This text was published in the course of an intervention at EFSYN in Athens, Greece and translated by the Berlin Assembly in memory of Kyriakos Xymitiris and in solidarity with the persecuted in the Ambelokipi-case.
We are intervening at EFSYN’ in order to publicize the following texts. This intervention follows our presence and the distribution of these texts in the area of Ampelokipi and on Arkadias Street in order to show our solidarity with the residents of the apartment building.
At the same time, we went to the spot where our comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris lost his life.
TEXT FOR THE APARTMENT BUILDING ON ARKADIAS STREET
On 31/10/24, my comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris and I were in the apartment at 4-8 Arkadias Street. During the processing of explosive materials, an explosion occurred that took the life of my 36-year-old comrade, caused my own very serious injury, and resulted in damage to the apartment building. Since then, I have been detained in Korydallos women’s prison under horrendous conditions, having to confront the loss of the person closest to me, my own injury, and very serious accusations.
This explosion obviously was not part of any plan, nor did it happen due to carelessness. This tragic development was the consequence of defective material, something that unfortunately could not be foreseen.
The anarchist political space to which we both belong fights for a world of equality, solidarity, and self-organization. For a world where monthly survival does not cause anxiety, where interpersonal relationships are not based on competition, and where a life in dignity is not a matter of luck. And when this anarchist political space chooses to attack those who impose poverty, exclusion, and insecurity with such means, it takes all necessary measures, often putting the acting subjects themselves at risk, in order to ensure the safety of unrelated people.
Beyond protecting people’s physical integrity, our political spectrum targets those who oppress and exploit us. It sets its sights on the powerful of this world. Those who eat with golden spoons while we make do with the absolute necessities, those who live off rents while we beg that there not be yet another increase, those who reap profit while we work twelve-hour a day. Those who spread death through wars, misery through high prices, fear through racism, extermination through long and uninsured labor. Those who impose uncertainty, insecurity, danger even when you simply take the night train to Thessaloniki or try to cross the border for a life with dignity.
We struggle so that all of this does not remain unanswered. To win back the right to live. To put a stop to injustice, exploitation, oppression, cover-ups. Within this struggle we risk much, we are targeted, we receive violence and repression, we endanger our safety, our freedom, and sometimes even our lives. Not because we are indifferent to life, but because we care about the life of our struggle and then we feel responsible for many people. Thus, we consciously set social solidarity as a priority.
My comrade adopted this stance in life, and that is why he decided to struggle with all means. And if he was still here, he would be the first to try to help the residents of the apartment building, not because he would regret the means he chose to struggle with, but because for him, as for all of us, solidarity and mutual aid are a deeply human feeling, a driving force that pushes us to action.
“We are not terrorists, nor criminals. It is precisely because of our love for life, because we rejoice in the human spirit, that we became fighters for freedom against this racist and deadly imperialist system.”
Marianna Manoura
Korydallos Women’s Prison
Statement on the explosion on Arkadias Street
More than a year has passed since the explosion in the apartment of Arkadias Street, an explosion that was destined to change the lives of dozens of people forever. Residents of the apartment building, a few minutes after the explosion, go to the apartment to see what has happened. There they find the very seriously injured comrade Marianna Manoura, and also the dead comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris. A few hours later the building is sealed for inspection by the anti-terrorism unit while dozens of media outlets rush to break the news and spread a climate of terror. Within a few days, the apartment building is declared uninhabitable.
From our side, as the Assembly of Solidarity with imprisoned, fugitives and persecuted fighters, we express our solidarity with the people who lost their homes in the explosion on October 31. Our struggle seeks connection with those parts that are hit by the plunder spread by state and capitalism. In every neighborhood, every home, where people of our class are found, we promote unmediated struggles, we promote taking our lives into our own hands, until everyone is free, until the demolition of every cell, until we build a world that will include us all. At the same time that high prices continue to rise, working hours increase, people are thrown into the streets by evictions, basic rights such as public health are continuously struck for the interests of the bosses, the state attempts to present our comrades as anti-social elements who try to spoil the polished democracy of the country. This democracy in which one scandal springs up after another, in which hundreds of workers are killed in the labor camps, thousands of migrant women die at the borders, while dozens live on the edge of poverty. All these are the people who are consciously thrown to the margins, exploited, oppressed, murdered.
In the apartment, an attempt was made for the daily struggle against every oppression and authority to become flesh and bone, also through armed struggle. An attempt was made to materialize the dream that a world of solidarity, equality, mutual aid can exist. No matter how much they steal of our lives, no matter how many wars they spread across the globe, no matter how much they terrorize through the media, no matter how overwhelming their superiority in arms may be; the justice of the struggle and the thirst for life will defeat them. This same hope that lived inside the apartment on Arkadias Street is what followed comrades Kyriakos and Marianna in every choice until October 31 and continues to follow comrade Marianna in the daily struggles she gives while imprisoned in the cells of democracy. The thirst for life is what fueled the daily struggles given by the comrades for the improvement of this world, from the struggles to defend the Exarchia neighborhood against gentrification and repression, the struggles for imprisoned comrades who through solidarity manage to surpass the prison bars and connect the common struggles for life inside and outside the prisons, and countless other daily battles and choices which show us that those whom the state calls terrorists are those who live daily among us, who struggle with us against every attempt to degrade our lives and ultimately are those who stand at the side of the oppressed of this world.
In contrast, however, to the state and its ideological mechanisms, the anarchist idea stands against and consciously acts against the logic of collateral damage, which now parades as evidence of guilt regarding means and choices of struggle that the comrades paid for in the harshest way. The offensive actions of anarchists are targeted operations that prioritize the safety of anyone who might pass through the area. Therefore, the explosion inside the apartment and the hardship caused to so many people could never have been the comrades’ objective, no matter how much the state mechanism tries to burden them with the label of “public danger.”
The explosion, which resulted to the death of our comrade, as well as the evacuation from the building of those who lived in the apartments on Arkadias Street, is politically instrumentalized from the first second, while, in a crescendo of hypocrisy, the damage to the apartment building is assigned for repair to TERNA, the well-known company and state partner through direct public contracts, which has entered into cooperation with the murderous state of Israel and is involved in the scandal with the hollow dams in Volos, in the construction of the new type C prisons, in the covering over of the crime scene of Tempi and the plunder of entire areas in the name of “green development.” Many months later the state announces compensation to the tenants, attempting to show a face of care, a care that it did not grant to the victims of the flood in Thessalia, in Mati and other similar areas which are burned by fires, as well to the earthquake’s victims in Crete and elsewhere. In this specific case carrying out a communication trick that aimed on the one hand to ”feed” the climate of terror and on the other to divert the discussion from the killing in Tempi.
The comrade Kyriakos Xymitiris made choices of struggle that contain enormous commitment, consistency, and cost. Armed struggle and urban guerrilla warfare, contains this cost, the risk even to one’s own life. However much you believe that you control all the factors, that you have measured them correctly, there is this unpredictable factor that cannot be calculated. There are dozens of stories of people around the world who lost their lives in such a harsh way.
People devoted to the revolutionary cause die from the very means they chose in order to attack their oppressors. History often proves harsh for those who chose the path of guerrilla warfare. No one made lightly or irresponsibly the choice to put their life and freedom at risk. This choice arose from their experience in life, from social injustice, the imposition of domination and the repression of authority. Of an authority that plunders all our lives without calculating any cost, with profit and omnipotence as its only criteria. All those who lost their lives from a premature explosion of a preparatory action or in the action itself had a common purpose, liberation. The guerrilla fighter is flesh of the flesh of society, a part of it that listens to and experiences its oppressions, that struggles against the omnipotence of states and capital, that fights by all means for the overthrow of the existing system.
On this path sometimes the price we are called to pay is heavy, comrades fall in battle, our comrades are confined in cells.
For this reason we do not forget our comrades who are prosecuted for the Ampelokipoi case and have been in pre-trial detention for more than a year. The road to freedom is always open no matter how difficult it may seem. It is enough to believe in our strength, it is enough to believe that we will succeed. One next to the other.
Assembly of Solidarity with imprisoned, fugitives, and persecuted fighters.