The area of Halkidiki, plundered over recent decades by mining and the environmental devastation it has caused, has seen the birth of resistance movements trying to stop these destructive projects. Today, capitalist giants such as the multinational El Dorado Gold, arrive in areas crushed by capitalism such as Greece, privatizing territories for export profits and ignoring the damage they cause to local populations and the environment. The State supports this project blindly, justifying it as an economic necessity, and protects the good functioning of mobilizing the whole repressive machine. At the same time, it presents as a solution to the problem of unemployment by offering jobs to hundreds of local residents.
We do not recognize this capitalist logic to pay the debts of the State and give work to people, making them partners in the destruction and bleeding of their own land.
We refuse the State propaganda that wants us to believe that this is the only road for survival in this place. Employees of El Dorado Gold were also used as a reactionary force paid and motivated by the company to organize gatherings, anti-concentrations, road blocks and attacks creating a climate of civil war between partners in disaster and people who resist. What interests us in the struggle against Skouries gold mines, is on one side the organization into self-managed assemblies and on the other the unmediated practices used in recent years. We share the horizontality of the Assemblies of certain villages who discuss resistance actions to stop the mining activity and prosecute the capitalists attacking of their land.
One of these moments was the resistance at Skouries on 23 August where thousands of protesters hours of efforts to reach the construction site which was protected by law enforcement. The day ended with the arrest of 78 people on board a bus that was moving away from the mountain. After this, four of us were in a detention regime because of our refusal to give our fingerprints. In the past, the Skouries struggle was characterized by the use of new enforcement and control practices such as forcible taking of DNA or worksite approach ban of less than four kilometres. The police’s attempt to take fingerprints of all persons arrested is part of this logic.
The fingerprinting is part of a broader plan that seeks a more and more global control of society. Technology is moving in the same direction, producing sophisticated surveillance cameras, control of phones and networks, recording every digital flow.
Another element of control is the relentless presence of the police and private security guards in the streets.
The objective of these mechanisms is to monitor, incriminate and punish those who do not respect the laws of the established order. For this reason there is a prison, which protects the rich and their interests and those of capital blackmailing and terrorizing those who refuse to bow their heads. Proof that prison is a weapon of the rich is the fact that freedom is often acquired through judicial institutions.
We work against the realization of this totalitarian plan, fighting the interests and the order that they defend. That is why we refused to give our fingerprints in AT Polygyros.
As a consequence, the Polygyrou court sentenced us on Monday, August 24 to 17 months’ sentence suspended for alleged violent involvement and refusing to give our fingerprints. Not satisfied, the Polygyros police made an extradition request refusing us entry into Greek territory for eight years because of hazards to public safety.
A further element of social control is the border and what results from it as nationalities, passports and all abominable measures such as deportation.
Borders allow the reinforcing of national pride, which has the capacity to neutralize, in the name of unity, potential conflicts generated by the capitalist system within a defined territory. All these produce what is called the “phenomenon of migration”, ie the reason why men and women are portrayed as illegal and are exposed to imprisonment and deportation. The State exploits migrants for the worst and most underpaid crap work when it is convenient, to enclose them then in concentration camps awaiting deportation and thus, simultaneously, serve State propaganda and expand nationalist hatred against the ‘common enemy from outside’.
We, on the contrary, believe that the enemy is the State and capital.
We feel the importance of links that can be forged in places where we live, deep structuring human relations in each environment. The significance of this is not comparable to that of any data written on passports and various documents.
For all these reasons, we reject our deportation.
Complicit with those who refuse fingerprinting and DNA.
We fight the social peace imposed on us.
Solidarity with all imprisoned anarchist comrades.
08/31/2015
Errol, Andrea