INTRODUCTION

What is a CPT (the Italian for immigration detention center)? It is a place where the Italian State locks up all immigrants (children, women and men) who do not have stay permits. It is a modern concentration camp where undesirables are confined before being deported.

Immigration detention centers exist all over fortress Europe, as the bosses establish that only certain immigrants are allowed to stay; the others, those whose face doesn’t fit and cannot be exploited as cheap labor, are locked up in prisons especially created for them and held until they are deported. They are ‘guilty’ of coming from lands where mere surviving is impossible, owing to famine and war, desertification and ecological disasters, industrial reorganization and mass dismissal.

To imprison people escaping from devastated countries is an infamy, regardless of the treatment the prisoners are given. The latter, however, is far from being respectful of so-called ‘human rights’; hence the many protests organized by associations and even leftist political party members, which started showing their dissent only when the infamy became too obvious. After all, the CPTs were introduced in Italy by a leftwing government and were initially supported by many of those who now express their pacific indignation towards them.

On the contrary, angry protesters, disgusted by the fact that human beings are imprisoned simply because they are foreigners, poor and without the right documents, have been struggling fiercely against the CPTs since their introduction in 1998.

This struggle led to the arrest of five anarchists in Lecce, southern Italy, in May 2005. They had chosen not to delegate their protest to any expert or politician, on the contrary they had gone outside the local immigration concentration camp (the Regina Pacis in San Foca) thousands of times and shouted their solidarity to the imprisoned immigrants, openly denounced those responsible for the detention center, where the prisoners were inflicted all kinds of abuse and violence, and had declared their hatred towards racism and confinement, exploitation and the exclusion of the poor. The detention center in San Foca was closed down after the director was charged with private violence and embezzlement, but two of our comrades are still in jail and another two are under house arrest.

This pamphlet presents a few contributions concerning the struggle against the CPTs in Italy and actions carried out in other countries in solidarity with imprisoned immigrants and with the anarchists arrested in Lecce.

‘To the Immigrants’, which introduces the discussion, offers an insight into the question of immigration, the concept of ‘illegal immigrant’ (or ‘clandestine’, as they say in Italy), the creation of the immigration detention centers and the possible way of arriving at the destruction of both these hideous prisons and the machinery of expulsion.

If on the one hand immigration detention centers are the products of this society-prison where social control has penetrated all aspects of our life and where entire masses of poor have become useless to the bosses, on the other hand the responsibilities for the immigration centers are quite concrete and specific and we do not intend to turn a blind eye to them. We do not want these centers to be more human and respectful of rights and laws. We want them to be razed to the ground, and that’s that.

FREE SALVATORE, SAVERIO, CRISTIAN, MARINA

FREE ALL IMMIGRANTS

NO BORDERS, NO PRISONS

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