who were arrested after clashes with the police around the Polytechnic School (Athens, Greece) at the end of the pupil’s demonstration, in January 14th 2000
ON HUNGER STRIKE since the 18th of January
Friday 14th of January in Athens... The
programmed school student’s demonstration is starting, formaly indicating
the end of the resent youth’s movement through the suffocating manipulation
of the political parties and the open state repression, with prosecutors
and cops invading the occupied schools. It was the last demonstration,
with few
hundred pupils taking part, surrounded
and strictly safeguarded by the state’s and the communist party’s repression
squads, which led the whole demo running breathless in the streets of Athens
.
During this demonstration, the Polytechnic
School becomes a meeting point and place of communication for dozens of
young people who suffocate in a police-city and refuse as a life term to
submit to the raw dictatorship of the political and economic bosses, dressed
as democracy. By the end of the demonstration, more young people are
directed to the Polythechnic and the riot
police (MAT) hurries to the area as well.
A group of the people gathered arm themselves
with improvised material (molotov cocktails and stones) and takes action.
Among many cars they chose and burn a van belonging to ALTEC, corporation
of computer science
systems. A mass attack of the riot police
follows and the people in revolt, resisting as much as they can with their
handy means against the well-armed praetorians of the regime, take refuge
in the Polytechnic.
Many more people are also inside, most
of them not participating in the specific events, and they are also besieged
by the police encirclement.
When the clashes end, the police impose
a shut down of the whole area and carries out «cleansing operations», beating
up and taking to the state security building many young people, choosing
them based on the usual cops criteria...
Special treatment was reserved for those
who thought that they had no reason to remain surrounded inside the Polythechnic
and decided to get out, unsuspicious of what they would face. They tried
to pass through the police cordon and they were immediately attacked by
the MAT and security policemen, they were badly brutalized and ended up
in the Police Security building, where they were charged for the previous
riots. Eleven persons in total, who were arrested under these circumstances
and with fabricated testimonies against them by the cops themselves, were
taken to the public prosecutor from where they left full of charges, so
that the «public feeling for justice», patronized by the mass media against
the people in revolt who disturb the order, would be satisfied and secondly,
in order to be proved that the police really manages to do its dirty job
arresting the «trouble-makers»...
Six of the arestees who were students
and pupils were taken to the flagrant court and two of them were convicted
(in a 4 months suspended prison sentence) while the rest were acquitted
because of being minors. Another group of five people was charged with
5 felonies. Three of them, two students of the Polytechnic and a pupil,
were permanently released on bail until their trial and they our out on
restrictive conditions. The other two, Kostas Karpouzos, a worker, and
Panagiotis Katsilas, jobless, on who all the raw violence of the cops and
the institutional violence of State justice was used up, were both imprisoned,
indisputably because it consists an aggravating ?element? the fact that
they are ANARCHISTS, that they are listed in the electronic files of the
State Security.
In the case of Kostas Karpouzos, it was
also the fact that he had been arrested before, with 153 other young people,
in the 17th of November 1998, during the demo for the Polytechnic revolt,
when the MAT and the communist party thugs had together attacked the antiauthoritarian
block...
Since the 18th of January, Kostas Karpouzos and Panagiotis Katsilas, denying their imprisonment in the jail of the State, denying the charges and the frame up against them, have started the ultimate struggle for life and freedom: HUNGER STRIKE!
Our imprisoned comrades are not alone.
Their struggle is our struggle too. Let it be also a chance of struggle
for every oppressed and exploited person (worker, unemployed, youth, local
or immigrant) in the way for total refusal and subversion of the authoritarian
capitalist world. No matter how powerful they are, we are going to fight
them...