FROM KASTRO

I was sixteen years old when they coercively cut all my hair and tortured me for the first time.
It was again because I was saying NO to the racist oppression by the military-dictatorial regime of Syria, that is called Arab Republic of Syria. I didn’t find it strange: it is a dictatorial regime, the army governs, so the police can do whatever they want, unobstructed.
In these conditions many people are forced to look for other countries, for more humane conditions -and I was one of those who were saying that a democratic country where I could live and where human rights are respected is Greece.
After 18 years, in the country that is called Greek republic, this time in a regime that co-decides who will be the next peoples to die, who will starve and who will migrate, after 18 years that maybe in Syria they have forgotten this kind of behaviour, I was found along with all the other arrested, again for saying a NO, coercively shorn and shaven. I experienced and I saw such violence that I had not seen before, not even in the dictatorial regime, and faced threats of rape by the police (“we will you throw you in a cell with the gypsies to rape you”).
I don’t want to disappoint the people who fought for democracy and paid for this fight with imprisonment and exile, but maybe I will embitter them, leaving them with the question whether this is a justice state or a police state.
The public prosecutor and the interrogation judge didn’t hear any of the accused, but only the testimonies of the police who were giving the orders. And the dismal justice was applied, without any doubt, despite that many testimonies of the police are obviously fake and ridiculous, if someone looks at them better.
They stated for me and one Spanish that we had the same bag with the same things: 2 slingshots, 3 screws and 1 coil of copper-weir, but they charge us for molotov, resistance et.c.
The prosecutors and interrogators keep us in prison, and not only in different cells but also in different floors. I don’t know if they really believe they are being just, or if they execute orders. ...What is prison and what is medieval treatment... I hope this is happening only in the prison of Thessaloniki, and that the reason for this is that it is so close to dictatorial Turkey. Endless violence, psychological and physical, from the moment of our arrest until now.
I have some hope in the small possibility that Greece is a state of justice and make (such) trial, because what we have seen us, the foreigners, is only police state and such mediaeval situations, that every citizen would be ashamed for.
From Diavata judicial prison
Thessaloniki
27 June 2003,