The Direct Action Cells take responsibility for the attack with a low-powered incendiary/explosive device at the home of the head of the Inspection and Control Corps of the Detention Facilities and Deputy Prosecutor of Appeals Spyridoulas Presveias at 13 Solomou Street in the area of Glyfada, in the early hours of 1/4.
We are sending a clear message to prison prosecutors, prison wardens, prison officers, wardens, directors, social workers who choose to treat prisoners as second-class citizens. Who choose to play dirty political games on their backs. Who become agents of the Ministry of Civil Protection in order to advance themselves and their careers. Gather round because you will find us in front of you. The prosecutor we targeted is at the top of the institution responsible for the internal control of prisons and is directly responsible for all the injustices suffered by prisoners, especially after the passage of the new penal and new prison code.
Spyridoulas Presvias as the head of the Prison Inspection and Control Corps (ΣΕΕΚΚ) is the person whose responsibilities concern the most authoritarian parts of the anti-crime policy. He was appointed by the (former) secretary general of anti-crime policy Sophia Nikolaou, a failed New Democracy politician and declared enemy of prisoners, who a few years ago did everything in her power to murder the communist revolutionary Dimitris Koufontinas. In recent years, and after her appointment as its head, the ΣΕΕΚΚ, in addition to conducting investigations and files within the prison, has been upgraded to a body that can take legislative and administrative initiatives to further repress prisoners within the prison. This agency and the upgrading of its repressive tools is part of the broader planning of the New Democracy government for prisons as reflected in the new penal code and the new penitentiary code and a number of other repressive moves they call anti-crime policy. The state may talk about a “war on crime”, but in reality the policies that follow these declarations do not reduce crime, nor do they work to promote the cohesion of society. On the contrary, these policies are the intensification of the war through the systematic class, social and political exclusion declared by the ruling classes against the social base. And the prisons constitute the ultimate point, the absolute domination of this exclusion over the bodies of those who end up in the concrete tombs of bourgeois democracy.
Prominent in this war is the judicial priesthood, staffed by scum like Spyridoulas Presvias. Judges and prosecutors, claiming to serve a kind of objective science, which in reality is nothing more than a set of rules, created through the interlocking of the bourgeois, political and judicial classes, enshrines and reflects the class violence which – even in the odious form of inter-class violence – has its roots in the power centres of real organised crime. The police, the big lawyers, the high-ranking judges, the shipowners. Prosecutors and judges, as modern-day inquisitors, have the role of interpreting the (already class-biased) laws in a way that sanctifies and whitewashes the caste of the economic and political bosses, their paid propagandists (journalists) and their slaves (cops), while condemning the excluded classes to further impoverishment through punitive sentences, torture, disciplinary, vindictive transfers, deprivation of licenses and suspensions. They turn their backs on those who denounce their rapist and pimp, on families who mourn sons and daughters who happen to be in the path of uniformed trash or in cheap night train seats, condemn those who offer medical care to the uninsured, at the same time, they turn their backs on businessmen, politicians, rapists and cops. For as a well-known slogan rightly says : Justice is like snakes, it bites only the barefoot.
At a time when social resistance seems to be receding and the broader antagonistic movement is waiting for the dead to take to the streets, the government of the New Democracy is taking the opportunity to pass by the throat the gains and rights of prisoners in prisons, trying to put a tombstone on decades of gains. Against this backdrop, prisoners from prisons all over the country have been on mobilization since 28/10, with a series of comprehensive demands against the new prison code, fighting for their inalienable rights that are being violated by the callousness of the aristocrats who dream of prisoners melting like the living-dead slowly and torturously in prisons without rights and without a reason to exist.
The demands of the prisoners are:
- Return of the detention facilities as a whole to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice Abolition of maximum security prisons (former type C prisons)
- Granting regular leave at 1/5 of the sentence for all prisoners and for life sentences at 8 years.
- No exception on the basis of offence to the right to transfer to rural establishments
- No exception on the basis of an offence to the granting of regular leave
- No tightening of the conditions for granting educational leave
- Separation of disciplinary penalties from the granting of conditional release of prisoners
- Granting immediate and priority parole to prisoners with a disability of more than 67%
We have no illusions. It goes without saying that in this era of political rot and systematic disinformation, the voice of the people in the Greek hellholes called prisons will be heard like a whisper. Let every person who still resists, who still goes against the current of privatization and depersonalization that tends to become a torrent (Prisoners of Korydallos Prison on 31/10/22)
It is therefore our duty to become a barrier to the torrent of privatisation and resignation, to put our words into practice and through practical, militant solidarity, to break the code of silence that the political and media world has imposed on the struggles of the prisoners. To connect the struggles of those on the same side of the barricade as a whole, targeting those responsible, returning to them a tiny bit of the terror they sow. To make the whispers of the prisoners into cries of counter-attack against the rotten world of prisons and their endless loneliness.
With this act we have chosen to target the prosecutor who is directly responsible for all the injustices suffered by prisoners, especially after the adoption of the new penal and prison code. We had previously stated after our attack on the former Chairman of the Standing Legislative Committee, Lambros Margaritis, who was essentially in charge of the new penal code, that for us attacking the gains of struggles within the prisons is a top priority. With this strike we are taking a fighting position alongside the prisoners who have been struggling all this time.
FEAR MUST CHANGE SIDES
Solidarity with the member of the Anarchist Action Organization Thanos Chatziangelou and the anarchist Georgia Voulgari. Immediate release of Panos Kalaitzis who is in prison because of his social relations.
We wholeheartedly send our solidarity to the four imprisoned comrades for the case of the arson attack on the Piraeus Traffic Police on 14/11/2021.
Solidarity and complicity to the prisoners of war Monica Caballero and Francisco Solar in Chile. Anarchists and subversive prisoners in the streets.
Practical internationalist solidarity and complicity with all revolutionary political prisoners and prisoners in every corner of the world.
Direct Action Cells
Cell Katerina Goulioni*
Source: athens.indymedia
DN Note
*Katerina Goulioni, political prisoner whose death at hands of prison guard scum in March 2009 sparked an uprising in the Greek prison system and riots during demos outside the Women’s prison of Thebes.
The death of Katerina Goulioni, known for her struggle against vaginal inspection of inmates sparked a violent uprising in the Women’s Prison of Thebes on Sunday 22/3. Inmates refused to return to their cells, and set fires and smashed the jail, while a protest march in solidarity to Goulioni clashed with riot police forces outside the prison. One section of the prison is said to have beeen seriously burned.
Katerina Goulioni’s last letter to the Initiative for Prisoners’ Rights published in the Communist Newspaper Epoxi is revealing of her struggle with the prison authorities:
“I hit the chief-screw because besides everything he had me locked in isolation in Korydallos Prison and I had to pee in a bottle”
Besides her struggle against vaginal inspection which she has termed “informal rape”, in letters past, Katerina denounced the conditions of prison transfer, a process during which many inmates lose their life under suspicious conditions, the lack of facilities for prisoners with special mobility needs.
Goulioni’s co-inmates sent the press the following goodbye note to their comrade:
“All your life was full of thirst. Thirst for struggle and justice. You fought for all and for everything without care for the consequences. And at the end the consequences of your struggles rewarded you in the worse of manners, with a violent, unexpected sudden death. But we are still here, Katerina, and we shall remember you and continue the struggle you began. You are everywhere. We sense you and we thank you for taking care of us. For us, you will live for ever. Have a great journey!”
