Letter from Konstantina Karakatsani

On April 22, while I was talking on a payphone in the middle of Athens, they came and arrested me. A logical conclusion as I had not set myself a specific time limit so that I could have been gone by the time they tracked me down. Then I was taken to Police Headquarters, where the usual took place. Some specific pigs didn’t miss the opportunity to bully. It was all so nuff, I still feel like throwing up! Anyway, I don’t expect anything better from them. After spending two days in the 12th-floor “safe house,” and after the prosecutor finally decided to put me in prison, I was transferred to Eleona. Six or seven cars and three motorcycles escorted a lone criminal: me.

Of course, everyone defines “crime” in their own way. To them, consciousness and struggle are crimes. That’s exactly why the Minister of Snitch Protection has gone to great lengths to repress crime right from the start! With imprisonments, never-ending criminal prosecutions in the Fire Cells case, mass detentions and creation of files on people, beatings in Exarchia, assaults on political spaces, outrageous charges, and the recent murder of Lambros Foundas—shot in the back during what some reprobates don’t hesitate to call “the great success of the Greek police”.

Their objective isn’t just to dismantle some organization, but to intimidate and paralyze all who fight.

They will never succeed in this attempt…

It doesn’t matter whether there is evidence; you have to go to prison to learn to bow your head… Someone has to tell them, once and for all, that revolutionary consciousness knows no bars, cages, or handcuffs, and that it can’t be “corrected”.

Most people tend to tighten their own chains. Each, in their way, is building their own imaginary prison, because that’s what they were taught, and it makes them happy, they feel secure.

In here and out there, now and forever, those who live free will be the ones that never built their own prisons…

A huge embrace for all the imprisoned and persecuted victors. The vanquished are the ones who cower in surrender and submission.

“In the hushed silence of an impregnable slaughterhouse, the rage of a trapped animal is all the more terrifying.”

PS: When the comrades’ demo reached the prison, the phone lines were cut to prevent me from communicating with them. Also, my cell window—by sheer coincidence!—doesn’t face the street. The demo was received quite positively, and the prisoners talked about it all day.
—Konstantina Karakatsani, Eleona prison, 5/5/2010

About the case of Aris Seirinidis

Comrade Aris Seirinidis was arrested on the evening of May 3rd, 2010 in the centre of Athens, at a police check-point set up for an irrelevant to him case. Initially he faced a misdemeanor charge but in the end the anti-terrorist unit pulled out a forgotten case related to the shooting of a police riot van in the area of Exarchia in the summer of 2009, which became known by the media as “the case of the pistolero with the sombrero and flip flops” (due to the attire worn by the person that carried out the shooting). The main “evidence” against Aris was the matching of DNA taken from his wallet after his arrest with DNA found on one of the many surgical mask strewn around Exarchia (due to a demo and rioting that had taken place in the summer of 2009, exactly the previous to the incident day) that was collected on the day of the shooting. Aris Seirinidis’ trial in the first degree is set for the 9th of March 2011

Letter from Aris Seirinidis, Koridallos prisons