10th DAY OF THE HUNGER STRIKE OF GIANNIS MICHAILIDIS
Update from today’s intervention at ESIEA
The assembly in solidarity with the hunger striker Giannis Michailidis, who has been on hunger strike since 23/5, held an intervention today at the ESIEA building, in order to give visibility to the struggle of his comrade. As soon as the intervention started, the vice president of ESIEA was negative even with the hanging of the banner. We made it clear to him that we had come with the specific purpose of highlighting the hunger strike and that we would leave when we felt that the comrade’s hunger strike had been sufficiently highlighted. He threatened us that he would call the police and we replied that we would not leave the building until we had left safely and had achieved our purpose. He ordered all the telephone lines and computers in the building to be shut down to prevent the propaganda of the action.
We are not in a position to know if the vice president ultimately called the cops or if they came on their own. Two Delta groups (Motorcycle cops) came to the scene and even without any legitimacy they entered the ground floor and threatened us with arrest. We re-stated that we would not leave unless the police forces left.The determination of the solidarity groups to remain in the building made it clear to the president that in order to end the intervention the cops had to leave.
The banner was hung from the rooftop and leaflets were thrown.
About the choice to intervene in the ESIEA
We have no illusions about the mainstream media. However, against the constant tactic of the state apparatus to silence the hunger strikes, we had to intervene in order to make the demand for the immediate release of Giannis Michailidis heard. The regime media that wrote about the intervention did not post the text.
The text of the intervention:
10 DAYS OF HUNGER STRIKE
10-day intervention at the ESIEA for the anarchist hunger striker G. Michailidis
The “Assembly of solidarity with the anarchist hunger striker Giannis Michailidis” is holding an intervention at ESIEA, expressing solidarity with the hunger striker. At the same time, it seeks to break the wall of silence, which almost all the media have erected around the case of comrade Giannis Michailidis and the hunger strike itself, which has been going on since 23/5. Giannis is demanding his release with the last means of struggle available to a prisoner, his very life.
NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION THURSDAY 2/6 GATHERING AT SYNTAGMA AT 19:00
PRE-EMPTIVE CAPTIVE AND HUNGER STRIKE FROM 23/5/2022
Anarchist comrade Giannis Michailidis has served the formal conditions of release for all his sentences as of 29 December 2021, after 8.5 years of detention. The Judicial Council of Amfissa, however, denies his release on the pretext that he does not meet the essential conditions of release. This additional detention is being used at will by the judicial mafia to punish choices and attitudes of struggle. After the first rejection of his request for conditional release in February comes the second negative prosecutorial proposal, now in May, with the judges in charge unable to time his release, or rather stating that the comrade will have to remain in prison for an indefinite period of time until it is decided, based on their appetites, that he is no longer a danger. In order to justify this indefinite hostage-taking of the comrade, the pretext is used that the prisoner ‘does not meet the substantive conditions for release, as there is a risk of committing new offences’. In other words, this is a preventive extension of a prisoner’s detention without a time limit. Under the Criminal Code applicable to the case of the comrade, all prisoners who have completed 3/5 of their sentence are entitled to conditional release if there are no active criminal cases or active disciplinary offences in the prison. Conditional release is a militant achievement of prisoners. An acquisition that, along with a few others, such as short-term furloughs, was won during the era of harsh incarceration and bloody prison riots.
THE THOUGHT POLICE OF CIVIL JUSTICE MUST BE DEFEATED
At this moment in the person of Giannis the most odious and Orwellian face of bourgeois justice is being applied. Behind the creative ambiguity of the essential conditions lies the thought police of judges and prosecutors, who punish prisoners not for the criminal offences they have committed but for what they themselves imagine they might commit in some indefinite future. This kind of subjective judgment is always exhausted and applied against political opponents of the state and against those prisoners who maintain a fighting spirit. There are not a few cases where prisoners have completed their sentence, have signed up for parole, and are waiting for a parole board to decide positively, months or even years, without any tangible reason for rejection other than the existence of a thought police that in the name of its imagination commands : “rejected” – “you are dangerous for what I think you might commit”. This kind of preventive detention is in essence part of the exception regime which has specific objectives and is built to crush unrepentant political prisoners and those prisoners who refuse to comply with the state’s dictates within the ‘correctional’ institutions. We know that the unrepentant political opponents of the regime are subjected to all the fury and vengeance of the state apparatus. Special laws, special detention regimes, special trials are applied against them. They are the recipients of all kinds of judicial coups and machinations. Their unrepentant attitude, their resistance through hunger strikes, militant mobilisations, political interventions, escapes, is precisely what they want to crush the States through their anti-terrorist laws and their demands for statements of repentance. The example of continuous struggle and resistance to every condition despite the cost. The political choice that the struggle is not futile but necessary and continues even from within the prisons.
That is why they consider comrade Giannis Michailidis dangerous. Because he participated from a young age in anarchist student groups, because he participated in the anti-war/anti-state/anti-capitalist demonstrations of that period and was arrested during the conflicts. Because he participated in the 2006-2007 student struggles against educational restructuring, because he fought against the plundering of nature and was arrested for intervening in the Parnitha casino in 2007i, because he was an integral part of the December uprising, because he was present in the battles against the memoranda. For expropriating the bloody wealth of the banks. Because throughout his life he has remained steadfastly committed to the vision of the overthrow of state and capital from an anarchist perspective. Because for eleven years, either as a wanted man or as a prisoner, he maintained a combative – militant stance against the police-judicial complex, the material expression of state terrorism. Because he never bent, he never repented, he never chose the easy path of snitching and indignity.
CIVIL JUSTICE IS A SNAKE THAT BITES ONLY THE BAREFOOT.
He is dangerous because he is not involved with the shipping capital that acts as a cartel drug dealer transporting tons of heroin (NOOR1ii), because he is not an artistic figure who uses power and influence to rape people’s bodies and souls (Lignadisiii), because he is not a prominent corrupt official of a multinational or a political party (Energa, Novartis, Siemens)iv. We know very well that the bourgeois justice system is committed to ‘respecting the rights’ of prisoners and shows humanitarian sensitivity when it comes to its own children. The list of their own people who have slipped painlessly through the nets set up by the judiciary is endless. The release of the unrepentant Korkoneasv, the releases of the members of the Golden Dawn, the political cover for the cop killers of Nikos Sampanis and the prosecution’s mock sentence covering up the big business rapists of Georgia Bika show us that it could not be otherwise, since we recognize in the face of bourgeois justice one of the main pillars of the state.
At a time when the structural crisis of capitalism is deepening and the war conflicts are now spreading to European territory, pre-emptive counterinsurgency strategies are the war preparation for confronting social-class resistances. On the front of criminal repression, the penal codes are being tightened and the regime of exemption for all political prisoners continues to deepen and sharpen. The comrade’s demand for his immediate release is a struggle to break the vindictive practice of preventive imprisonment and acquires special weight because political prisoners, due to their political choices, are the frontline of the social-class war. The struggle of the comrade for his release is therefore not a narrow struggle that concerns him exclusively. It is a militant choice as a whole against a regime of exclusion arbitrarily and abusively imposed against any prisoner who has a decent attitude, but more specifically against the regime of exclusion against political prisoners, anarchists or communists. It is an integral part of the struggle for a world without prisons and barbed wire, without borders and concentration camps, without the plunder and destruction of the planet by the multinationals, without class exploitation, without rich and poor, without gender and racial oppression. This is the world we are fighting for, this is the world the comrade is fighting for through his hunger strike.
THE INDEFINITE DETENTION OF THE HUNGER STRIKER MUST BE ENDED IMMEDIATELY
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ANARCHIST GIANNIS MICHAILIDIS
Assembly of solidarity with the anarchist hunger striker Yannis Michaelides
Source: athens.indymedia
DN Notes:
i. A direct action by a group of 30 anarchist comrades, daubed the Parnitha casino building and parked cars with red paint. They also spray-painted messages demanding the removal of the casino from the mountain where a fire burned the month before 4,000 hectares of forest. The blaze prompted the first public protest of its kind in Greece when several thousand people gathered in front of Parliament a few days later to demand better environmental protection policies. After the action 27 people were arrested after a six-hour chase by cops even with a helicopter through remote paths on Mount Parnitha.
ii. NOOR1, a police and judicial investigation into the transport and trafficking of 2.1 tonnes of heroin carried by the tanker “Noor 1” from Dubai to Athens in the summer of 2014. The case has been in the Greek and foreign media due to the huge amount of heroin and the deaths of several witnesses that have been recorded, while it has been described as “the largest known heroin transport in the history of Europe”. High profile businessmen and politicians were prosecuted or got away with being imprisoned including the corrupt mafiaesque shipowner, businessman, sports club owner and politician Vaggelis Marinakis, wo is current owner of Olympiakos and Nottingham Forest football clubs, highlighting further the utter corruption that permeates throught Greek state and capitalism.
iii. Paedophilia scandal in theatre that has rocked Greek politics. The extent of the paedophilia ring is still not known because there has been a blatant cover up because of high profile members of Greek society involved in the case.
iv. Major corruption cases involving Greek companies, businessmen and politicians.
v. The cop scum who shot and killed 15 year old Alexis Grigoropoulos in Exarcheia, Athens, 6th December 2008, that lead to the mass riots and insurrection that followed.