Terrorist attack

In the early hours of December 17, 2018, a powerful explosion rocked the Faleric Delta zone. The high-powered bomb had been placed on the outside of the elevated enclosure of the offices of the TV station SKAI and “Kathimerini”.

A few days later, specifically on January 8, the “Group of People’s Fighters” (ALL) with a proclamation posted on an anti-authoritarian website, took responsibility for the bombing that alarmed many. The proclamation was a manifesto against the systemic media and particularly against the Faliros group for their attitude during the years of the great financial crisis and their support for the measures and policies to deal with the destructive cycle of over-indebtedness and bankruptcy. It basically captured, with intensity and excessive sharpness, the then prevailing – and largely preserved to this day – perception also in the circles of the ruling Left that the media is the long arm of the bourgeois system, it is “a key pillar of the reproduction of bourgeois power, it is a state ideological mechanism, a mechanism for the protection of capitalist interests and finally it is capital itself”.

The reappearance

Despite the sharpness and intensity of the proclamation, that bombastic action was to be the swan song of ALL. Since then, and for five whole years, the bombs were hidden, the buttons were put back into the scabbards and terrorism was literally silenced. It was also the circumstances that changed dramatically. The Left was defeated in the 2019 elections, the New Democracy returned to power after a tumult, and the media was truly reborn. The pandemic followed, the post-pandemic jump and the new sweeping, this time double victory of the New Democracy, which was accompanied by the electoral collapse of the center-left current. All that ideology that armed the hands of the unrepentant and multiple losers of armed struggle and violence collapsed in front of the only conservative shift that took place in all the previous years.

Then followed the unfolding of the government’s reform agenda in the universities, in the Judiciary and elsewhere, the void of the opposition was recorded in a deafening way and the unrepentant of armed violence decided that the time had come to come back more fiercely. On December 18, 2023, exactly five years after the SKAI bombing, they placed a powerful bomb on Kokkinopoulou Street, near the headquarters of the MAT in Kaisariani and directly opposite the entrance to Polytechnic University.

That bomb was defused in time following recorded warning messages sent by the bombers. Responsibility was claimed on December 24 by an organization called “Armed Proletarian Justice”, which, after declaring that it was taking all measures to ensure that there were no innocent victims, warned that it would hit unsympathetic targets. This was followed at 1:29 a.m. after midnight on February 3 by a new bomb attack on Stadiou Street opposite the Ministry of Labor and next to the ALPHA BANK building being renovated. Again the authorities were warned in time, traffic was stopped, but this time the bomb exploded destroying the facades of the surrounding buildings and all the windows up to the sixth floor of the Ministry of Labor. The organization “Revolutionary Class Self-Defense” took responsibility, which has not currently posted a relevant announcement, which worries the authorities that a next strike may be hidden.

“From the same circle”

Be that as it may, the police authorities have been put on high alert and everyone at the Ministry of Citizen Protection is sure that we are once again facing the revival of the terrorist phenomenon. The responsible minister Michalis Chrysochoidis does not treat this whole wave of armed violence as something new, but appreciates that “it is old and largely the same as the one that unsuccessfully tried to intervene in the previous phase”. “They come from the same zone, from the same circle and maintain the same views and ideas” he says characteristically, though he wonders “how after so many defeats and so much damage they have caused to the country they persist in the same pattern, knowing that they will end up in dismemberment and in prison, as happened to all the previous ones”.

The Minister of Citizen Protection, experienced and a protagonist in uncovering the dismantling of the network of political terrorism in our country, recognizes the characteristics of the emerging organizations, knows first hand the culture that governs their action and does not hide that with their actions they come to declare to the government and the Authorities that “you are not alone, we have the power and the ability to react to your policies, we can scare you and scare you”.

According to Michalis Chrysochoidis, this is the doctrine of this circle of the unrepentant who insists and fantasizes that they can intervene with weapons in the political life of the country. “This is a Greek idiosyncrasy, a Greek anachronism, a remnant of another era, completely delegitimized in our society” characteristically says and insists that “he will have no luck, as he has not had in the past”.

However, he does not hide his concern that in the interim they may attack foreign targets and tarnish the country’s image at a time when Greece is regaining its place in the world and is seen as a zone of security and stability in the wider South-East Mediterranean zone. “That is why it is urgent to expose and dismantle the group or groups that indulge in armed violence” emphasizes with intensity, heralding reorganization, restructuring and strengthening with new technical means and capabilities of the Anti-Terrorist Service.

The concerns

Meanwhile, in the circles of the Anti-Terrorist, which, in passing, has been inactive and rested especially after 2021, the belief is firmly established that the devotees of the revival of the phenomenon and perpetrators of the latest acts of armed violence are basically 40-45 years old, coming mainly from the circle of his die-hard supporters Dimitris Koufodinawho aspire to be his descendants.

In this sense and based on the first announcement, the investigators believe that it is most likely that the armed violence organizations that have appeared will not be limited to bombing actions, but may even take up arms against police and economic targets. Something that already concerns prominent financial actors. Anti-Terrorist officials also believe that security reasons force the perpetrators to use traditional means and tools in their actions. The new technological products that some speculate they can use leave endless digital trails and make it easy to track down the perpetrators.

Be that as it may, after five years of immobilization the devotees of armed violence feel that they have an opportunity to recover and reactivate. They apparently believe that the opposition vacuum combined with the growth of social fronts in universities and elsewhere favors their own choice. With the difference that they do not realize that their delegitimization is complete. There are no allies of gun violence out there like there might have been in the 80s. Now they are clearly isolated and entrenched in a narrow ideological and small circle, which society abhors and does not even want to listen to.