GUARD DOGS, KEEP WATCH OVER YOUR BOSSES [slogan to the cops]
Friday night, April 19th, 2013 at Exarchia: some people decide to show factually to MAT anti-riot squads that they’re undesirable in the area. Clashes, tear gases and manhunt follow. I leave my company of friends in the café where we were sitting, and I head towards Tzavella Street to get a motorbike that a friend lent me. There I get attacked by DELTA motorcycle cops, the modern version of scum like Bourandas [chief officer of the police motorcycle unit during the Axis occupation of Greece], whose sole duty is targeting and exterminating dissidents or simply those whose personality does not match their own tastes. They assure me they just bring me to the GADA police headquarters for ID check.
Inside the police headquarters, they change their attitudes. A random detention out of the many of the sort turns into arrest because incriminating evidence pop out of nowhere (a glove, a collar and a lighter allegedly found in my possession), although none of these objects are mentioned in the arrest report. Then I find out that there are witnesses against me (all of them DELTA cops), who claim in identical statements that they recognize me as we were standing in a long distance between us, but I (quite taller and with different hair though), with my face covered… was the person threatening them waving ‘facetiously’ a lit Molotov cocktail at hand.
The rest of the process goes as expected. They order my pretrial detention despite the fact that there are no grounds for imposing this ultimate measure of incarceration, as clearly defined by their laws. These things, however, are more or less known as I am neither the first nor the last case where the judges will dismiss their own laws that they purportedly honour, in order to convict someone among us, a proletarian, someone coming from ‘those below’ in this world.
Waiting two months now to see when and if they intend to release me from prison, given also their effort to incriminate me through a controversial DNA report, I understand that the guard dogs of Power are right: although legal requirements for my arrest and pretrial detention are not ‘met’, there are other, more important grounds for my confinement. My conviction as squatter of the Polytechnic School in 1995, my participation in collective struggles and ventures without patrons or leaders, my solidarity to those who shout out loud ‘Back off, snitches! Onward, comrades!’ in the streets, stadiums, squats or courtrooms, my solidarity to those who challenge the state monopoly of violence, to those who do not ultimately consent to their extermination, and refuse to open the way for the domestic and transnational elites to pile up profits…
I have been found guilty without being tried, guilty thanks to completely identical statements of the fascist criminal gang named DELTA nowadays, instead of Organization X, as it was called under the Nazi regime. This is because, anyone who is not subordinate to the State, the bosses and their fascists, can only seem guilty in the eyes and ears of those who oppress us and try in vain to crush us, can only be an internal enemy, or simply redundant and ideal for ‘storage’ in one of their dungeons. Guilty because I like many other men and women at Exarchia have not always just drank our wine in shops of the Square, but with uncovered face and just a stone’s throw from those who crushed the heads and the dignity of rioters and ordinary passers-by, have oftentimes shouted at them: GUARD DOGS, KEEP WATCH OVER YOUR BOSSES!
Stefanos Amilitos
First wing in Koridallos prison
June 12th, 2013
PS. Solidarity with Kostas Sakkas, who conducts a hunger strike since the 4th of June, and Gerasimos Tsakalos; both comrades are over 30 months in remand at the dungeons of Democracy.