This Monday, November 25th we take the streets for the International Day of the Elimination of Gender-Based Violence. With us we carry the unbreakable bond with our anarchist comrades Marianna and Dimitra in the women’s prison of Korydallos, Athens, who are facing investigations under charges of terrorism.

Marianna was heavily injured by an explosion in an apartment on October 31st, during which our anarchist comrade Kyriakos lost his life. While being hospitalized, she had to endure various and ongoing attempts of humiliation and torture by the anti-terror unit, which took her fingerprints while she was unconscious and subjected her to forced interrogation. After 15 days in the hospital, she was kidnapped by the anti-terror unit and taken to the women’s prison of Korydallos.

The forced deprivation of our comrade of her privacy is a practice that seeks to demoralize her, in a world where the morality that seeks to regulate our bodies pretends to tell us that femininity can only exist in the sacred. It seeks to create guilt, shame and above all fear of other forms of outrageous patriarchal violence that could come after. But there is not only patriarchal violence in the physical, the emotional violence tries to infiltrate the most intimate sphere of our companion, stripping her of the space to feel pain and the full expression of her emotions in such a difficult moment.

In the aftermath of what happened on 31st October, our comrade Dimitris as well as our anarchist comrade Dimitra were arrested and imprisoned. Without any evidence, they were placed in custody, constructing yet another one of the many cases where relationships and solidarity are persecuted.

The case of our comrades is one example of a thousands in the systems of punishment and incarceration all around the world. In Damon Prison in occupied Palestine, palestinian FLINTA* endure torture by the israeli forces, from the confiscation of their hijabs and traditional clothing as cruel punishment to strip searches that are supposed to rob them of dignity, intensifying their humiliation and pain. But they remain steadfast and resilient in the fight for a free people.

The torture exercised against our siblings are rooted in classical practices of Western patriarchy, which is enslaving and colonial. The stripping of subjectivity and manipulation of bodies as objects, by force, is a historic practice of white patriarchy with the ideology of progress. It is the European states that try to create the myth of an external enemy, an enemy of color, with another alphabet. And it is here in the western world, where prisons were invented. Meant to imprison not only the body but the minds of the people. For women or other dissident gender identities, prison is punishment not only for a criminalized act, but also for transgression against the imposed role of the weak and passive.

November 25th was initiated in memory of the three sisters Mirabal, called „las mariposas“, who fought in the June 14 Revolutionary movement against the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican republic and were murdered by it on November 25th, 1960. After it was already established as a day of remembrance, the United Nations General Assembly claimed this day in 1999, attempting to pinkwash the fact that statist power and its organisations in itself are patriarchal.

As for today, while Germany and the western world continue to claim morality, we know that their morality is nothing else than rotten. And while we see our siblings rising against gender-based and colonial violence, we have the responsiblity to stand at their side. From the centres of western supremacist ideology and war machinery, we can not remain silent and we won’t. In this sense, November 25th is a call to fight. With the memory of past struggles in our souls, the anger of the present pulsing through our veins and the hope and will for justice, freedom and self-determination in our hearts and hands.

What they call organization, is for us comradeship, friendship, complicity, and solidarity.

What they call terrorism is for us the multifaceted struggle for social liberation.

Noone is free, until we all are free!

Join us on November 25th at the demonstration „Resist – by any means necessary“, called by the Alliance of Internationalist Feminists. We will be there, together, with a banner.

passiert am 25.11.2024