Chapter 11 : Hands off the Immigrants! Solidarity is our Weapon!

HANDS OFF THE IMMIGRANTS! SOLIDARITY IS OUR WEAPON!

A brief communique about the situation of immigrants in Greece, the recent torture of Afghan refugees in Ag.Panteleimonas police station in Athens, and one view of the action of anarchists, antiauthoritarian and autonomous comrades who attacked the station.

The end of the Olympics and of the biggest part of the construction works means for the Greek state the beginning of a new period, where immigration policies are being redefined as long as large numbers of immigrants who were used as expendable slaves for the realization of the «grand idea»[1] are now considered useless. At the same time, a wider repressive attack against those who resist is in progress, in accordance with the global «anti»terrorist crusade of domination which includes the fortification of the borders to confront the waves of refugees deserting regions that have been turned into war-zones.

Today, an operation of «law and order» — as it was named by the minister of interior P.Pavlopoulos — is launched in order to reduce the number of immigrants, to register them and put them under control so that the interests of the bosses will be better served within an environment that is more convenient for them. An environment imposing suffocating terms of survival for the immigrants and making more effective the regulation of their movement from one country to another according to the needs of the market.

Practically this operation means that the forces of repression are intensifying the intimidation campaign and escalating the terrorism excercised on immigrants, and the Media are cultivating an atmosphere of defuzed nationalism-racism, in order to gain consent from parts of society.

This operation has many aspects, moments and tactics: The racist pogrom against Albanian immigrants by cops and fascist thugs of the state after a football match in the beginning of September.[2] Deportations taking place on a daily basis. Hundreds of deaths on the borders, either in minefields or shipwrecks. Numerous incidents where police guns are supposed to have «accidentaly» gone off and shot somebody in police blockades in the streets. Torture and humiliation suffered by immigrants inside police stations every day. Concentration camps. The cover up that all institutions of democracy offer to cops-pimps who rape immigrant women.[3]

One more moment of this campaign was the torture of dozens of Afghan refugees by the cops during the first days of December, first inside a house they live and then in Ag.Panteleimonas police station, where they were taken by force and tortured in order to give information about another Afghan immigrant who had previously escaped from that police station.

For days, people who could not defend themselves were chained and beaten in the cells of Panteleimonas station, suffered the torment of «phalanga» (repeated flogging of the soles of the feet until they bleed and swell), were forced to strip naked, children and juveniles threatened with rape unless they speak. Bruises and wounds on the abused bodies of people harassed and hunted, fear in the eyes of those experiencing State brutality on their skin.

Against the systematic violence of the State and the bosses, militants oppose tactics of social anti-violence strengthening the social-class struggle.

Among others, one important moment of this struggle was the demonstration of 150 enraged anarchists, antiauthoritarians and autonomous comrades on Friday 24/12/2004 from Ag.Paneleimonas square towards the police station, who attacked the station causing property damage to the building and to many police cars parked outside. It was an assault against a police station that had already been targetted in society after torture had been revealed, reminding us of Guantanamo and Abu Graib).

The forces of repression, after experiencing the outburst of social rage, arrested 18 persons. 17 were immediately released without any charges and one comrade, badly beaten by the cops who satisfied their vengeance on him, was finally accused. This comrade, N.M. who participated in the demonstration in solidarity with the immigrants refused all police charges. His arrest created a new wave of solidarity and on Wednesday 29/12 he was released on parole.

The attack against the Ag.Panteleimonas police station was an action of social justice. An action that has spread wider than the specific neighborhood the message that social and class solidarity among the oppressed finds its significance in the struggle against the domination of the state and capital, in the struggle against the brutality and the daily crimes of authority.

LET’S NOT LEAVE ANY CRIME OF THE STATE AND THE BOSSES UNANSWERED

LET’S OPPOSE SOCIAL ANTI-VIOLENCE TO THE VIOLENCE OF AUTHORITY

December 30, 2004

Open Assembly of anarchists -antiauthoritarians

The Trial

On July 12 2007 the sentences of the first grade of the Nottetempo trial were pronounced after almost two years imprisonment (preventive arrest) had been inflicted on Salvatore (who also spent a period in isolation in the Salerno prison), Saverio and Cristian. As it was impossible for the jury to confirm the accusation of subversive association (article 270bis) they turned to article 416 of the Italian penal code and accused four comrades (Salvatore, Saverio, Cristian and Marina) of forming a ‘criminal association’ and gave them from 1 to 5 years’ suspended sentence.

COMRADES’ DECLARATIONS

The arrest of five comrades in Lecce, which was carried out simultaneously with others all over Italy, offered the occasion for a deceptive and denigrating campaign.

The accusation of having formed a subversive association aiming at subverting the democratic order of the State only exists 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, as happens with all rebels, present them as monsters. That is why some of us have been held under arrest for almost two years, while the appeals that the prosecution incessantly presents against our release have turned 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 continued to defend 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 practice 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 don’t know each other or 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 labeled 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 friendship 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 maneuvers aimed 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 organization. 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 organization. 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 centers for immigrants. Today these 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 centers, 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 scaring the public. 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 labeled 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 Romanian who remained completely paralyzed on August 10 2004 while attempting to escape the detention center 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 propagandized 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.

Marina Ferrari

Lecce, June 28 2007

Finally there are situations when a passionate man must write. When the stage 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 to beyond 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.

First of all I return to the sender the epithet of ‘terrorist’ that has been used to define me since this story began, and also before, aimed at producing satisfactory public opinion, which ‘is made by idiots’, as Stendhal rightly said, and the persecution and repression that ensued; 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 favorite 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 practices.

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 distinction, if not subversive? All this is certainly subversive in a world where social relations are based on exploitation, plunder, 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 accused in this trial. As an anarchist, I have two fundamental principles: that of 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 it would be the organization that dominated 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, 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 concerning 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 carry out ‘proselytism’. This practice 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 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, 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 anesthesia as those we are living in, and it is for this reason that they scare.

This is the real point: what is on trial in this court exactly? Certainly not ‘crimes’, 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 in order to justify. No, it is not this. Here it is the Idea that is on trial, anarchist thought and practice. Nobody can believe in the old fable of the ‘State of Right’, also because, as Hobbes rightly says, ‘rights being equal, strength wins’.

It is therefore clear that the 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 for individuals desiring freedom, the destruction of all power and a dignified life for everybody to be 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 is also due to the politics of emergency that the State has adopted for a long time 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 affairs, and anarchists in particular.

Dozens of conspiracy court cases have been rigged against anarchists, most of which have fallen through. What the prosecution is trying to do 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 ideal place for such a precedent to 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 organizing themselves on a double level – one public and the other clandestine – and the intentionally distorted interpretation of one comrade’s words published in a number of books. There is, in fact, a repressive thread on a national level that 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 precisely books that were seized in the course of the searches carried out when we were arrested... It might be useful to remember 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 falsity 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 practice and practice 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 subjected, 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 that is so frightening, can be spread. After all, as the inquisitors have tried to stop me many times, they know perfectly well that I cannot stand the closedness of what they call ‘dens’, especially as the excluded to whom I address myself are not 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 for which I am on trial is exactly my radical opposition to these places.

I loudly claim my struggle against the detention centers for immigrants and against Regina Pacis in particular. It was an infamous place that was luckily closed down but whose corpse continues to spread a horrible stink 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 be totally razed to the ground so that not even the memory of their infamy will remain. Yes, for a few years there has been the custom to celebrate ‘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 ‘oblivion day’, the total destruction of all concentration camps. And I want to point out that I do not use the word ‘concentration camp’ as rhetoric or because it has become fashionable among left-wing politicians who created the modern 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 laborers, who can be blackmailed more easily, are selected from. It is in fact important to remember that the exploitation of this kind of laborer is very important to capital.

The last thing that I would like to say concerns the particular time in which 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 distract public attention from these episodes that uncovered the true nature of that CPT and opened a crack in the wall that I had been trying to open myself for years so that everybody could see through it. It was at this point that attention had to be deviated and diverted and focused on the worst enemies of the State. That does not surprise me: it is one arm of the State that goes to secure its other arm. There is a popular saying that sums up the concept: ‘one hands washes the other and both hands wash the face’.

During the time I was detained I was able to personally experience the fury that the State has towards words, against which it has waged a war, as also proved by years of phone tapping and bugging used against me and by the great quantity of papers confiscated from my house. It is hatred towards all the aspects of the word: the written and spoken word and therefore, basically, 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 just a question of auxiliary verbs substituting each other.

I was able to see that when censorship went for my letters and books when I was in prison (and still does). The inner meaning of the matter can be found in one single sentence that was repeated many times by a prison officer who, when I insisted on having books that had been witheld for two months by the censors, used to say; ‘You read too much!’.

This short phrase is very significant and sums up 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 future I find myself on this side or that of the bars of this open prison called society, because I am convinced that in the court justice is not administrated but rather that vengeance is executed.

Unless you agree with Dostoevskji, who wrote: ‘When they became criminals they invented 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 say.

Lecce, June 28 2007

Salvatore Signore

There are two fundamental reasons for which I am sitting in this court as a defendant, the only role that, against my will, I could ever 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 meters, that three people shared twenty hours a day, then house arrest where the bars 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 colors, 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 centers 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 centers 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 laborers, 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 centers’ 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 center of San Foca was a theater 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!

Cristian Paladini

LECCE, June 28 2007