At 11:20 a.m. on September 17, 2010, four people in ski masks robbed a bank at gunpoint in the small town of Psachna on the island of Evia north of Athens. A half-hour later, on a motorway road near the island’s capital Chalcis, a 27-year-old man, a 28-year-old man, and a 35-year-old woman were arrested. They were brought to the Chalcida police station, where the men—Alexandros Kossivas and Michalis Traikapis—were charged with the armed bank robbery and the Maria Ekonomou was charged with “aiding and abetting fugitives.” The charges were based largely on the comrades’ connection to the anarchist milieu (Traikapis was one of the Thessaloniki 7, along with two Spanish comrades and others, arrested during the riots surrounding the 2003 EU summit in that city and finally released thanks to a lengthy hunger strike) and http://saloniki2003.blogspot.com/2010/05/call-for-solidarity-with-prisoners-of.htmldubious witness testimony (one of the witnesses, a kiosk attendant, supposedly remembered one of the comrades—just prior to the robbery—asking: “Excuse me, but where is the bank?”). The comrades didn’t have any weapons or “loot” on them at the time of the arrests, while searches of their Athens homes revealed nothing more than “ski masks, four 9 mm bullets, and other objects that are being investigated.” Nevertheless, Kossivas and Traikapis are currently in prison, while the Maria was released on probation. It’s expected that they will soon write something that states their position regarding the charges, their political identity, etc.
Letter from the three accused of the robbery in Evia, central Greece
19/10/10
We are witnesses of a historical development, of a new even more devastating world that is opening in front of us. The so-called capitalistic crisis and the merciless pillage that follows it, signal a new phase of the metropolitan war and its two devastating aspects. The violence and the violence. Ideological violence, repressive violence. We speak of a new phase of war because we realize the era that preceded the crisis, equally barbarian and flattening. It was that memorable era of “plenty”, that prefaced sneakily and patiently what we live today. It was a continuous, “low intensity” war, that in two decades accomplished to extend by giving out dreams, hallucinations and ideology.
Lending, as the last “invention” for the extension of life of the developed capitalistic world, was not only the yuppies, their statistics and their numbers. It was also those. Mainly however it was the ideological promotion of the then modern way of life with loans, that penetrated, determined and transformed the total of social relations. It was the sovereign language and its commercials. It was the cynicism and the stepping over dead bodies hunting of happiness, that changed the metropolis in to immense theatres of war. The triptych of force, wealth and power, that should by any means be achieved, was glorified by all classes in all aspects of social life and un-guiltified a constant crime against the “others”. The invisible, the outcasts, the poor, the immigrants. A barbarian mass where within each one is alone and against all, could consume, exploit, manage, have fun and rape without guilts. It was the era of all is allowed. However it was borrowed and as everything, so this at some point ends.
The that rises brings with it poverty, unhappiness and prohibitions. It is the season of void that spits in the faces of those who live with hallucinations. And now what? Now that theres nothing for them to promise, they will only order. The sovereign language drips blood and the oratory with which the sweeping social transformations are promoted as an essential condition for the confrontation of the crisis, are rhetorical polemics. Direct, violent and merciless. The declaration of a “situation of emergency” and the obligation of obedience to whatever is commanded by the “national interest”, do not leave and room of misinterpretation. We have war. The state is barricading setting up an immense wall of protection around it. Because it knows that even though it still survives-the leftovers of the “plenty” of the previous decades-, even if still individualism and fatalism absorb dissatisfaction, even if still we “from under” have not constituted a compact competitive force, its not long before the moment where the accumulated rage will be expressed. And then it will explode. Even if it is a dead-end and contradictory it will explode. And the strikes will be criminalized, terrorlaws that are upgrading, the urban disturbances and the army that trained, the equipment and the budgets that are approved, the cities, the neighborhoods, the houses, our own lives that are being surrounded, prove it to us.
In this setting, prosecutions, arrests and the imprisonments of those who fight are inevitable. Because it is now that they should, by striking us, spread the fear in those that are already thinking and are ready to act, because it is now that they should demonstrate their supposed omnipotence, because it is now that they should declare as useless and impasse, every form of struggle.
We find ourselves therefore in the foresight because its what our era dictates. This may make us vulnerable and exposed, however in no case does it make us victims. Rather the opposite. This is why we speak of choices and conscience of the struggle. For the conscience that from the moment you begin to fight, you retake your life in your own hands, you cease perceiving yourself as a victim. Never again. Finally. We therefore say again, we have war. And with this fact we will recount our story.
On friday 17th of September and at a long distance away from Psahna Evia, where previously a robbery had happened in the national bank of greece in the area, cops arrest us and lead us to the artakis police station. While theres no evidence that connects us with the particular robbery, it is the verification our personal data that reveals our “identity” and gives a specific turn in events. Its our arrests that we had in the past for hostilities against the regime, that constituted the “solid” evidence for our involvement in this case. Our direct transport to the Halkida station and the insistence of the cops in the interrogations to focus on our past, were indicative of their intentions. And since our presence in the wider area of the robbery alone is not enough, the evidence had to be invented. What else therefore, than the ridiculous testimonies of some snitches-residents of the area, that “recognize” walk styles, watch brands, labels on jackets and other imaginative things that were dictated to them by the agents of halkida, struggling to fulfill the mission that was assigned to them by their superiors from g.a.d.a.(central police headquarters in athens) At this moment three of us are accused and two of us imprisoned, with an insubstantial official charge.
We could denounce the police arbitrariness against us and make pleads of innocence. However for us words are not neutral. They are charged with meanings and logics. They constitute entire worlds that are occasionally completely hostile between them. Words are therefore competing. What does it mean in our strange times to denounce arbitrariness? For us it means nothing else but an indirect faith in the monopoly of laws. A consensus admission, that arbitrariness is not in the nature of the system, but a making of certain perjurers and corrupted. It is a disorientating tactic that skillful directs the problem away from the root. To revelations, scandals, individual incidents. The system is a entirely criminal machine and violence and only violence is the oil that maintains it. Whoever still continues to ignore this, is either a suspect or turns a blind eye.
We will not be focus therefore on the cops that “exaggerated”, to the public prosecutors that “arbitraded”, in the journalists that “misinformed”. What we seek is through our own story to describe the modern terms submission. To expose to common view these small stories, that compose the total of barbarian world that surrounds us. Each one us should take a position on them. We took ours. We demand the lifting of the charges and our immediate release, without begging for nothing. We are not victims, we are a part of our choices. For all that we did, for what we didnt make, for other things that we left. No one should look for “innocents” among us. We are on the side of the repeatedely “guilty”. We are next to the poordevils, the immigrants, the outlaws, the robbers, the “terrorists”. And we will remain here.
For before, for now and for ever.
Alexandros Kossivas, Michalis Traikapis
(imprisoned in the 1st wing of koridalos prisons)
Maria Ekonomou
(accused for the same case)
19/10/2010
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