I am already serving 8.5 years in prison for the activities of the organization Revolutionary Struggle. I have been sentenced for all the attacks of the organization to 137 years in total, of which the new CP stipulates that in 20 years are suspended. According to the «penitentiary» code, even with the latest modifications made by the government last November, when it increased the limits for granting leave to convicts with 10 years or more of sentence – from 1/5 of the sentence as it was before, to 3/10 – I am entitled to be granted a short leave, since instead of the 6 years required for someone with 20 years of sentence, I have served 8.5 years. I should also point out that I have served most of my sentence to the limit of being eligible for parole at 3/5th of it, as stipulated by law for decades. In fact, as I have been informed by the secretariat of the Domokos C.C. where I am detained, in the first months of 2022 I will serve 3/5 of my sentence. That is to say, the 12 years gross of the 20 years of imprisonment which will then include more than 9 years of my stay in prison plus 3 years of working days of beneficial computation in the serving of my sentence.
The granting of short furlough days to prisoners, which has been legislated following prisoner struggles, is essentially a transitional stage in the preparation of prisoners from confinement to release with restrictive conditions due to the suspension of serving the remaining 2/5ths of the sentence.
Despite the fact that I meet all the formal requirements for ordinary leave, such as being well over the legal limit (I have clearly served more than 2/5 of the sentence), having no criminal proceedings pending against me and having no disciplinary offenses in force, the prison board has already twice rejected my application for short leave. The reasoning on the first occasion has the character of «prophecy», as it is considered that «there is a risk of committing new crimes during the requested leave and there is reason to expect that there is a risk of absconding and misuse of the requested leave». Behind these vague and arbitrary assumptions and considerations, the real reason for denying ordinary leave is the very substance of the matter for which I am in prison. Namely, the fact that I am convicted for an armed revolutionary action, an urban guerrilla action. The invocation of disciplinary misconduct the second time I have previously served prison, namely in 2017, which has prescribed, and also the breach of the restraining order of 2012, 9 years ago as prosecutor of the 2nd Board that I have recently passed, as the prosecutor has said, which is the breach of the restraining order when we were released once the 18-month time limit had prescribed, is totally pretextual. Moreover, the invocation of discipline is also contrary to Article 69, paragraph 4 of the Penal Code, which states that disciplinary sanctions are erased from the individual disciplinary file of the prisoner and are not taken into account for the purpose of granting ordinary parole leave if 2 years or 1 year or 6 months have elapsed since their imposition, depending on the type of disciplinary sanction. The real reason is that I am an enemy of the regime, of the State and of capital and that I have been condemned for armed revolutionary action.
The fact that I have defended in state courts the action of Revolutionary Struggle from 2011 until today, that I have taken political responsibility for my participation in Revolutionary Struggle in all the trials – including the 5 trials against the organization – that I remain convinced of the justness of our struggle, of the right to rebel and rise up against an unjust and criminal regime such as the state and capital, I understand that this is even more aggravating for the prison councils. I imagine that it is even more aggravating that we have broken our restraining orders 9 (!) years as the prosecutor of the 2nd trial said and we did not surrender at the end of the first trial of Revolutionary Struggle to go «voluntarily» to jail but we continued the action against the criminal and antisocial policies of the memorandums by attacking the institutions hated by the vast majority of society, the ECB and the IMF, two of the three institutions that imposed the memorandums. But for all this, for all our action, we have been tried and finally sentenced to heavy penalties. But that was not enough for them. The criminal apparatus of the State to deal with us resorted to illegal and atrocious means when, after the arrest of comrade Roupa on January 5, 2017, they kidnapped our son, who was then 6 and a half years old, while our relatives could pick him up, they preferred to lock him in the psychiatric ward of the Children’s Hospital where he was guarded by police officers with the obvious purpose of sending him to an institution and breaking our parental relationship with him. For this crime in which mainly the executives of the state »justice» but also of the then SYRIZA government were responsible, with the minister of »justice» Kontoni coming out publicly and defending the despicable and criminal treatment of our son, even citing an article used for abusive parents to deprive us of the custody of our son. But what they then cited to definitively remove us from parental custody was that we had been convicted of Revolutionary Struggle activities, i.e. we were their political opponents.
The treatment we received as members of Lucha Revolucionaria by the State was historically unprecedented. It was not enough for them that we were initially sentenced to life imprisonment in 2016 and 2018 – which was later broken in the appellate courts – for attacking the ECB and the IMF using exclusively against us the extreme provision of the 1969 Board law (section 270 P. C) which was legislated to deal with the dynamics of resistance at the time, but also using against us the practices of past fascist regimes, as in the civil war where they kidnapped the children of IDF guerrillas to »reform» them in Frederica’s »children’s cities» or the kidnappings of dissidents’ children carried out by the Pinochet and Videla juntas in Chile and Argentina.
But none of this has broken us. My attitude throughout these eight and a half years of imprisonment, the fact of not renouncing my identity as a member of Revolutionary Struggle, the fact of not renouncing my action, the fact of not having tolerated without protest everything that has happened against us since the disciplinary proceedings began on the day of the arrest of comrade Roupa and the kidnapping of our son, has caused me to be judged again and again in all the courts, seeking reasons in advance to reject the request for leave. But it is not just the question of permission. Their obvious goal is to keep me incarcerated as long as possible, even beyond the statutory 3/5 parole limit. Why would any board grant parole to a prisoner when it has not been granted up to the parole limit? And the grounds for denial of parole will be the same as those for denial of furlough.
Their goal to keep me in prison as long as possible, even after 3/5 of the sentence limit set by law for parole, is consistent with the general condition of the tightening of criminal repression in the last 2 years by the current Southwest government. We have already positioned ourselves in the doctrine of «repression, law and order» with which the Southwest invested for its return to power in 2019. According to this doctrine, armed revolutionary action, political prisoners, spaces of resistance and struggle, on the one hand, and social crime, on the other, are put in the same repressive blender, On the other hand, organized crime, trying to present urban guerrilla as «terrorism» and as the most «heinous» crime next to organized crime, rapists, anti-social robberies with special cruelty and crimes such as the recent Sweet Waters. It is well known that the first bill brought by this government in August 2019 concerned amendments to the new prosecutor aimed at the remaining political prisoners sentenced for domestic urban guerrilla warfare and the abolition of university asylum, followed by a program against anarchist and migrant squats throughout the country. It is no coincidence that a few months ago the same government introduced modifications to the »penitentiary» code and increased the limits for granting regular furloughs to those sentenced to sentences of more than 10 years and from 1/5 of the original limit to 3/10 and for life sentences from 8 to 12 years, changed for the worse the criteria for transfer to rural prisons and as political prisoners sentenced under 187A we are excluded from the right to serve our sentence in rural prisons and CDF, with the apparent aim of denying us the possibility of a quicker release. While recently, on the occasion of the Sweet Waters crime, he announced the increase of the parole threshold for heinous crimes from the current 3/5 to 4/5. And among them will be, of course, «terrorism».
This whole package of reforms concerning the intensification of criminal repression is in line with the general anti-social policy of the governments of recent years, the economic crisis, where the measures imposed by the state to cope with it through the memorandums of understanding have led to the impoverishment and impoverishment of large sectors of the population and, consequently, to the intensification of social crime and criminality. And those who created the problem with the crisis and the policies to deal with it are now coming to impose the only solution according to them: Repression, the enactment of more draconian laws, the increase of the detention limit, the creation of more prisons.
However, the advocates of the doctrine of «law and order» are proving to be hypocrites. Those who talk about heinous crimes and play sensitive, for example, with the long-standing allegations of rape and sexual abuse in the field of sport and culture, are the same ones who covered up for their former member and head of political planning of the New Democracy party, Nikos Georgiadis, sentenced to only 28 months in prison with probation for pederasty and sexual abuse of minors in Moldova, where he had diplomatic status. The same supporters of «law and order» spoke of a political «plot» against him and some even attended his trial as defense witnesses. These are the same as the current ND Minister of Health, Kikilias (and former Pro.Po Minister), who complained in the fall of 2019 that they had broken my life sentence for the Revolutionary Struggle against the ECB (BoE) – IMF bombing and pointed out that in about 2 years he could be free. A statement of clear political manipulation of the judiciary that should decide on the question of my furlough and parole. But he said nothing when they broke the life sentence of the murderer of policeman Korkones, who was immediately released on Lamia’s advice. If you are a murderer and cop, have no disciplinary record and have a »legitimate» life then you get out of jail faster. Those who played »anti-fascist» with the conviction of Golden Dawn are the same ones who negotiated with them before Fyssa’s murder to support them politically. The outcome of the Golden Dawn trial proves that it is »advantageous» to belong to a neo-Nazi criminal organization covered up by the state, while the years its members will spend in prison will be practically minimal. Their «democracy» knows who to keep in prison for several years: us.
Those who sold and enslaved a whole people to the slave services of the markets with the memorandums to pay their own debts and their life of luxury, those who sold the country trampling on the Constitution itself to save their privileges, do not have so many problems with the big drug traffickers (see NOR 1), nor with the embezzlers of public money that come from their own elite, nor with the rapists and organized crime of which there is no file that does not involve retired or active policemen. After all, organized crime copies their methods, the methods of political and economic power, legal power and capital, since they have the same values: profit, entrepreneurship, investment, power. However, legal power turns out to be more capable and more effective in stealing from the people and workers on a large scale. Power’s biggest problem is not organized crime but us, the revolutionaries. Its biggest problem is those who have difficulties.
Nikos Maziotis member of Revolutionary Struggle
Fourth ward of Domokos prison.
SOURCE: ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΤΙΚΟΣ ΑΓΩΝΑΣ
TRANSLATION: ANARQUÍA
VIA: ACT FOR FREEDOM NOW!