.

During the protests, people shouted “Murderers!” and painted the names of the deceased on the ground in red. Some protesters also attempted to enter the reactionary parliament but were blocked by police troops. Nearly a hundred protesters were arrested by riot police in Athens alone.

In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, more than 100,000 people occupied the urban center. The city is significant because many of the deceased were students from the University of Thessaloniki. In various villages across the interior of the country, there were also shutdowns.

According to the report, the Hellenic Railways Organization (OSE), Greece’s national railway company, “was already suffering from severe safety issues, and recent administrations with their ‘austerity’ policies managed to deplete the number of employees and left the equipment in decay.”

The station master had no training to use the automated controls and had to rely on manual controls that did not indicate which tracks the trains were on, facilitating the collision.

Additionally, there are suspicions that the government may have attempted to cover up its crimes by purchasing reports that attributed the deaths of the passengers to a fire and a supposed accidental silicone oil spill from the transformers.

Experts noted that the collision at a speed of 240 kilometers per hour was so violent that it destroyed the locomotive and the first six cars of the train, claiming the lives of the vast majority of those affected; moreover, only 5 to 7 of the 57 people who died did so due to the fire, as proven by private investigators hired by the victims’ families.

There are indications that funds from a contract that existed since 2014, known as ‘Contract 717,’ funded by the European Union, were wasted. This contract was intended to install safety equipment throughout the network but was never executed.

The Communist Party of Greece (Marxist-Leninist) (KKE (m-l)) denounced in its newspaper Proletarian Flag that false left or opposition parties, such as PASOK and SYRIZA, attempted to pacify the popular uprising by seeking a motion of no confidence and trying to resolve everything within the parameters of bourgeois justice, doing everything possible to prevent the situation from escalating into a mass insurrection.

Below, we share photos and videos published on social media and Antigeitonies. Among the mobilizations carried out, there were also school closures and assemblies in educational centers to prepare for the mobilization.

Athens