In this moment I am writing these few lines from inside isolation; 30 days of solitary confinement is the price I pay for my refusal to sell out my dignity and obey the humiliation of a full body search, which would last 5 minutes.
I remain unrepentant in my decision. I won’t give away even a second of compromise to prison guards. I will not exchange my refusals and choices with the ‘warmth’ of a standard cell and the ‘liberty’ of yard time among the general prison population.
I’m not looking to become another normal statistic of an inmate who cringes before the prison service, who serves ‘quietly’ her sentence, who trips into hallucinations induced by wacko-pills, who forces herself as an ‘older rank’ on new-coming prisoners.
During my time in prison, I’ve seen the densely populated desert of the society of prisoners. Just like when I was free, now that I am within the walls I still remain a refuser of every society which is built by demolishing the ‘ego’, imitates its false idols by abolishing the authentic, survives by following its conventions. I refuse the lonely crowd that wears as face its feints because it bears no soul to become one’s self. I remain friend, comrade and human with all women and men who keep the fire burning inside them. With those women and men who choose the dangerous paths of wolves instead of sheep pastures.
When it comes to all of us, anarchists of praxis, imprisonment is never enough ‘punishment’. For this, disciplinary penalties, transfers and solitary confinements are due to come down.
Isolation is a prison within the prison. You remain 24 hours a day locked up in a cage with a bunk bed, an in-cell toilet and the vigilant eye of a closed-circuit camera (which I finally managed to cover with a sheet…).
Inside here, your only girlfriends are your thoughts and memories. Inside here, the days and hours are eliminated, lost, dying, pushing slowly each other…
But these 30 days of solitary confinement I was not left alone. I had some odd and charming visitors by my side that passed secretly and ‘smuggled’ their way into my cell, breaking the isolation.
There were the beautiful sound of gun shots by the Olga Cell FAI/IRF against the nuclear company’s scumbag Adinolfi (sisters and brothers, I THANK you for the smile you gifted me with), the unique noise from ANFO and dynamite explosions in Ecuador, in Bolivia (strength to the arrested comrades), in Peru, the pleasant news from the captive brothers of mine Eat and Billy in Indonesia (Eat, your words in your letter gave me courage and strength), the incendiary smokes by the new Conspiracy of Cells of Fire FAI/IRF-Greece (by your will and your actions, you show that nothing is over), the chanted slogans and voices of people in solidarity who held a gathering outside Diavata prisons, where I’m kept captive; there were all these gestures of substance, the texts, the posters, the sabotages (in Volos), the arsons, which have engraved on my mind and my heart a phrase with indelible colour: ‘SOLIDARITY between anarchists of praxis is not just words’…
Olga Ekonomidou
member of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire-FAI/IRF of the first period
30 days of solitary confinement and I go on, but the she-wolf inside me doesn’t sleep, doesn’t give consent, doesn’t forgive…
2 thoughts on “Greece: Letter of CCF member Olga Ekonomidou (in solitary confinement of Diavata prisons)”
Comrades from War on Society have also added specifically this link regarding recent arrests in Bolivia -> http://waronsociety.noblogs.org/?p=5030, while we had chosen to include their Tag Archives: Bolivia.
It should be taken into account that Olga’s text was first published in Greek on June 2nd (after being sent from solitary confinement of Diavata prisons and then transcribed), while the communiqué by Unas noctilucas descarriadas FAI/FRI was released on June 3rd.