On 9/5, the extension of my pre-trial detention and that of my other co-defendants was officially received. However, the decision had been made months earlier, on 31/10, when the anti-terrorist police instructed the investigator to attribute the maximum charges to a highly inflated indictment.
Nevertheless, I will not focus on the decision of the Athens Misdemeanor Council – what council would take responsibility for releasing a defendant of the anti-terrorism police? – as well as the proposal and argumentation of the Athens Misdemeanor Prosecutor, Sotiris Bougioukos, who even rushed a whole month before the end of the semester to prove his obedience to the anti-terrorism law by assembling and proposing an abortive report, both for me and for the rest of the co-defendants. By rehashing the words of the anti-terrorist police, he simply repeats its position, revealing his indifference and the predetermined strategy followed by the dictatorship.
But there is no demand from the anti-terrorism and state mandates. We have been confronted countless times with their immorality, inhumanity and hypocrisy. In my case, the prosecutor had the audacity to use as an argument for the extension of my pre-trial detention the fact that on 9/11, 9 days after the tragic explosion and just 5 days after I had regained consciousness, remaining exhausted, with multiple injuries to my body, head and face, I claimed the obvious: my inability to study the case file and to attend a long interrogation process. Mr. Bougioukos also read the Medical Certificate of the Annunciation as he saw fit, since he only retained my mental clarity that the clinic recognized to me, but not the fact that “she cannot speak for a long time due to generalized weakness and injuries”. Double standards are, of course, an expected tactic of the judicial mechanisms, especially in cases that they prosecute under Article 187A where the anxiety of the repressive authorities to cover up the hypocrisy, injustice and rot of their system, their fear of revealing their true face and the vision of those they persecute for a different world, solidarity and equality, lead them to their well-known unstable geometries.
While these kinds of arguments are – unfortunately – to be expected, my description as anti-social showing disdain for human life, by a representative of the apparatus who has always supported and covered up this voracious system, seems not only absurd, but also contradictory. Because he belongs to the caste of people who acquitted the 9 police officers who participated in the murder of Zak Kostopoulos, who unleash rapists, bosses, politicians, such as Lignadis, Manoukarakis, Karamanlis, who crush consciences and lives, who discredit human life, especially those of the social base, workers, immigrants, the invisible, the excluded. To the caste of men who ratify the anti-labor measures and the evictions, who abolish the five-day and eight-hour workday, who tighten the penal and suffrage code, who co-sign the poverty and precariousness that the system sows.
With these people, who serve this system and its laws, for whom people’s lives and freedom are expendable material useful only to serve their interests and purposes, I am separated by a huge red line. A line that on my side the world is fair, without violence, exploitation and oppression, without prisons and borders, individualism and selfishness. I’ve been divorced with their world for years now.
“It is precisely because of our love of life, because we rejoice in the human spirit that we have become freedom fighters.”
KYRIAKOS XIMITIRIS PRESENT
FREEDOM TO ALL THE IMPRISONED COMRADES
Marianna Manoura