Realities behind the arrest of Nikos Romanos

On 31 October, 2024, an explosion in the Athens neighborhood of Ambelokipoi killed the comrade Kyriakos X and severely injured the comrade Marianna M.

They were both in an apartment where an explosive device detonated, knocking out one wall of the building. The state claims they were planning to detonate a bomb elsewhere and that it exploded prematurely. Both Kyriakos and Marianna are anarchists, respected participants in the movement.

The press in Greece is owned by a handful of old families who control most of the remaining greek assets– those that haven't been sold off to foreign investors. The Greek mainstream media exists to disseminate state narratives, and it immediately began slandering the victims of the explosion as well as engaging in wild speculation– such as that the israeli embassy was the intended target. Whether or not that's true, it is true that israeli mossad agents came to assist the Greek police in their investigations. Since the explosion, the state has made additional arrests of people it claims are somehow connected to the apartment and its lease, sublease, etc.

As the Greek press promoted the propaganda of the state, there commenced activity in some cowardly corners of the left to distinguish the more "guilty" of those accused from the others. This is the question of who to tar with the labels of "anarchist" and "terrorist" — thereby assumed to deserve repression– vs. who is really "innocent."

The anarchist movement itself, both in Greece and internationally, has rejected such division and remained strong in solidarity despite a chilling increase in repression. There were multiple support gatherings outside the hospital where Marianna was held under guard and when, shortly after her second surgery, she was transferred to Korydallos prison, comrades also gathered there. Kyriakos has been honored with actions, banners, marches, events and memorials, and will remain a beloved comrade forevermore. There has been no "disavowal," no step back.

Since the tragedy in Ambelokipoi state repression against those suspected of being "anarchists" has become more aggressive, although this is consistent with an ongoing trend since the pandemic. What we have seen now are not new tactics but an increase in frequency: police actions such as stopping and searching people around the neighborhood Exarcheia, early-morning "preventative detention" of targeted individuals (people considered politically prominent) on the days of demonstrations and marches, and an increase in surveillance of those the greek state has a grudge against, including by parking unmarked cars with surveillance equipment in front of their homes.

Βίντεο από το χθεσινό πολιτικό μνημόσυνο για τον αναρχικό Κυριάκο Ξυμητήρη, στη συμβολή των οδών Τζαβέλα και Μεσολογγίου (μνημείο Αλέξη Γρηγορόπουλου) και την πορεία προς το #Πολυτεχνειο που ακολούθησε. #antireport pic.twitter.com/uRJmtS7fOc

— Alexis Daloumis (new account) (@Alexis_Daloumis) November 17, 2024

Few people in the anarchist movement here have been under as heavy surveillance, long-term, as the comrade Nikos Romanos. He was a friend of the anarchist Alexis Grigoropoulos, and witnessed Alexis' murder by police on 6 December 2008. Since that time Nikos has been arrested many times and accused of many crimes, along with false accusations of involvement with the direct action group Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

Because Nikos is a living witness to the shameful conduct of the state, he has been labeled a terrorist by politicians and the mass media many times over. Of their many accusations, however, the only crime the judiciary has ever pinned on him is a bank robbery, for which he served a prison sentence. During the time he was imprisoned, Nikos went on hunger strike for 31 days to (successfully) demand access to education, something he was entitled to under law but which the state had refused him. His steadfastness in this matter inspired solidarity actions throughout Greece and internationally, and is still well remembered.

Again, there are few people in Greece as relentlessly surveilled as Nikos, which made it all the more absurd that he was arrested on 18 November and accused of unspecified involvement in the explosion, on the basis of the state claiming to have discovered a single fingerprint from him on a trash bag "found" in the destroyed apartment.

Some or all of the above you may already know. The purpose of this piece is to contextualize the arrest and repression of Nikos in Greece's overall economic collapse and the scandals of the Greek state's ruling party, New Democracy, as well as to condemn those who respond to the greek state's abuse of Nikos with gleeful excitement (because they anticipate spectacular resistance) and those who promote state narratives about Nikos, including the lie– proven to be a lie in court! — that he was involved in the group Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

Nikos has been put through hell by the state for nearly his entire life, from the horror of watching his childhood friend murdered in front of his eyes to years of repression, intimidation, violence, false accusations and imprisonment. Anyone who repeats the state and state-media slanders about Nikos, using buzzwords like "terrorist" or breathlessly associating him with guerrilla groups he wasn't involved in, is promoting the state's narrative and serving the greek state's agenda.

On 22 November, the state used the flimsy pretext of the fingerprint to imprison Nikos more or less indefinitely, pre-trial, furthering the outrage. Even some of the right-wing TV talking heads were at a loss to explain this, which only provides (additional) evidence that the supposedly impartial judiciary of Greece is no more than a weapon of the ruling class, in this case of Prime Minister Mitsotakis and New Democracy.

Nikos is being held under article 187A, an antiterrorism statute passed by the "progressive" socialist government previous to new democracy. The excuse for 187A at the time was that it was necessary to prosecute Golden Dawn, a neo-fascist organization– but it wasn't used for that. Instead, we see in the detention of Nikos the penal code's true purpose. All state tools of "anti-extremism," including those that claim to be protection from fascists or to repress the far right, will end up used against anarchists.

Article 187A, which applies to terrorist organizations, states that a terrorist organization must be at least three people. So, we have the martyr Kyriakos, the injured Marianna… and because the state needed a third, like magic, they discover a bag with a fingerprint and kidnap Nikos.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis went and toured the site of the explosion personally, a bizarre and cynical media circus, and then pulled a true Reality TV stunt: he announced that a benevolent construction company (also, of course, owned by one of Greece's ruling families) would be providing free reconstruction of the building to give the other residents homes again.

The recent imprisonment of Nikos is likewise a stunt, but a cruel, barbaric stunt using a man's life and freedom to try and score political points. Not only has New Democracy been delegitimized by scandals– to name just a few: a mass-casualty train crash directly caused by austerity and privatization, deliberate mass drownings of immigrants, and being caught using illegal israeli spyware to monitor political rivals– but the economy of Greece is collapsing. Rent in most cities is unaffordable relative to wages, the healthcare system is being stripped for parts, and the schools are in shambles.

The abduction of Nikos Romanos is a provocation by the ruling party towards the anarchist movement, timed immediately after the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising and just before the anniversary of the police murder of Alexis. Mitsotakis wants to focus attention on the anarchists, because his coalition of neoliberal austerity privatizers is losing ground to a growing fringe far-right. Arbitrarily imprisoning a high-profile anarchist (and thus perhaps triggering a response) is perfect red meat for the kind of reactionary droolers who have been lately abandoning the technocratic soft-authoritarianism of new democracy for more overtly fascist political parties.

We can see the heavy hand of the Greek state in not just conventional media, but social media. Shameless, ignorant, parastatal parasitic "extremism" experts parrot the lies of Nikos' involvement in matters he was acquitted of, reactionaries and liberals casually refer to Nikos as a "terrorist," and Facebook auto-bans Nikos' name, much as it did the name of the revolutionary Dimitris Koufontinas during his 2021 prison hunger strike.

There is a parallel to the case of Tasos Theophilou, an anarchist-communist who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a bank robbery he didn't commit. Tasos also was falsely accused of membership in Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (despite not sharing their ideology), and the state's evidence against him was the anti-terrorism task force claiming they found his DNA on a hat near the bank– although the hat in question wasn't in the list of items collected and photographed at the scene of the robbery.

Although Tasos' conviction was eventually overturned and he successfully sued the state for his five years of false imprisonment, the government and its media parrots defamed Tasos for years based on these false accusations. After all, he's an anarchist!

There are many more instances and incidents I could invoke here, but I hope that this helps establish that

1.) the arbitrary imprisonment of Nikos in the wake of an unrelated tragedy is a sick political game by the state, and

2.) those who accept and repeat the Greek state's lies about Nikos are de facto agents of state repression.

Let us reject not only the continued abuse of Nikos Romanos and other prisoners by the state, but the state's narratives and slanders.

As has been said elsewhere, "May Athens get the December it deserves"