The headquarters of the Dutch intelligency agency AIVD in Zoetermeer. Photo ANP / Lex van Lieshout

Last week NRC reported that the NSA has infected 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software. According to Dutch law, the intelligence service is permitted to hack computers of people or organisations under suspicion. But the law is not prescriptive regarding sophisticated forms of computer espionage. These techniques allow the intelligence services to harvest, analyse and utilise computer data of a large group of people using web fora.

Read the secret NSA-document here:

Indeed the contradictions involved in the process cause complications since there are not only white people who come as tourists in Greece. So plenty of non-white tourists were brutally detained and beaten up by the Greek police since August 2012 that ‘Xenios Dias’ started. Moreover, the mainstream Greek perceptions of Europe and the West these days are shifting once again, since Greek government officials and their corporate media often blame the evil North Europeans for the austerity. Indeed the same governmental officials make also statements about the benefits of austerity.

Within such confused socio-cultural context, since the 1980s, the ideological elevation of a ‘Europe-ness’ took place, peaking in the 1990s in the name of the so-called European integration. Under this slogan on the one hand, the policies of European integration correctly led to a loosening of the internal borders for people living within the EU. On the other hand, this was accompanied with the militarisation of the external European borders leading to ‘Fortress Europe’, a continent where non-Europeans are often condemned to death for their effort to cross the sealed common border. Frontex, national borders police forces, and coastguards are just some of the apparatuses dedicated to the militarization of the European border.

So along the so-called ‘Europeanization’ of Greek state’s institutions we had the ideological upgrading of the Greek borders into European ones. Greece was located very much on the margin of that undetermined Europeness as the most south-eastern EU (and previously EEC) member country. Surrounded by non-members for decades. So it became the favoured territory for the application of at least two xenophobic projects: the Greek one and the European one, often in tension with each other, but usually in collaboration. This process in ideological level was confirming a much desired admission of Greece to the European family and even worse as a significant player in the European securitisation project.

This anti-migratory dogma did not limit itself to the borders; it was soon matched with the ongoing process of the militarization of public-space policing in European cities. The case of the Greek border guards symbolizes perfectly this extension of border-control security tactics to urban spaces; in 2010, it was reported that out of the 510 border guards employed in the country, 473 were, in fact, serving in Athens.6 Indeed, deployment of border guards in cities has become standard practice these days; for example, in the summer of 2013 UKBA organized a large-scale operation in London’s underground stations stopping and checking migrants and people of migratory origin. So security and military techniques developed supposedly to protect the borders of a nation-state from a military attack (from the organized army of another nation-state) have been applied against unarmed migrants on the borders or on the city centres.

It is not simply the deployment of border guards in the cities; the urban policing itself targets the ethnic Other. In the case of Greece, the semi-military police operation ‘Sweep’, in the early 1990s, targeted migrants in the Omonoia7 area of central Athens and elsewhere. However, this paled in comparison to what was to follow. In 2005, operation ‘Polis’ led to over 200,000 people across the country being stopped and searched, and although the emphasis was on youths and migrants, they were not the only victims. Today the ongoing operation ‘Xenios Zeus’ has resulted in over 84,000 migrants being detained between August 2012 and February 2013, targeting everyone who appears to be foreign.[2]

Such operations imply and apply a state-directed exclusion of the population of the cities, which takes spatial characteristics since it displaces people from where they live and locks them in police stations temporarily until their documents are checked or detention camps if they are arrested. The Other is gradually exiled or declared as undesired from parts of the city and more generally public spaces. Officially, this phenomenon is not based explicitly on racial criteria – as neo-Nazis demand; rather, the formal state authorities’ claim is that they are trying to tackle the ‘crime’ of living without proper permission. In the case of UKBA operations or the operations of the respective French police, some of the officers stopping and searching non-white passers-by are themselves non-white, precisely because the European state authorities are aware of the racism involved in the process, and there is the hope to give the idea that it is not racist since non-white people are the physical agents of racism.

However, as Kassidiaris’ case [3] suggests, you do not have to be white in order to apply fascism. By extension, as the example of police and border police forces physically targeting migrants en masse implies, you do not have to be explicitly and openly a neo-Nazi state apparatus in order to apply policies of racial discrimination in the streets and pave the way for the actual neo-Nazis. The cases of migrants who have been stopped and checked for their papers by Golden Dawn members, often in order to be beaten up afterwards, are not rare. The distance between anti-migratory policing in Athens and the Golden Dawn’s ban of migrants from certain public spaces was not that long.

by Dimitris Dalakoglou

A longer version of this article was published as: Dalakoglou. D. (2013) ‘From the Bottom of the Aegean Sea’ to Golden Dawn: Security, Xenophobia and the Politics of Hate in Greece. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 3

Notes

[1]: One of the main slogans of Anarchists in Greece is ‘On the mines of Evros River (the river that marks the land border between Greece and Turkey) and on the bottom of Aegean Sea is built the security of each European’ (‘Στις νάρκες του ′Eβρου, στον πάτο του Aιγαίου, χτίζεται η ασφάλεια του κάθε Eυρωπαιου’).

[2] Given that this operation was implemented, ostensibly, with the intention of tackling crime level (implying a direct link between migrants and criminality) it has had very poor results indeed, as scarcely any of those detained was guilty of any offence other than lacking proper documents. Then the approximately 5,000 (by 9 September 2013) migrants who were arrested as part of Xenios Zeus have been transferred to and locked in new detention centres that were opened by the debt-ridden state. It is worth noting that another big public work completed by Greece during 2012 was the fence along the Turkish-Greek border in order to prevent migration.

[3] When the extreme-Right online forum ‘Stormfront’ published his photograph, in August 2013, setting the question to its users whether they felt he looked like a white man. Kassidiaris’ fellow Nazis were quite vocal on the subject; most of them concluding that he does not look like a white man.

Following our last action on November 9^th for Skouries international day, we are extending our scope to build a network on mutual struggles taking place all over the world. El Dorado Gold Co. is involved in mining activities in Greece, Romania, Turkey, China, Brazil and Canada among others.

The evening will include:

• screenings of short documentaries and presentation of the case of Skouries providing an insight of the related economic, environmental and social outrage
• live streaming via Skype with people from Skouries [Greece], Rosia Montana [Romania] and solidarity groups who are going to provide a closer look into their struggles
• presentation from SOMO; an independent, non-profit research and networking organization that investigates multinational corporations and the consequences of their activities for people and the environment around the world

Large scale extracting activities threaten to destroy a forest of incredible beauty and ecological value in Halkidiki, North Greece. El Dorado Gold Co, with open support from the Greek state and private interest groups, is involved in an immense mining project that will alter the character of the entire region.

The social movement of protest and resistance to these destructive plans has suffered terrible state repression, police violence, prosecutions, imprisonments, defamation, muzzling and criminalization.

With the help of SOMO we will look into the status of El Dorado Gold Co. regarding the violation of human rights, the environmental law infringement and the cash flows through mailbox and offshore companies.

Introducing the available research tools, we aim to create a platform that can take on this research and strengthen the links between all the involved actors.

If you are interested you are welcome to join this cause and contribute with new ideas.

The evening will start with a collective kitchen at 17:30 and will end with open bar.

Place: Joe’s garage

Pretoriusstraat 43hs, 1092 EZ, Amsterdam.

Source Link allegralaboratory

ALLEGRA: Dimitris, you are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. In the past you have studied highways and infrastructures and currently you are carrying out a research project entitled « The City at the Time of Crisis », funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Can you briefly introduce yourself to those who are not familiar with your work and describe your projects?

DIMITRIS: For my PhD I studied anthropologically political transition via infrastructures and vice versa. More precisely I studied the main cross-border motorway between Albania and Greece and via that peculiar -at the time- ethnographic site I studied in a new way -via the road and its flows- the postsocialist conditions in the Balkans. By extension this study of infrastructure provided an insight into the materiality of the wider European neoliberalisation project.

We have to understand that the project of European neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s passed precisely via a mass development of built environment in the continent. Moreover an additional element of that process was the re-determination of European boundaries and a related inter-European movement of populations which crossed these re-determined borders. Indeed, the replacement of State-run economies by market-based capitalism in half of the continent and the parallel expansion of Western European capitalist interests in Eastern Europe had a crucial role in this neoliberalisation project. So given this context the cross-border road between postsocialist and non-socialist peripheral European states looked like an ideal ethnographic locus for analysing such process anthropologically.

Today we are seeing one more stage of that neoliberalisation process with a capitalist crisis centered on the periphery of Western Europe.

In 2012, together with a team of colleagues, we started the ‘City at the time of Crisis’ project funded by ESRC. In this project we study the new forms of governance implemented in that periphery of Western (as political determination rather than geographic) Europe. A basic idea is that one of the most important parts of this new form of governance is the transformations of the notions of public. So ethnographically we study political transitions and social change in the form of socio-spatial changes in the public urban and infrastructural materialities of Athens.

ALLEGRA: You seem to suggest that Athens is the ideal ‘laboratory’ from which to observe the global financial crisis. In their recent book, Theories from the South, the Comaroffs argue that it is rather the global South that is best placed to help us understand contemporary world transformations. The obvious fact that you are Greek put aside, can you tell us why you chose Athens as your primary site of inquiry?

DIMITRIS: The Commaroffs are right, but they are also wrong. The reality is that we first saw extreme capitalism being applied in the global South. Gradually, more advanced and elaborated versions of capitalism were applied there. However, a very similar version of extreme neoliberalism -like the one that emerged in the 1970s in the South- was then applied in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Now it is the turn of the Western European periphery to experience a similar regime.

The anthropologists who happen to have ethnographic knowledge of both the postsocialist and non-socialist European periphery would be able to confirm the similarity between e.g. the loan and “aid” agreements between EU and postsocialist states and the current agreements between e.g. the Greek or Spanish governments and EU institutions.

So in the current historical stage it is not only organisations like the IMF:  there are other institutions involved in the shaping of the world political economy. For instance the EU leadership and especially the European Central Bank along with several other European banks play a crucial historical role in the expansion of an extreme neoliberalist form of governance that is applied in the crisis-ridden euro-zone countries. More and more populations are subjected to that regime and what we used to call Global South governance extends well beyond the South. So the category itself is a bit problematic.

As I mentioned in the previous question Greece is centrally located in a process of global proportions that is unravelling at this very moment. Greece’s centrality in this project starts from the re-definition of Greek borders which changed radically after 1990, given that it was surrounded by socialist European countries. Phenomena like migratory flows, big construction projects and capitalist expansion of Greek capitalist entreprises in Eastern Europe just complete this picture.

Under such circumstances the anthropology of Europe and European politics keep asking the same questions since the 1990s: How did the continent change after the collapse of socialism? What will come next? These questions are very similar to the ones we ask about e.g. China or India and especially North African countries.

The end of the cold war has led to radical transformations globally and we are still seeing them in front of our eyes. If European communism had really been the point of reference for the Left everywhere we would not have the squares movements occuring around the Mediterranean. So it is not a process that is detached from what is happening in the so-called Global South. Overall I think that unless anthropology starts including more substantially Europe and the West in its own perception of the world we will end up running behind change.

ALLEGRA: A few weeks ago, ALLEGRA launched a discussion on the future of universities, and tried to define the nature of the ‘space’ that current movements against cuts are seeking to preserve. Some of our conclusions were relatively optimistic, in the sense that we also tried to highlight the regenerative potential of the public to achieve positive change. In the past when ASA asked you to write a text on the crisis of higher education you jumped to similar conclusions. However, seeing your more recent work you seem to suggest that the current global crisis has deeply transformed notions of ‘public space’, ‘public good’, ‘public interest’ and so on…to the extent that the public as we used to know (or fantasize?) it seems to be slowly disappearing. To a certain extent, one is left with an impression of Athens as a city under a permanent state of exception, to use an Agambian expression. What has changed?

DIMITRIS: Since you used the term of a political philosopher I will respond with a political answer. In that ASA article I concluded that higher education in Britain does not deserve to be defended for what it is or what it was, but for what it may potentially become. I guess this applies in the case of Athens and Greece as well.

In the last two decades, as  European neoliberalisation reached a more intensified form,  we saw some of the resistance movements in the Western world romanticise or imagine a capitalism with better public social provisions. Much of the Occupy movement in the US had such demands, while many of the European movements suggest a return to a recent past of better social provisions. While I see the value of these benefits for the better quality of life of many, as a political proposition I think that implies a crucial mistake. If the middle classes of the Western World had a better life during the recent past, the majority of the world, the poor in the West or globally had very bad time.

The issue is that the current crisis is quite crucial for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and probably globally, and as we know in anthropology crises signify a transition while they also provide a window for anti-structural events to take place. This is our case at the moment and unless societies come up with a radical alternative (way forward from just better social policy) the future of European people will look very bad.

I think that the potentialities of the crisis are visible to economic elites and state authorities who are trying to make sure that no anti-structural events will occur. This is the reason why they employ some of the most violent apparatuses, like e.g. extreme police violence or armed neo-Nazi groups.

For example when the large anti-austerity and anti-governmental movement in Greece appeared in the summer of 2011 the police brutality was profound. Soon the neo-Nazis were funded with huge amounts of money and were activated on the streets of Athens but also electorally.

Neoliberal governance since its birth was ready to employ fascists such as Pinochet or go to fascistic extremes such as declaring national wars out of the blue like e.g. Margaret Thatcher did in the case of the UK or her social democratic offsprings did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Researching the use of extreme violent apparatuses in Greece these days might make you pessimistic. In order for the austerity experiment to work, in order for the bankers’ interests to be protected, the current form of governance in Greece is ready to spill a lot of blood. A similar escalation in state’s violence has been seen in Britain in the last couple of years when the student movement emerged: police brutality against the protesters has been profound in recent British history. We even saw the police being invited on campus to arrest protesting students:  I personally saw it twice in my university, Sussex, and I have worked there only for only five years!

ALLEGRA: Your work brings an important contribution to the scholarship on statehood, by documenting changing everyday experiences in public spaces. With the mass privatization of public infrastructures, it seems like the only means left for the state to manifest itself is through violence, symbolic or real. What do you think is remaining of the state in Greece today?

DIMITRIS: Well, violence is a crucial part of statecraft anyway. Even the most democratic socialist or mild state mechanisms have used and/or use apparatuses of death and pain. For example, one of the most quoted of such examples: the Swedish state was force sterilising women until the 1970s. For another example, we have to remember that every state apparatus discriminates against people: citizens and non-citizens alike.

As the history of Europe shows in the best case scenario such division just implies less rights for the non-citizens and in the worst case scenario it implies exterminating non-citizens massively.

Even the most democratic states are still states and have the monopoly of legal violence, so potentially the state authorities or their agents can crash, kill, torture, and imprison any of us at any moment they will decide. They do not have necessarily to do it, but the fact that apparatuses are ready to do so is violent enough. And indeed these days they have a nice army of journalists, academics and so on who will provide good excuses about public order and social peace that need to be restored.

When the revolt of 2008 happened in Greece you had people like Greek Yale professors up to famous journalists supporting the government and indirectly excusing the police assassination of a teenager, and this is precisely what triggered the revolt.

Within this barbaric mechanism modern states provided various things to their citizens and selected citizens from other states to become part of the national body. That happened for many reasons, which I do not have the time to analyse at the moment. However, such provisions maintained some kind of social peace and consent between the State (or what we imagine to be the state) and a critical mass of state residents.

So in our case, EU citizens and migrants with visas probably had a better life at some point, but a substantial part of the population was faced with a state that did not even give them the right to exist, that arrested them, deported them and killed them. The same dynamics stands for the new poor, for example: many young people in Europe mainly experience the state as an apparatus that deregulates labour and that makes sure that the majority will work like slaves for small salaries, will have no job or social security etc. If they protest, the state will beat them up or in some cases may even kill them just for being around a protest, as Metropolitan Police did with Ian Tomlinson a few year ago. It is just that today we see this state of exception expanding towards social groups who have not had direct experience of state as violence before.

And certainly we are in a very difficult position, because the state and the capitalist market have ended up being the main controllers of social provisions, so now that state policies enforce poverty and austerity and fewer and fewer can afford private provisions, we see suffering of important proportions of the European population. This has been a usual phenomenon outside Europe though and among the non-citizens within Europe!

What one should stress is that the last few decades when the state has been as social provider have been nothing more than a happy break in the history of capitalism, based on the fear of social unrest.

Today that states have achieved so advanced repression and silencing mechanisms, is probably what allows them not to find it necessary anymore to provide social provisions. Anyhow, Western European middle classes as consumers of the products of global capitalism lose their significance given that we have new consuming classes emerging in other places of the planet. So their future is that of most Eastern Europeans: lots of work for peanuts, extreme inequalities etc. When it was happening there very few Western Europeans complained or protested against the barbaric form of postsocialist capitalism.

Indeed while European states decrease social provisions to the citizens in a drastic manner and provide only violence for non-citizens, simultaneously great proportions of state’s wealth is chanelled to global financial institutions and other corporations through various paths.

To end this answer with a final note though. I think that when the elites start busting their cards one after the other, namely when the police violence is not anymore enough to control social disappointment and rage and they have to use the para-state neo-Nazis apparatuses, we are in a situation where they are running out of legal responses, running out of cards, while running towards a potential dead end.

ALLEGRA: Michael Herzfeld, in his now famous books The Social Production of Indifference, argues that Greeks have always maintained some kind of indifference or at least, some kind of distance towards the state. In which ways does your work confirm or contradict this argument? How has the current crisis transformed citizens relationship towards the state? Is this pattern illustrative of broader transformations taking place in European/Western democracies?

DIMITRIS: Herzfeld’s question was phrased in the right way, one could summarise it like this perhaps: If Greeks are generally polite and welcoming people how comes when they become civil servants they are so unhelpful? My take on that phenomenon can be summarised like this: generally people are polite and nice until State and other power apparatuses intervene. For example when the civil servant’s role provides them with e.g. three options to the way s/he will treat a citizen and all three are nasty options, going for the least nasty one is actually a good option. At the same time remember that the official state does its best to create obedient people who will follow the rules.

It is like the banality of the evil argument of Hannah Arendt who suggested that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust were just civil servants who saw the mass extermination of people as just doing their job, like they would do any other job. They were good civil servants.

Back in 2011 when the people in Greece rose against the government, more than 500 people were hospitalised only in Athens due to police brutality.

Last summer when I was in Gezi park in Istanbul, I saw how Turkish policemen attacked the camp beating up people while, in the meantime, they were chatting and having cigarette breaks. Similarly in London, when Occupy London started in front of St Paul, the riot cops brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators without any reason, when 10 minutes before they were queuing next to each other in front of the same toilet in a nearby cafe. While I do not consider police or Nazi officials as simple civil servants, the reality is that the modern state apparatus filters and fractures its violence so much that the actual state’s employees/attackers often feel that they are merely serving the state and the government that feeds them. Indeed the state makes sure that they can do whatever they want, that they are fully potected and that they will never have to face the consequences. Most Nazi officials never paid for their crimes and quite a few of them were happily integrated in capitalist post-war state apparatuses. This does not imply that police officers who beat up demonstrators or shoot migrants are innocent. Only certain kinds of people can remain silent under such circumstances or blindly obey orders. So this is not an excuse: it is just an analysis of the production of indifference.

The reality is that civil servants (with the exception of riot police!) are on the forefront of salary and personnel cuts in Greece these days. The same mechanism that was programming them to misbehave, by e.g. giving them few resources, poor training, unjust promotion or employment system, poor and misleading explanation of tasks and roles etc. is the same mechanism that now blames them for doing what they were told to do. In other words everyone, even the cops are just consumable for the political and financial elites. So people do come to a realisation with great potentialities, as far as insecurity and state violence reaches one of the most secure social class such as permanent civil servants, there is a discontinuity in the continuums that have made the system sustainable so far.

The plot

For an unknown reason, counter-terrorism services took over the case of the robbery. Few days later, Tasos Theofilou, an anarcho-communist, got arrested.

Counter-terrorism services claim that they were led to Tasos Theofilou, after an anonymous call they received, during which somebody mentioned that one of the culprits of the armed robbery in Paros was named Tasos, who is involved in terrorism. Additionally, the anonymous caller also mentioned where Tasos Theofilou used to live.

Few days later, counter-terrorism services claimed that they received a new phone call, from the same anonymous person, during which they were told where Tasos Theofilou was at that time. The funny thing about this story, is that counter-terrorism services claim that they don’t have number identification.

Plainclothes policemen detained Tasos Theofilou and in order to justify the violent fingerprinting and DNA sampling, they accused him with vagrancy and resisting arrest

Counter-terrorism services claimed that a hat was dropped from the culprit of the robbery, which had DNA on it that matched Tasos’ DNA. In the last few years, every anarchist that gets arrested, he is accused automatically of being a member in the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

Usually, the process of DNA matching can only prove the acquittal and not the guilt of someone. As an example, DNA from the skin of a person can only prove that this DNA does not belong to millions of people, but it can’t prove 100% the identity of the person that it came from.

Despite all these, in the case of Tasos Theofilou, it is really strange that fact that

1) no other DNA was found on the hat.

2) a scarf and a cell phone was dropped from the culprit of the robbery, but there wasn’t any DNA of Tasos Theofilou.

3) there wasn’t any fingerprint at the crime scene, despite the fact that the culprit touched objects inside the bank that cannot be moved, without any gloves.

4) counter-terrorism services gave out photos of the robbery, where the culprit appeared on the photos, could match the characteristics of millions of people, but not Tasos Theofilou.

The criminalization of personal relationships

The second section of accusations that Tasos Theofilou is facing, is about his impending participation in the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, an accusation we see pretty often imputed when it comes to anarchist prisoners.

Counter-terrorism services claimed that Tasos Theofilou looked like a person that could be a member of CCF. So, this accusation is based only in policemen’s guessings.

In other words…

If you are an anarchist, you have guns and you are automatically a member of CCF.

If you are an anarchist and you have friends who are members of CCF then you are a member too.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

The greek Media

Greek media,  started contributing to the lies of the counter-terrorism services by calling Tasos Theofilou a murder and a member of the Conspirancy of Cells of Fire. All these vulgar accusations by the media occured not just before his trial, but even before any charges against him were laid.

In order to creat of a monstrous profile of Tasos Theofilou, media started calling his house a bomb lab and at the same time they kept posting photos of him worn down by insomnia. Greek media also used a blog of T.T where he used to write fiction stories, that were presented like real stories that actually happened.

The case of Tasos Theofilou is being used even politically till now, since he used to have “friends” on his facebook page who “belonged” to the SYRIZA party. Tasos Theofilou during an interview claims that this plot that was set up against him can only be based on media and believes that if media didn’t exist, he wouldn’t even be arrested at the first place.

The trial

After a 5 month postponing, on Monday 11/11/2013  the trial of Tasos Theofilou will take place in Athens, where there will be also a gathering of people in solidarity with T.T. at 09:00

On twitter: Hashtag #Free_TassiosThita   the twitter account of Tasos Theofilou is @TassiosThita

Original article from @_Giant_

Ahmet Yüksel and Erdğan Çakır are facing the danger of extradition in Germany and France respectively and Hasan Biber and Mehmet Yayla in Turkey. All of them have asked for a political asylum. For Ahmet Yüksel and Erdğan Çakır arrest warrants are issued for pending decisions regarding their solidarity actions for Turkish people.

These political prisoners were arrested in 30/7/2013 after a police raid in the offices of solidarity committee for Turkish and Kurdish political prisoners.

Solidarity Committee for Turkish and Kurdish political prisoners, is organizing days of solidarity action and distributes information materials about the 4 political prisoners and their extraditions. Authorities respond to their mobilization with prosecutions and detentions. In the last 24 hours, 7 solidaritarians have been detained at least three times with the accusation of “Environmental pollution”.

Düzgün Yüksel, as a lawyer back in Turkey, he used to take over murder and human rights cases, as a result he was targeted by fascists and he immigrated in Germany. In Germany, with accusations including democratic activities such as the 1^st of May protest, organization of concerts, solidarity actions for political prisoners, distribution of information materials, he was arrested and kept as prisoner in solitary confinement for 4 years. Due to the unsanitary conditions of solitary confinement he got sick and then paroled. In order to not get arrested again in Germany, he immigrated in Greece, asking for a political asylum, but got arrested and his extradition back in Germany was decided. In Germany he will be sentenced to 3 more years in solitary confinement. Ahmet Düzgün Yüksel, in order to stop this injustice against him, is on a hunger strike to the death since 24/9.

Erdoğan Çakır, is a worker in France and has been a rebel for 36 years. He was sentenced to prison for 7 years, because he took part in democratic activities such as the organization of concerts with  the band “yorum”, selling political magazines and going for camping on summer. In order to not serve the 7 year sentence, he immigrated in Greece. When he came to Greece, he was arrested and his extradition to France was decided. Erdoğan Çakır in order to stop this injustice against him, is on a hunger strike to the death since 24/9.

Hasan Biber, was arrested in 30/7/2013. He was a president of a trade union, and because of his syndicalist activities in Turkey, he’s been arrested many times in the past. On September 26, his trial took place at the court of Piraeus, where his extradition to Turkey was decided. Hasan Biber’s file included also an official document of USA. USA asked Greece for every information they have about Hasan Biber, Mehmet Yayla and the rebel from Turkey Bulut Yayla, who was abducted, not long ago, in front of many people in Athens, and then handed over the fascist Turkish Government that asked FBI to take part in the interrogation of the arrestees. This document proves that Greece has handed over even her justice to USA. Today, the decision of Hasan Biber’s extradition is in other words, the validation of his execution in Turkey.

Hasan Biber stated that: “Fascism is not a threat just for our country, but for the countries near Turkey as well. Especially Greece. Your ships, your airplanes, are being harassed. Greek people are underestimated. We are fighting against all these things. And for this reason, I believe that this decision is unjust.” and announced he is going on a hunger strike to death.

Mehmet Yayla was arrested in 30/7/2013. USA asked from Greece every single information they have about him. He started a hunger strike in 29^th of Septemper in solidarity with his comrades’ struggles.

 

http://omniatv.com/blog/3756-few-words-about-the-political-prisoners-from-turkey

The Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their activities. A politically neutral ranking, it is a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows.

The index was launched on November 7, 2013.

Shining light into dark places

An estimated $21 to $32 trillion of private financial wealth is located, untaxed or lightly taxed, in secrecy jurisdictions around the world. Illicit cross-border financial flows add up to an estimated $1-1.6 trillion each year. Since the 1970s African countries alone are estimated to have lost over $1 trillion in capital flight, dwarfing their current external debts of ‘just’ $190 billion and making Africa a major net creditor to the world. But those assets are in the hands of a few wealthy people, protected by offshore secrecy, while the debts are shouldered by broad African populations.

Yet rich countries suffer too: in the recent global financial crisis, European countries like Greece, Italy and Portugal have been brought to their knees by decades of secrecy and tax evasion.

Secrecy jurisdictions – a term we often use as an alternative to the more widely used term tax havens – use secrecy to attract illicit and illegitimate or abusive financial flows.

A global industry has developed involving the world’s biggest banks, law practices and accounting firms which not only provide secretive offshore structures to their tax- and law-dodging clients, but aggressively market them. ‘Competition’ between jurisdictions to provide secrecy facilities has, particularly since the era of financial globalisation took off in the 1980s, become a central feature of global financial markets.

The problems go far beyond tax. In providing secrecy, the offshore world corrupts and distorts markets and investments, shaping them in ways that have nothing to do with efficiency. The secrecy world creates a criminogenic hothouse for multiple evils including fraud, tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, escape from financial regulations, embezzlement, insider dealing, bribery, money laundering, and plenty more. It provides multiple facilities for insiders to extract wealth at the expense of societies elsewhere, creating political impunity and undermining the healthy ‘no taxation without representation’ bargain that has underpinned the growth of accountable modern nation states. Instead of depending on tax, many countries are forced to depend on foreign aid.

This is not just a ‘developing country’ issue either: it hurts citizens of rich and poor countries alike.

Click here for the full 2013 ranking

What is the significance of this index?

In identifying the providers of international financial secrecy, the Financial Secrecy Index reveals that the traditional stereotype of tax havens is misconceived. The world’s most important providers of financial secrecy are not small, palm-fringed islands as many suppose, but some of the world’s biggest and wealthiest countries.

It shows that the illicit financial flows that keep developing nations poor are predominantly enabled by rich OECD member countries and their satellites, which are the main recipients of or conduits for these illicit flows. The trillion-dollar figure for annual illicit financial flows out of developing countries, above, compares with just US$130 billion or so in global foreign aid. So for every dollar of aid provided by OECD countries to developing nations, ten dollars or so flow back, under the table, towards OECD nations and their offshore satellites.

The implications for global power politics are clearly enormous, and help explain why widely heralded international efforts to crack down on tax havens and financial secrecy have been rather ineffective, despite many fine words from G20 and OECD countries: for it is these countries — which receive these gigantic inflows — that set the rules of the game.

Although there have been some positive changes since our last index in 2011, the infrastructure of global financial secrecy remains alive and well.

For too long, governments and campaigners concerned with cross-border finance focused on narrow problems such as terrorist financing and on certain kinds of money laundering, while ignoring much bigger flows involving tax evasion, abusive trade pricing and a range of other crimes and abuses. These larger problems operate through, and perpetuate, exactly the same mechanisms of offshore financial secrecy that facilitate cross-border flows of terrorist and drug financing. Tackling the smaller issues, while ignoring the bigger ones, cannot work.

The only realistic way to address these problems comprehensively is to tackle them at root: by directly confronting offshore secrecy and the global infrastructure that creates it. A first step towards this goal is to identify as accurately as possible the jurisdictions that make it their business to provide offshore secrecy.

This is what the FSI does. It is the product of years of detailed research by a dedicated team, and there is nothing else like it out there.

 

http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/

Born in French Algeria into a poor family in 1913, Camus lost his father in the Battle of the Marne in 1916. He was raised by his mother, who worked as a charlady and was illiterate. Winning a scholarship, Camus eventually began a career as a journalist. As a youth, he was a keen footballer as well as being a member of a theatrical troupe.

From his time as a goalkeeper, Albert Camus always had a team spirit. He had a generous, if sensitive nature, and always sought the maximum unity, seeking to avoid or bypass rancour. Many intellectuals writing about Camus have obscured his support of anarchism. He was always there to support at the most difficult moments of the anarchist movement, even if he felt he could not totally commit himself to that movement.

Camus himself never made a secret of his attraction towards anarchism. Anarchist ideas occur in his plays and novels, as for example, La Peste, L’Etat de siège or Les Justes. He had known the anarchist Gaston Leval, who had written about the Spanish revolution, since 1945. Camus had first expressed admiration for revolutionary syndicalists and anarchists, conscientious objectors and all manner of rebels as early as 1938 whilst working as a journalist on the paper L’Alger Republicaine, according to his friend Pascal Pia.

The anarchist Andre Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Etudiants Anarchistes (Anarchist Student Circle) as a sympathiser who was familiar with anarchist thought.

Camus also supported the Groupes de Liaison Internationale which sought to give aid to opponents of fascism and Stalinism, and which refused to take the side of American capitalism. These groups had been set up in 1947-48, and intended to give material support to victims of authoritarian regimes as well as exchanging information. Supporters included the Russian anarchist Nicolas Lazarevitch, exiled in France, as well as many supporters of the revolutionary syndicalist paper La Révolution Proletarienne. Camus remained a friend and financial supporter of RP until his death.

Albert Camus’s book L’Homme Révolte (translated into English as The Rebel), published in 1951, marked a clear break between him and the Communist Party left. It was met with hostility by those who were members of The Communist Party or were fellow travellers. Its message was understood by anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists in France and Spain, however, for it openly mentions revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism and makes a clear distinction between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. The main theme is how to have a revolution without the use of terror and the employment of “Caesarist” methods. So Camus deals with Bakunin and Nechaev among others. “The Commune against the State, concrete society against absolutist society, liberty against rational tyranny, altruistic individualism finally against the colonisation of the masses…”

He ends with a call for the resurrection of anarchism. Authoritarian thought, thanks to three wars and the physical destruction of an elite of rebels, had submerged this libertarian tradition. But it was a poor victory, and a provisional one, and the struggle still continues.

Gaston Leval responded in a series of articles to the book. His tone was friendly, and he avoided harsh polemic, but he brought Camus to book on what he regarded as a caricature of Bakunin. Camus replied in the pages of Le Libertaire, the paper of the Fédération Anarchiste (circulation of this paper was running at 100,000 a week in this period). He protested that he had acted in good faith, and would make a correction in one of the passages criticised by Leval in future editions.

The general secretary of the Fédération Anarchiste, Georges Fontenis, also reviewed Camus’s book in Le Libertaire. To the title question “Is the revolt of Camus the same as ours?”, Fontenis replied that it was. However he faulted him for not giving due space to the revolutions in the Ukraine and Spain, and for portraying Bakunin as a hardened Nihilist and not giving credit to his specific anarchist positions. He ended by admitting that the book contained some admirable pages. A review by Jean Vita the following week in Le Libertaire was warmer and more positive.

These measured criticisms from the anarchists were in contrast to those from the fellow travellers of the Communist Party, like Sartre and the group around the magazine Les Temps Moderne. This marked the beginning of Camus’s break with that other great exponent of existentialism. The criticisms of this group were savage, in particular that of Francis Jeanson. Camus replied that Jeanson’s review was orthodox Marxist, and that he had passed over all references to anarchism and syndicalism. “The First International, the Bakuninist movement, still living among the masses of the Spanish and French CNT, are ignored”, wrote Camus. For his pains, Camus was “excommunicated” by Jeanson from the ranks of the existentialists. These methods disheartened Camus. He also received stern criticism from the Surrealists for the artistic conceptions within the book. It looked like the anarchist movement were Camus’s best supporters.

Camus marked this break in other ways too. He had made a pledge to himself to keep away from intellectuals who were ready to back Stalinism. This did not stop him from wholeheartedly committing himself to causes he thought just and worthwhile. In Spain a group of anarchist workers had been sentenced to death by Franco. In Paris a meeting was called by the League for the Rights of Man on February 22nd 1952. Camus agreed to speak at this. He thought it would be useful if the leader of the Surrealists, André Breton, should appear on the podium. This was in spite of the attack that Breton had written in the magazine Arts, over Camus’s criticisms of the poet Lautreamont, admired by the Surrealists as one of their precursors.

Camus met with the organisers of the event, Fernando Gómez Peláez of the paper Solidaridad Obrera, organ of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union the CNT, and José Ester Borrás, secretary of the Spanish political prisoners’ federation FEDIP, asking them to approach Breton without telling him that Camus had suggested it. Breton agreed to speak at the meeting even though Camus would be present. Gómez then told Breton that Camus had suggested he speak in the first place, which moved Breton to tears. Later Camus told the Spanish anarchists that because he had not replied to Breton’s anger in kind that a near-reconciliation was possible. Camus and Breton shared the podium and were even seen chatting (for Breton and the Surrealists links to the anarchist movement see here).

Camus took a position of the committed intellectual, signing petitions and writing for Le Libertaire, La révolution Proletarienne and Solidaridad Obrera. He also became part of the editorial board of a little libertarian review, Témoins 1956., getting to know its editor, Robert Proix, a proofreader by trade. Camus, via Proix, met up with Giovanna Berneri (Caleffi) the companion of the gifted Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri, who had been murdered by the Stalinists in Spain in 1937. Camus also met Rirette Maitrejean, who had been the erstwhile companion of Victor Serge, and had been involved in the Bonnot Gang affair and trial. Rirette had been working as a proofreader for the paper Paris-Soir for a long time. Camus also became a friend of the anarchist veteran Maurice Joyeux, who was later to remark that of all contemporary literary works The Rebel was the book that most closely defined the aspirations of the students and workers in May 1968.

Again in 1954 Camus came to the aid of the anarchists. Maurice Laisant, propaganda secretary of the Forces Libres de la Paix (Free Forces of Peace) as well as an editor of Le Monde Libertaire, paper of the Fédération Anarchiste, had produced an antimilitarist poster using the format of official army propaganda. As a result he was indicted for subversion. Camus was a character witness at his trial, recalling how he had first met him at the Spanish public meeting.

Camus told the court, “Since then I have seen him often and have been in a position to admire his will to fight against the disaster which threatens the human race. It seems impossible to me that one can condemn a man whose action identifies so thoroughly with the interests of all men. Too few men are fighting against a danger which each day grows more ominous for humanity”. It was reported that after his statement, Camus took his seat in a courtroom composed mainly of militant workers, who surrounded him with affection. Unfortunately Laisant received a heavy fine.

Camus also stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the workers’ revolt against the Soviets in East Germany in 1953. He again stood with the anarchists in 1956, first with the workers’ uprising in Poznan, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution. Later in 1955 Camus gave his support to Pierre Morain, a member of the Fédération Communiste Libertaire (the Fédération Anarchiste had changed its name in 1954 following rancourous struggles within the organisation). Morain was the very first Frenchman to be imprisoned for an anti-colonialist stand on Algeria. Camus expressed his support in the pages of the national daily L’Express of 8th November 1955.

Camus often used his fame or notoriety to intervene in the press to stop the persecution of anarchist militants or to alert public opinion. In the final year of his life Camus settled in the Provence village of Lourmarin. Here he made the acquaintance of Franck Creac’h. A Breton, born in Paris, self-taught, and a convinced anarchist, he had come to the village during the war to “demobilise” himself. Camus employed him as his gardener and had the benefit of being able to have conversations with someone on the same wavelength. One of the last campaigns Camus was involved in was that of the anarchist Louis Lecoin who fought for the status of conscientious objectors in 1958. Camus was never to see the outcome to this campaign, as he died in a car crash on 1960, at the age of forty-six.