Greece: a country in mourning, still in shock, following the death of 57 people in a train crash at Tempe, the deadliest in the country and one of the worst in Europe.
8 days later the dead passengers, mainly young students, are still being buried and people continue to protest against the crime executed by the neoliberal government and a private company, that chose to sacrifice passenger safety for profit, resulting in a passenger service train, carrying more than 350 people, ramming into a freight train, just before midnight on Tuesday 28 February 2023, after they ended up on the same track mainly due to the lack of technical equipment and the incompetence of the stationmaster, causing the front carriages to burst into flames.
Ongoing revelations of staff shortages and substandard equipment have revealed the dangerous state of the privatized rail network. It was indeed an accident waiting to happen.
For 8 days, almost all protests in Athens have been brutally attacked by the so-called “mourning” riot police, under the orders of Mitsotakis government that pretends to care, while they even close down all metro stations around a protest’s starting point to deter people from joining them. Such is the government’s sincerity and repentance for the blood of 57 people on their hands. Regardless, the protest of March 8th was one of the biggest protests in Athens during the last decade, with more than 80,000 people taking part.
Just a few months before the parliamentary elections, the situation in Greece is unpredictable in a place where there is no justice, nor peace.
While the government still tries to evade assuming full responsibility for the train disaster, a general nationwide strike and new protests have been announced for Thursday, 16 March 2023.