Op 20 februari schreef Katerina Goulioni onderstaande brief aan de Griekse ombudsman. Op 18 maart was zij dood. Met enkele verbeteringen overgenomen van Occupied London, ik hoop niet dat het mij kwalijk genomen wordt dat ik het verhaal niet in het Nederlands vertaal (het zou toch een tweedehandsvertaling zijn).
De dood van Katerina Goulioni heeft to een algemene gevangenisopstand in Griekenland geleid.
Complaint to the Greek Ombudsman by prisoner Katerina Goulioni
Eleonas Thivon, 20-02-09
I am 41 years old today, addicted to heroin from the age of 17. All these years I have been sick and addicted to a substance without which I would not be able to stand, to work, to live. The worst nightmare however, some nightmare many consider a somehow given follow-up to the addiction, is one I had never imagined I would live in the way I live and am threatened to live daily. This “given follow-up to the addiction” is my imprisonment which means my captivity, being taken hostage by prison guards who control and intervene even on my genitals and most private parts of my body.
Whenever I enter a prison, either because I go there for the first time or after returning from court or the hospital, I am subject to the following attack, which they call “body search”:
The guard forces me to take off all my clothes, to open up my legs and to cough while she examines my anus. Often she takes the opportunity to examine my naked body; she looks at me thoroughly, she treats me offensively, ironically, as if I’m the worst scum on earth.
Then, they give me other clothes, from their storage, which are mismatching and humiliating. They take my bra because it is “banned” in isolation as I might, supposedly… kill myself with it. They give me shoes a few sizes bigger than mine so that I walk like a clown and they take me to the pharmacy. There, they make me sit on a gynaecological chair and the guard puts her finger in my vagina. I am then forced to urinate in the presence of the guard, for the drug test.
Once, on the paper placed on the gynaecological chair where they put me I saw hair of the previous prisoner. The sterilisation of their equipment is something they only occasionally remember. To some they place rusty dilators while forcing their fingers in such way that the prisoner is in pain. The sarcastic jokes do not miss from their repertoire.
Recently I refused a vaginal examination from the gynaecologist as I think that regardless of knowledge, specialisation and education level, having anyone force their fingers into you is at least “improper”, I’d say. I asked for a sonar scan only to be threatened I would be tied up overnight - this threat was mouthed by the prison guard assigned the role of a …nurse in the Prison of Thiva, Stella Gavana, in the presence of her superior Sotoria Sampani. She told me that since I am a prisoner I must accept the vaginal examination - and those who are not prisoners are “different”. In short she told me and still tell me that since I am a prisoner they can do whatever they want with me and I should not react.
They took me to sub-commander of the prison Aglaia Kafritsa, who told me that since I refuse the vaginal examination, any drugs found in the prison she will charge on me and that she will hold me in solitary confinement for many days to come. When I asked her for a sonar scan and told her I can no longer stand this raping of my vagina she told me she did not have the capacity to do that. I replied that I am not obliged to pay for their own incapacity and they took me to solitary - where they would take me, that is, whether they had given me a vaginal examination or not.
In solitary they put me in a cell where I had to ring a bell for a guard to come take me to a toilet shared between all the prisoners and watched by a camera.
While defecating you are being watched by the prison guard from the camera and only once she sees your excrement can you ask for her permission to flush the toilet.
Not only am I forced to defecate in front of a prison guard, I am also forced to defecate 8 times before I am removed from solitary - although this, too, depends on their mood.
Most prisoners take laxatives in order to achieve these 8 defecations and often either the prison guard doesn’t come to open their door or there is another prisoner in the toilet and so they literally defacate on themselves. The guards will threatingly tell them, “this is Thiva, you will only ring the bell when you really need it”, which “real need” is assessed by the prison guard. Or they will grudgingly tell them, “you want to go to the toilet again?”, and similar in an unbelievably inhuman and sadist behaviour.
It has happened to me that the guard would not open the door and so I was forced to urinate in a plastic bottle and to later have problems with my bowel because of holding on defacating. In the end I reached the point of kicking the cell’s door so that it would open; the guard treated me subhumanly and in a provocative manner because I called her “chicken”; she wrote a false report (ms Harikleia Daniilidou is the guard in question) together with guard Ioannis Galanis, who was on duty on the day. I stood against the disciplinary committee and their subordinate attorney Georgios Prassas punished me with the detention in isolation for five days with the additional and illegal removal of my right to coffee, cigaretes and phone calls.
This disciplinary punishment is only written off my records after two years, meaning that apart from the torturing I was put through, I will not be able to be bailed out sooner and so my sick parents and my 21-year old daughter will wait a long time before they can see me and I can support them.
All of these events took place in the female prison of Koridalos (Athens) but all of these guards still work in Thiva, together with head prison guard Panagiotis Korakis, who here in the isolation unit of Thiva told me that despite my 8 defacations he has the right to hold me in isolation for six days according to “prison rules”. The prison rules mention nothing of the kind - to the contrary they state that a 3-day stay in isolation can only take place after an order by an attorney general and is only extended if illegal substances are found in the body of the prisoner which are impossible to remove…
You cannot take a bath in isolation (which they call “special detention area”, as if changing a name ends the horror) because whenever there happens to be hot water, the guard is not there and where she is she might take you out of the cell, insisting that water is hot even when it isn’t.
Whenever you take a bath they watch you. And so we might stay without taking a bath for seven days, if not longer. You are only allowed to order coffee, water etc from the prison café, which runs for the prison guards and in which prisoners also work. Last time I was held in isolation I paid 20 euros to the café. With this amount I could have lasted around 20 days by buying my own coffee and sugar and yet I was forced to spend it within 5 days. Yet here the managing of our money depends on the mood of the prison guards.
So when our torturers decide to take us out of isolation we have to go through the same torture of body search and vaginal raid. They can put you through the same torture at any time in the main prison unit, where I am staying, whenever there is a suspicion of use of illegal substances. They enter our unit, they wake us up, they put us through this examination, they take us out of unit and mess up all our stuff, throwing it to the floor. We then lose our stuff because they throw it or take it with them and need to put everything back to place in order to be allowed to sleep…
I used to be a human with lust for knowledge, with a sustainable business, with lust for creation.
Today, all this pain, abuse, the raping of my body and my soul make me dream that I kill all those who get paid to torture weak people.
Crunching my teeth I wisper “to your doggedness, you swine, I still hold” hoping the day will come when they will stop putting their dirty, twisted hands on defenseless people. I know the world cannot change, yet it can REFORM - as long as we don’t stay indifferent.
I shall never overcome all that I have been put through in prison.
Goulioni Katerina
