Letter from imprisoned anarchist prisoner Aris Sirinidis (Greece)

On the 9th of March 2011 the urban justice is to judge in a public procedure my “case”. A “case” that was manufactured in the biological laboratories of GADA (central police headquarters in Athens), but was not in any case a product of science fiction.

The political character of my prosecution can, I believe, be summarized in a abomination of the interrogative proposal, with which it was attempted to confirm the decision of my imprisonment. Immediately after the monotonous effort to support the sole, and this of minimal importance, evidence that the police brought as proof of guilt – a surgical mask with my DNA-, the interrogator continues as follows: “Testifying, anyway, the defendant, in his own phraseology, declares himself an anarchist, does not hide his subversive action, he includes himself in the anarchist movement, he considers himself a revolutionary and he wishes to reverse this world, being included in the daily struggle against the state and capitalism”.

The gravity that is taken by the word “anyway” in the oratory of the denouncing authority excellently reveals the content of the probative statements. It means the reliability of the preceded legal argumentation, which obviously is evaluated as incomplete and mobilizes in order to strengthen it and for it to gain entity and prestige by my ideological convictions and objectives, substantially my political DNA.

If this is, therefore, something that gives substance to the official charge, this is not the genetic material that was found on one of the scattered masks that were found in the area of Exarchia because of the riots of the previous days, but my political genetic material, my presence on that side of the barricade that defines my class position and conscience, against capitalistic sovereignty and the governmental terrorism.

Inevitably, the content of the upcoming trial on the 9th of March is defined also by this precise conflict of two hostile worlds, the world of sovereignty on one, and the resistance and revolt on the other. A conflict that in the particular field of my prosecution is represented by the direct juxtaposition of the henceforth totalitarian core of urban democracy, the police-juridical cluster, with me and the movement of solidarity to political prisoners.

Besides however the politics, the imminent trial is also a pilot: in my case what is tried substantially is the possibility of authority to neutralize the political opponents, manufacturing guilty people with only proof of evidence scientific results of the biological laboratories of GADA.

The up to now evidence of my prosecution are more or less known. Immediately after the failed attempt of the police and the electronic and printed office pushers to invest in my arrest for a felony offence with charges that aimed at my moral stigmatization (but also the blackout of the conditions of the severe wounding of fighter Simos Seisidis), the directing was taken over by the Antiterrorist cops, pulling out a forgotten case of a shooting against a riotcop van of the MAT in the summer of 2009 in Exarchia. With proof of evidence the identification of my genetic material that was taken illegally from my wallet with the genetic material that was found on a surgical mask that was collected in the area of the incident, just a few minutes before I am let free, a warrant for my arrest is published and they order my detention. Only the script of the antiterrorist police beyond imaginative was also extremely amateur. Nowhere in the brief does it result that the mask – the only alleged evidence- belonged to the perpetrator of the shooter, while the body shape and the characteristics of the perpetrator that the eye witnesses and the police officers describe are in obvious contradiction to mine. As for the infamous genetic material, it never was clarified what kind and type it was, while a report of the police laboratories themselves were deliberately kept secret – which strengthens my main defense statement, according to which in the mask-evidence was also located genetic material of more individuals.

Substance to the script of the antiterrorist police pending someone else “that did not come”, as he himself admitted, was attempted to be given by the interrogator. With selective use of evidence of the brief and unacceptable procedural counterbalancing of the witnesses statements, the interrogator composes a reality adapted in the truth of the antiterrorist police and founds as proof the sole evidence of the abused procedurally and disputed scientifically DNA.
It appears, however, that the manufacturing did not satisfy the interrogator, that mobilizes finally the decisive argument in order to tie up the case: my as I confessed, he mentions, subversive position and action. My political commitment was not, of course, unknown to the juridical authorities that obviously were not waiting for my statement in order to learn them. What needs however particular attention here, is that the political DNA of a defendant is presented henceforth in juridical proceedings as a powerful evidence of guilt, something that at least up to a while ago the authorities made sure to keep outside of their official rhetoric. The infamous governmental paperwork of the Police and the Antiterrorist police, which constituted for years the guide on the prosecutions and imprisonments of dozens of fighters, are surrounded henceforth with a legal force and are changed into a juridical official. In the new antiterrorist frame that was voted, a few months ago by the government of the memorandum, the prosecution of belief has become law. A new idiom, together with extraordinary juridical-police authorities, is from now on in force and opens the way for mass preregistering of fighters, political spaces and movements.

In the new era of repression, in the time of the IMF and the totalitarian war that the capital and state has declared on society, the prosecutions against the political enemies of the regime cannot be carried out anymore with the long gone and stiff methods of the in anyway shrunken urban democracy. The same moment that the IMF, the EU and their domestic representatives impose a regime of capitalistic economic totalitarianism, the same moment the cloak of democracy falls. Then the files of social beliefs open and the similar to post civil war constabulary scenarios “are tied up” with the cogent research of DNA in the laboratories of GADA. It is the moment where the stinky deliverance of domestic governmental repression meets the totalitarianism of the future.

The analysis, therefore, of my politician DNA acquires a fundamental importance to the reading of particular facts of my prosecution. Because what, in the end, the state aims for in this trial -as in the trials of other comrades that are coming up-, beyond even the actions that are attributed is the imaginative of the fight and the resistance that each one of us represents. The qualitative and quantitative evidence that are detected in my personal sample, are identified within the collective imprint that is left by the small and big moments of social class struggles of the last twenty years, composing with thousands more unique traces the mosaic of the revolutionary anticapitalist movement.

This way each political trial and at extension each struggle is also an exploration of our own history.

Since we are speaking of history therefore, the festive “end of History” that in the early 1990s was claimed for itself by the capitalistic globalization and aspired to express the domestic fabricated argument of modernization, was also the starting point of the formation of my own political matter, in other words, my own history. The school occupations of the warm winter of ’90-’91, as an experience of rage, self-organized struggle, conflict and victory, were the motivational starting points and the reference points for dozens of teenagers from different areas of Athens that met in the streets of the center. In the social and political laboratory of Exarchia the adolescent rage was located, socialized and evolved into insurrectionist social and political action, without however stopping its playful dimension: the momentum, stubbornness, improvisation, companionship, friendship, left their own indelible traces so much on the form as well as in the content of political action. An action, that although geographically located, sought the thread of connection -and to a great degree accomplished it- with almost all the clashes of the domestic and worldwide class-social struggle. From the insurrectionist attempt of the Polytechnic university in ’95 to the barricades outside from the school exam centers the summer of ’98 and the school mobilizations against the school reform law. From the warm reception of the “leader of the planet” Bill Clinton in November ’99 and the demonstrations against the imperialistic wars, to the movement against the capitalistic globalization. From the local actions and assemblies in neighborhoods to the practices of direct action. From the assemblies of workers unions to the solidarity to immigrants. From the student mobilizations against the privatization of education, to the revolt of December 2008. And of course, as a steady value that runs through the total of the struggle: solidarity to the political prisoners and the underlining of the memory of comrades that left us during it.

This therefore political DNA, mine and that of all those who socialized politically in the same context and continue to define themselves through the fight for social freedom, is in the end what essentially is being tried in this trial.
My arrest coincided one day after the subordination of the country to the IMF and the announcements from the Prime Minister of the first measures of harsh austerity. At the ceremony of deliverance of the last labour rights to capital, the speech about the “end of an era” and “turning a page” sounded coquettish again. But, sovereignty should be careful. Another “end of History”, twenty years before, was for many the starting point of crossing from the region of adolescent rage to subversive political action. Through the painful process of self-knowledge, self-criticism and maturity that accompanies each new and accumulated fighting experience, the new “end of an era” is the beginning of new conflicts, politically and militantly upgraded as is the nowadays explosive objective condition.

Aris Seirinidis

Political prisoner
1st wing prisons of Koridallos

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