From 2010 to the present day no March has bloomed the same.
But our silences still cry out desperately “to arm ourselves, to take revenge, to continue”.
At dawn on Saturday 19/1, police officers opened fire in Aliveri Volos against an underage driver, against whom they had launched a manhunt. Three patrol cars of the police chased for more than half an hour a car with five underage Roma youths. The 16-year-old driver had just stopped and opened the door to get out of his father’s car and stumbled and fell down. He thus dodged the cop’s bullet which went through the driver’s door glass. The rest of their bullets scattered across the shower doors of his house.
Last November, police officers murdered Nikos Sampanis in Perama in exactly the same way, the story repeats itself, this time with the Magnesia Police Department as the protagonist, but the end, fortunately for us, is different. Five months after Perama, they confirm what their job is. They confirm that they are a body of state-subsidized killers. They confirm their laundering and cover-up by the state, the judiciary, prosecutors and the media. In the murder of N. Sampanis, the cover-up effort starts from the police themselves who even bury evidence such as the car itself to Minister Theodoricakos who rushes to reassure the police officers who emptied over thirty bullets into a car full of unarmed people. In the Volos case, the police director Alexakis is quick to make statements talking about ricochets, describing the Roma as dangerous. He tries to find channels of communication with them but also to reassure them by inviting the driver’s relatives to the station. At the same time, the local media are actively showing their role by making sure that the whole incident is hushed up by trying to pass it under their mats.
Waiting for justice to do its work.
In our city, we’ve had our fill of waiting. To this day we are still waiting for the findings of the investigation into the death of Vasilios Mangos to be made public. Together with his family we are waiting for the names of his torturers to be communicated to us. We are waiting for the biggest organized crime in our city, the burning of garbage, to be stopped. To close the AGET plant. We are also waiting for the delivery man who was beaten on the job and then fired for demanding the obvious, as well as the pregnant mother who was thrown out of her job, we are waiting for the water of Kryas Vrysi to return to the village of Stagiata, we are waiting for the 16-year-old Roma boy to find justice. We are waiting for the obvious. So because we have had enough of waiting, it is time to act with our own means, reminding us that the system is not impersonal, it is staffed by people who occupy positions in its hierarchy, either at local or national level. We aim to turn our anticipation into anger and to turn this anger into action, targeting people and places that have an active role in the cogs of the system, choosing to put into practice the slogan “to change the camp of fear”.
Never get used to death, never get used to repression.
The state beats us, imprisons comrades, baptizes people as members of organizations, sets up legal proceedings, criminalizes struggles, while the prices of water, electricity and gas are rising sharply, as are the prices of basic necessities, workers are losing their lives, auctions of first homes have taken place and will continue to take place, with people left on the streets, public health is constantly being devalued with public hospitals closing and private clinics getting rich, education is collapsing, the plundering of nature continues at a dangerous pace and in all this the poor are getting poorer, the rich – richer and the powerful – stronger. We must realise that the state and capitalism have nothing more to offer than poverty, exploitation, misery, repression and death. The only ones who can stop all this capitalist barbarism are us, we the recipients of it, the oppressed themselves. Our only hope is organisation, class struggles and social revolt. If we do not decide that we must collectively overcome the obstacle of fear, if we do not prepare ourselves by organizing diverse fronts of action to crush them, we are doomed to live the small and daily death to which we have been condemned.
About our Action.
We have no illusions about the role of the ELAS [official acronym for the Hellenic/Greek police]; as we wrote in the beginning, it is nothing more than a body of state-subsidized killers; they are the ones who protect the powerful and execute the weak, the marginalized and it is our duty to stand up against the state repression and the killers of the ELAS. In the morning of 15/03 we chose to attack with incendiary devices on the parked vehicles of the police station of the Volos district; we chose under their noses to place devices on all official cars in order to destroy them completely.
To organise collective self-defence out of which aggressive formations of revolutionary violence will emerge.
We owe a multifaceted struggle that must be fought by all of us collectively. A struggle that will raise mounds of state repression to build the mass self-defense of the oppressed, of the people of our class. A struggle that must change the correlations between the strong and the weak. A struggle that will return to the oppressors a share of the rage and violence that is their due. A struggle in which fear will change sides and the losers will emerge victorious. And this struggle will be multiform, it will be violent, it will be militant and radical, building and strengthening the fighting fronts of subversive action. This struggle will be dedicated to the dead revolutionaries, to those who did not return home from slavery, to our murdered comrades, to the oppressed of the whole world and to all imprisoned militants waiting for their freedom.
Solidarity with the comrades who were arrested on 8/2
We have the right, the anger, the determination to win!
Social Self-Defense Formation “NIKOS SAMPANIS”
Translation note: Image used is an actual photo of the fire caused by the incendiary devices used in the attack. The photo is from Greek corporate media and was taken by a local resident. According to the same media reports, 5 official police vehicles were rendered useless as a result of the attack.
Machine-assisted translation of the following Greek-language article from the Athens Indymedia website: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1617639/
Via Raddle