April 12, 2012
by actforfreedom
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SOLIDARITY CALL POSTER
Solidarity to the arrested / Nothing is over, everything continues
Protest on Thursday 12/4 at 18:00 Liberty Square (Pl. Eleftherias)
Student group Skapoula / those arrested/ others in solidarity / comrades
Freedom suffocates from the decisions of the powerful,the media strangle free thought, and imagination stops at the police’s batons.
On April 6th, at 10:30, special antiterrorist forces and other trained squads of the police entered the squatted social center within the green line with uncontrollable brutality, answering our questions with beating and pushing. When they realized that the majority of people there were underage, their behaviour reflected a systematic psychological violence, despite the fact that there was no resistance from the arrested. The attempt to excuse the raid came out to be false, since there was no warrant for a drug search, and there were also no requests from the building’s owners (Kykkos Monastery). After many hours of detainment at the Pyli Pafou police station, the arrested were accused of illegal entry without permission, an accusation that on its own is not an actual crime under the legal code, since there was no evidence of a purpose to commit a crime. Those who were beaten during their arrest were accused of resisting the police, assault and obstruction of police work, so that they could justify their own actions.
Is it logical to arrest, beat and kick out those who took a derelict, dead building and transformed it into a social center? A space that hosted a projection area, a self-organized cafe, a collective kitchen, a working out space, and recording station – for music and a radio station. A space that when we entered it, even the floors had holes, and yet despite this we did not undermine its historic value, the view of the sunset from the roof, and its unusual architecture. Filled with passion and energy, with a profound creativity, in one month we made the building able to host both people and various activites, and meanwhile we discovered that this attempt was a necessity for EVERY cypriot, as you expel the wounds from the invasion, materialistically and mentally, with creation upon the ruins. Throwing away the military’s sandbags, fixing the doors and the windows, filling up 40-year-old holes from bullets of automatic rifles, drawing around – and not on – the decomposition of the walls, as we do not forget the mental death caused by the invasion. We dare to give back life to everything they have stolen from us and we do refuse passiveness. We contest every piece of land, every building, and every human relationship. Not in theory, but in practice, a social example that surpassed the schedule of the leader’s ‘discussions’ and lived a reunification, proving that borders cannot keep us apart.
The media’s misinformation was based on photo-documents taken after the police’s invasion, and the building is projected as a ruin, which was infact caused by the actions of the police. A space that was built upon horizontal structures of collective participation faced the political authorities of the island, which is trying to destroy any social effort that does not come from its authoritarian structure (political parties/ state/ church). Due to the coming presidency of the European Union in Cyprus, any such social experiments do not fit in the image of a quite, lawful island that the cypriot state and the capital behind it want to present.
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