Trento, Italy: Our comrades

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10/02/2019

It’s Tuesday 7th February, 4:40 am and it’s still dark. In via Alessandria, in Turin, where Asilo Occupato has existed for 24 years, dozens of plain clothes police storm the place. In a few minutes the road fills up with police vans and cars, the carabinieri in antiriot gear, the finance police. Submachine guns in hand, they immediately make their intentions clear:  besides the eviction of the Asilo, yet another repressive operation is underway. Seven arrest warrants with charges of subversive association (article 270bis), while the investigation involves about thirty comrades.

It’s not surprising, given the times, that the operation is set up against those who for years have been struggling against prisons for migrants (previously known as CIEs, now as CPRs) and against State deportations, and have denounced the complicity of those who collaborate with the hell that is defined ‘migrants’ welcome’. Having been repeatedly requested by 5-star movement mayor Appendino, the eviction and the investigation are being carefully followed directly by the Minister of the Interior, who with his remark: ‘Vandals arrested in Turin: from words to deeds’ makes it understood that this is no ordinary operation.

For us it couldn’t be more clear. As the wars waged by governments and flag companies for the plunder of Africa are continuing to devastate entire countries causing the flight of thousands of people, the dead in the Mediterranean are by now countless, as are those on the borders of Europe. Those who get over are locked up, deported, killed. In the meantime racist propaganda and practices are becoming ever more explicit: the Minister of the Interior applauds police murders, and those who are struck are those who have always struggled, those who have never stopped dreaming of freedom, those who understand that there’s no correspondence between just and legal.

But there’s more. In that place, many of us have spent unforgettable moments. Debates, struggle, blood and sweat. We have all been through these rooms in those 24 years, at initiatives, events, setting up of barricades; and what makes these walls unassailable, however defeated they might be by sad individuals in uniform, is the relation that unites us and will continue to do outside, a relation of solidarity, love and anger against a world that’s all to be changed. For we can only be on the side of those who struggle against all sorts of jail, deportations and exploitation. For in the hands and intentions of those who decide to struggle there’s the one and only real choice of our time. The lives of thousands of people, as well as our own, are determined by what we do or don’t do. Which Baleno and Sole knew very well before they were killed by the State.

There are those who cry scandal, who only just seem to have discovered the racism of State now; those who for years have pretended not to see the over a million people locked up in concentration camps in Libya built up by Minniti (former centre-left minister), face-to-face controls, police beatings, evictions, raids, deportations.

Then there are those who, alone or in the streets and along pathways, have always seen the State’s violence and have never forgotten it. And even if they know the price of the struggle, they carry in their hearts the determination that can overcome the fear of facing such a price. That’s why they never gave up. That’s why it’s us who say ‘from words to deeds’. That’s why those struck by the State in Turin are our comrades.

Anarchists from Trento and Rovereto

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Translated by act for freedom now!

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