Friday 14th of January in Athens... The programmed school student's demonstration is starting, formaly indicating the end of the resent youth's movement through the suffocating manipulation of the political parties and the open state repression, with prosecutors and cops invading the occupied schools. It was the last demonstration, with few hundred pupils taking part, surrounded and strictly safeguarded by the state's and the communist party's repression squads, which led the whole demo running breathless in the streets of Athens .

During this demonstration, the Polytechnic School becomes a meeting point and place of communication for dozens of young people who suffocate in a police-city and refuse as a life term to submit to the raw dictatorship of the political and economic bosses, dressed as democracy. By the end of the demonstration, more young people are directed to the Polythechnic and the riot police (MAT) hurries to the area as well.

A group of the people gathered arm themselves with improvised material (molotov cocktails and stones) and takes action. Among many cars they chose and burn a van belonging to ALTEC, corporation of computer science systems. A mass attack of the riot police follows and the people in revolt, resisting as much as they can with their handy means against the well-armed praetorians of the regime, take refuge in the Polytechnic. Many more people are also inside, most of them not participating in the specific events, and they are also besieged by the police encirclement.

When the clashes end, the police impose a shut down of the whole area and carries out "cleansing operations", beating up and taking to the state security building many young people, choosing them based on the usual cops' criteria...

Special treatment was reserved for those who thought that they had no reason to remain surrounded inside the Polythechnic and decided to get out, unsuspicious of what they would face. They tried to pass through the police cordon and they were immediately attacked by the MAT and security policemen, they were badly brutalized and ended up in the Police Security building, where they were charged for the previous riots. Eleven persons in total, who were arrested under these circumstances and with fabricated testimonies against them by the cops themselves, were taken to the public prosecutor from where they left full of charges, so that the "public feeling for justice", patronized by the mass media against the people in revolt who disturb the order, would be satisfied and secondly, in order to be proved that the police really manages to do its dirty job arresting the "trouble-makers"...

Six of the arestees who were students and pupils were taken to the flagrant court and two of them were convicted (in a 4 1/2 months suspended prison sentence) while the rest were acquitted because of being minors. Another group of five people was charged with 5 felonies. Three of them, two students of the Polytechnic and a pupil, were permanently released on bail until their trial and they our out on restrictive conditions. The other two, Kostas Karpouzos, a worker, and Panagiotis Katsilas, jobless, on who all the raw violence of the cops and the institutional violence of State justice was used up, were both imprisoned, indisputably because it consists an aggravating "element" the fact that they are ANARCHISTS, that they are listed in the electronic files of the State Security. In the case of Kostas Karpouzos, it was also the fact that he had been arrested before, with 153 other young people, in the 17^th of November 1998, during the demo for the Polytechnic revolt, when the MAT and the communist party thugs had together attacked the antiauthoritarian block...

Since the 18^th of January, Kostas Karpouzos and Panagiotis Katsilas, denying their imprisonment in the jail of the State, denying the charges and the frame up against them, have started the ultimate struggle for life and freedom: HUNGER STRIKE!

Our imprisoned comrades are not alone. Their struggle is our struggle too. Let it be also a chance of struggle for every oppressed and exploited person (worker, unemployed, youth, local or immigrant) in the way for total refusal and subversion of the authoritarian capitalist world. No matter how powerful they are, we are going to fight them...