STATEMENT BY ANARCHIST GIANNIS MICHAILIDIS AT THE COURT FOR THE ARRESTS IN AGIA PARASKEVI AND FINAL SENTENCE AT THE TRIAL ON 29 JUNE 2021 (Athens,Greece)
Final news of the terror court trial on 29th of June, and sentence against our 3 anarchist comrades Kostantina Ahanasopoulou, Giannis Mixailidis and Dimitra Valavani
Giannis Michailidis 26 years ( 20 ‘merged’)
Kostantina Athanasopoulou 2 and a half years
Dimitra Valavani 2 and a half years
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Dimitra Valavani is free! from 30th of July 2021 she walked out to the streets as she had already been in prison from January 31.01.2020
Konstantina Athanasopoulou had been on the run since she was released on bail for activities related to the Revolutionary Struggle organization. She was sentenced in absentia in 2019 to 35 years and 6 months. Kostantina is still in prison and the appeal court trial of the Revolutionary Struggle organization continues this month, July 2021 also the 2 members of the Revolutionary struggle Roupa Panagiota (Pola) and nikos Maziotis, and one person charalampidis x.
GREECE: STATEMENT BY ANARCHIST GIANNIS MICHAILIDIS AT THE COURT FOR THE ARRESTS IN AGIA PARASKEVI
Once again I face a tribunal that I do not accept to judge my decisions and my actions. I have already stated my position on the State, capital, the established order of inequality and the widespread enslavement and exploitation of people and nature, the gradual transformation of the planet into an immense prison for every living thing. I have opposed the laws that sustain the murderous State order, both in word and deed. I have tried to be consistent in my position vis-à-vis law and order every time I have been dragged into the dock by the organs of its enforcement, not participating in the hypocritical process of every trial that always pretends to validate the State’s control over life and liberty.
I have paid the price of my choices by spending almost 8 years of my life inside penitentiary institutions, which are the centre of the social panopticon, the fear to discipline society and the tool for the reproduction of crime in terms of integration into the dark capitalist economy. Where in the name of the Law the walls suffer a generalized injustice. There in the grey zone of the law where the bones and souls of people are smashed to be thrown away morally and economically broken with no choice but to feed the prison monster with their despair. Providing the perfect alibi for the supposed necessity of the law and the building of the State of society. Of course, the outrages, which, if revealed, are labeled isolated incidents, are actually structural elements of the system and take place under the control or supervision of various officials and servants of the State, the «corrupt» and those who passively tolerate them so as not to jeopardize their positions or careers.
And all this for the judicial elite is arithmetic: mechanically counting days, months, years of imprisonment without being aware of what their choices imply. Or, what is worse, the time spent in prison depends most of the time on the pressures to which the judge is subjected or what benefits him financially. If you have the financial means to pay a reputable lawyer with the right connections and enough cash for bail, you won’t rot in jail like the financially weak poor who fall into their clutches. If you are a cop and you shoot a child, your life sentence will be broken. If you are a prison officer and you beat up a prisoner, at most you will get a few months in jail. If you are an anarchist, an enemy of the regime, you will not get one day less. This profoundly classist and essentially unjust system has the audacity to call itself Justice.
So I am taking a stand against self-proclaimed Justice and its functionaries, who have treated me as an enemy. Until my previous arrest I chose to remain silent about the charges against me, which resulted in my being convicted even for things I had not done. However, in this case, the kidnapping of my partner and her prolonged confinement in prison is a permanent blackmail on my position and attitude. I no longer only have to consider the consequences of any choice she makes on myself personally, but also how it will reflect on her criminal treatment. Realizing that I am facing a kidnapping State, which keeps my partner in prison in order to take revenge and blackmail me, I have no choice but to constantly clarify what is her only involvement in the case, however little feel like giving explanations about my actions, my life or my relations to a State institution.
That is why I stated from the very first moment of the investigation process that my partner has no involvement in the robberies and thefts that I am charged with, while the weapons found on and near me were mine and under my exclusive control. The 2 girls sitting in the front seats did not even have eye contact with them as they were in zipped locked bags. However, whatever you say, the so-called fairness doctrine of proving guilt and not innocence did not apply in our case. Despite her and her mother’s serious problems, she was remanded in custody and remains in jail to this day, as the otherwise independent judicial authorities were pressured to do the State’s bidding. The media propaganda had already shown the way with its gross lies, such as the fact that Dimitra’s house was labeled as a precedent for going into prison even though nothing illegal was found inside.
At this point I will begin a brief account of the events leading to our arrest to make it clear that the police narrative of a criminal organization has nothing to do with reality. Since my position is one of non-cooperation with the police and judicial authorities, I do not intend to provide information regarding my own actions and the acts for which I am individually charged. I will speak exclusively about the fact of the arrest, which is the only thing that relates me criminally to the two girls.
What you insultingly impute to me, an alleged criminal organization with hierarchical roles, of which I am even the head, is something that goes against my values, against the anarchist relations I try to promote and against my way of acting as a human being.
In fact, what connected us with Konstantina is that we were both on the run, while with Dimitra it was a relationship of deep companionship. Because of this relationship and her loyalty, which cannot be judged by any court of law, Dimitra was forced to endure long, persistent and disturbing surveillance by the anti-terrorist police to track me down. This led her to adapt her life to a counter-intelligence regime in order to meet me. She was even forced to travel under a false identity I gave her in order to escape the clutches of the anti-terrorist police every time she visited her mother in Berlin, who is there because she is receiving treatment. The house where Dimitra lived in Athens in order to visit her had to be checked for the possible presence of security guards. Since it was a legal house, which under normal circumstances would not be at risk of police intrusion, I had left some of my legal belongings there, such as clothes, shoes, notes, etc.
In the days leading up to our arrest, I had become aware of possible signs of police surveillance and decided that in order to escape arrest I had to leave my safe house (which was ultimately not located) and organize my escape from the cordon that had been set up. To do this I stole the RAV 4 and fabricated fake license plates. Late in the afternoon (before the day of the arrest), I emptied my bunker and loaded all useful things into the car I had stolen. Then I informed Konstantina by phone and we made an appointment in Byron to go to the car and leave unannounced. Finally, I went to Dimitra’s house in the morning by cab. I told the driver to wait outside and woke her up. I spoke to her briefly, whispering, as I was concerned that the house had been bugged. I told her to hurriedly gather the things she thought were necessary for us to leave. We left her house agitated and got into the cab, where again I could not explain what was going on as the driver was listening. When we arrived at Byron, Konstantina was already waiting for us there and we jumped into the RAV 4 so as not to be noticed by the surveillance team and escape the cordon. I asked Dimitra to drive because I was very tired from the night and the whole escape process. Once on the road, I gave a detailed report on what I had seen, what I had done and that I was carrying illegal items.
When we went up to Ymittos, where I had the illusion that we were not being watched, I changed the licence plates on the car and put on the fake ones I had prepared so that we could move around safely afterwards. At that point I contacted a friend of mine and asked him to look after Dimitra’s house in case something happened to me. He, fearing that some outsider would get into trouble if we were arrested (as has happened many times before in similar situations), arranged for the house to be cleaned.
As soon as we came down the mountain and entered the urban area, we were attacked by the anti-terrorist police. The moment they pulled me out of the back seat where I was sitting, I dropped my Scorpion bag on the ground while my CZ pistol was in my pocket. Next to me was a locked bag with the Kalashnikov. With dozens of guns pointed at us, we had no choice but to surrender or die. However, our arrest was met with vindictive brutality on their part, even tearing my clothes. Their claims of resistance from us, who were outnumbered and caught by surprise, are ridiculous to say the least. The only thing that comes out of this ridiculousness is the tendency of the police to inflate the files with false facts.
The first thing I said, when the tantrum was over and I was loaded backwards into the police car, was that they should have informed their superiors that Dimitra had tenderness in her head due to a recent operation, so that she would not be beaten. Which, of course, did not stop the security guards from slamming her head against the wall while she was restrained, to forcibly extract genetic material from her. They showed how outraged they are that people are standing up to them with dignity and not cooperating in the application of biometric totalitarianism.
This concludes the account of the events that led to our arrest, as the rest is well known. As a result of this succession of events, my partner has been in jail for 16 months now, accused of charges such as membership of a criminal organization and possession of heavy weapons. In a steamroller logic aimed at isolating the wanted anarchists, my own weapons, which I had on me and concealed, are automatically considered to be my comrade’s weapons, while because 3 people were arrested together they are dubbed as a criminal organization even though there is not the slightest evidence linking these 3 people to illegal actions together, except for the fact of the arrest. With false accusations and implausible logical acrobatics my comrade was kept in prison, denied access to her graduate studies and her health was put at risk by the lack of medical care in Korydallos when she was taken to the hospital where the hospital doctor recommended a regular medical examination that was never carried out.
In concluding my statement, I take this opportunity to take a position on the charges against me personally. As for the charge of escape, I am honoured to have broken the bonds of my captivity in a radical way. However, I must mention that my escape, organized in less than 12 hours, was a response to a fabricated case of prison strike, without any proof or testimony, which would have cut my furloughs and terminated the computation of the beneficial sentence in the rural prison, resulting in an increase of my stay in prison by 1 year, something I was not willing to accept passively, so I chose instead of humiliation to live a life of persecution.
Regarding the accusation of criminal organization I have already given my position. Furthermore, I will say that a criminal organization with differentiated roles and a hierarchical structure is the police-judicial complex that tortures and imprisons thousands of people to impose the monopoly of State violence.
If heavy arms trafficking is what is being sought, see the transnational trafficking of weapons intended for the slaughter of entire populations, in which the Greek State is actively involved. An example is the state-of-the-art rockets that Greece sold to Saudi Arabia, a country where raping underage girls is called legal marriage. Thus, rockets unloaded by the Greek State were used in the bombing of the poorest country in the world, Yemen, to destroy infrastructure and starve millions of people. Of course, no minister will be dragged to court. Mass murder and international trafficking in heavy weapons are perfectly legitimate activities. If, of course, I own 3 guns from decades past, they are called heavy weapons and I get hauled off to jail along with anyone who stands next to me. But that is the essence of laws, protecting the powerful from rebellion from the bottom of the social pyramid.
As for the accusation of theft, I throw it back to any bank whose nature of existence is the accumulation of wealth and the widening of social inequalities. Theft is the establishment of a bank, what I have done is to redistribute wealth.
And finally, I am again accusing of robbery any policeman who, by his profession, grabs people, tortures them and leads them in shackles to the dungeons of the State, where whole lives are destroyed. For those who are blamed for not coming to terms with the vast slaughterhouse that States have turned the earth into, for seeking ways to live outside the condition of generalized captivity, there are moments of struggle like this that return the blame to their persecutors and shatter the projected image of inverted reality that has been imposed as the only truth.
