GREEK workers and peace activists staged a mass anti-war rally as the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle arrived in the port of Piraeus in Athens today.

The protest, backed by the Greek Committee for International Detente and Peace and the the Panhellenic Union of Merchant Marine Engineers, was organised under the slogan “No war — imperialist ships are not welcome in Piraeus.”

Organisers described Piraeus as “a port of the peoples and not of the war and the imperialists.”

They warned that the further involvement of Greece in the Nato-EU plans would cause the country to become “a magnet for attacks” and are counter to the interests of the working class.

The Labour Centre of Piraeus denounced what it described as “Russia’s imperialist intervention in Ukraine” and said that it stood “in solidarity with the people that find themselves at the centre of war.

“Competition in the region of Ukraine over the control of wealth-producing and energy resources, trade routes, and spheres of influence among imperialist powers has resulted in the loss of dozens of people every day, including many children,” it said in a statement. 

“The working class in Greece has no interest in aligning behind one or the other imperialist. The interests of the workers are in conflict with the aspirations and objectives of all those who are currently waging the war. 

“We must not allow workers to become their cannon fodder,” it said.

Earlier this month Communist Party of Greece (KKE) activists painted Nato ships red in the same port during protests against the country’s involvement in the war in Ukraine.

The party has organised a series of anti-war demonstrations across the country, with a large rally held in Syntagma Square in the Greek capital Athens on Monday.

KKE considers Russia an imperialist country, with the current war being waged between Moscow and Nato-EU expansionism.

“The Ukrainian people have been paying for at least a decade for the antagonisms and interventions for the sharing of markets and spheres of influence between the US, Nato and the EU and the strategy of ‘Euro-Atlantic enlargement,’ on the one hand, and, on the other, the strategy of the capitalist Russian Federation for its own exploitative plans to the detriment of the people, to strengthen its own imperialist coalition in the region of the former Soviet Union,” a statement from its political committee said.