Just in case anyone has missed the Greek insurrection that’s been going on a while now….easy to miss in the UK media, what with Jordan’s breasts and other such high calibre subjects getting all the headlines.
Konstantina Karakatsani, an anarchist wanted in relation to the case of the Nuclei of Fire urban guerrilla group publishes a devastating letter against her accusers.
In the last few weeks the counterinsurgency plan of the greek state has concentrated in the issuing of secret warrants of arrest against people that the Ministry of Public Order is targeting as members of the urban guerrilla group Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy. The unprecedented method of secret warrants announced in the media breaches the fundamental clauses of the bourgeois constitution regarding personal freedoms aiming to spread fear and discordia amongst the social antagonistic movement. In this context, the publication of an open-public letter of one of the eponymous 6 wanted for the case, the anarchist Konstantina Karakatsani, is a bold, crystal clear and highly significant act of political determination and defiance towards the new totalitarianism which has been the state’s response to the December Uprising and the revolutionary prospects it has opened. What follows is a translation of the letter, following its original format, explanations in [brackets]:
After the recent event I decided to make public my position regarding the case for which I am being accused, defending first and always my political identity.
Lets take things from the start. The day that the police stormed the supposed safe-house of Chalandri, it arrested four persons. Three of them are at this moment enclosed in various prisons, while the forth was set free. In the news, a climate of terror-hysteria is reigning, while journalists on the verge of a heart attack are screaming off their heads, reproducing delusional horror stories. They set up an orgy of lies, wet-dreaming things for which not only there are no evidence, but not even indications. Immediately after, warrants of arrest were issued for 6 people due to fingerprints found in the house and in objects contained in it which are in no manner related to the case (such as doors, windows, newspapers, plastic bags, guitars) or to the presence of their vehicles outside the house.
It is obvious that the police acted in this way in order to satisfy the need of the past administration to show that it is producing results, even at the last moment of the pre-election campaign. It would be catastrophic for any government to step down the stage leaving behind it a term filled with scandals and corruption without the slightest success, even the image of one. That is why they decided that they must baptise the house a “safe-house”, the group of friends an “organisation”, and the visitors of the house ruthless bombers and send them to prison, so that maybe someone will be convinced that they are producing results. After a few days the next administration took over. Mr Chrisochoidis, the minister with the most “respected profile” in the eyes of the public opinion, and “the great success against the November 17 [urban guerrilla group], could not make mistakes at the most difficult turn of his career. And the delirium began again…
Perhaps New Democracy [the previous right-wing administration] is supposed to have broken the spine of the Nuclei of Fire Conspiracy, but PASOK [the current 'socialist' administration] from the moment that it rose to power found through this organisation the end of the thread for the entire complex of terrorism. And the fever started rising…In one voice (as usual) cops and the media are announcing with all certainty that we 6 have perpetrated the latest attacks, that we have relations with other organisations, that we know persons…
While they are saying that there is a possibility that we are hiding together with the three warranted comrades [the 3 anarchists on whose head the ministry has placed a 600,000 Euro reward each] and together we are doing bank robberies and planning new attacks. How was all this deciphered? Perhaps the cops are watching “CSI MIAMI” and then inform their police reports. Get a little bit serious, thats not a way to work….
At the same time, a determining role in the issuing of my warrant was played by the fact that the police knew my relation with the anarchist scene, due to my arrest in January in an operation in several houses in Exarcheia after the attack of the Revolutionary Struggle in the ministry of culture [the 5th of Jaunary 2009 attack against a stationed riot police squad with automatic weapons]. Then in order to storm the house they claimed we were suspect (supposedly due to the location of the house), and after finding nothing at all, in order not to return empty handed, they arrested my (along two more people) on charges irrelevant to the case. Even though the court found my not guilty, my arrest was a great advantage in the hands of the police in order to be able to accuse me again, as now I am a person “with a criminal past”.
Thus, all those sick people are drawing the wrong conclusions based on linking irrelevant things. As far as I am concerned what I have to tell them is to shut their mouths, because I burst out laughing every time I hear them say that we do not give ourselves in because we are guilty. I am not giving myself in because I have no intention to become the pray of police ambitions for medals, and not because I am planning attacks. I did not choose to be in this position, others chose it for me. Others are trying to portray that I have gone underground, to set me outside everyday life, outside my daily activities and my life in general. I will not go to prison for those others that have decided that the cells of their democracy have too much space and must be filled. That’s why I am not presenting myself “voluntarily”, if you can get it…And why all these? For a single fingerprint on a plastic bag in a friend’s house? With a single fingerprint on a plastic bag we have become coordinators of the entire neoterrorism in Greece? The only thing they do not accuse us of yet is Al Qaeda…If they search more closely they will find my fingerprints all around the house, so what?
There was no scattered explosive powder, nor any bomb in an apparent place, so that they can accuse anyone who just enters the house. The antiterrorist police came in and turned the house into Kosovo. They placed on the table boxes with paint and paint-sprays and said: “these are the tools of the terrorists” as if paint is an explosive material. How come they did not tell us that the remote control was a hand-grenade…
As far as the minister of Public Order that asked the 6 wanted individuals to present themselves, I personally have to tell him that Its not my habit to apologise, especially to your police, and even more specially as there are no evidence against me. Go to justice to prove what? That my palls were turned into an organisations and the house into a safe-house so as that they can be free to accuse anyone they want? That they are throwing on us all the penal code and are arresting just anyone they come across just so that they can talk about arrests? Or should I finally go to prove that I am not an elephant? Go and negotiate what exactly? I am an anarchist, I am not a beggar to enter into negotiations and bazaars [haggling].
Thats why I shall be absolute in what I have to say, For despite the fact that I might not recognise the institution of your court, it recognises me as guilty. This petty little story must at some point come to an end, and I will have to face up to your justice, when the case comes.
Moreover, Mr Chrisochoidi, make up your mind and form a stable opinion: On the one hand you talk about “little children that live away from their families and democracy must show understanding”, and on the other hand all the case is uprgraded and moves into the hands of a high-commissioner inquisitor. I am not moaning. I am just pointing out at the petty games of political scheming.
I know I might be accused for the truths I speak, but thats the job of all kinds of peeping-tom representatives of the law: to erect bogus accusation cases, to exhaust people in questioning, to penalise friendly relations, to put consciousness to trial and to try to fill their dungeons with revolutionary souls. And of course, they are promoting snitching by promising rewards for our warranted comrades. Since they already knew that amongst certain people saliva will drool down the face at the sound of the big sum of the reward, and they will compete for who will be the first to give people in.
Mr Chrisochoidis has the audacity to place a reward on three people, while no-one has ever published a single photo of one of those cops who are rapping and murdering in prisons and detention centres, participating in circuits of child pornography and drug trafficking, torture, beat-up, break the heads, take out their weapons and backfire. For the simple reason that these, the current protectors of the citizen, are unapproachable – they cannot be persecuted. Society provides them with its guilty silence.
I am talking publicly not in order to prove my innocence, as the bipolarity of innocence and guilt do not fit in my logic (I have already referred to those I believe as really guilty), but because besides the slimy all-knowing quills of power, there is another truth.
THE ONLY ONES WALKING FREE IN THIS WORLD ARE THOSE STANDING AGAINST IT
KONSTANTINA KARAKATSANI
