The Greek Asylum

Too far
Scrapping
university
asylum
altogether
because you
can’t stop a
bunch of socalled
antiestablishment
youths from
using it as a
base is like
throwing the
baby out with
the bathwater


In “Dogtooth,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s muchapplauded
most recent film, three walledoff
kids are subjected to the perverted language
games of their uber-controlling parents:
hence a large armchair is “the sea,”
a lamp is a “white bird,” and a cat is “a lifethreatening
animal.”
Greeks, of course, are no strangers to
linguistic abuse. “University asylum,” a
law that bans police from campuses so as
to safeguard “the free dissemination of
ideas,” has started to feel much like the
opposite.
Professors and students are regularly
bullied and physically abused by groups
of nonstudents, ranging from self-styled
anarchists to ultra-leftists. Threats and destruction
of public property are often accompanied
by beatings. Universityowned
buildings are occupied by outsiders
who use them for private purposes,
such as hosting publishing centers, radio
stations and websites like the “bourgeois”-
bashing Indymedia network. During
clashes with the police, protesters use
the premises to regroup and to rebuild
their supplies of petrol bombs before getting
back to the streets. Although some
education is involved in all of this, it surely
is not of the sort that lawmakers had
in mind in the early 1980s.
The asylum law was established by the
late Andreas Papandreou’s socialist
PASOK in a bid to forestall a repeat of the
army raid that crushed the Athens
Polytechnic uprising against the military
junta in November 1973. The uprising is
a watershed moment in Greece’s modern
political history and many politicians
have, often unscrupulously, capitalized
on their part in it. Politics here is still much
about managing symbols.
Hence it’s easy to see how the ongoing
debate about whether to scrap asylum legislation
has become a symbolic battlefield
in a war that exceeds the old-style leftright
divisions. The rampage following the
police shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros
Grigoropoulos in the pock-marked
Exarchia district last December caused
cracks on the left between the motley crew
of banner-waving radicals and the more
sober elements who were put off by the
orgy of vandalism and violence. Hundreds
of cars were torched and shops destroyed
or looted in the riots that cost some 100
million euros in damages as the conservative
government ordered riot policemen
to keep their batons sheathed for fear of
justifying its right-wing bogeyman profile.
The riots exposed the cynicism but also
the divisions and ideological confusion
of the Greek left, as reactions ranged from
delight and schadenfreude to sadness and
despair. Voters eventually punished
those who sought to exploit the backlash,
none more so than SYRIZA chief Alexis
Tsipras, whose reluctance to clearly condemn
the violence quickly transformed
him from socialist wunderkind to villain.
His party, a coalition of radical left-wing
factions, was seriously damaged in the
elections that followed. Mainstream voters,
once charmed by his ostensibly maverick
style, did not like what they saw on
their television screens.
The uncomfortable truth is that leftist
activists are increasingly flirting with violence,
prompting further soul-searching
among their nonmilitant fellows. A number
of professors, writers and journalists
have over the past year been attacked on
campuses and in bookshops, also in the
ostensibly pluralist Exarchia. Even Soti
Triantafillou, a self-described leftist author
who lives in the area, was recently
harassed during a book presentation by
a group of men who threw eggs at her for
being “a capitalist lackey.” The assailants
warned Triantafillou, who has in the past
received threats against her life, that she
is persona non grata in that part of town.
Decades of anti-rightist reflexes ensure
that any move on university asylum will
not go down easily. Even mild measures
that go without saying in foreign institutions,
like the introduction of university
security guards and identity cards for
students proposed by the Athens Law
School last week, have met here with opposition
from students – even those belonging
to the New Democracy-affiliated
group. Such ideological paradoxes expose
vested interests that are outside the leftright
dichotomies.
Critics of the asylum law claim it is a
meaningless safeguard – and they are
right. Any dictatorship’s first move would
be to do away with the Constitution and,
in that sense, it’s true that the asylum law
does not carry much weight on a practical
level. But symbols can have real power
over people’s behavior. Green-lighting
police patrols inside campuses risks causing
more problems than it would solve.
After all, scrapping university asylum altogether
because you can’t stop a bunch
of so-called anti-establishment youths
from using it as a base is like throwing the
baby out with the bathwater.
The law allows prosecutors to intervene
when a felony is committed – but the police
have only rarely, and only too late, taken
action inside the premises despite the
extensive wrongdoing. Anyone who lives
in this country knows that keeping the
law in place while preventing its abuse
is a matter of political will.
Ironically, this time the hot potato is in
Socialist hands. Perhaps it’s better that
way. It took a Socialist public order minister,
the deft-handed Michalis Chrysochoidis,
to launch a tough crackdown on
troublemakers in order to prevent a repeat
of the havoc on the anniversary of
Grigoropoulos’s death.
Chrysochoidis, the man behind the dismantling
of local terrorist group November
17, knows that, once again, much will
depend on public consent. And as the 2002
terrorist crackdown showed, there is no
better way of gaining this than by stripping
wrongdoers of their heroic aura. The
government will only manage to clean up
the mess when the public comes to see
university asylum for what it has been reduced

to: an excuse for real, not theoretical