Lecce, Italy – Sentence of the Nottetempo appeal trial (9th December 2010)

14 December 2010

As usually goes with the justice of the system, things turned badly for the comrades on trial: not only have some of the requests of the public prosecutor been accepted but those who had been acquitted in the first grade of the trial have also been charged.
The story is by now well known. Operation Nottetempo started in May 2005 when searches were carried out all over Italy and five comrades from Lecce were arrested and detained for almost two years in preventive arrest. The main reason for this judicial operation against anarchists was the tenacious struggle the comrades had undertaken against the notorious detention centre for immigrants Regina Pacis (which eventually closed down also thanks to that struggle), run by the church and situated in Salento (Lecce), the southernmost area of the Puglia region (southern Italy).

After a long series of hearings during which various squalid witnesses for the prosecutions gave vent to delirious declarations, the thesis that the comrades were part of a subversive association with the aim of terrorism had been rejected. However, due to strong pressures from the powerful local clergy and their political allies, four of the twelve accused had been charged with organised crime, two with specific crimes and the others had been acquitted. Unsatisfied with this result, which was insane in any case, public prosecutor Lino Giorgio Bruno presented a request for appeal as it was his intent to have the Lecce anarchists sentenced to subversive association. After all, it was the career of this ignominious servant of power that was at stake. He hoped he would become famous as the magistrate who finally managed to have anarchists condemned according to article 270 bis of the Italian penal code (subversive association with the aim of terrorism), a task many of his Italian colleagues had failed on numerous previous occasions.
Therefore, after a few years of postponements, the court of appeal has finally come to a new staggering conclusion: all the twelve anarchists originally accused have been sentenced to article 270 (without bis), i.e. subversive association without aim of terrorism. The heaviest charges have been inflicted to the four comrades condemned in the first grade, with one of them considered as the founder of the “association”, while the other two charged on that occasion have seen their sentence increased and the acquitted in the first trial have been given sentences rangi
Sentence of the Nottetempo appeal trial (9th December 2010)
As usually goes with the justice of the system, things turned badly for the comrades on trial: not only have some of the requests of the public prosecutor been accepted but those who had been acquitted in the first grade of the trial have also been charged.
The story is by now well known. Operation Nottetempo started in May 2005 when searches were carried out all over Italy and five comrades from Lecce were arrested and detained for almost two years in preventive arrest. The main reason for this judicial operation against anarchists was the tenacious struggle the comrades had undertaken against the notorious detention centre for immigrants Regina Pacis (which eventually closed down also thanks to that struggle), run by the church and situated in Salento (Lecce), the southernmost area of the Puglia region (southern Italy).
After a long series of hearings during which various squalid witnesses for the prosecutions gave vent to delirious declarations, the thesis that the comrades were part of a subversive association with the aim of terrorism had been rejected. However, due to strong pressures from the powerful local clergy and their political allies, four of the twelve accused had been charged with organised crime, two with specific crimes and the others had been acquitted. Unsatisfied with this result, which was insane in any case, public prosecutor Lino Giorgio Bruno presented a request for appeal as it was his intent to have the Lecce anarchists sentenced to subversive association. After all, it was the career of this ignominious servant of power that was at stake. He hoped he would become famous as the magistrate who finally managed to have anarchists condemned according to article 270 bis of the Italian penal code (subversive association with the aim of terrorism), a task many of his Italian colleagues had failed on numerous previous occasions.
Therefore, after a few years of postponements, the court of appeal has finally come to a new staggering conclusion: all the twelve anarchists originally accused have been sentenced to article 270 (without bis), i.e. subversive association without aim of terrorism. The heaviest charges have been inflicted to the four comrades condemned in the first grade, with one of them considered as the founder of the “association”, while the other two charged on that occasion have seen their sentence increased and the acquitted in the first trial have been given sentences ranging from one year to one year and eight months imprisonment. The court has also decided that all the accused are guilty of having instigated the imprisoned immigrants of Regina Pacis to committing crime, referring to two episodes when the immigrants had revolted and some had attempted to escape. It is therefore crystal clear that the real goal of this court is to condemn the struggle against Regina Pacis and, to a larger extent, any other struggle of this kind.
Waiting for the comrades involved to give us further details, we can just express our total disgust at this miserable public prosecutor, his repugnant associates in the local political scene and the shameful clergymen of Lecce.
It won’t be a court or any other servant of power to stop the exploited from revolting.
Fire to all prisons!!!
An accomplice of the accused anarchists
ng from one year to one year and eight months imprisonment. The court has also decided that all the accused are guilty of having instigated the imprisoned immigrants of Regina Pacis to committing crime, referring to two episodes when the immigrants had revolted and some had attempted to escape. It is therefore crystal clear that the real goal of this court is to condemn the struggle against Regina Pacis and, to a larger extent, any other struggle of this kind.
Waiting for the comrades involved to give us further details, we can just express our total disgust at this miserable public prosecutor, his repugnant associates in the local political scene and the shameful clergymen of Lecce.
It won’t be a court or any other servant of power to stop the exploited from revolting.
Fire to all prisons!!!
An accomplice of the accused anarchists

From Lecce, Italy. The Church and the State, a long story of collaboration.

Police lack sense of humour

An anti-religion demonstration took place in the centre of Lecce [southern Italy] on April 30, 2010 with an exhibition, leaflets, megaphone and discussions on sexuality, abortion, personal freedoms, obscurantism. All these questions are obsessively brandished by the Church, as it tries to intrude its tentacles in the intimacy of everyone.
Nothing strange so far, except that the terrible demonstrators, just for fun, were offering desecrated wafers, wine of the Madonna and sweets of free love to passer-bys. Funny games were also being played to cheer the sunny afternoon of the very bigoted and bourgeois city of Lecce. But, as everybody knows, the pigs in uniform don’t like having fun except when they massacre those who end up in their barracks and police stations. So the pigs showed off their contempt: defamation, defamation, this is public defamation! First a few Digos officers tried to film passers-by and demonstrators intent at playing darts with a picture of Ratzinger [the current pope], but were soon driven away. Then they came back in greater number in anti-riot gear in order to seize the vituperated picture. Meantime dozens of people strolling in the piazza realized how the police, headed by chief Digos officer Raffaele Attanasi, were acting violently in their attempt to apply censorship. Not yet satisfied with creating such a chaos, Mr Attanasi threatened to kill an anarchist comrade if the latter dared touch him: ‘I’m going to chase you and kill you’, said the officer. Needless to say, the mess created by the police (but shouldn’t they guarantee public order?) attracted the attention of many passer-bys and onlookers, who stopped to watch the exhibition and to take leaflets. More police and carabinieri arriving on the spot were compelled to step back in front of the demonstrators denouncing them publicly through the megaphone.

Anarchists from Lecce

Text of the leaflet distributed during the initiative:

In a different way

To claim that violence and sexual abuse of minors are consequences of being homosexual [as an Italian high prelate recently did] is a proper terrorist act. It means to deny free sexual choice by considering it as a disease to be eradicated in order to avoid the most disgusting crimes that can be imagined. This is what high prelates of the Italian church felt obliged to say in the middle of so-called ‘paedophilia scandal’ that involves priests all over the world with the cover-up of the Vatican – including the pope. Besides suppressing all possibilities of auto-determination, this affirmation aims at banning the ‘diverse’ and legitimises, on a social and cultural level, the persecution against them. The more and more frequent aggressions against homosexuals are a clear example of this.
The stabbing of a homosexual is never mentioned whereas much is said against the abortion pill in the name of the defence of the ‘non-born’. Similarly, the murder of a pro-abortion doctor by a catholic fundamentalist is also silenced. Obviously not all lives are considered equal and worth being lived in the same way. After all, this reflects the entire history of discrimination characterising the catholic church and all the religions in the world.
If, on the one hand, the Vatican tries to divert the attention from the infamy committed by its representatives, on the other, relying on a particularly favourable socio-political climate, it tries to condition the life of everyone through practises of control on bodies and minds by pursuing its millennial aim: the submission and obedience of the masses through obscurantism.
Interfering with women’s wombs and spying under people’s sheets are practises aimed at social control: in this respect the Church and the State have always worked together in order to survive and reproduce themselves. Not by chance the campaign against the abortion pill can count on the support of the most conservative and reactionary politicians. This is an obvious example of the new form of collaboration between the State and the Church, which has seen the leaders of the Veneto and Piedmont regions backing the ban of the abortive pill in their local hospitals. Furthermore, when cardinal Bertone argued that it is homosexuality that leads to sexual violence on minors, there was total silence on the part of all [Italian] political representatives.
To talk about collaboration between the State and the Church might sound strange to some, but it is sufficient to look back in history to realize how the authority of these two institutions has always been the same.
Because of this collaboration, the revolutionaries shot priests and burnt churches during the Spanish civil war. If this had happened everywhere, maybe we wouldn’t be talking about all this now…

THE TRUE FACE OF WELCOME IN THE SALENTO CONCENTRATION CAMP OF SAINT FOCA

‘Welcome’: this is what bureaucrats, priests and politicians call the infamous practice of locking up in concentration camps like the Regina Pacis one in Saint Foca (Salento, southern Italy) all the people waiting to be deported because they don’t fit into the immigration quota which has been fixed by the bosses. We must come out and say it: immigrants are merchandise (like everything else in our society). The bosses decide on the quantity and character of what they want to buy, political power collects information, the police does its roundups, and finally the jailers look after the prisoners in the immigration camp in order to prevent them from moving freely. These camps are surrounded by huge walls and barbed wire, with bars on the windows and cameras and guards all around. In spite of the fact that they are presented as places of welcome and solidarity, they are actually prisons for those who are to be deported from the rich western world where there is only room for the ones who are useful to its awful machinery. This is their great welcome.
Monsignor Cosmo Francesco Ruppi, archbishop of Otranto and prestigious figure in political and religious circles of Salento, is fundamental to this perverse machinery. Through his lackey father Cesare Lodeserto he controls the prison Regina Pacis in Sain Foca where men women and children whose only guilt is that they landed on the shores of southern Italy without any identity documents in order to escape from miserable living conditions are locked up: for this stupid reason alone these human beings are called ‘clandestine’. The archbishop hides himself behind a false and reassuring mask of benefactor and succeeds in gaining many common people’s confidence. The truth is that he is just an unscrupulous criminal, a very mean man who takes advantage of hundreds of human beings’ hopes and desperation. Ruppi regards them as animals for the slaughter who serve only for him to get rich as quickly as possible during their imprisonment while waiting to be sent back to their countries to face hunger, war, misery, sickness, exploitation once again … These conditions are all being created by the western world. In addition to this, we have to consider the hundreds of people who die during these so-called ‘journeys of hope’. And Ruppi and his accomplice Cesare Lodeserto, a criminal of the same category, are also morally responsible for such deaths. These two vultures, along with anyone else who does the same job as theirs, are our enemies, whereas we are side by side with the immigrants who reach our shores. We know well that capitalism is making our existence similar to that of the exploited immigrants, full of uncertainty and the impossibility to decide about our present and our future. If we share the same conditions of exploitation, we can also share the struggle against this life which is becoming more and more deprived of any freedom.
ENEMIES OF ALL BORDERS

THE ANARCHIST STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CONCENTRATION CAMP OF SAINT FOCA (Lecce, S. Italy)

Concentration camps for immigrants were introduced in Italy by a law passed in l998 by the ‘leftist’ government of Massimo D’Alema. They are called CENTRI DI PERMANENZA TEMPORANEA (CTP), ‘temporary stay camps’. The minister responsible for this law was Livia Turco, former Welfare Minister.
There is no substantial difference between the ‘leftist’ law on immigration and the one passed by the current Berlusconi’s government, the so-called Bossi-Fini law. The latter simply limits the number of visas to be given, a measure which meets the needs of the Italian capitalist system and therefore would have been taken by the previous government had it still been in charge. In other words, now fewer immigrants are allowed to stay in Italy than before, the ones who are useful to the Italian economy. All the others are located in concentration camps built by the ‘leftist government, waiting to be deported to their countries where they face once again those awful conditions (hunger, war, sickness, exploitation) that have been created by the western world.
In Salento in southern Italy, which is part of the Puglia region, can be found the concentration camp REGINA PACIS of Saint Foca. It is run by Italian the catholic organisation Caritas, or more precisely by Cesare Lodeserto, a priest who is the manager of the camp, and his boss Cosmo Francesco Ruppi, archbishop of Otranto.
A number terrible deeds have occurred in ‘Regina Pacis’ since it was created, including beatings, forced administration of psychotropic drugs, attempted suicides… not to mention the many escape attempts which were unfortunately mostly unsuccessful. There have been protests against such a hellish detention centre since it was built. Both Lecce Social Forum (composed of leftist parties and various humanitarian and green associations) and the anarchists of Lecce have always taken part in the struggle against ‘Regina Pacis’, but no agreement has ever been made between the two categories of protestors. At the beginning the main difference concerned the existence of the camp–while the Social Forum claimed for the improvement of the material living conditions in the camp, the anarchists wanted its immediate suppression. But was only after Berlusconi came to power that the Social forum started asking for the closure of the camp too,
The contrast between the anarchists and the other protestors, however, has always been one concerning methods of struggle, as Social Forum has always refused any find of direct attack against the camp. The anarchists, on the contrary, maintain that what really counts is sharp attack, aiming to transform the struggle against the concentration camps into a concrete fact. Not only the help given to the immigrants, but also and mainly the attack against the people responsible for their suffering. That’s how, along with demonstrations, sit-ins, debates, distribution of leaflets, meetings, etc, the anarchists have always been planning a series of attacks against the core of Regina Pacis management.
More than once, Social Forum members have sent delegations, also comprised of a number of members of parliament, inside the camp in order to talk with the manager and eventually acquire some meaningless promise from him. On the other hand, the anarchists have always refused any dialogue with the people who capture immigrants for deportation and draw up the troops to prevent them from entering Italy. Somany tragedies have occurred in the Adriati Sea over the past few years, not only tragic shipwrecks of immigrants’ boats but also massacres due directly to some military measures taken to block access to the Italian shores. [Kater I Rades] No bartering is possible with those who sell weapons to the armies and take war into the countries from where most of the immigrants escape. No dialogue is possible with the exploiters of their labour and resources, the same who reduce them to starvation, then build prisons for capturing them and give protection to those who beat, torture and kill them. Only recently the manager of ‘Regina Pacis’ Cesare Lodeserto has been charged with ill-treatment and injuries after many years of investigation which had never led to any charges in spite of all the evidence of Lodeserto’s guilt. And it was following this serious episode that Social Forum interrupted its dialogue with ‘Regina Pacis’ manager.
The contrast between Social Forum and the anarchists has shown itself during many demonstrations in front of the camp. In particular Social Forum, especially before Lodeserto was officially charged, were clearly worried about certain slogans shouted out by anarchists against the manager. Social Forum used to say that ‘don Cesare’ was not such a bad person nd that all the guilt belonged to Berlusconi’s government (we should remember that Italian camps for immigrants were set up by the current Berlusconi’s opponents). And they have always dissociated themselves with indignation from the acts of sabotage carried out by the anarchists both during demonstrations in Saint Foca (damage to Caritas vans, attempts to communicate with the imprisoned immigrants, writings on the walls surrounding the camps) and at any other time in any other place. […]

Main actions:

Counter-information in the places where the camps are located in order to let the inhabitants know what really happens in those prisons.
Saint Foca, where the camps are located, is a little sea-side town which is full of people on holiday in the summer. During that period the anarchists organise unauthorised public debates and distribution of leaflets. Social Forum only comes to the big demonstrations against the camp which have previously been authorised by the police.
Cooperation on a large scale with the comrades who struggle against the many other concentration camps in the country.
Acts of sabotage aimed at striking anything anything and anyone connected to the camps:
managers and their armed guards
firms providing any kind of service (food, laundry, etc)
lawyers defending the people who work in the camps and are responsible for the ill-treatment of the immigrants
etc

The information produced by the anarchists is in sharp contrast with that provided by the media and journalists, whose aims and methods are opposite to those of the anarchists.

Chronology

31 August 2002 – group of demonstrators interrupts a meeting of Melendugno Council with trumpets. They also show the banner ‘No Borders, No Foreigners’ and shout their content against the mayor who had banned an exhibition on immigration in Saint Foca. Distribution of leaflets and among the people of the Council.

21 September 2002 – 4 immigrants attempt to escape from Regina Pacis and have a fight with the police who are always in the camp. Unfortunately 2 are arrested.

3 November 2002 – Demonstration in front of the church in Monteroni (Lecce) where Archbishop Ruppi is celebrating a religious event. Exposition of banner, exhibition on immigration and distribution of leaflets. Ruppi doesn’t show up to greet the crowd who were waiting for his blessing, but runs away by the back door.

12 November 2002 – Group of demonstrators gathers outside the palace of the Prefecture in Lecce where 11 Home Secretaries of the Adriatic-Ionic area are about to have a gala dinner. The next day the same ministers are supposed to have a summit to strengthen measures and a plan of ‘alert and rapid reaction’ against illegal immigration. The demonstrators show their anger with whistles, trumpets, megaphones. Thousands of leaflets are handed out and road blocks are carried out.

13 November 2002 – During a Social Forum against the summit of the 11 ministers, the anarchists throw some rotten fruit and eggs against the cops, the journalists and the security service of the Social Forum.

20 November 2002 – Casarano (Lecce) – a conference organised by Alleanza Nazionale (the Italian fascist party) on immigration in which Lodeserto participates is interrupted by 15 demonstrators who show a banner against the deportation of immigrants.

22 November 2002 – 40 immigrants escape from Rgina Pacis after a fight with the police. In the following days most of them are captured again, only 7 succeed in gaining freedom. The immigrants captured again are violently beaten for reprisal.

26 April 2003 – 4 Rumenian attempt to escape from Regina Pacis and beat two carabinieri cops who try to stop them.

3 May 2003 – A group of North African immigrants destroy the canteen of Regina Pacis in protest against their deportation notice. 8 carabinieri are injured.

10 May 2003 – Lecce – soon before the start of ‘Giro d’Italia’, the most important cycling event in Italy, some writings appear on the roads of the trajectory: ‘Free all Immigrants, Ruppi is a killer’.

11 June 2003 – Lecce – The front door of the ancient baroque cathedral is set on fire. On the walls these writings appear: ‘Free the Immigrants from the concentration Camps’. ‘Ruppi and Lodeserto are Criminal Bastards’.

September/October 2003 – Lecce – the local newspapers write about the many writings on the churches and palaces of Lecce against Regina Pacis and its management.

October 2003 – 4 attempted suicides in Regina Pacis.

8 November 2003 – in Lecce and Lequile two cash machines of ‘Banca Intesa’ are set on fire and destroyed. That bank is involved in Regina Pacis management. In Lequile a few bank nots also burn and the inside walls of the bank are damaged. On the spot a few leaflets are left about Regina Pacis.

9 November 2003 – Lecce – another cash machine of Banca Intesa is blocked with glue.

24 November 2003 – An Algerian prisoner in Regina Pacis attacks Lodeserto with a stick and injures him.

3 December 2003 – Calimera, Lecce – a lot of posters and writings against Catia Cazzato appear on the walls of the village. The woman is employed in Regina Pacis and is responsible for writing false reports about the beatings of immigrants, maintaining that the prisoners’ injuries were self-inflicted in order to try to escape from the camp.

Statement to the court, Lecce 2007, Cristian Paladini

There are two fundamental reasons for which I am sitting in this court as a defendant, the only role that, in spite of my will, I can play in a court room.
First of all I am a revolutionary and an anarchist; and if you consider how many comrades are still being held in Italian jails, that in itself seems to be reason enough. After all, what can those who want to break this damned murderous social organization based on misery and exploitation, expect from the ruling class, which does not intend to renounce its power, and the interests of which this court is bound to defend?
The second reason is closely linked to the first, or rather it is its direct and logical consequence: the struggle that, as an anarchist and revolutionary in this society, I have been carrying over the past few years.
So, after the ground had been prepared with a long period of preventive criminalization thanks to the usual journalists of the press and TV, imprisonment was not surprising. First imprisonment in a proper cell of 8 square metres, that three people shared twenty hours a day, then house arrest where the b,ars on the doors and windows cannot be seen, yet are there. House arrest, which is certainly less hard in certain respects, serves the project of total isolation carried out by the State even better: you do not have any contact with other prisoners and your only way of communicating is by mail, which, as this prosecutor well knows, is not at all reliable.
One year and ten months have passed since May 10 2005, during which my comrades and I have endured isolation, transfers, continuous intimidation and abuse of all kinds, but always cheered by practical solidarity by many other exploited like ourselves. Certainly it was not easy, as it never has been for all the men and women who have locked up throughout time all over the world, but I do not intend to complain or to present myself as a simple dissident who, by a judicial mistake or for whatever other reason, finds himself involved in a sensational judicial frame-up and is now waiting for justice.
Nothing is more extraneous to my way of thinking and living. Condemnation or absolution, justice – real justice – cannot be found in a courtroom.
It is true that this is a frame-up, quite a clumsy one, and in some aspects even a ridiculous one. The prosecutor, in fact, not having any evidence in his hands, relied on the old and always useful habit of inventing it by deforming reality, transforming conversations that he infamously listened to and omitting the context in which they occurred, so that he could make us members of a subversive association punishable by article 270bis. When you are a liar by profession, as time goes by you probably end up losing track. I think that it is how this prosecutor, trying to conciliate what cannot be conciliated, went quite further and established that anarchists, who refuse all authority, were part of a hierarchical structure composed of leaders and followers.
Apart from these dirty tricks, power was right as regards me: it has singled out an individual who refuses the State, does not care about its laws and strongly desires the subversion of this system, the destruction of all authority and the creation of a free life for everybody. This is the dangerous idea that power cannot tolerate, in spite of what they declare, and which is well beyond the worn-out old chatter about liberty and rights upon which the ideology of the regime is based.
Actually there is no freedom in rights. The latter are a concession given to vassals and as such they can be suspended or suppressed, and they strengthen the power of those who concede them. In other words, the State concedes and removes rights according to its needs. This said, it is not surprising that article 270bis, which we are accused of, comes from old article 270, which was first produced by the fascist dictatorship (Rocco code) in order to repress rebels, and eventually passed from the fascist regime to the Republic that boasts it was born from the Resistance. In other words, the most efficient legal weapon against dissent during the time of dictatorship is being used today; moreover it has been refined and adapted to the different social conditions, going through decades and governments of all colours, as a sign of continuity between two powers that, basically, are not so different from each other. This article, which establishes a six-month imprisonment that can be reconfirmed every six months up to two years, cost us to be locked up for quite a long time before any jury decides our sentence. In this way the principle of ‘presumed innocence’, which any good democratic subject feels he is protected by, has been clamorously denied.
Many of the specific charges against us concern the struggle for the closure of all detention centres for immigrants and in particular the infamous Regina Pacis in San Foca, which was run profitably by the homonymous Foundation Regina Pacis [a foundation of the Lecce clergy] up until March two years ago. CPTs and deportations are another thread that links past and present: fascist and nazi concentration camps, before becoming centres of systematic massacre, were places where people were locked up without having committed any crime. It is exactly what happens in all CPTs. That is why I have always called them concentration camps. In these places immigrants who managed to reach Italy but do not have the right documents to stay in the country are locked up, after enduring terrible journeys during which they risked their life: The Mediterranean sea bed is now a cemetery without crosses or names. For them, guilty of being poor and foreigners on the run desperately searching for a better life, State racism has established that they be imprisoned, following what is a mere administrative question for an Italian. They are kept there until they are identified – officially 60 days – and, with the collaboration of companies such as Alitalia and Trenitalia they are eventually deported to their country of origin or, and this is what counts, somewhere else outside fortress Europe. Otherwise they are handed a deportation order compelling them to leave the country within a few days. Those who do not obey are put in prison. As they do not have any other choice in the face of misery, hunger, and war that they have escaped from, they are forced to live in hiding, constantly chased by the police, escaping raids and facing prejudice and hostility stirred up by the media propaganda that depicts illegal immigrants as criminals and possible ‘terrorists’. In order to survive they have to accept even more hideous working conditions because they can be easily blackmailed under the threat of deportation. They live constantly with the terror of being captured, thrown in CPTs and then sent back from what was their journey of hope. The condition of ‘clandestine’ hanging over immigrants, therefore, serves a precise project of exploitation: on the one hand the bosses ask the State for legal labourers, according to the established quota; on the other the latter have at their disposal a considerable number of undesirables without any rights that they can exploit to death. These ‘undesirables’ are used to threaten the legal immigrants so that the latter do not stand up for better working conditions (without a work contract immigrants cannot stay in the country).
Everything in this world is submitted to the rules of economy. It is such an obvious truth that power does not even try to conceal it; on the contrary it tries to make us think that it is an inevitable reality from which everybody will gain something.
When they do have to conceal reality, on the contrary, their most effective trick is to call things with names that do not match their meaning. It this way the expression ‘humanitarian war’ was introduced, concentration camps for immigrants are called ‘welcome centres’ and the prisoners inside these structures are called ‘guests’, as Cesare Lodeserto, a ‘benefactor-jailer’ ex-director of Regina Pacis did in this court. According to the stories of many prisoners, the detention centre of San Foca was a theatre of violence, beatings and abuse of all kinds, especially after revolts had broken out. But even if such atrocities had never occurred, my struggle for the closure of Regina Pacis would have been the same because the real problem is not the way a CPT is managed but its mere existence as a place where people are locked up. For a long while now these places have been called concentration camps even by the left that contributed to creating them and by a large part of civil society, without any practical consequences. The new governors, who out of pure political calculation had expressed their intention to vaguely ‘go beyond’ the CPTs, have now changed their cards: this ‘going beyond’ is nothing else but a different setting. The CPTs would be reduced in number, become more secure and serve as prisons ‘only’ for the ‘irreducible’, that is to say those who do not collaborate with the police to be identified and voluntarily deported. A real disappointment for the people who voted the new governors. The truth is, as the political class admit, that the CPTs are necessary to the current politics of immigration. The State cannot do without them, even if they represent the total demystification of the democratic lie and show how exclusion is at the base of democracy. As far as I am concerned, this does not make any difference, as I have always known that Cpts will disappear only if and when we have the social strength to impose it. This is the reason why, today like yesterday, I am continuing my struggle against detention camps and deportation, focusing my attention on the responsibility of those (managers and collaborators) who allow their existence and activity. Furthermore, I always bear well in mind that there exists a strong link between CPT, permanent war and the militarization of society.
The regime’s incessant propaganda has always used fear as a means to produce consensus. The continuous creation of a threat, highlighted according to the circumstances, justifies a more and more suffocating control over all aspects of life and allows power to introduce more and more liberticidal laws. The enemy is everywhere, it is called ‘terrorist’ and can be an immigrant or a revolutionary. Reality is turned upside down: those who massacre entire populations in order to control resources accuse those who struggle for freedom of terrorism. But if terrorism is, according to its historical definition, the indiscriminate use of violence aimed at conquering and consolidating power, then it is well clear that THE STATE IS THE TERRORIST!

LECCE, June 28 2007

Cristian Paladini

Statement to the court in Lecce, Salvatore Signore

‘Finally there are situations when a passionate man must write. When the platform is empty and the people are crushed, when a society of slaves has a shopkeeper as king, when all those who think are condemned, it is well necessary that the latter, exiled from the present, dwell upon the future’.

Ernest Coeurderoy, Days of Exile

First of all I want to clarify that this declaration does not intend to be a justification because I have no reason to justify myself. Then, any clarification in this court is pointless because my words can hardly be understood in all their meaning in this place. Not that I think you are stupid but because we belong to opposing ‘sides’ – you represent power and I represent its enemy – and our ways of understanding and interpreting reality are absolutely different and alien to each other. This trial, however, is obviously and exclusively political, and therefore social, and I cannot help expressing what I think. I want to point out that my thoughts are addressed outside this court, to the vast mass of exploited and excluded to which I belong and to which I have always addressed myself with the means and methods that I have acquired through time.
The first thing that I want to say is that I send back to the sender the epithet of ‘terrorist’, which has been used to define me since this story begun, and also before that, aimed at producing satisfactory public opinion, which ‘is made by idiots’, as Stendhal rightly said, and the ensuing persecution and repression; I will come back to this later. For my part, as I have already done many times, I reaffirm that terrorism has always been the favourite weapon of States, be they old empires, more recent nazi-fascist or socialist dictatorships or advanced democracies. Even if those who hold power, and therefore the manipulators of History and Culture try to change its meaning, the word ‘terrorism’ means ‘use of indiscriminate violence with the aim of conquering, consolidating and defending political power’. Anarchists, on the contrary, even when they have decided to use violence, have never used it in an indiscriminate way. Then it is absolutely ridiculous to think that anarchists want to conquer power, given that their aim is to destroy it! After all, the bombs in the squares and on the trains, the massacre of entire populations and the ‘exporation of democracy’ are certainly not anarchist practises.
As far as the appellation of subversive is concerned, I candidly admit that that is what I am. What is an individual who despises all kinds of power and struggles for a completely different society and for the freedom of all living beings without distinctions, if not subversive? All this is certainly subversive in a world where social relations are based on exploitation, robbery, exclusion and abuse of the weakest. Furthermore, I could never belong to any subversive ‘association’, which would really be a very miserable thing and would not match with the fact that I am anarchist, which I assert and for which I am defendant in this trial. As an anarchist, I have two fundamental principles: the individual and anti-authoritarianism. Therefore I could never organize myself in a vertical way – even if I have been defined ‘leader’ and ‘chief’ and, according to the prosecution, I occupied a ‘leader’ s position’. I strongly refute these words. I could never organize myself in a rigid way either, because in that case the organisation itself would dominate me and I would become a mere instrument and appendix of it, and my being a unique individual among other unique individuals would disappear behind it. On the contrary I establish my relations according to the necessity of the moment, to the love, friendship and affinity that link me to others. I can agree for a moment on one question and soon after be in total disagreement on another. But this relation is always horizontal, informal and never hierarchical, according to the principle of anti-authoritarianism. In this free and temporary relation, I am free to move by myself or with whoever wants to move with me. On the contrary, in an organized structure, individuals only move inside the ‘association’, exactly like in political parties. If I acted in this way I would follow a religion, but as anarchist I am against political parties and religions, no matter what they say. I would even be against anarchism if the latter were to become a dogma and therefore religion.
Another accusation made against me and that I want to clarify because I find it disgusting is that I would make ‘proselytism’. This practise does not belong to me; it belongs, for example, to the armed forces that go around schools in order to convince kids to enlist, and to priests and to missionaries all over the world. But I have always been extraneous to the ‘missionary logic’. I do not think that social change is a historical mission that I have to carry out nor do I think that it is an inevitable event according to some determinist dream. On the contrary I think that it is an open possibility that can become true or not, that can be fair or not. And it will not be any ‘party’ of anarchists to radically transform the world; it will be the exploited that organize themselves together with anarchists. If I were to live my life and thought according to an historical mission, this too would overcome my will and would transform it into an instrument of something that does not belong to me and that would be the opposite of individuality. I would disappear behind the historical mission, behind the ideology. On the contrary I have never had the arrogance to claim that I know the truth in the place of ignorant masses that have not understood anything and that I should ‘convert’ and ‘indoctrinate’; in this way I would be putting myself in a vanguardist position, which anarchists historically refuse; I have never wanted to be a vanguard. What I do, through articles in our papers, posters, demonstrations, meetings, distribution of books, and which is being judged in this court, is called propaganda, that is to say an instrument for expressing my thoughts and ideas. Mind you, I said Ideas, not mere and stupid opinions. Opinions only represent the empty shell of ideas, as they do not have the subversive potential of the latter. Ideas are something more, they are dangerous, especially in times of social anaesthesia as those we are living in, and it is for this reason that they scare.
This is the real point: what is on trial, exactly, in this court? Not certainly ‘crimes’, to justify most of which the investigators had to construe ‘evidence’ and interpret in their own way words, sentences, concepts, highlighting what was convenient for them and omitting all the rest. No, it is not this. Here it is the Idea that is on trial, anarchist thought and practise. Nobody can believe in the old story of the ‘State of Right’, also because, as Hobbes rightly said, ‘rights being equal, strength wins’.
It is therefore clear that courts defend class interests, the class of the included against the big majority of the excluded, which is growing. It is sufficient to observe the social provenance of prisoners in the very democratic Italian jails to find the best confirmation to my statements. So it becomes intolerable that individuals wanting freedom, the destruction of all power and a dignified life for everybody are set free. It is not by chance that there exists a continuous and constant attack against what can be defined the ‘anarchist movement’. This attack has been increasing over the last ten years, and this is also due to the politics of emergency that the State has been adopting for a long while and upon which it now bases its very existence: it is a consolidated rule to create a fictitious enemy towards which to address subjects’ fears so that they create a common front against the ‘danger’ of the moment and cannot see who are really responsible for their misery: one day it is the mafia emergency, another it is environmental emergency, then the immigration emergency comes out. Following this logic today there stands an external enemy – foreigners in general and Arabs in particular – and an internal enemy – all those who oppose the present state of things, and anarchists in particular.
Dozens of conspiracy court cases were set against anarchists, most of which have ended up in nothing. What the prosecution is trying here, therefore, is not so much to put me and some other comrades in prison, which would be too little a thing, but to obtain a final sentence that could be useful in future penal procedures and help to get rid of anarchists for a few years, while sending a warning to all the others. The thinking heads of the State have certainly realized that, for a series of reasons, Lecce is the right place where such a precedent could be created: it is a little town on the suburbs of the Empire, where in their opinion there would be little resistance, and then there are no specific precedents. The most extraordinary thing, however, is that to obtain such a sentence, instruments that have failed elsewhere are being used, i.e. the usual old joke that fills the documents of investigators and public prosecutors about anarchist organising themselves on a double level – one public and the other clandestine – and the intentionally distorted interpretation of a comrade’ s words that have been published in a number of books. There is, in fact, a repressive thread on a national level, which is put into practice on a local level only to make it easier. A few more steps in this direction and, who knows, anyone who has certain books in his house will be criminalized! After all, it is exactly books that were seized in the course of the searches carried out when we were arrested… It is perhaps useful to remind that the ‘dangerous books’ hunt was carried out during the holy Inquisition and during Nazism, and it is also useful to remember that a few days ago in Bologna searches were made and an investigation on conspiracy was opened on the pretext that comrades were distributing a book that criticized the infamous ‘Biagi law’. And it is quite bizarre that some books are being considered the source of certain theories and strategies, in spite of the fact that your own magistrates have sentenced the falseness of these constructions!
Contrary to what the prosecution is trying to establish, I am a dangerous individual not because I speak and act in a clandestine way but because of the exact opposite: because I do not need to do so. I think I am a free individual coherent with himself, at least I try, so I openly say what I think and do what I say: theory becomes practise and practise becomes theory. I understand how this can be disturbing and unpleasant to power. It must be in fact unpleasant to mayor Poli [the right-wing mayor of Lecce] that in her ‘polis’, that is to say a town ruled by a bunch of exploiters under which slaves are submitted, there is still somebody who wants to take back the ‘agora’, that is to say a free piazza where there can be free discussion and where the Idea, this thing so frightening, can be widespread. After all, as the inquisitors tried a lot of times to stop me, they know very well that I cannot stand the closeness of what they call ‘hens’ – our sites – especially as the excluded to whom I address myself are not habitual frequenters of such places.
My anarchist thoughts and practice are even more dangerous to the inquisitors when they are aimed at striking the terrorism of very important men and the violence perpetrated inside the new concentration camps of the State, the so-called CPTs. The pretext under which I was put in jail and I am under trial is exactly my radical opposition to these places.
I claim with strength my struggle against the detention centres for immigrants and against Regina Pacis in particular. It was an infamous place that was luckily closed down but whose corpse keeps on spreading an horrible smell and whose walls are still impregnated with the blood and anger of millions of individuals who were locked up there and raped of their lives. In my opinion such places should not only be closed down, but also totally razed to the ground so that there will be not even the memory of their infamy. Yes, for a few years there has been the habit to celebrate the ‘remembrance day’ [in memory of the victims who died in nazi concentration camps]: if we did not live in an upside-down world, they would probably celebrate the ‘oblivion day’, the total destruction of any concentration camps. And I want to point out that I do not use the word ‘concentration camp’ out of rhetoric or because it became fashionable among left-wing politicians who created the modern concentrations camps, I use it because it is a rigorous definition. As in the old colonial and nazi camps, in fact, people locked up in the CPTs did not commit any crime, they are only undesirables at the mercy of police and exploited by the bosses of the moment. Besides being jails for immigrants, the CPTs are places where foreign labourers, who can be blackmailed more easily, are selected. It is in fact important to remind that the exploitation of this kind of labourers is very important to capital.
The last question that I would like to express concerns the particular moment my comrades and I were arrested. It was soon after the arrest of Cesare Lodeserto, the director of Regina Pacis, and when many members of his staff, including doctors, operators, and cops were (and some still are) under investigation. It was necessary to take the public attention away from these episodes that has uncovered the real nature of that CPT and opened a crack in the wall that I had been trying for years to open myself so that everybody could look through it. It was at this point that attention had to be deviated and directed to the worst enemies of the State. This does not surprise me: it is one arm of the State that goes to secure its other arm. There is a popular saying that synthesizes the concept: ‘one hands washes the other and both wash the face’.
During the period I was detained I could personally experience the fury that the State has towards words, against which it has waged a war, as also proved by years of phone and environmental tapping against me and by the big quantity of papers that was seized in my house. It is hatred towards all the aspects of the word: the written and spoken word and therefore, basically, the thought. It is the attempt to kill Cartesio’s statement ‘I think, therefore I am’ because in a social system where ‘to have’ is much more important than ‘to be’, individuals must stop being, and it is not only a question of auxiliary verbs substituting each other.
I could realize that when censorship went for (and still does) my letters and books when I was in prison. The inner meaning of the matter can be found in one single sentence that has been repeated many times by a prison officer who, when I insisted to have books that had been kept for two months by the censors, used to say; ‘You read too much!’.
In my opinion this short sentence is quite meaningful and summarizes the sense of my incarceration and trial: ‘You read too much!’. If this is true, I am sorry, but I can’t reassure you, I will keep on thinking, reading, writing, speaking and therefore struggling. It does not matter if in the next years I will find myself on the one side or the other of the bars of this open prison that is called society, because I am convinced that in the court justice is not administrated but vengeance is executed instead.
Unless you agree with Dostoevskji, who wrote: ‘When they became criminals they invented the Justice and imposed a series of codes to preserve it, and to preserve the codes they invented the guillotine’. In this case, innocence is the worst thing ever.
I do not have anything else to tell you.

Lecce, June 28 2007

Salvatore Signore

Statement to the court in Lecce, Marina Ferrari

The arrest of five comrades in Lecce, which was carried out simultaneously with others all over Italy, has offered the occasion for a deceiving and denigrating campaign.
The accusation of having formed a subversive association aiming at subverting the democratic order of the State exists only because it has been theorized by the investigators. The media have also played an important role in this context. Having repeated statements such as ‘anarchist cell’, ‘association’, ‘violent actions’ etc, something will remain in people’s minds, no matter what the conclusion of the trial is. This terrible way of speaking is still employed today and often ends up in total invention of news.
With fury and hysteria they have tried to silence anarchists and present them as monsters, as happens with all rebels. For this reason some of us have been held under arrest for almost two years, while the appeals that the prosecution incessantly presents against our release make our freedom a kind of lottery. Rules are mere instruments of interpretation: those who decide do not care about the individuals involved, individuals who in this case are aware of what they are and what they want. In fact, in spite of everything, anarchists have kept on defending their dignity and their ideas. Hence the fact that they are considered dangerous: in an era when dissent must be erased, this trial, like many others, is more than a trial against intentions, it is a trial against our convictions, desires, ways of being, thinking and acting.
Anarchists love freedom and are against any kind of prison, but they do not only say that. They express, demonstrate and practise that with their best weapon: solidarity. And it is also for this reason that they are considered dangerous. In a society where individuals are more and more isolated and where terror is inculcated in everyone’s mind, real solidarity, that which links people who do not know each other or that is the product of their common feelings, cannot be considered anything but dangerous. For this reason, even when protests are clearly social and derive from the awareness of the people promoting them, they are labelled as terrorism. Today it is sufficient to write on a wall to be considered a terrorist. Solidarity is suspicious to the inquisitors just as love and friendships are. Glaringly clear evidence of that is given by this court, where various witnesses for the prosecution have talked about relations, meetings, links and closeness between people. It is not specific crimes, therefore, that are being persecuted, but an idea and the individuals who hold it. It could be argued that the democratic State allows everybody to express their opinion in respect of personal rights and guarantees. Well, my arrest has been justified by the fact that in 2004 I sent emails in which I communicated the arrest of my partner.
I think that these miserable manoeuvres, which aim at humiliating and frightening us and making us renounce our lives, affections, past and future, demonstrate yet again the groundlessness of this theorem and their concern to keep it alive.
Another element that I consider even more damaging for my identity is the attempt to confine me in a rigid, closed organisation. This proves the inquisitors’ inability to understand a horizontal way of life that does not know hierarchies and is based on mutual respect; on the contrary they have individuated leaders and subjects among people who, like us, refuse these concepts. Moreover, as the prosecution records state, if you are a woman you can only be the fiancée or partner of the most influential male, or, according to occasional circumstances, his manipulator. That a man and woman have a horizontal relationship cannot be understood.
It is however important to talk about what is being discussed in this trial, that is to say the existence of a terrorist organisation. If we consider the classic definition of terrorism, ‘use of indiscriminate violence aimed at conquering, consolidating and defending political power’, we can well understand who the terrorists are and where they can be found. Imposition, authority and violence inflicted on harmless people are their instruments and their weapons. They declare and wage wars that kill millions of civilians and, by deception, present them as useful and necessary; they impose by strength infrastructures that devastate nature and the life of its inhabitants and take vital resources away from them. All these considerations are linked to another element of this trial: the criminalizing of the struggle against the detention centres for immigrants. Today they are called concentration camps even by the left that introduced them to Italy and intend to keep them there, whereas many individuals have been trying for a long time to unveil their real nature and affirm that, even if the media and the investigators still call them welcome centres, CPTs are prisons for foreigners whose only guilt is that they do not have regular documents and who, almost always, have escaped from wars, misery and catastrophe or are simply looking for better living conditions, and this search often costs them their life. If on the one hand there is the attempt to present all illegal immigrants as criminals and to hide the real nature of the places where they are imprisoned (of which the CPT in San Foca was an outstanding example), on the other there is the attempt to silence and isolate with all means necessary the anarchists who consider these places an intolerable reality. This has happened in Lecce, where, also thanks to the media, anarchists were called terrorists with the aim of frightening public opinion. This was not sufficient, so repression also struck anyone who demonstrated his/her solidarity to the accused anarchists so that that would be the end of them in Lecce.
Furthermore two places open to the public, where initiatives, concerts, discussions, social dinners have been held and books were at everybody’s disposal have been labelled as criminal dens. Relations between individuals have been presented as an organized group with a leader. Any action that took place in Lecce and surroundings has been attributed to these individuals, whereas phrases, quotations and opinions, have been rigorously quoted out of context, and their superficial and false interpretation have been used to insinuate vicious activity by these individuals. This method has constantly been used in this court, where the prosecution has systematically omitted everything that could be on the defendants’ side. This grotesque picture has been completed by the exasperating attention that the men in uniform have given to books, magazines, leaflets, posters and other material that has been around for years. I think that is why the inquisitors try to get rid of anarchists and give them so many years in prison as if it were nothing, simply because anarchists think and write too much.
In conclusion, I want to say that the repression hitting us is being inflicted day after day on the rebels and excluded of this wealthy society on the edge of the abyss, and that the lack of freedom inflicted on us during these months (isolation, deprivation of affection, morbid and obsessive control of our personal life), is also experienced, sometimes quite dramatically, by the millions of prisoners in Italy and all over the world and by the foreigners locked up in the CPTs, whereas a generalized delirium points at the question of security and conceals the widespread precariousness that is affecting more and more people. And it is exactly because I am a foreigner among the foreigners that I’d like to remember Vasile Costantin, a Rumanian who remained completely paralysed on August 10 2004 while attempting to escape the detention centre in San Foca. His story, like many others, testifies where the real violence is, a violence that takes life away from millions of individuals day after day. The management of this deprivation, which is propagandised as charity, but which is so false that it has been uncovered even by the magistrates, has often been justified by those in charge (such as in the case of Regina Pacis) as a simple and necessary execution of the law. The many escapes and revolts that have occurred in the CPTs, including the Regina Pacis, demonstrate better than anything else the reality of such places and what that law was and still is: the product of racism, exploitation and repression. After all, even the nazi camps were legal and so were the Italian racial laws, but they certainly were not legitimate.
With these words, I return the appellation of terrorist back to the sender.

Lecce, June 28 2007

Marina Ferrari

Statement to the court in Lecce

The arrest of five comrades in Lecce, which was carried out simultaneously with others all over Italy, has offered the occasion for a deceiving and denigrating campaign.
The accusation of having formed a subversive association aiming at subverting the democratic order of the State exists only because it has been theorized by the investigators. The media have also played an important role in this context. Having repeated statements such as ‘anarchist cell’, ‘association’, ‘violent actions’ etc, something will remain in people’s minds, no matter what the conclusion of the trial is. This terrible way of speaking is still employed today and often ends up in total invention of news.
With fury and hysteria they have tried to silence anarchists and present them as monsters, as happens with all rebels. For this reason some of us have been held under arrest for almost two years, while the appeals that the prosecution incessantly presents against our release make our freedom a kind of lottery. Rules are mere instruments of interpretation: those who decide do not care about the individuals involved, individuals who in this case are aware of what they are and what they want. In fact, in spite of everything, anarchists have kept on defending their dignity and their ideas. Hence the fact that they are considered dangerous: in an era when dissent must be erased, this trial, like many others, is more than a trial against intentions, it is a trial against our convictions, desires, ways of being, thinking and acting.
Anarchists love freedom and are against any kind of prison, but they do not only say that. They express, demonstrate and practise that with their best weapon: solidarity. And it is also for this reason that they are considered dangerous. In a society where individuals are more and more isolated and where terror is inculcated in everyone’s mind, real solidarity, that which links people who do not know each other or that is the product of their common feelings, cannot be considered anything but dangerous. For this reason, even when protests are clearly social and derive from the awareness of the people promoting them, they are labelled as terrorism. Today it is sufficient to write on a wall to be considered a terrorist. Solidarity is suspicious to the inquisitors just as love and friendships are. Glaringly clear evidence of that is given by this court, where various witnesses for the prosecution have talked about relations, meetings, links and closeness between people. It is not specific crimes, therefore, that are being persecuted, but an idea and the individuals who hold it. It could be argued that the democratic State allows everybody to express their opinion in respect of personal rights and guarantees. Well, my arrest has been justified by the fact that in 2004 I sent emails in which I communicated the arrest of my partner.
I think that these miserable manoeuvres, which aim at humiliating and frightening us and making us renounce our lives, affections, past and future, demonstrate yet again the groundlessness of this theorem and their concern to keep it alive.
Another element that I consider even more damaging for my identity is the attempt to confine me in a rigid, closed organisation. This proves the inquisitors’ inability to understand a horizontal way of life that does not know hierarchies and is based on mutual respect; on the contrary they have individuated leaders and subjects among people who, like us, refuse these concepts. Moreover, as the prosecution records state, if you are a woman you can only be the fiancée or partner of the most influential male, or, according to occasional circumstances, his manipulator. That a man and woman have a horizontal relationship cannot be understood.
It is however important to talk about what is being discussed in this trial, that is to say the existence of a terrorist organisation. If we consider the classic definition of terrorism, ‘use of indiscriminate violence aimed at conquering, consolidating and defending political power’, we can well understand who the terrorists are and where they can be found. Imposition, authority and violence inflicted on harmless people are their instruments and their weapons. They declare and wage wars that kill millions of civilians and, by deception, present them as useful and necessary; they impose by strength infrastructures that devastate nature and the life of its inhabitants and take vital resources away from them. All these considerations are linked to another element of this trial: the criminalizing of the struggle against the detention centres for immigrants. Today they are called concentration camps even by the left that introduced them to Italy and intend to keep them there, whereas many individuals have been trying for a long time to unveil their real nature and affirm that, even if the media and the investigators still call them welcome centres, CPTs are prisons for foreigners whose only guilt is that they do not have regular documents and who, almost always, have escaped from wars, misery and catastrophe or are simply looking for better living conditions, and this search often costs them their life. If on the one hand there is the attempt to present all illegal immigrants as criminals and to hide the real nature of the places where they are imprisoned (of which the CPT in San Foca was an outstanding example), on the other there is the attempt to silence and isolate with all means necessary the anarchists who consider these places an intolerable reality. This has happened in Lecce, where, also thanks to the media, anarchists were called terrorists with the aim of frightening public opinion. This was not sufficient, so repression also struck anyone who demonstrated his/her solidarity to the accused anarchists so that that would be the end of them in Lecce.
Furthermore two places open to the public, where initiatives, concerts, discussions, social dinners have been held and books were at everybody’s disposal have been labelled as criminal dens. Relations between individuals have been presented as an organized group with a leader. Any action that took place in Lecce and surroundings has been attributed to these individuals, whereas phrases, quotations and opinions, have been rigorously quoted out of context, and their superficial and false interpretation have been used to insinuate vicious activity by these individuals. This method has constantly been used in this court, where the prosecution has systematically omitted everything that could be on the defendants’ side. This grotesque picture has been completed by the exasperating attention that the men in uniform have given to books, magazines, leaflets, posters and other material that has been around for years. I think that is why the inquisitors try to get rid of anarchists and give them so many years in prison as if it were nothing, simply because anarchists think and write too much.
In conclusion, I want to say that the repression hitting us is being inflicted day after day on the rebels and excluded of this wealthy society on the edge of the abyss, and that the lack of freedom inflicted on us during these months (isolation, deprivation of affection, morbid and obsessive control of our personal life), is also experienced, sometimes quite dramatically, by the millions of prisoners in Italy and all over the world and by the foreigners locked up in the CPTs, whereas a generalized delirium points at the question of security and conceals the widespread precariousness that is affecting more and more people. And it is exactly because I am a foreigner among the foreigners that I’d like to remember Vasile Costantin, a Rumanian who remained completely paralysed on August 10 2004 while attempting to escape the detention centre in San Foca. His story, like many others, testifies where the real violence is, a violence that takes life away from millions of individuals day after day. The management of this deprivation, which is propagandised as charity, but which is so false that it has been uncovered even by the magistrates, has often been justified by those in charge (such as in the case of Regina Pacis) as a simple and necessary execution of the law. The many escapes and revolts that have occurred in the CPTs, including the Regina Pacis, demonstrate better than anything else the reality of such places and what that law was and still is: the product of racism, exploitation and repression. After all, even the nazi camps were legal and so were the Italian racial laws, but they certainly were not legitimate.
With these words, I return the appellation of terrorist back to the sender.

Lecce, June 28 2007

Marina Ferrari

Solidarity with the Lecce anarchists

On the appeal trial against the Lecce anarchists

So-called operation Nottetempo (Night Time) started in May 2005 with a massive police deployment that led to the arrests of 5 anarchists in the Lecce province (southern Italy) and to the investigation of another ten for conspiracy. The comrades had actually been actively engaged in the struggle against the Regina Pacis immigration detention centre of San Foca (Lecce) run by the clergy, which closed down before the beginning of the infamous operation Nottetempo. The tenacious struggle of the local anarchists, in fact, had unveiled the atrocities perpetrated in that prison for immigrants to such a point that the operators of the centre could no longer hide their ignominious activity. Some of them were even put on trial and eventually went abroad, where they carried on their dirty business and managed to repair their reputation.
On the contrary, two of the arrested anarchists spent two years in prison while the others were put under house arrest or subjected to various restrictions. The first grade of the trial concluded in July 2008: as it was impossible for the jury to confirm the existence of a subversive association (article 270bis on conspiracy), they turned to article 416 of the Italian penal code and accused four comrades of forming a ‘criminal association’ (organized crime). Three other comrades were accused of specific crimes and the other eight were acquitted.
Anxious about his career and longing for promotion, public prosecutor Lino Giorgio did not resign himself to the fact that his theory of an anarchist clandestine association had been rejected by the jury. For this reason, a few weeks later, he presented an appeal against this sentence in order for another jury to confirm the accusation of conspiracy against the Lecce anarchists.
The sentence of appeal was to be finally pronounced on February 10 2010, but it has once again been postponed following the decision of the jury to examine further ‘evidence’ provided by the public prosecutor. The intention to charge the anarchists
involved in this shameful story of repression with yet more serious charges is evident, and it is also clear how the local powerful are determined to silence the entire matter as well as the violence and the abuse inflicted on immigrants by the
operators of the Regina Pacis concentration camp. If the latter no longer exists, numerous others can be found all over Italy and everywhere else; but the struggle is also alive, the struggle of those who, inside and outside these concentration camps,
believe that the only fate of these places is that of being destroyed along with the fear, hatred, indifference and racism fomented by power in order to create terror and to stir up a war among the exploited.
Solidarity to the Lecce anarchists!
Destroy all prisons!

The Unwanted Children of Capital

The creation of the clandestine, the creation of the enemy

The welcome of a Lager
To call the detention camps for immigrants waiting for expulsion Lagers – centres introduced in Italy in 1998 by the left wing government by mean of the Turco-Napolitano law – is not rhetorical emphasis, as most of those who use this formula think. It is a strict definition. Nazi Lagers were concentration camps where people thought by the police to be dangerous for State security were locked up, even in the absence of criminally indictable behaviour. This precautionary measure – defined as ‘protective detention’ – consisted in taking all civil and political rights away from certain citizens. Whether they were refugees, Jewish, gypsy, homosexuals or subversives, it was up to the police, after months or years, to decide what to do about them. So Lagers were not jails in which to expiate some crime, nor an extension of criminal law. They were camps where the Rule set its exception; in short terms, a legal suspension of legality. Therefore a Lager is not a consequence of the number of internees or of the number of murders (between 1935 and 1937, before the start of Jewish deportations, in Germany internees numbered 7500), but rather of its political and juridical nature.
Immigrants nowadays end up in the Centres irrespective of possible crimes, without any criminal trial whatsoever: their internment, ordered by the police superintendents, are a simple police measure. Just as happened in 1940 under the Vichy government, when prefects could lock up all the individuals considered a ‘danger for national defence and public security’ or (mind this) ‘foreigners in respect to the national economy’. We can refer to administrative detention in French Algeria, to the South Africa of apartheid or to the present ghettos for Palestinians created by the State of Israel.
It is not a coincidence that, with regard to the infamous conditions of detention centres, the good democrats don’t appeal to the respect for any law at all, but to respect for human rights – the last mask in the face of women and men to whom nothing remains but belonging to the human species. It’s not possible to integrate them as citizens, so they are falsely integrated as Human Beings. The abstract equality of principles hides real inequalities everywhere.

If we take a few steps back, it will become clear that eradication is a crucial moment in the expansion of the State and capitalist domination. At its dawn, industrial production drew the exploited away from the country and villages to round them up in the city. The ancient skills of farm workers and artisans were thereby substituted with the forced and repetitive activity of the factory – an activity that was impossible, in its means and its finalities, for the new proletarians to control. So the first children of industrialization lost both their ancient spaces of life and their ancient knowledge, that which had allowed them to autonomously provide for the most part of their means of subsistence. On the other hand, forcing millions of men and women to similar living conditions (same places, same problems, same knowledge), capitalism unified their struggles, got them to find new brothers and sisters to fight against that same unbearable life. The 20th century marked the apex of this productive and State gathering, whose symbols had been the factory-neighbourhood and the Lager, and at the same time the apex of the more radical social struggles for its destruction. In the last twenty years, due to technological innovation, capital has substituted the old factory with new productive cores ever smaller and more widely distributed throughout the territory, also breaking up the fabric of the society within which those fights had grown, thereby creating a new eradication.
There’s more. Technological reorganisation has made trade faster and easier, opening the whole world to the most ferocious competition, overthrowing the economies and ways of life of entire Countries. So, in Africa, Asia, South America, there has been the closure of many factories and mass lay offs. Within a social context that has been destroyed by colonisation, by the deportation of inhabitants from their villages to the shantytowns, from their fields to the assembly lines, all this has produced a crowd of poor people who have become useless to their masters: the unwanted children of capitalism. Add to this the fall of the self-styled communist Countries and the debt racket initiated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and we will get quite a faithful cartography of migration and ethnical and religious wars.
What we now call ‘flexibility’ and ‘precariousness’ is the consequence of all this: further progress in the submission to machines, fiercer competition, a worsening of material conditions (trade, health, etcetera). We’ve seen the reason why: capitalism has dismantled the community that it created. Anyway it would be partial to see precariousness in an economic sense alone, as the lack of a steady work place and the old pride for professionalism. It is isolation inside standardisation, or a fanatical conformity with a lack of common spaces. In the distressing void of meaning and perspectives, the unfulfilled need of community returns, mystified, giving birth to new nationalistic, ethnical or religious counter-positions, a tragic re-proposition of collective identities exactly where any real communality among individuals has diminished. And it’s exactly within this void that the fundamentalist argument finds its place, a false promise of a redeemed community.

Civil war
All this leads to a scenario that is more and more that of an ongoing civil war, with no distinction between ‘time of peace’ and ‘time of war’. Conflicts are no longer declared – as the military intervention in the Balkans has shown –, but simply administrated to grant the establishment of the World Order. This endless fight goes through the entire society and the very individuals. Common spaces for dialogue and struggles are substituted by adherence to similar commercial models. The poor go to war against each other for a fashionable sweater or a hat, since the possession or not of particular goods creates the illusion of a social or clan-like hierarchy. Individuals feel more and more irrelevant, so ready to sacrifice themselves to the first nationalist blunderbuss or for whatever flag. Abused daily by the State, here they come zealously defending any piece of land (desolated and polluted, with factories and malls everywhere – is this the ‘land of the forefathers’?). Tied to that mirage of property that is left to them, they are scared to face themselves for what they really are: interchangeable gears of the Megamachine, in need of psychotropic drugs to get to the end of the day, always more envious towards anyone who even just looks happier than themselves. To an always colder, more abstract and more calculating rationality, correspond increasingly brutal and untold drives. So, what better than someone different by the colour of the skin or religion to throw their grudge upon? As a man from Mozambique said, ‘people have taken war inside them’. A few external conditions can be enough for all this to explode, just like in Bosnia. And these conditions are being carefully prepared. Ethnic particularism opposes itself to capital-ist Universalism in a tragic game of mirrors. Under institutional order, with increasingly anonymous and controlled places, the implosion of human relationships lies concealed. It all looks like the same quicksand from whence totalitarian man arose in the 30’s.

Two possible ways out
Why have we talked so much about immigration and racism, as we are not directly touched by problems of wandering and expulsion? Dictated by some of its peculiarities such as precariousness and the im-possibility to decide for the present, this same capitalism is joining our lives more and more: that’s why we feel like brothers, in deed, with all the exploited who land on the shores of this Country.
In the face of the despoliation of millions of individuals towards a commercial imperialism that is forcing everybody to dream the same lifeless dream, there can be no appeal to dialogue or to democratic integration. Whatever the legalistic anti-racists might say, it’s too late for hypocritical civic education classes. When the fields in which misery is confined – from the shantytowns of Caracas to the suburbs of Paris, from the Palestinian territories to centres and stadia where aliens are locked up – are growing everywhere; when the state of exception – or the juridical suspension of every right – becomes the rule; when millions of human beings are literally left rotting in the reserves of the capitalist heaven; when entire neighbourhoods are getting militarised and armed (Genova doesn’t tell you anything?), to merely talk about immigration becomes a despicable joke. There are only two ways out from these conditions of desperation and fear, from this planetary civil war: the fraticidal clash (religious and clannish in all its manifestations), or the social tempest of class war.
Racism is the grave of every exploited individual’s fight against the exploiters, it’s the last trick – the dirtiest – played by those who would like to see ourselves killing one another. It can only evaporate in moments of common revolt, when we recognise our real enemies – the exploiters and their servants – and we recognise ourselves as exploited individuals that no longer want to be so. The social fight that took place in Italy during the 60’s and 70’s – when young workers immigrated from the South met those in the North in the field of sabotage, wild strikes and absolute disloyalty to the firm – has shown. The disappearance of the revolutionary struggles after the 70’s (from Nicaragua to Italy, from Portugal to Germany, from Poland to Iran) has crumbled the foundation of concrete solidarity among the dis-possessed of the World. This solidarity will only be conquered again in the revolt, and not in the powerless words of the new Thirdworlders or the democratic anti-racists.
So, either religious and clannish massacre, or class war. And at the end of this we can only catch a glimpse of a world free from State and money in which there’ll be no need for money to live and no visa required to travel.

A machine that can be broken
A slogan in the 80’s said: ‘It’s not the noise of the boot that should scare us today, but the silence of the slipper’. Now they’re both coming back. With a holy war speech (the police as ‘army of good’ protecting citizens from the ‘army of evil’, as the Prime Minister said recently), day after day the State conceals its essence at the expense of immigrants. Their homes are devastated, aliens are rounded up in the streets, locked up in Lagers and expelled in total indifference. New detention camps are already under construction in many cities. The State wants to limit the number of visas according to the exact length of work contracts, blacklist all immigrants, make being clandestine a crime and re-inforce deportation. The democratic mechanism of rights and citizenship, wide as that might be, will always presuppose the existence of excluded people. To criticise and try to prevent expulsions signifies realising a critique of racism and nationalism in act; it means creating a common space for revolt against the capitalist uprooting that affects us all; it means obstructing a hateful and essential re-pressive mechanism; it means breaking the silence and indifference of the civilized ones who stand looking on; lastly, it means confronting the very concept of law with the principle ‘we are all aliens’. Finally, it signifies an attack on one of the pillars of the State and class society: competition between the poor and the in-creasingly seditious substitution of social war with ethnic or religious wars.
In order to function the expulsion framework requires the collaboration of many public and private structures (from the Red Cross which cooperates in the manage-ment of Lagers, to companies which supply services, to airline companies which deport aliens, to the airports that put up waiting zones, to self-styled charity asso-ciations that operate in collaboration with the police). All those responsible can easily be seen and attacked. From actions against detention camps (as happened a couple of years ago in Belgium and a few months ago in Australia, when demonstrations ended up with the liberation of some clandestine immigrants) to those against ‘waiting zones’ (as in France, against the Ibis hotels chain that supplies the police with rooms) or obstructing the flights of infamy (in Frankfurt, the sabotage of optic fibre cables some years ago put all the computers of an airport out of order for a couple of days), there are thousands of activities that a movement against expulsion can carry out.
Today like never before it’s in the street that it’s possible to rebuild class solidarity. Only in the complicity against police raids, in the struggle against the military occupation of neighbourhoods, in the firm rejection of every division that the masters of society want to impose on us (nationals and foreigners, legal immigrants and aliens), aware that every outrage suffered by any dispossessed on Earth is an outrage to everyone, will the exploited from a thousand countries be able to recognise themselves.