Action in Greece!

ATTACK!!!!!!

from Athens Indymedia via Dark Nights

Athens, Greece: Incendiary-explosive attack upon cop’s vehicle in solidarity with anarchist prisoners Vaggelis Stathopoulos & Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis

For 3 years now, the far-right government of the ND has intensified state repressive action against those who fight and stand against its brutal capitalist plans.

The repressive attacks and frame-ups and persecutions against militants are countless. In these 3 years we have witnessed demonstration bans, torture of protesters and prisoners, informal hostage-taking of anarchists under harsh restraints, mass arrests, intimidation with non-existent DNA and detention. The purpose of all these state practices is to completely cut off and isolate militants from social resistance and physically eliminate them.

The basic premise of this repressive policy is to put the management of everyday life in the hands of the police, which, with the chariot of the pandemic, has been largely conquered by placing uniformed men everywhere like an army of occupation to decide who goes out and who does not.

Police impunity and police state repression has so far resulted in hundreds of incidents of beatings, torture and arrests, even murders, as in the case of Nikos Sampanis who was gassed for not stopping at a checkpoint.

One of the first state frame-ups is the prosecution and imprisonment of the anarchist comrade Vaggelis Stathopoulos, who has been locked up in state cells for two and a half years for showing his practical solidarity with the wounded anarchist comrade Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis.

In a mock trial with a tailor-made indictment by the anti-terrorist police, held in March-April 2021, Vaggelis Stathopoulos was sentenced to 19 years in prison.

On the night of 21 April we placed an incendiary-explosive device in a cop’s vehicle in the area of Ampelokipoi, destroying it completely, in solidarity with the anarchist prisoner Vaggelis Stathopoulos, whose appeal trial begins on 18 May.

It is our belief that state framing and trumped up charges are overturned through diverse solidarity actions.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF ANARCHIST VAGGELIS STATHOPOULOS

FREEDOM TO THE ANARCHIST DIMITRIS HATZIVASSILIADIS WHO IS BEING PROSECUTED FOR THE SAME CASE AND TO ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

FOR FEAR TO CHANGE SIDES

THE ANSWERS ARE GIVEN IN THE STREETS OF FIRE

Anti-State Saboteurs

Source: athens.indymedia

Thessaloniki, Greece: Communique for an arson attack upon mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis’ car by ‘Nightriders of the Flame’

Life in the metropolises is suffocating. In recent years, we have seen the urban beast growing larger and sucking life into its path. Cops and snitches lurk around every corner, poverty and deprivation are reflected in every aspect of daily life, oppression (labour, sexual, racial) is a brutal reality, while the circle of ‘freedoms’ and ‘breaths of life’ are getting narrower and narrower. In this suffocating grip, capitalism comes to remind us that we are expendable materials for its machines, which produce endlessly and thirst for profit.

The gentrification projects are the blunt admission by the state that we exist simply to produce for them. Squares, parks, neighborhoods that were once appropriable by their inhabitants are being gentrified by labor and handed over to tourists and urban bourgeois. Expensive cafes, airbnb, surveillance cameras, increasing tourist population, overall increase in the cost of living are some of the consequences of redevelopment. Consequences that result in the displacement of people who once lived in these neighborhoods as they can no longer cope with the new existing situation. So the so-called ‘gentrification’ thus creates ‘fortress’ (urban) areas with increased social control and repression while other urban areas are ghettoised and impoverished. The segregation of neighbourhoods within cities and their so pronounced differentiations, clearly facilitates the work of the cops in terms of mapping and surveillance.

We see such a project unfolding before us in the Pavlos Mela military camp. A huge space within the confined metropolitan prison, freely appropriable by all and sundry, has been included in the redevelopment plans of Mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis.

But to introduce ourselves to the “gentleman” in question.

This right-wing trash has been in politics since he was 25, which seems to have given him the opportunity to create “strong friendships”. For the “Antonis Tritsis” project concerning the redevelopment of the Pavlos Mela military camp, he met with the then Deputy Minister of Interior Stelios Petsas, the Deputy Minister of Interior of Macedonia and Thrace Kalafatis Stavros and the Bishop of Stavroupolis-Neapolis Varnavas. A “successful” meeting, judging by the fact that the amount of 10 million Euros was approved for this project. In a poor district of the city, with residents deprived of basic needs (heating, electricity, etc.), Demourtzidis chooses to ask for and use 10 million euros for a place where he and his friends will set up festivals. In fact, this scum had the audacity to sue groups of residents who wanted to oppose his “grandiose” plans.

So for these reasons, at dawn on 27.03, we chose to set fire to Demourtzidis’ professional car, which was parked at the back of Stavroupoli’s town hall.

This attack is a small contribution within the framework of the diffusion of direct actions in the dead silence of the city. The boundaries are constantly narrowing. The state has launched a new witch hunt, with new cycles of prosecutions, new criminal codes, cops in universities, gentrification of areas, intensification of controls, and so on. But the noose they weave for us will become the gallows they find before it and our hatred will become the rage that kicks the stool, because our rage against what we hate is our weapon and you would do well to fear it.

Solidarity and strength to those who are prisoners in the hands of the state

For anarchy

Nightriders of the Flame

Source: athens.indymedia

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attack on ‘airbnb StrefiHomm’ in Exarcheia

Last week we chose to disrupt for a while the now dystopian normality of the neighbourhood of the Exarcheia. The tourist industry is stepping on our bodies, displacing the local population, the poorer classes, the immigrant(s), grabbing more space from the hands of the antagonistic movement. A very important example of the ruthless march of capital into the neighborhood is the real estate firm, Homm.

This Greek company manages, buys, sells, rents apartments, villas and all kinds of properties in Athens, Mykonos, Evia and other areas. By browsing their site, one can see the luxury apartments they manage in “run-down” areas such as Patissia, but also in classic neighborhoods where gentrification has been completed such as Koukaki. Exarcheia seems to be their preferred neighborhood as they operate many properties such as luxury apartments and airbnb. Many of these are being targeted in protests in Exarchia. In fact, one can distinguish them by the paint people throw on their facades and the slogans they write.

The company has 135 properties on booking.gr and its offices are located at 83 Poseidonos Street in Glyfada. It is neither the first nor the last company that camps and does business in Exarcheia, but it is a main agent of gentrification that, despite the hostile climate it receives, insists on expanding more and more, opening more properties. We will not tolerate another one of them making fun of us right in our faces, investing at our expense, selling alternativeism, head-butting the struggles and the history of the movements in the region.

The airbnb StrefiHomm, located at the foot of Strefi Hill, a landmark of the neighbourhood struggle world, a place of meeting, politicization, events, play. A refuge for the young, the old, for people who do not fit into the mold of society. A place of nature and life of many animals. The hill is under the threat of privatization by the real estate company Prodea, where together with the municipality of Athens they plan to completely take over, putting cameras, fences, security guards, changing the character of the hill.

This building has caught the attention of those fighting against gentrification as we have noticed the removal of its cameras and a wide range of different colours adorning its facade. For the above reasons, we therefore chose to break some of the building’s windows with stones as a minimal sign of opposition to the neighborhood’s appropriation. This move caused damage to the building, at the expense of the company. It also has a symbolic character to demonstrate socially that the presence of the company is unwelcome in the neighborhood.

There are many targets everywhere, let’s take our neighborhood back from the hands of capital, cops and corporations.

IF WE DON’T FIGHT BACK IN ALL NEIGHBORHOODS OUR CITIES WILL BECOME MODERN PRISONS

NOT IN EXARCHEIA, NOT ANYWHERE, NOT AN AIRBNB IN ANY NEIGHBORHOOD.

Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia

Athens, Greece: Demonstration at the French Embassy in solidarity with the anarchist prisoner Claudio Lavazza (17/05)

The open assembly convened after the call of the Anarchists’ Initiative against State Killings decided to convene a demostration at the French Embassy (7 Vassilissis Sofias Avenue) on Tuesday 17 May at 18.30, the day when the appeal of comrade Claudio Lavazza is being considered, through which he is demanding his release from prison. Below is the text of the appeal.

FREEDOM FOR CLAUDIO LAVAZZA

THE FRENCH STATE TAKES REVENGE ON POLITICAL PRISONERS

Our anarchist comrade Claudio Lavazza has been in prison since 1996, having already completed 25 years of continuous detention. He is one of the longest serving political prisoners in Europe. Claudio was one of the militants who took up arms to oppose capitalist rule politically and militantly.

An insurgent proletarian who participated in conflicts and expropriations in the early years of joining the movement in the dynamic 1970s in Italy. Armed fighter of the revolutionary movement of the 70’s-80’s afterwards. Member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism, a horizontal guerrilla group with strong ideological influences from workers’ autonomy. Participant in the coalition of groups under the name ‘Organised Communists for Proletarian Liberation’, an armed project to support fugitives and free comrades and comrades-in-arms from prison. Accomplice to the 1981 attack on the prison in Frosinone where imprisoned militants were released.

At a time when the meaning and content of words had not been surrendered to museification, revisionism, and limited activism. But it found meaning through the practical cultivation of hope in those imprisoned and “exiled” from the legal order by the relentless repression of the state and the parastate. That words like freedom and solidarity would be put into practice with guns in their hands.

After repeated difficulties and under constant persecution of repentant members of armed organizations, the comrade was forced to leave Italy and to flee as a wanted man to France in 1982, a country where there were thousands of Italian political refugees persecuted by the Italian state for their involvement in the revolutionary movement. It was a period when the then social-democratic Mitterrand government was accepting on its territory those persecuted/fugitives wanted by Italy on condition that they “refrain from illegal activities”, the so-called “Mitterrand doctrine” was to begin to unravel with the beginnings of the “war on terror” in 2001. He remained a fugitive for more than 16 years, during which time he managed to survive and support the infrastructure of the revolutionary movement through the practice of expropriation in both France and Spain. He chose to go underground as he did not reconsider his choice. In the choice of armed struggle as a necessary condition of rupture and real attack on the capitalist structure and its structures.

“Anarchy is by its very nature illegalistic, because it seeks to exist on the margins of the legitimacy imposed by the system. We anarchists have our own laws and forms of existence, which are always condemned by the laws and forms of existence of the states.” ( Claudio Lavazza)

The attitude of the French state towards Claudio exudes all the state reactionism and authoritarianism one encounters in dealing with unrepentant opponents of power. Criminal laws are reduced to rags and the famous ‘human rights’ are abolished. The bourgeois justice system becomes the vanguard of the “war on terror” and, wearing the mask of bureaucracy, wages a merciless war of attrition. A mechanism of cruel class domination and organised state violence that undertakes the extermination of its unrepentant enemies.

The historical course of French capitalism was decisively linked to colonial policy up to the first half of the last century. A review of the history of French imperialism and its disastrous interventions in Africa and the Middle East makes clear to us its disgusting historical role in the capitalist system.

The French state is equally well known for its relentless anti-terrorist policy at home. The case of the comrade Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who in a few months’ time will have been a prisoner in French prisons for 38 years, is typical. Although the comrade has been entitled to be released from prison since 1999, the judicial authorities in France are refusing to do so without even any legal pretexts.

Returning to Claudio’s case, at the moment our comrade has served 25 years in Spanish prison hellholes for bank expropriations. In his last expropriation, known as the “Cordoba case” there was an armed confrontation in which 3 comrades (including Claudio) were seriously injured and 2 policewomen were killed. He has been serving this case for almost 1 year now when he was transferred to France to serve a 10 year sentence for a bank robbery.

Under European law, however, he should have been released from prison a month ago (11 December) on completion of 25 years’ imprisonment as the sentences should have been merged. However, the French prosecution authorities refuse to do so and are asking our comrade to serve at least another 5 years in real prison. The comrade has legally challenged the exceptional status he is experiencing and on 17 May his appeal is being considered, through which he is seeking his release from prison. We know that the main reason for their refusal despite so many years of imprisonment – and the humiliating attitude of parts of the movement who split their position in the face of the fear of repression because of the deaths on the part of the state – is that they have never retreated from anarchist principles and values, that even from prison he continued to produce political discourse, to participate in hunger strikes against the FIES-type regime, to claim the connection between his own experience and the wider historical memory.

He did not stop fighting and advocating with all his strength the necessity of the attack against the state and capital.

At this moment, it is the French state that is responsible for the prolongation of our comrade’s imprisonment and the regime of arbitrariness and exclusion that is being set up against him. We therefore join our voice with the call for international solidarity for the release of comrade Claudio Lavazza. The imprisoned comrades are flesh and blood of the revolutionary movements and we will demand that they are in the street and in the struggles of today.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF COMRADE CLAUDIO LAVAZZA

INTERNATIONALIST STRUGGLE FOR THE RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS

SOLIDARITY RALLY AT THE FRENCH EMBASSY 17/05 AT 18.30

Comrades’ initiative in solidarity with comrade Claudio Lavazza

Source: athens.indymedia

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