Letter from Greek prisoner

Today, 9 July 2009

On 8 July, after 6 and 1/2 months in prison, where I am kept detained after the December Uprising, charged with acts that I never did, they [TN: Συμβούλιο Πλημμελειοδικών, Simvoulio Plimeliodikon, Council of Jurists] decided to continue my detainment.

It's the only decision that called for continuation of detainment for such a case, when all the other detainees for the December Uprising, charged with the same or other acts, have all been freed.

This decision proves the personal antipathy and hate against me; they can neither rationalize nor explain it, for it's a decision taken for personal dislike, unjustly and illegally, as in any detainment.

Against this hate that is being expressed against my person, against this unjust 'punishment' that I am subjected to as a detainee, against this continued refusal on the part of the jurists and the prosecutors to see the real facts and the truth of the case, against this apparent and unprecedented discrimination against me, I've no other way to fight except my own body.

I begin a hunger strike. It's the only way I have as a detainee to shout for freedom and denunce the great injustice.

[TN: The only way to] To denunce the hate and the prejudice of the mechanism of the 'penal law'. To denunce the arbitrariness and the violence of a blind 'justice' and its even more 'blind' employees.

From Friday 10 July I stop accepting food and I submit a letter announcing my hunger strike to the prison administration.

Those who experienced the events of the December Uprising, those who experienced the violence of the mechanisms [TN: of the state, police, etc], those who experienced the cruelty of the cell without a sentence or with a sentence, those who know that the only way for freedom is resistance, those who fight against the arbitrariness of the courts and its horror, they are those who can understand me and will support me.

I thank them right now.

Thodoris Iliopoulos (Θοδωρης Ηλιοπουλος)

Koridalos Prisons (Φυλακές Κορυδαλού)