Message by captive comrade Dimitris Chatzivasiliadis from inside greek prisons
For the liberation of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, for the liberation of Palestine and the Sahel, for the liberation of the global South, for social liberation everywhere.
It is now blatantly obvious that the attempt for the political annihilation, by life incarceration, of comrade Georges Ibrahim Abdallah is not the project of some law or of one government or of some chance European state or of any state in general. The communist revolutionary Georges Ibrahim Abdallah is a captive of the global pyramid of class exploitation. What is being punished on the person and on the flesh of this anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist revolutionary, is not merely the victorious resistance of the Lebanese and Palestinian people against imperialist terrorism and ethnic cleansing. Rather, the prolonged captivity of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah is a central strategical operation to terrorise the anti-capitalist movement worldwide; it aims at the perpetual disarmament of the global proletariat, at maintaining the military supremacy of the euro-american center on Earth, and especially at maintaining the monopoly of military force within the capitalist metropolis. To that effect, the captivity of the emblematic fighter is also intended to separate the struggle of the metropolitan proletariat from the anti-colonial resistance of the global South, to split the working class into ‘locals’ and ‘foreigners’, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, and to foment the turnaround of resistances towards religious wars. By holding Georges Ibrahim Abdallah captive under a state of unlawful extortion, NATO aspires to the subjugation of the movements in the Middle East and Europe.
The long-term attempt of the captivity and subjugation of an internationalist national-liberation movement, by endlessly torturing the persons who paved the way, is an established method of power. The George Ibrahim Abdallah case as an exception to every state and interstate legal convention, which remains in place in order to confirm the overarching rule of military-terrorist domination and colonial ethnic cleansing, intersects with the case of the isolation and the three-year disappearance of Kurdish pioneer Abdullah Ocalan and the endless captivity of the black and indigenous revolutionaries in the US. Moreover, the prolonged captivity of the communist guerrilla Dimitris Koufontinas, through the same illegal tricks that the french state is using, is the tip of the decade-long campaign for the disarmament and cultural genocide of the social movement in the greek territory. The struggle is one, the front line is indivisible and the fighting bodies are as many as the class conditions we are now facing.
The french state is a fundamental link in the history of colonialism and the french hinterland is a crossroads in the history of social revolution. Today, as in the era of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (FARL), french capital and french militarism are a central junction for imperialist hegemony in the Middle East and Africa. The french metropolis is a crossroads of the European labour movement and the immigrant revolt, a crossroads of the socialist and anti-colonial struggle. These intersecting lines meet in the struggle of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. To defend comrade Georges against the french state and the imperialist counter-revolutionary front means for us to take a position in directly joining the intersecting resistances. An organic unity within actual circumstances.
We must take a stance Here and Now. Today, french imperialism, that has also committed greek nationalism to its chariot with the Rafale deal, is launching a military operation in Niger or more broadly in sub-Saharan Africa (Sahel), with a view to maintain the predatory possession of uranium mines and other sources of industrial raw materials. To this end, it is weighing up the possibility of mobilizing the subordinate regimes of the economic zone of the Sahel (ECOWAS), against the newly-established renegade regimes of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, which are attempting a redistribution in the world market, against the supremacy of the french monopolies. In the name of bourgeois democracy (again), western european imperialism is looking to another massacre among proletarians. The same class-political structures that are keeping the communist George Ibrahim Abdullah captive, the same that rely on Israeli and Turkish fascism to keep control of the Middle East and to this end they support them, are the ones that keep Africa in an endless war. For the same reason: to maintain the class pyramid of world capital distribution.
The international anti-capitalist movement has a duty to resist the militaristic plans of french imperialism, regardless of whether this conflict, from the side of the african South, is led by communist or bourgeois, libertarian or statist forces, and whether the national redistribution programs have a socialist-revolutionary or capitalist-modernizing character. We are taking up battle positions against the imperialist centres of war and their activities around the globe. Comrade Georges Ibrahim Abdallah joined the struggle for this duty and keeps the flag up high.
This struggle for the liberation of the captives of the global movement, for the liberation of the Middle East, of Africa and of the entire South from imperialist control, has no space for elitist opinions nor for dissociation. Our own practical program can be unfolded on the basis of and on the development of proletarian political autonomy, of social self-management (or Democratic Modernity, as the apoists call it), of the transcendence of the nation-state, certainly of women’s liberation, etc. But none of these can be a prerequisite. Revolutionary struggle creates the conditions for any social evolution, revolutionary solidarity, and equality in joining arms against the class-political enemy. How can any political proposal from the other side of the Earth be heard in Niger and Palestine, if it is not accompanied by a practical position of resistance to the specific enemies at the specific time? There are a lot of abstractions that reflect the structures of exploitation which infiltrate social resistance. For example, the non-differentiation with regards to class antagonisms within the colonial nation, with regards to the degree of one’s military participation or to one’s basic participation in an organisation (children, victims of war, the most characteristic case), leads to the dispersal of the blows of the resistance upon the most vulnerable subjects of the dominant nation. By what criteria are we to deny the right of an even response to the unrelenting systematic totalitarian violence and terrorism against a people? Abstractions cannot be tackled with idealistic abstractions, but by a firm intervention in the existing conflict. The stronger the contradictions, the stronger must be our commitment to the resistance over the crucial need.
The european guerrilla resistance of the last five decades has given substance to the anti-imperialist struggle, on this side of the metropolitan borders. But we are not here to bless our past, we are here to asseverate our common struggle that runs through Palestine, Africa, the streets of France, the plundered Earth and beyond the walls of the North and within its inner South. The issue of internationalist solidarity against capitalist military rule is far from over. The movements in the European hinterland do not hold the magic keys. If they did, they would also unlock the cells of the political prisoners. This is not a matter to be dealt with by some privileged ones outside the field on behalf of those who are in the field. Capitalist militarism is everywhere. The spearhead of the counter-revolution strikes our limits at every point of resistance.
But let us look at the crossroads called France. An open war is being waged against the social movement. Last March in Saint-Soline, the state showed its determination against a demonstration of tens of thousands of people: Within an hour and a half, 4000 rounds of ammunition, tear gas and cluster bombs, rubber bullets and flashballs were fired. 200 people were injured, 40 with deep wounds and shrapnel. The testimony of the protester doctor Agathe is very illuminating as to the intentions of authority: «We can see the police carefully arranged around the basin, surrounded by mobile guard trucks, several armoured vehicles. A squadron of four wheelers with a pair of cops on each. Some would think that this is the cavalry. No one is worried at this moment. What can they do against this heterogeneous and determined crowd? For a moment I wonder why the police are there. The basin is inaccessible to us. I wonder why the presence of all this artillery is necessary. What would we have done in their absence? I discuss it with a friend, we say that they are making the fight against megabasins a symbol of state authority. […] The path of the wounded. The intensity level was maximum from the start. No half measures. All these wounded people falling back. Lying in a field. Sitting in a ditch. Hate is growing against the police. What do they do, what do they defend, are a few cubic meters of concrete worth all these mutilated bodies?” Just like they do every day in occupied Palestine, the cops cut off access of the medical emergency units.
Against the uprising for the pension issue, the authority resorted to the colonial tactic of nasse, i.e. the encirclement and confinement of protesters in a metal fortress, which is prohibited by law in France. The BRAV-M motorbike assault unit, like its Greek counterpart DRASI (formerly DELTA), is tasked with mass torture and maiming in order to spread terror. Police killings have been legalized. The killing of teenager Nahel of Algerian descent was followed by another killing caused by a flashball projectile during the next demonstration (in Marseilles).
The massacre of Saint-Soline was followed by abductions of demonstrators by the anti-guerrilla (“anti-terrorist”) forces. Algorithmic data processing has been added to the mechanism of universal surveillance and personalised monitoring. The General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) is advertising a new tool to create records on the social movement (the S list). The cabinet declared the mass network of movements The Earth’s Uprisings (Les Soulèvements de la terre) illegal. “Ecoterrorism” is the most recent ideological product of imperialist militarism. Capital, such as France’s Lafarge, which financed the Islamic State with $6 million a decade ago, so that production at its factories in northern Syria could continue unhindered, is doing everything for the counter-revolution to prevail. In the territory of an exporter of “democracy”, that still waves the stolen bonnet rouge of 1789, the attempt of a social body to establish itself in the public space, the most basic condition for the existence of the Demos, automatically becomes a military and criminal target.
These days (3 to 27/10), we have the trial for the case of December 8, through which an attempt is made to incriminate the entire movement, by legitimising ideological and preventive persecutions and imposing a universal mandatory adjustment to surveillance (criminalising communications security). The main defendant in this counter-revolutionary operation is comrade Libre Flot, due to his involvement in the confederal social revolution of NE Syria. Internationalist solidarity is certainly at the heart of the clash between revolution and counter-revolution.
The insurrectionary wave of the previous months, as this was acknowledged by various participants, was faced with the crucial question of any insurgency: how to organise itself? The defeatism and fatalism of decades, or even centuries, not only in the french movement, which has become a political and ideological stance, presenting the military predominance of the bourgeoisie as unconquerable, transforms a historically determined class and political relation of power into an eternal structure of servitude. Precisely because every day all the initiatives, programmatic and organisational proposals, theories, agreements and disagreements, compositions and conflicts, are judged in terms of the power they give to the social movement, to its immediate needs and its prospects, everything converges at the neck of an hourglass: in the confrontation with the entity of counter-revolutionary warfare in the contested social terrain. This is where anti-imperialism takes root.
The Kurdish movement points out the successive syndromes of Turkish fascism. After 40 years, the resistance of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (FARL) and the message it left behind still scares the imperialists, so much so that they need a hostage to hide behind him, just as they are holding Palestine, Kurdistan and the entire Middle East hostage, in order to maintain their global dominance. How much they fear the organised and armed peoples!
The sooner we defeat imperialist terrorism in the french and greek streets, the sooner it will be defeated in the regional South. The sooner we defeat imperialist terrorism in the Sahel and in Palestine, the sooner it will be defeated in the metropolitan South. The force that can end the captivity of the communist revolutionary Georges Ibrahim Abdallah will be the very defence of the social movement.
Dimitris Chatzivasiliadis
Domokos Prison
9-10 October 2023
(On the 9-10 October 2016 the attack of the Organisation of Revolutionary Self-defence against the French embassy in Athens took place)
Excerpts of this message were read, along with messages of other political prisoners, at the solidarity gathering for the liberation of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, in front of the french embassy in Athens on 20th October 2023
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