Greek communists call for return of Elgin Marbles

By New Worker correspondent

Campaigners at the British Museum

Greek communists have long supported the call for the return of the Parthenon friezes known as the ‘Elgin Marbles’ to Greece so that they can be put on permanent display at the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The marbles, dating back to the 5th Century BC, were removed by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812. In those days Greece was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and Elgin said their authorities had given him permission to take the marbles from the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens. This was challenged at the time by Lord Byron and other champions of Greek independence and later by Greeks academics following independence who said these priceless relics had been looted and that in any case they weren’t the Turks to give in the first place.
    Over the years these calls for their return were routinely rebuffed by the British Museum which has held the sculptures in its galleries since the early 1800s. But hopes of an amicable compromise were raised following talks between the British Museum's chairman George Osborne and Greek premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis in London last November.
    According to reports in the Greek press the former Tory Chancellor set the ball rolling with a discreet meeting with Mitsotakis in London the year before in November 2021. Further talks with other Greek ministers followed culminating in the meeting with Mitsotakis when the Greek leader was in London for talks last year.
    Neither side revealed what was actually on the table during these talks but the Parthenon Project, a campaign group set up by the Greek magnate John Lefas that includes former Tory and Labour culture ministers as well as the actor Stephen Fry, hinted that the return of the marbles would be linked to a cultural exchange that would bring other outstanding classical Greek works of art such as “Agamemnon’s mask”, Nestor's Cup and the bronze Jockey of Artermision to London.
    A spokesperson for the Parthenon Project said: “With widespread support for reunification amongst both the Greek and British public, and constructive dialogue going on based on mutual trust, a solution to this long-standing issue is finally within reach.
    “We have argued for a deal that is beneficial to both Greece and Britain, centred on a cultural partnership between the two countries.
    “This would see the British Museum continue in its role as a 'museum of the world' displaying magnificent Greek artefacts as part of rotating exhibits, with the Parthenon Sculptures reunited in their rightful home in Athens.'
    But sadly these hopes were dashed last week when Culture Minister Michelle Donelan told BBC Radio that the Parthenon marbles belong in the UK and that returning them would "open the gateway to the question of the entire contents of our museums".
    Her remarks were dismissed as “unacceptable” by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). The Greek communists said that “based on the ‘law of the strongest’ the Minister of Culture of Great Britain has categorically rejected the obvious demand of the Greek people for the restoration of the stolen Parthenon sculptures to their natural place”.
    The KKE also criticised Mitsotakis’ conservative New Democracy (ND) government for cynically exploiting the campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles for political purposes.
    “The ND government didn't hesitate to exploit the desire for the return of the looted sculptures by using it in its electoral propaganda, cultivating impressions of a successful outcome of the issue through its own actions, while it knew that the problem was impossible to solve through ‘under the table’ discussions with the British Museum's management instead of the British government.
    “The [Greek] government must be also held accountable because its adventurist tactics undermine the timeless demand, allowing the circulation of dangerous views about the borrowing and exchanging of the Parthenon sculptures with other priceless antiquities, something that means the legalisation of the theft.
    “All the previous governments bear responsibility for perpetuating the problem, because they never exerted substantial pressure to end the illegal possession of the country's cultural treasures by the British Museum and other major museums of EU countries.
    “The urgent demand of our people is the permanent restoration of the Parthenon sculptures as an inalienable part of the monumental ensemble of the Acropolis, as well as of all the other treasures of the ancient cultural heritage which have, at times, been objects of looting or antiquities theft”.

Warm welcome for KKE leader in London

By New Worker correspondent

AKEL’s community centre in Wood Green was packed out on Saturday as London comrades joined members of London’s Greek community at a social at the Cypriot communist centre in honour of visiting Greek communist leader Dimitris Koutsoumbas. Many had gone to listen to the Greek communist leader give a talk at Birkbeck College in central London earlier in the day. Many more came along for the evening reception, which included live Greek folk music and jazz as well as a Greek buffet and bar.

Dimitris Koutsoumbas, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), spent a hectic three days in London visiting the Marx Memorial Library on Friday and Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery on Sunday.

Koutsoumbas said: "The instruction of Karl Marx that 'the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, the point is to change it', which was the meaning of his teaching's revolutionary character, is the timeless message that exists today and illuminates the future for the new generations, for the world's working class."

Accompanied by numerous members of the British branches of the KKE and the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE), Koutsoumbas laid a wreath on Marx’s grave on behalf of the Party. With their fists raised, the Greek communists shouted "KKE, the people's party" and "A century of struggles and sacrifices, the KKE in the vanguard".

100 years of the KKE!

 By New Worker correspondent

Tilemachos Dimoulas speaking

 

NCP leader Andy Brooks joined hundreds of Greek and Cypriot communists celebrating the glorious 100-year-old history of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) at a meeting in London last weekend. Wood Green’s Cypriot Community Centre hall was packed to the rafters on Saturday to see a video tribute to the KKE that was founded in 1918 and hear an report of the current situation in Greece by Tilemachos Dimoulas, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of KKE.

The KKE was founded amid the flames of the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 .  From the very first moment of its foundation in 1918, the KKE stood unwaveringly as an advocate and defender of the Soviet Union, it opposed the Greek bourgeois class which along with others on an international level, tried to supress the October revolution at its birth.

Fourteen capitalist states participated in the imperialist intervention against the Soviet Union, with capitalist Greece being among them. The KKE called upon the Greek people to condemn and oppose the imperialist intervention. From its founding Congress, it addressed

a protest resolution for the intervention of the imperialists against the young Soviet power. The Greek communists of Odessa distributed proclamations to the population and the Greek troops, which called upon the workers not to turn their guns against their class brothers but

against the real enemy, the imperialists.

            Opposing dictatorship at home and supporting the fight against fascism in Spain the KKE took up the gun to fight the Nazis during the Second World War and fought  the royalists and their Anglo-American backers during the post-war civil war.

The KKE is at the forefront of the effort for the revolutionary regroupment of the International Communist Movement, the effort of creating a Marxist-Leninist pole in the international movement. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991  the Greek communists took important initiatives in order to rally the communist forces from all over the world, to organize the international meetings of communist and workers’ parties that began in Athens in the 1990s. Today the KKE keeps up the fight  against austerity and the European Union to defend workers rights to build the revolutionary movement in Greece and throughout the world.

When Londoners stood up to Mosley

Italian comrades opening the ceremony

By New Worker correspondent

Comrades from Britain, Greece, Italy and Israel gathered at the Cable Street memorial in Shadwell on Saturday to remember that epic day in 1936 when Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were stopped in their tracks on 4^th October 1936. Communists played a major part in the mobilisation along with members of the Independent Labour Party and the Jewish Ex-Servicemen’s Association, and their efforts were recalled by British, Italian and Greek communists at a ceremony in London’s historic East End last weekend.

NCP leader Andy Brooks and comrades from the Communist Party of Italy’s Pietro Secchia (UK) branch, along with members of the Greek communist party (KKE) and the Communist Party of Israel, paid tribute to the East Enders’ heroic stand against fascism.

On that day some 3,000 Blackshirts and thousands of police were met by a hostile crowd who had erected barricades to stop the fascists marching. After hours of clashes with the police and many arrests, the police told Mosley that the march would have to be abandoned.

The massive mural, painted by a number of local artists, was started in 1979 and finally completed in 1983. The work has been vandalised by fascists several times but it was substantially restored in 2011.

The design was based on original photographs of the battle and the buildings of the day. Some of the people who took part in the battle are depicted in the mural, along with others who symbolise the people of the East End today.

• Islington Tribune