On June 28, the Lamia Court of Appeal secured for the unrepentant murderer Korkoneas the mitigating circumstance which opens the way for his release for the second time. No thinking person was surprised by this decision, which was the logical continuation of the favourable criminal treatment of the cop-killers by the civil justice system.

A look back at the recent post-communist history of incidents of police brutality confirms our claim. Dozens of deaths from police guns and batons were covered up under tons of media mud, Administrative Inquiries that ended up in drawers, Disciplinary Prosecutions that were withdrawn, court decisions that put them on easy street or exonerated them, political decisions that rewarded their murderous services to the Greek state directly or indirectly.
It must be made clear that we are not faced with the exception but with the absolute rule where civil justice plays its role. The institutional defence of the state monopoly on violence.

The political and historical responsibility of those whose attitude contributed to the depoliticisation of the case is enormous, those who made sure that the events were presented in a way that was detached from the historical and social environment in which they took place, those who with political expediency established in the courtroom of Lamia a climate of confrontation of legal arguments as if it were a simple criminal and not a political case, where criminal laws and legal interpretations will allow developments cut off from the social factor.This particular scheme which, although seemingly apolitical, is deeply political. It begins by depoliticizing a state murder and disconnecting it from history, objective facts, and memory. It continues by shifting the public debate from right-wing positions now to a defence before the fascist cries of the Kyr-Pantelidwn [song: ‘Mr Pantelis’, (politically indifferent ‘honourable man’)]. While it ends in complete surrender and humiliation through political bargaining with the government of the murderers who had political responsibility for the murder of Alexandros and who bear corresponding political responsibility for many more deaths at the hands of the police to this day.

A brief look at the picture that has emerged after the years have passed will convince anyone. Saraliotis [accomplice of Korkoneas] was not only acquitted at the Lamia Court of Appeal but will be returned to the police and paid all the wages that were not paid to him because of the pending criminal proceedings. Korkoneas was released from prison with a sentence lower than the sentences that dozens of political prisoners have been dealt out over the last decade for political “offences” without “human victims”. At the same time, the Lamia Court of Appeal, the same court that released Korkoneas, is prolonging the torture of anarchist comrade and hunger striker Giannis Michailidis who is being treated in Lamia hospital, waiting for the same judicial circles that secured Korkoneas’ release to do the obvious by granting him a conditional release.

The repetition of the obvious becomes important when these obvious things are not only in question but are being put within the execution of revisionism and vulgar state propaganda.

The imprisonment and release of Korkoneas was never a matter of the criminal code but a matter of shaped social and political correlations. The cop-killers of Berkin Elvan in Turkey remain unpunished in a country where the penal code drags thousands of political prisoners to prison and is considered one of the most severe. Korkoneas would have been released under any criminal code if it had existed. Because bourgeois justice as a bureaucratic apparatus of the state imposes its class power and protects the interests of capital. The cop-killers cannot possibly not be given defiantly favourable treatment because they have acted within the framework of their formal duties, which are none other than to defend the same interests that bourgeois justice defends.

But there is also this form of justice which Mr Giorgos Thalassis described in a very eloquent way in the political event of honour and remembrance of Alexandros for the restoration of his monument. Street justice, which is the only material – political factor that can impose its point of view and determine correlations that in turn affect multilevel developments. The justice of the street that never forgot that Alexandros was one of us, he was a friend, a comrade, a brother who the bullets of his unrepentant killers did not defeat as he remains alive in our memory, our history, in every step we take. The justice that every December takes to the streets and keeps his memory alive by updating in the present that police killings remain a reality. Carrying the message that the rebellion of that generation against murderous police violence was just and necessary. The justice of the street calling out along with Alexandros’s name all the names of our dead in this long list seeking vindication. For Lambros, for Vassilis, for Christos, Zack, Mixalis , Stamatina, Iakobos, Christoforos, Harris, Anastasia and hundreds more.

The bearers of this justice are not few and certainly not indecisive. They know very well what happened that night in the pedestrian area of Mesologgiou and Tzavella streets, they have carried on their shoulders all the political weight so that we will never forget who the murderers, their political superiors, their willing and all sorts of defenders are. Let us never forget who the ugly sad people they defend are.

With the world they carry in their hearts, those who are part of that justice will ensure that this ruling gets not only a defiant reward for the murders committed by the police but also an open challenge to street justice to take on those who would keep it on the sidelines.

As has been said before : “Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”

Nikos Romanos

via:athens.indymedia

Translated by Act for freedom now!