The squatters of Villa Amalias released a stirring statement titled“From the Social Trench of Villa Amalias. They’ve been besieged in their home for nearly a week now as fascists run rampant through the neighborhood, abetted by the police.

You should definitely read the whole thing. But here are some excerpts:

For the past three days the wider area around Villa Amalias has seen events that any intelligent being living in the year 2011 would have thought to come out of a science fiction scenario. But this is not the case. This has been the reality for the past three years more or less: some have not experienced it, some do not want to see it, some are stupor and refuse to see it, some become complacent — and yet some seem to seek it.

Under the pretext of the condemnable —by all of us— murder of the 44 year old Manolis Kantaris on the junction of Tritis Septemvriou and Ipirou street, some people decided the time had come for them to cleanse the area from those strange and grubby creatures (according to them), the migrants, launching an indiscriminate pogrom.

…

In a blink, the rules of the game are overturned and from the point where all enraged greeks would condemn criminality and uncontrollable violence in their neighbourhoods, we now reached the point where anything is allowed as long as it is committed by greeks. Mobbing is allowed and so are mass beatings, stabbings, exemplary and throughout likeliness murders — like the one of the 21 year old Bangladeshi migrant [in the neighbourhood of Kato Patisia, trans.] Everything is allowed in the name of fear, survival, imposition and revenge.

…

people and ideas are not disposable products or part of some trend that we would change or bin at the first instance. Our responses, from whatever post they are given, will always be collective, dynamic and unabridged — they will not be supported or manipulated by anyone who wants to gain from bodies, whether metaphorically or literally. For us life has no “price tag” to negotiate in the markets of nationalities and their falsified national pride.

We have written this in the past but we do not tire ourselves in repeating it: we consciously find ourselves facing and against any exploiter, procurer and heroin dealer, regardless of nationality. Yet we also know that what is lacking is neither more police (there is an excess of that), the demand for order and security, nor of course the racist propaganda and fascist violence. What is lacking is the courage of the contact and association with what is different, the mutual self respect and dignity, the attempts for cross-cultural coexistence and the (substantial, not para-statal) self-organising, which can heal many of the wounds of our multicultural/proletarian neighbourhoods.