Lecce Defendants Update

July 7, 2007 ELP

As a lot of people receiving this e-mail will be aware, a couple of
years ago, in May 2005, a number of anarchists from Lecce where
arrested accused of terrorism (initially five people were arrested
but then others were dragged into the investigation as the police
investigation continued).

The charges against the defendants relate to alleged activity which
included damaging petrol pumps at a petrol station in protest at the
war in Iraq; targetting a multinational company in support with the
Mapuche people in Chile; and targetting a bank in support of people
held at an immigration centre (the bank has links to the immigration
centre).

The Lecce Defendants trial is on-going but we've just received the
following news which includes:

1) An update from the trial
2) A statement by Marina Ferrari
3) A statement by Salvatore Signore
4) A statement by Cristian Paladini

ELP supports the Lecce Defendants and we encourage everyone to help
spread the word about their trial.

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Update Nottetempo

During the hearing held on June 28 the public prosecutor summed up
and expressed his requests for sentences. He spoke for nearly five
hours and exposed the ‘theories’ and ‘strategies’ according to which,
in his opinion, the defendants had drawn ‘inspiration’. He also read
out extracts from the introductions of a number of anarchist books.
He then talked about the anarchist ‘organisation’ to which the
defendants would belong and tried to prove his statements by citing
relations of friendship and meetings between the Salento anarchists
and comrades from other parts of Italy. He also mentioned a few books
– one in particular - in which he would have found ‘strategies’ aimed
at subverting the democratic order of the State. As far as is known
he is the only one who has individuated such strategies in that book,
assuming that he has ever read it! Finally he went along with the
‘spiral of hate, violence and intimidation’ that would have struck
Salento from 2002 to 2005 and mentioned for the nth time all the
actions that he tried to attribute to the Lecce anarchists. He did
his best to impress the jury but, being quite dull, he did not seem
to be very successful.

Francesca Conte, the lawyer for the plaintiff, was on the contrary
much more theatrical. She defended priest Cesare Lodeserto and the
doctors of the Regina Pacis camp, Anna Katia Cazzato and Giovanni
Ruberti, who sued for damages in this court case. As for doctor
Cazzato, her lawyer stated that her health is in a precarious
condition and she is compelled to take psychotropic drugs following
the threatening telephone calls that she would have received!

Before the public prosecutor’s speech, three comrades read out their
declarations, which are enclosed.

These are the requests for sentencing:
9 years imprisonment and 3000 euros fine for one comrade;
7 years imprisonment and 500 euros fine for another two comrades;
6 years and 250 euros for three comrades;
5 years and 6 months imprisonment and 100 euros fine for another six comrades.
The prosecutor also asked one year and a half imprisonment for
another comrade and two months’ imprisonment for another two, all of
them accused of specific offences and not of conspiracy.

++++++++++++++


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

+++++++++++++

‘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

+++++++++++++++


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 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
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

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Bristish Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network
BM Box 2407
London
WC1N 3XX
England
www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk