Note:
We are reprinting below a translation of a press release about the upcoming trial of Savas Michael Matsas, a long time leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK). We urge all left and labor groups in Greece and internationally to express their solidarity with Savas Michael and oppose the vicious attempt to silence the voice of anti-fascists and socialists in Greece. It is obvious that this case, initiated by the Golden Dawn fascists, would never have gone to trial without the complicity of the right wing Samaras government and their "left" allies in the coalition.
We are reprinting below a translation of a press release about the upcoming trial of Savas Michael Matsas, a long time leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK). We urge all left and labor groups in Greece and internationally to express their solidarity with Savas Michael and oppose the vicious attempt to silence the voice of anti-fascists and socialists in Greece. It is obvious that this case, initiated by the Golden Dawn fascists, would never have gone to trial without the complicity of the right wing Samaras government and their "left" allies in the coalition.
Savas Michael Matsas |
A trial organized by
the Nazi “Golden Dawn” in Greece
Savas Matsas, a Greek
Jewish Marxist intellectual, and Secretary General of the Workers’
Revolutionary Party (EEK) of Greece, will go on trial on September 3, 2013. He
is being accused of “defamation” against the Greek openly Nazi party, the
infamous “Golden Dawn”, for “instigation of violence and chaos” and “disruption
of the civil peace” because, four years ago, in May 2009, the EEK issued a
leaflet calling for participation in an antifascist demonstration protesting
against a murderous attack by the Nazis against the immigrant communities in Athens
that was made possible through the covert assistance of the local police in
Greece.
The events leading up to this trial
are noteworthy enough to be described in more detail.
In December 2008, an important youth
revolt had shaken the entire country following the murder of a 15 years old
adolescent, Alexandros Grigoropoulos by two police guards. The revolt continued
for nearly two months, in what Dominique Strauss Kahn, head of the IMF at that
time, had rightly described as “the first political explosion of the current
world financial-economic crisis”. In the spring and summer 2009, the right wing
Karamanlis government had launched a counter-offensive to check the social unrest by organizing
continuous pogroms by the police assisted
by the Nazi “Golden dawn”( then still a marginal far right extremist group) targeting the immigrant
communities and the left. In the
December 2008 revolt the immigrant workers played a rather secondary if not a
marginal role in the events, with one great exception: during the revolt, on Christmas
eve in 2008, a gang of thugs hired by the bosses – and never punished to this
day – attacked a Bulgarian immigrant with acid, resulting in serious injuries
to the woman, Konstantina Kuneva. She was apparently singled out for being an
active trade unionist. Kuneva went on to become a symbol of the revolt and of the
unity of all workers regardless of their national or ethnic origin.
It is not an accident that other female
trade-unionists coming from abroad, like the Polish Monika
Karbowska, were targeted later in 2009, arrested and made the subject of show
trials.
The police pogroms against immigrants
reached a climax in the spring of 2009, in Athens, in the neighbourhood of
Aghios Panteleimonas, where the “Golden Dawn” murder squads terrorised immigrants
with the protection and collaboration of the local police. Left organizations
had called for anti-fascist demonstrations. The EEK joined this mobilization and
issued a leaflet calling for mass participation. The leaflet signed by the EEK as a party was
also published in the party newspaper NEA PROOPTIKI and featured on the party’s
web site. This is the “crime” for which the General Secretary of the EEK is
accused and put on trial.
In May 2009, leading members of the ‘Golden Dawn”, including Ilias Panagiotaros, now a member of the Greek
Parliament, and Themis Skordeli - a woman with shadowy connections to the
underworld, accused of a murderous attack on an Afghan immigrant but who to
this day has never been brought to trial - initiated a lawsuit against the entire
spectrum of the Greek left, from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and SYRIZA
to the extra-parliamentary left, ANTARSYA and EEK, all the immigrant
associations, and independent personalities like the Dean of the National
Technical University of Athens Constantinos Moutzouris. The charge against Moutzouris was that he
allowed an alternative web site, Athens.Indymedia, to broadcast from space on
the campus.
The lawsuit remained in limbo until late
2012, after the Greek elections of May and June 2012, when, the Golden Dawn was
catapulted to Parliament from the margins of political life and the shadows of
the State repressive apparatus. In November 2012, at the day celebrated nationally for decades now as the anniversary of the 1973 youth revolt in Athens National
Technical University (the “Polytechnic”) against the military dictatorship of
the colonels, the Greek Police, after receiving
orders from the judiciary, began
interrogations of all those accused in the Golden Dawn lawsuit of 2009. By June
of 2013, from the dozens of the accused in the legal action of 2009, and
interrogated in 2012, only Savas Michael(Sabetai) Matsas of the EEK was called
to trial on September 3, 2013, together with the former Dean C. Moutzouris.
Simultaneously with this preposterous
“legal” action, the Nazis have intensified a non-stop,
vicious anti-Semitic and anti-communist campaign against the Secretary of the
EEK, accusing him of being “an instrument of the World Jewish Conspiracy to
foment civil war among Greeks to impose a Judeo-Bolshevik regime in Greece ”.
Pictures of Savas Michael are presented
combined with anti-Semitic insults and open death threats: “Destroy the Jewish
vermin!”
Although there is a powerful wave of
solidarity for Savas Michael both in Greece and internationally, including the
support of many Jewish people, the “official” leadership of the Greek Jewish
community, the Central Israelite Council of Greece(KISE) has so far refused to
make the slightest public statement on this vicious attack on a Greek Jew. The
reason is obvious: they disagree with his political views. Even more sinister,
the current Chairman of KISE, in a recent interview in the Jerusalem Post,
defended the credentials of Adonis Georgiadis,
a vicious anti-Semite and a
fascist well known in Greece, who after being for years a leading member of the
far right LAOS party, has jumped to the right wing New Democracy party and
became a minister of Health in the Samaras government (where other notorious
fascists are included: like Makis Voridis, personal friend of Jean Marie Le Pen
and former leader of the youth
organization of the dictator Papadopoulos)! The “Judenrat” mentality and
practices did not finish with the Third Reich.
On August 29, a press conference is scheduled
in the headquarters of the Union of Journalists in Athens (ESHEA) to present
the facts behind this case, the political implications of this trial, and the
solidarity campaign that is gaining an
increasing hearing throughout the world.
August 2,
2013
1 comment:
As far as I know, Comrade Savas has made a call for letters that support his right to fight fascism. I think, in line with his call, Permanent Revoultion should ask its readers to send letters of support to Comrade Savas.
His e-mail address is savvasmatsas@gmail.com
We should also do our best to spread the word.
Kemal Ulker
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