Intervention in solidarity with the anarchist hunger striker G. Michailidis took place in the context of the nationwide day of action on Thursday morning 2/6 at the radio station “Sto Kokkino” in Thessaloniki.
During the intervention, leaflets were thrown and texts were distributed on Venizelos Street, while the programme was interrupted to play a recorded text of solidarity.
Immediate release of hunger striker G. Michailidis
Victory in the – since 23/5 – hunger strike by
All and everyone at the microphone solidarity meeting Thursday 2/6 at 19.00 Gounari & Tsimiski
Below is the text of the intervention:
Giannis Michailidis, has been in Greek prisons since 2013, and has been arrested in the past during clashes in anti-war and anti-state/anti-capitalist demonstrations. From his participation in anarchist student groups in his teenage years to the student struggles of 2006-2007 and December and from the struggles against the memoranda to a series of prisoners’ struggles, the comrade has fought and continues to fight against the state and capitalist dystopia without renouncing his ideas, without repenting for his choices.
Giannis continues to be imprisoned even though he has served the required sentence for his conditional release and the disciplinary sentence as well as the detention sentence (which is not merged) for the disciplinary offence of escape, and since Monday 23 May he has been on hunger strike against his vindictive treatment, demanding his freedom, putting his health and life at risk.
More specifically, in December 2021, after nearly 8.5 years in prison, Giannis completed the necessary conditions for his temporary release. However, on 22/02/22, the Amfissa Plenary Council, as another thought police, decided that the comrade “does not meet the essential conditions as there is a risk of committing new offences”, thus prolonging his imprisonment. A decision based on the fact that the comrade, after being deprived of his educational and regular leave and facing the risk of being transferred to a closed prison, escaped in June 2019 from the rural prison of Tiryns, on the fact that he has been convicted of bank robbery and on the fact that he did not make a statement of repentance, instead defending morally and politically the choice of targeted robbery in a wealth mechanism over a common robbery such as that of people passing by. In fact, in their hopeless attempt to support this decision, they fall into blatant contradiction. Although they acknowledge that the comrade did not renounce his anarchist identity and choices, by demonstrating his consistency and unrepentant attitude they present his demonstrated good behavior in prison as pretextual and ostensibly good.
We know with him that he is not called a Korkoneas killer, he is not part of the rotten system, he is not a fascist, he is not a rapist or a woman killer and therefore he will not get any lenient treatment. Instead, he is a hostage of the judicial mafia until a judge finds that he meets the vague “substantive requirements” for release.
In contemporary social reality in a new outbreak of the global capitalist crisis, the power complex is enriching its arsenal, and repression is constantly being upgraded in the face of the “earthquakes to come” (university police and university tournaments, constant upgrading of the terror law and the penal code, curtailment of the right to demonstrate and strike, special privileges for clashes in marches, silencing of the few dissident journalists, vindictive treatment of political prisoners). The attack on every worker, immigrant, oppressed, on what is left, on every struggling part, on everyone who rebels, continues with diverse means. Solidarity is a necessary condition of our survival and a one-way street for those who refuse to submit to the power of the state and capital.
The hostage-taking of Giannis and the denial of his release from prison, which he has been entitled to since last December, concerns many more people than himself, and is a point of condensation of the class and repressive violence we are subjected to. Thus the case of his release must also become a point of rallying and struggle of the entire movement, which must support, despite individual disagreements, political prisoners in the face of the special regime of exception imposed on them. For it is in these difficult circumstances, from the trench warfare that kept our existence alive on the streets in previous years, to the student movement last year in Thessaloniki, and from the hunger strike of the communist D. Koufontinas, to the exemplary and persistent workers’ struggles in Piraeus, Kavala, E-food and Larko, where a generation of fighters is steeling itself and learning anew, against the prevailing defeatism, how to change the correlations of power.
STRUGGLE AGAINST THE TERROR OF STATE AND CAPITAL
SOLIDARITY WITH POLITICAL PRISONERS
Assembly of solidarity with the anarchist hunger striker Giannis Michailidis (Thessaloniki)
Source: athens.indymedia