This story can easily be in the front line of all those people who fight for a just cause like human rights, regardless if it is connected or addressed to race, colour, sexuality, gender, class or religion. And could easily be one of those rare Hollywood scenarios that achieve to promote a path for a different kind of human consiousness, creating, then, not just a movie but a cultural “event”.
Yet it is a true story, evolving as we speak in contemporary Greece, while Greeks have become the modern scapegoats of a universal financial tsunami, created by the virus of an unethical “financial market” that targers first the weaker structures in order to come and meet you, later, wherever you are.
It involves 2 people with a triple minority dimension in their identity: Immigrants, evolving Lesbians and outcasts. They met in the (more over) deteriorating Greek prisons in the ancient toen of Theves (where Oedipus fail to recognise his fate and Antigone dared to face hers) and they discover they could love eachother out of choice and as a reffuge from a catapulted reality. And they decided to live in the same cell.
And then, as children folk stories go, the bad witch of an anonymous system arose and they start getting detentioned and suspended.Denied their right to
“Freely develop their personality” and to gain “Resrect for their personal Life” (as the Universal declaration of human rights demands).
Right now, as we speak, they are on a hunger strike and soon might face serious troubles with their health. The Defense of these 2 women is organised by the NGO Greek Action for Human Rights (having Ilektra Koutra as their lawer), in coordination with NGO Les.Equals (having Evaggelia Vlami as a contact person).
Yet what they need in eras like that where conservativism projects rights as an unecessary luxury, and where people are to tide and tired to care, is a vast wave of solidarity. Your Solidarity, because when rough times come “noone should be alone” as the saying goes. Please write letters to the Greek Ministry of Justice:96 Mesogeion Str, Athens, tel. 0030 210 7711 019
30 210 7767 426, fax: +30 210 7767 486, email:
azantza@justice.gov.gr http://www.ministryofjustice.gr/site/el Or send those letters to the email:
penguinas2005@yahoo.gr It might seem like an easy activism for a topic less important than others in a turmoil world, but, after all, Democracy is the system (to re-phrase Perikles) where any kind of question and the collective fate are addressed to your face, your consciousness, when you look in the mirror.
Eleni Karasavvidou
elenikapa1@gmail.com Please Distribute Widely!