NO SURRENDER... NO PARALYSIS...
On the 24th of April 2007, the court of Dendermonde (Belgium) sentenced our comrade Geert Waegemans to 1 year imprisonment on the charges of beating and wounding police officers and resisting authority. Geert was not present during the sentence, the judge ordered his immediate arrest.
In the shadow of the democratic State and its media, no discussion about facts is possible. Their reality is not ours, and that was proven again during this trial. On June 28, 2005 there was a demonstration in the streets of Dendermonde in solidarity with two comrades who stood trial on charges of destruction of the windows of a fast-food restaurant and a fur shop. On clear instigation of the state security services (as turned out also in the records of the trial), Geert was targeted during this demonstration. The police seized the opportunity, mobilized massively (with a special intervention team, helicopter, etc.), and after a few skirmishes arrested 17 demonstrators. The most were released after 12 hours, not without first having been threatened and mistreated in the darks of the cells. Three comrades – Geert, Joppe and Olivier – were charged and provisionally released after 16 days.
After almost two years of legal circus, last week the sentence fell: Geert was condemned to 1 year non-suspended imprisonment and Joppe and Olivier to 1 year of which 6 months non-suspended. In the mean time, appeal was made against this sentence. None of the three comrades are in jail now.
This trial proves again how the State creates and selects the facts as it suits it best. Geert was caught because he is an anarchist and because he continued to be actively involved within the anarchist movement also after his previous condemnation. Geert was released on parole in April 2003 after a sentence of 5 years for a series of incendiary attacks on fast-food restaurants and infrastructures of the meat industry. The State can use the sentence in Dendermonde to let him sit out the remaining 2,5 years from this former sentence.
Media and justice didn't refrain from juggling with abbreviations and acronyms to identify a possible extension/spread of anarchist struggles, and thus make it seizable. So the repression tries to paralyse the struggle against prison and its world by attacking solidarity groups as the Anarchist Black Cross among others.
"Geert does not belong in this society," the prosecutor said during the trial. Indeed, Geert and all those who fight against the State, its prisons and its tribunals, do not belong in this society. Repression is there to break this struggle and to isolate the individuals who struggle. In this sense, the repression that touches one of us, touches us all.
Should the ladies and gentlemen Judges think that we give in just like that, that we let them take a comrade out of our midst, than our solidarity can prove the contrary. Solidarity is for us not a therapeutic activity, but is an integral part of our existence as anarchists. The extension of our revolt is the only answer the State can expect to its trials and sentences. It's up to us now to find the means and ways of expression thereof.
FREEDOM FOR ALL PRISONERS
FOR ANARCHY
Anarchist Black Cross Antwerpen
Anarchist Black Cross Gent
May 4, 2007