Delegation of the Organizational Assembly of Balkan Anarchist Bookfair 2023 have travelled to Sofia to support the anti-Lukov march on the 25th of February. They used this opportunity and visited also Niš (Serbia), Thessaloniki (Greece) and Istanbul (Turkey) to meet comrades, promote BAB2023 and talk about ongoing struggles, international and mutual solidarity.
During the visit of Thessaloniki the train accident in Tempi happened – our delegation proposed a solidarity statement with people and their struggles against the state and capital in Greece in the context of this accident. Organizational Assembly of BAB2023 supported the statement – you can read it below.
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concerning the train disaster in greece – rage and solidarity from ljubljana
we want to express solidarity with the people who survived the train crash, with the close ones of those who died, with the railroad workers on strike and the rest who took the streets against the capitalist system and the state in the past days.
on the 28th of february a train crash occurred in tempi, a valley between athens and thessaloniki. it was the last day of holidays, and students, among others, were going back to their cities. the two trains collided with 160km/h, which resulted in a complete destruction of front wagons and a heavy fire. the current number of the people who lost their lifes is unknown, since most of the bodies were burned down completely and there is no way to find out how many people were on the train at that particular moment.
safe travel and regular connections should be available to all of us – we do not believe that buying new cars for personal security is the solution, neither is the construction of new highway systems, expanding airports and deficient automatization. students, migrants, elderly and workers are just some of those who heavily rely on train transporation, and rightly so, especially in times of ecological collapse.
this accident is a direct consequence of the capitalist management of what used to be a public transport sector. when syriza was in power, the railway companies got privatized, automated only on paper and many railroad workers got fired. the latter were warning about the situation for a long time and yet there were no measures taken to better the situation. the fault is not at the individual worker but is in the hands of the european union, which forces privatization in exchange for loans, and its agencies, government and all those who put profit before everything else.
in the following days people gathered on the streets of athens, thessaloniki and larrisa to express their anger and sadness and to show who is responsible for the death of the large number of people who died that day. police responded with tear gas, sound grenades and beatings only to reveal again that they are the ones protecting the capital and are the closest collaborators of the murderous regime.
with anger we are following the news from which we understand that the reason of another catastrophe is neoliberal greed at the expense of our lives, which makes us even more determined to fight the corrupted system enabled by the state and european institutions. again we want to express our solidarity with all those fighting against modern totalitarianism and its murderous methods.
it was not tempi, it was not bad time,
state and capital kills;
their profits – our dead!
organizational assembly of balkan anarchist bookfair 2023
