Greek riot policemen during clashes with protesters in Keratsini, a western suburb of Athens, yesterday.
ATHENS: Thousands of civil servants demonstrated in Greece yesterday in the week’s second major protest against planned job cuts, as social tensions rose over a leftist musician’s murder by a suspected neo-Nazi.
A police source said some 20,000 people marched in Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities as a two-day strike called by the civil servants’ union ADEDY shut down public services and disrupted the operation of hospitals and schools. Fearing additional layoffs in the recession-hit country, unions reject a job redeployment scheme demanded by Greece’s EU-IMF creditors in return for access to bailout loans.
Protesters held aloft banners reading, “No to layoffs” and “No to the dissolution of public services”.
“They will abolish permanence (in public sector jobs) and sell whatever they can from the public property, be it schools, hospitals, social insurance funds,” said Christos Vagenas, a 39-year-old civil servant.
“Essentially, everything will be given to the private sector,” he said.
The protests were held in a tense climate following the killing hours earlier of a left-wing musician allegedly by a member of neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.
Pavlos Fyssas, a 34-year-old hip hop singer, was stabbed to death early yesterday morning in the western Athens district of Keratsini outside a cafeteria, in an apparent ambush.
Speaking to reporters, the victim’s father said Fyssas had been “hunted down” by a group of assailants and dealt a “professional” stab blow. AFP
