Our friend and comrade Dr. Savvas Michael Matsas will be going on trial in Greece for insulting the fascist New Dawn party, there. He called the fascists, ummm, "Nazis", denounced them in newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK) of which he is secretary, and issued a flyer calling for mass protests against fascism in Greece.
This threat to Savvas' liberty is also an attempt by the Greek state to crush the radical Left.
It was many years ago when I heard Savvas speak in New York at the Left Forum (then, the "Socialist Scholars Conference"). He told us about his attempts, as an organizer of medical doctors in Greece, to run the U.S./NATO bombardment to bring desperately needed medical supplies and care into a besieged Iraq. We became friends.
Savvas is a "direct action do-er" and not just a great talker. We need to defend him, and put pressure on the Greek government to stop this farce of a trial immediately. Free Savvas!
You can write letters of support directly to Savvas at <eek at ath.forthnet.gr>
There's also a petition in Greek & in English that others have created at www.change.org (I've created a TinyURL for it, as the URL was over 200 characters long, translating from the Greek): http://tinyurl.com/lfzwbfo
- Mitchel Cohen Brooklyn Greens/Green Party
Here is a press release translated into English that was posted at:
<http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2013/08/defend-savas-michael-against-golden.html>http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2013/08/defend-savas-michael-against-golden.html
Defend Savas Michael Matsas against the Golden Dawn fascists!
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.
Emacs!
Savas Michael Matsas
A trial organized by the Nazi "Golden Dawn" in Greece
August 2, 2013 -- 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 a murderous attack by the Nazis against the immigrant communities in Athens, which were made possible by 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-year old teenager, 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), which targeted the immigrant communities and the left.
In the December 2008 revolt the immigrant workers played a rather secondary if not 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 because she was 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 terrorized immigrants. The murder squads were protected by and collaborated with 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 was signed by the EEK as a party, and it 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 a room on the campus.
The lawsuit remained in limbo until late 2012, after the Greek elections of May and June 2012, when the Golden Dawn catapulted to Parliament from the margins of political life and the shadows of the State repressive apparatus. In November 2012, on 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 interrogating 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, scheduled to begin on September 3, 2013, together with the former Dean, Constantinos 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 and 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 years as a leading member of the far right LAOS party -- has jumped to the right wing New Democracy party and become 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)! (1) 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.
------------------------------- NOTES 1. <http://www.jpost.com/International/Greek-Anti-Semitic-minister-not-a-worry-318668>http://www.jpost.com/International/Greek-Anti-Semitic-minister-not-a-worry-318668
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