May14th in the morning the sentence was being pronounced in the court of Bolzano against 63 comrades accused of devastation and looting following a demo against borders that took place in Brenner on May 7th 2016, for whom prosecutors were asking for over 300 years’ prison. Meanwhile, a group of comrades went to Bologna station to the platform where an OBB train to Munich was about to leave and pass through the border where an anti-immigrant barrier was to have been erected in 2016 by the Italian and Austrian states. For months anyone on those trains who didn’t have a white face was subjected to police control.
Today a banner was unfurled on the platform along with a spoken intervention as leaflets were handed out to the passengers to remind them and everybody else that borders continue to kill and that those who are against them or try to cross them are harshly repressed.
SOLIDARITY WITH THOSE ON TRIAL FOLLOWING THE DEMO IN BRENNER!
Here is the leaflet distributed during the initiative:
AGAINST ALL BORDERS AND THEIR VIOLENCE!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE ACCUSED OF THE BRENNERO DEMONSTRATION
Today, May14th, the sentence will be pronounced in the court of Bolzano against 63 comrades accused of devastation and plunder following a demonstration against borders that took place in Brenner on May 7th 2016, for whom prosecutors have been asking for over 300 years’ prison Five years on the reasons that pushed us to come out into the streets are more valid than ever: people continue to die at the borders of fortress Europe (the latest massacre, with 120 people left to drown in the Mediterranean, was just a few weeks ago) and the condition of illegality that the State reserves for foreigners without documents has been extended to the whole of society with generalised militarization and control of all our movements justified by the Covid emergency. Not only, the accusation of devastation and looting is the weapon with which the State is responding to the strongest moments of struggle against the management of the emergency: the revolts in the prisons last March and the clashes against the imposition of the curfew in October.
EXTRACT OF A DECLARATION MADE TO THE COURT OF BOLZANO BY SOME OF THE ACCUSED ON SEPTEMBER 11 2020:
Every day the border system strangles thousands of people. What is happening between Syria and Turkey, Turkey and Greece, in the Aegean Archipelago, at the border between Bosnia and Croatia, in the detention camps in Lybia, in the Mediterranean, confirms that walls and hunting the poor are the face of the present time. While merchandise is travelling freely from one side of the planet to the other, human beings are mercilessly divided between those who can cross borders and those who can’t: between the drowned and saved, in the words of Primo Levi.
First an economic order – devastating in its logic of war and increasingly plunderer of raw materials, ecosystems and alimentary sufficiency – prepares the conditions for which millions of women and men are forced to abandon the country where they were born and grew up in; then the gigantic machinery of barbed wire, electronic surveillance and concentration camps pushes this ‘waste humanity’ to a terrible obstacle race; those who survive must be so exhausted and afraid as to accept any conditions of life and work in the country they land in. And precisely for this, finally, can become pointed at by institutional and social racism as a scapegoat to blame for anything.
When the Austrian State declared its intention to build an anti-immigrant barrier at Brennero at the end of 2015, the remonstrances of the Italian institutions only concerned the negative repercussions that the wall would have on their commerce. As emblem of a past that doesn’t pass, the press conference on the barrier was held directly by the Austrian police and was presented as a mere “technical solution” to border management. The expression alone was enough to make one’s blood boil. While the ballet of the crossed declarations between the Austrian government and the Italian one was taking place, the police controls on the train were done on Italian territory and the “technical solution” moved south. For months anyone not with a white face did not even manage to get on these trains, in Bolzano as in Verona. The border-system, moreover is a mobile contrivance, all one with the networks of the police and the centres of administrative detention. (And the fact that the same “technical solution” was adopted months ago to control and push back the drivers and passengers aimed for Austria positive to Covid-19 should make one think: the potential ‘infected’ were us).
For all these reasons some people have blocked the OBB trains more than once: for this in the demonstration in May 2016 many insisted on the concept “if people can’t pass, goods can’t pass either”: for this, discussions on how to subvert the management of that abomination called “technical solution”.
