Sentence of the Nottetempo appeal trial italy (9th December 2010)

On the appeal trial against the Lecce anarchists for so-called operation Nottetempo

As usually goes with the justice of the system, things turned badly for the comrades on trial: not only have some of the requests of the public prosecutor been accepted but those who had been acquitted in the first grade of the trial have also been charged.

The story is by now well known. Operation Nottetempo started in May 2005 when searches were carried out all over Italy and five comrades from Lecce were arrested and detained for almost two years in preventive arrest. The main reason for this judicial operation against anarchists was the tenacious struggle the comrades had undertaken against the notorious detention centre for immigrants Regina Pacis (which eventually closed down also thanks to that struggle), run by the church and situated in Salento (Lecce), the southernmost area of the Puglia region (southern Italy).

After a long series of hearings during which various squalid witnesses for the prosecutions gave vent to delirious declarations, the thesis that the comrades were part of a subversive association with the aim of terrorism had been rejected. However, due to strong pressures from the powerful local clergy and their political allies, four of the twelve accused had been charged with organised crime, two with specific crimes and the others had been acquitted. Unsatisfied with this result, which was insane in any case, public prosecutor Lino Giorgio Bruno presented a request for appeal as it was his intent to have the Lecce anarchists sentenced to subversive association. After all, it was the career of this ignominious servant of power that was at stake. He hoped he would become famous as the magistrate who finally managed to have anarchists condemned according to article 270 bis of the Italian penal code (subversive association with the aim of terrorism), a task many of his Italian colleagues had failed on numerous previous occasions.

Therefore, after a few years of postponements, the court of appeal has finally come to a new staggering conclusion: all the twelve anarchists originally accused have been sentenced to article 270 (without bis), i.e. subversive association without aim of terrorism. The heaviest charges have been inflicted to the four comrades condemned in the first grade, with one of them considered as the founder of the “association”, while the other two charged on that occasion have seen their sentence increased and the acquitted in the first trial have been given sentences ranging from one year to one year and eight months imprisonment. The court has also decided that all the accused are guilty of having instigated the imprisoned immigrants of Regina Pacis to committing crime, referring to two episodes when the immigrants had revolted and some had attempted to escape. It is therefore crystal clear that the real goal of this court is to condemn the struggle against Regina Pacis and, to a larger extent, any other struggle of this kind.

Waiting for the comrades involved to give us further details, we can just express our total disgust at this miserable public prosecutor, his repugnant associates in the local political scene and the shameful clergymen of Lecce.

It won’t be a court or any other servant of power to stop the exploited from revolting.

Fire to all prisons!!!

An accomplice of the accused anarchists

SOLIDARITY ACTION IN ROVERETO AND BOLOGNA ITALY

Rovereto – Cash machines damaged and daubed.

Source: L’Adige 19/11/2010

Unknown people have daubed and damaged some cash machines in Rovereto. According to the investigators, the action is to be attributed to people of the anarchist-insurrectionist area.

The group has hit at Unicredit on piazza Leoni, BNL on via Dante and BTB on piazza Nazario Sauro by spoiling the machines with greasy liquid.

Slogans have been spray painted against the centres of identification and deportation for immigrants and the financing of Italian military missions abroad.

Police and carabinieri have started investigating.

Translated from informa-azione.info 

Bologna – Hydrants against prisoners in the immigration detention centre (CIE)

From noinonsiamocomplici.noblogs.org

In the afternoon of 21st November a demo was being held outside the Cie of via Mattei in Bologna in solidarity with the migrants locked up there. As in many other similar occasions, the demonstrators tried to communicate with the prisoners with loud speakers. This time, however, around 5:30pm, police, carabinieri and the army deployed outside and inside the centre, started using hydrants in order to push back migrants who were approaching the gates to communicate with the demonstrators. Hydrants were also fired against demonstrators. The centre was inundated with water. Later the migrants have declared that, in spite of the fact they don’t have any dry clothes, they were happy with the solidarity, the shouting and the slogans they managed to hear.

This nth intimidation is perfectly in line with the infamous deportations of the last days and with the repression of the recent struggle of immigrants in Brescia.

Meantime escapes and revolts in immigration centres do not stop: Milan, Gradisca, Bari, Modena…

On the towers, on the cranes and in the streets the struggle of the oppressed does not stop!

Translated from informa-azione.info.

Riot police violently attack migrants after tonight’s anti-fascist demonstration – photos athens

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Photos from Athens IMC. The attack happened a bit after the main anti-fascist demonstration tonight, launched by the riot police against a group of migrants who went on marching after the main demonstration had ended.
 

 Friday, October 8, 2010

Today, we’ve won a huge bet. Responding to a call for an antifascist demo in Attikis square, more than 1,000 migrants and locals marched together through the streets of an area often marked by fascist attacks, pogroms on the squares, police violence and so much more. Today was a very important day; the first, most probably, where local anti-fascists and (many undocumented) migrants march together, side-by-side. The people in today’s demonstration sensed this; the atmosphere as we were passing through the streets of neighbourhood is difficult to describe.
It is important to keep this momentum, to make sure that the fascist gangs (which didn’t dare make an appearance today) stay well hidden off the streets. Attica square, and the entire area just north of the Athenian centre, is a very volatile area in the past few months and years.

 

The Battle For Attica square – athens Greece

www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures#p/c/1/gPl9PW7ONIQ

Posted by clandestinenglish on 6 October 2010

It’s the first time that an EU country has seen its treatment of refugees described as a humanitarian crisis by the UNHCR. This report gets to the heart of the escalating tensions in Greece.
“I’ve seen too many. They cross the river like bees”, sighs a local fisherman. With as many as 400 people crossing the Evros river each day, arrests of illegal immigrants in Greece have exploded from 3,500 to 20,000 in a year. Most choose to turn themselves in, but they have no idea what awaits them. Infested with rats, Greece’s detention centres are now critically overcrowded. Those who try to avoid this fate end up on the streets, such as in Attica Square, home to hundreds of Afghan refugees. With no government support, crime is rife here, and as frustration builds, racial attacks by local vigilantes are escalating beyond control. Ghulam’s family sleep on a bench in the square – his four-year-old son was recently attacked in the middle of the night. “If I’d stayed in Afghanistan I might have been beaten, but they would have at least spared my children. I cannot believe this is Europe.”

---

Bruxelles – Action against the Italian embassy

Today at 19.00 loads of shit where thrown against the Italian Embassy.
With this symbolical act, we wanted to denounce the murder Italian migration policy. Return agreements with Libya, racist laws, state violence against migrants, infernal detention centers make this country one of the most shameful example of the murder European anti migration policy, carried on with thousand of people drown in the Mediterranean sea, with people tortured in Libyan jails, with rapes and savage violence against detained migrants.
We prefer having the hands dirty of shit than of blood….
NO BORDER NO NATION STOP DEPORTATION!
x bxl.indymedia.org, 01.10.10

Some unreported news from Bulgaria - Summer 2010

25 Септември 2010

03.06.2010 - Jewelry shop in Sofia was robbed by only one man. He made it not in the night but in a bright day. How can one guess it is so easy to rob a jewelry shop, lol ?

30.08.2010, Sofia - A roma man (gypsy) managed to hit a policeman with a brick.

Political party "Ataka" (Attack) is the biggest right-wing party in Bulgaria. It is in the bulgarian parliament and in european parliament too and a lot of its younger members are fascists. But there are some resistance against them as well.

28.08.2010 in city of Varna, an office of the party "Ataka" was robbed.

07.09.2010 in city of Burgas, a shop belonging to "Ataka" was set on fire.

But fascism and fascists are on high rise in Bulgaria. On 06.06.2010 fascists beat down some left activists. Some fascists were arrested but latter released and it looks they will not be send in court. Same fascists organized a demonstration against roma people. Others right-wing nuts and priests organized demonstration demanding christianity to return to class rooms. WTF ?! This is not Talibania, this is Bulgaria and religion should stay away from school.

18.09.2010 Fortunately there was a pro-roma protest too. After France deported some roma people back to Bulgaria, some people organized this protest - a lot of ethnic bulgarians supported roma people too.

“Welcome to Europe”

Announcement

This is the name of the organization which discovered and exposed the field with the mass graves of drowned refugees on the border of  Evros. There’s no meaning in numbers and statistics, any more. Important are the coherences and thoughts that the images bring to those who are yet not dehumanized. The image of a shoddy metal sign, riddled by gun-shots in front of a field with fresh popped pits. “Cemetery,” is indicated, “of illegal immigrants” …
We know, of course, that a daily war is going on across the border of Evros, and its victims [we talk about dead people] are always the refugees. But it’s even shocking to know that the dead refugees are dumped into pits in the fields. Contextually are coming to mind images in black and white of war and mass killings, pictures of holocaust, with bulldozers piled up in ditches piles of corpses. Is this an exaggeration? But yet … The proportions that make the association inevitable is tolerance, indifference and complicity of those societies which are responsible for massacre.
Exaggeration? What the hell… Let’s we all learn to listen and then everyone should take responsibility for the tolerance, the indifference, and the complicity. Each year hundreds or thousands of people are killed around the -so called “civilized” western world- Europe ‘s external and internal (sea ports, detention camps) borders. The mass slaughter is taking place at our next door, as corpses are washed up on beaches where the western tourists are having their holiday, on beaches where the greek fishermen are fishing. Tragically, this mass slaughter on the borders is only the last act of the drama for the refugees who escaped from countries that have been devastated by western colonization, the IMF, dictatorships and tyrannies – servile to western interests. From countries which lack rudimentary infrastructure for the reasons above, and on the first heavy rainstorm or on a usual earthquake are measuring carnage victims. From the countries ravaged by wars for oil, diamonds, by wars of the western capital, by wars with the participation of the greek state for the sake of the greek capital.
After all these, at least let us demand from this state to bury the people who were killed in its frond door – bury them like humans and not like dogs. As a society we also have to demand stopping the institutional reproduction of this humiliating designation “illegal” for those people who were lucky enough to survive and cross that door.

Sydney Anarchists

On Monday 20/9/2010 11 prisoners at the Immigrant Detention Centre at Villawood occupied the roof of the prison, with many more on hunger strike. One of the prisoners jumped off the roof committing suicide to protest their deportation. The others on the roof threatened to also jump by 5.00pm Tuesday unless their demands were met.

Yesterday afternoon (Tuesday 21/9/2010) a group occupied the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIC) and locked themselves inside. This action was undertaken with the direct purpose that it could affect the outcome of the protest taken by detainees at Villawood who were saying they would be forced to jump from the roof if no-one from DIC would speak to them regarding their cases. By occupying and refusing to leave the DIC office we intended to apply some more force upon these faceless officials to actually respond to the desperation of those occupying the roof.
The action was also taken because it had become clear that the militancy of those incarcerated within these detention centers was far outstripping that of anyone outside. We hoped to raise the level of solidarity with those inside beyond passively pleading to some higher authority to be 'more humane'.
After gaining entry and occupying, the group asserted they would not leave until things were sorted out on the roof at Villawood. All the while, we were in contact with those on the roof at Villawood, expressing our solidarity and finding out how they thought negotiations were going. By the time police rescue arrived to cut free those locked on at DIC it was becoming clear that there was a chance of a resolution out at Villawood that was at least satisfactory enough to make the detainees on the roof not jump off.
2 of the comrades inside DIC were arrested and held for a number of hours and charged with trespass. A number of people gathered outside the police station in solidarity where those arrested were being held, demanding their release. Due to further police provocation and harassment another comrade was arrested outside and charged with trespass. The 3 were released after 7 hours.
It is also worth pointing out there were 2 other equally significant actions undertaken in solidarity with those on the roof today. One involved a few hundred people heading out to Villawood so that they could be visible and heard by detainees in a strong and direct show of support. The other was the occupation of Newtown square by 30 or so people who hung banners and handed out flyers during peak hour.
In solidarity with all those incarcerated in prisons, detention centers or whatever name they are given we shout...
THE PASSION FOR FREEDOM IS STRONGER THAN PRISON

Mass breakout of asylum-seekers in Australia

 1 September 2010

It has been reported that 60-70 Afghani men have escaped from the refugee and asylum- seekers' detention centre in Darwin today, Wed 1st September. The men, the majority of whom are asylum-seekers whose request for refugee status has been declined, are holding a 'sit in' alongside the Stuart Highway, with banners that read "Please help us", "Show us mercy", and "We are homeless, defenseless and we seek protection".
Some of the men have informed the media that if they return to Afghanistan they will be killed. "If I go back, they will cut off my head," said Kazemi Syed Zulfiger.
The peaceful protest comes just days after 100 accused people smugglers rioted in the centre, lighting fires and smashing windows. Ian Rintoul, from the Refugee Action Coalition, explains that the rioters are impoverished fishermen who have been manipulated by criminal gangs and should simply be sent home.

ROMA - Europe 1942 - 2010

French police evacuate a Roma family from a camp near Lille last month. In a speech French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that he had asked the interior minister to "put an end to the wild squatting and camping of the Roma." 

This picture from July 30, 1942 shows a concentration camp prisoner, Hans Bonarewitz, being accompanied to his execution by the camp band at the Mauthausen camp in Austria. Nobody knows exactly how many Roma died during Nazi times. Numbers range from a firm 90,000 to as many as an estimated half a million.

In Norway, in a refugee camp rolled riot

Thu, 08/07/2010 - 15:14 — editor Tuesday night at the camp on fire for illegal migrants in the city of Lier province Buskerud in Norway. It was informed by the police department Buskerud province. Burned down three buildings where foreigners were living with their families, before obtaining the waiver of the Norwegian authorities the right to stay in the country. This is one of the two refugee camps, where riots broke out on Tuesday. Protesting against the decision of the Norwegian authorities to expel them from the country, refugees staged riots, first in Tuesday night at the camp Fagerli (some 50 km north of Oslo), where 90 people. About an hour later unrest spread to another refugee camp near the town of Lier, where there were 140 people, mostly immigrants from African and Arab countries, among them women and children. They beat the windows, set fire to garbage containers, and then began to break into the building, where lived. After the refusal of asylum, all refugees are illegal immigrants and should be deported outside the kingdom. And according to initial estimates of the authorities, the refugee camp in the town of Lier suffered less - as expected due to location are women and children.Despite the fact that by Tuesday morning, the police took control of the situation in both camps, on Wednesday night riots continued. One of these centers because of the damage recognized as a national UDI uninhabitable.

NEWS FOR IMMIGRANTS GREECE.

WORKING AND LIVING BY THE SWEAT OF OUR BROW!


We sell things on the street because we don’t have an alternative way of making a living.
No work is refused in order for us to make a living.
These people that you see on the street , these people that you keep harassing, are people who are familiar with most trades and professions.
Even though we are only vagrant street vendors, we are the ones paying for the houses that were had locked up for a long time, houses crying for a human presence.
A house can’t live by itself. It needs souls, it needs lives.
Water, power, telephone, means of transport and everything else we need to live are not for free.
You will never see one of us involved in affairs of the night and the underworld.
We are honest people, very sociable and open to everyone and everything.
We have obligations, but we also have rights.
We are only asking for understanding and tolerance.
Immigrant street vendors

Death toll rises at the greek borders
Nine immigrants were found dead in the last 48 hours at the greek-turkish borders, near the Evros river – two more were found dead on Saturday 26th June.
The number of immigrants that died in June in the Evros river remains unknown as more dead immigrants were discovered on June 8. Three more were found dead on May 27.
On the 16th of June, a 19-year-old Afghan refugee was found dead, hidden in the fuel tank of a truck, inside the ferry “OLYMPIC CHAMPION”, traveling from Patras to Venice.

Meanwhile in Athens
Attacks by fascist groups aligned with shopowners against immigrant street vendors on central streets have not ceased. But neither will actions of solidarity to immigrants:
Below is a leaflet that was distributed during a gathering outside Athens Chamber of Commerce

Migrants die crossing river northen greece 30/6

Authorities in the northern port of Alexandroupoli said yesterday that they had recovered the bodies of 11 drowned immigrants from the banks of the Evros River since Saturday.

The bodies were discovered by local fishermen who reported the gruesome finds to police. The migrants, believed to have been of African origin and aged between 20 and 25, appear to have drowned in their attempt to cross the river from neighboring Turkey in flimsy rowboats. The director of the Alexandroupoli general hospital, Nikos Raptopoulos, reported a sharp increase in the deaths of would-be migrants seeking to enter Greece illegally, noting that drownings had become “virtually a daily phenomenon.”

Raptopoulos said that the city’s morgue was full, currently accommodating the corpses of 17 migrants. According to migrants’ associations, hundreds of would-be immigrants have drowned in their attempt to cross the Evros River in recent years.

On immigration and the Crisis in Greece: Four points

on 13 June 2010

1. For some, the crisis did not start two years ago.

From the Structural Adjustment Programs in Africa and Latin America in the 1980s, to the neo-liberal looting in the countries of the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s, crisis and migration have been twin concepts.
For three decades neo-liberalism has been engineering a weakened and destabilized workforce. Capital prefers migrants because they are powerless, unorganized, badly paid workers for whom there is no need for safety in the workplace, nor for health insurance and pensions. In other words, they are much cheaper and make no demands. It has been estimated that in 2009, 3% of the world population, 200 million people, lived outside the country they were born in.

2. Immigrants, the last vestige of the welfare state

Not only do immigrants offer cheap labor, they also have absolutely no participation in the creation of the present economic crisis in Greece. Quite the contrary: They are the social security system’s last gasp:
The State uses the immigrants’ (obligatory) contributions in order to support its health insurance and pension funds. Most immigrants will never benefit from the pension funds they are helping rescue, since in Greece you do not get compensation for retirement unless you have worked for a minimum of 40 years.
The vast majority of migrants are of productive age. If they weren’t here, the balance-of-payments deficit of insurance funds between those who work and those who retire would be even greater than it already is. Even the income from taxation would be drastically reduced, since, as State sources openly acknowledge, “immigrants are much more consistent than the Greeks in fulfilling their tax obligations.”
Migrant women, in whose hands now lies the main responsibility for the care of children and the elderly, are saving the State millions of euros in public care services, such as daycare and childcare centres, public health institutions and old people’s homes.

The public health system further profits from the devalued labor of immigrants in the cleaning sector: Public and private buildings, ministries and hospitals, airports and trains, offices and homes are being cleaned largely by immigrant cleaners, who are subcontracted on utterly exploitative terms for the workers by intermediate private rent companies.

3. The money isn’t enough anymore, what’ll happen with those immigrants?

“The crisis is driving the immigrants away”, the media announce repeatedly. It is true that the first people affected by the crisis are the legal immigrants. The residence permit in Greece depends on the work permit, so legal immigrants are trapped in the legal vicious circle of blackmail – if you don’t have work, you cannot stay legally, yet if you have no residence permit, you cannot find work.

Unemployment is expected to skyrocket in a few months. Hundreds of thousands of migrants, especially from Albania, who experienced the brutality of “Greek hospitality” during the first years of working here, and gradually found themselves with children and certain consumer privileges in a state of semi-legality, are now confronted with a terrible dilemma.
Those who have children are bound to stay. This is where the new citizenship bill comes in. The fee for applying for citizenship is 700 euro – multiply that by half a million legal immigrants…
The strategic goal of Greek capital has been to keep hundreds of thousands of migrants in a state of semi-legality as cheap and easily manipulable labor.
On the other hand, the illegal migrants, the sans-papiers, cannot leave. Lacking official documents, they are trapped both in the “country of first entry into the EU” according to the Dublin II convention, and also within the unofficial and undeclared labor market. The dogma of zero-tolerance further narrows margins for resistance – let us remember the sudden drastic devaluation of the Egyptian fishermen’s work, or the ongoing slave-labor conditions of Bangladeshi strawberry pickers in Manolada in the Peloponnese. Things can always get worse…

4. The crisis of solidarity (the summer of 2009 was only the beginning)

The level of workers’ rights is regressing to where it was decades ago… That’s plain to see. Yet wasn’t it already the acceptance, over the last years, of concentration camps for the victims of global order that turned the clock back to the fascist regimes of the interwar period? What crisis is greater than the moral degradation of society? And it doesn’t seem to pay off either: When you nod affirmatively to the bosses in their war against the weak, it doesn’t mean the boss owes you anything in return. We devalued refugees and migrant workers, believing this would never happen to us. Yet it is now a fact: As long as solidarity does not prevail, everyone’s rights will spiral downwards, towards the lowest common denominator…

“…exploiting the immigrants for twenty years
now its your turn to taste some of their agony and fears…”

Dead migrant Greece

The body of a young man believed to be an African migrant was recovered yesterday from the River Evros, police in Orestiada, northern Greece, said. The man is thought to have been one of a group of migrants who drowned at the end of last month while trying to enter Greece via the Evros from Turkey. Police found the bodies of two Somalis and a Tunisian man, all aged between 20 and 25, in the river on May 26.

UPDAY NEWS FROM ITALY

Declaration to the court read by one of the Turin anarchist antiracists arrested on February 23 2010.

March 9 2010

Most defendants in this trial are anarchists, and to accuse anarchists of ‘instigation to committing crime’ is a very easy task, just as to shoot at the Red Cross.

Bearing a sense of justice and freedom that has nothing to do with the law, every anarchist makes of his or her life a continuous invitation to struggle against injustice, and therefore to violate the laws that produce such injustice: the life of every anarchist is a long and reiterated ‘instigation to committing crime’.

Waiting for some legal step that finally establishes that anarchists as such are criminals, those who accuse us today are compelled to prove that someone, from outside, has pushed the prisoners in the migrant detention centres all over Italy to revolt every week for the past two years, thus causing damages of thousands of euros and disrupting the machinery of deportation. And they have to find some evidence that this ‘instigator’ is sitting today on the bench of the defendants.

This evidence can’t be found anywhere in the warrant of arrest we have here. And it can’t be found because there has never been any ‘instigation’, and it was not necessary or right that such instigation occurred. Primarily because people do not need appeals and alluring slogans to revolt. On the contrary, it is injustice that originates conflicts, which in turn might lead to revolts.

And here is the injustice, and an obvious one. They pretend that people who risked everything they had in order to reach our cities are thrown out without saying a word. Or that people exploited for years in yards, fields or kitchens of fashionable restaurants let themselves be thrown out. Or those who arrived here as children and don’t have anyone waiting for them in their countries of origin also let themselves be deported. And as if this was not enough to generate conflict, inside the migrant detention centres people without documents are deprived of everything, reduced to a mere body left to die for lack of medical treatment or for desperation, a body to be beaten or sexually abused – especially when women are involved.

If all this is true – and you will find it is in the very documentation of this trial – the conflict in the migrant detention centres is not only natural but it is also the only instrument by which the imprisoned migrants can reaffirm their being human, a fact otherwise denied.

For this reason migrants didn’t need to wait for us or for anyone else to start struggling and trying to climb or destroy those walls. And they haven’t stopped doing it now, with great shame for those who arrested us in the ridiculous hope to bring peace where peace can never be.

There has never been a need for external ‘instigation’ because the methods and ways of the struggle must be autonomous, must mirror the experiences and conflicts of those who are locked up, must find their own time and expressions. It wouldn’t have been right to say: ‘now you go on hunger strike’ or ‘tomorrow you burn a couple of mattresses’ – as the prosecutor is stupidly claiming.

On the contrary, what we have always said is: ‘we are here’. In other words we have offered our means of information and net of contacts, we have encouraged the relations between the various detention centres on struggle, we have come forward to amplify the prisoners’ voices as best as we could, we have promoted our initiatives along with those taking places in the detention centres. All this can certainly affect the course of events, but to call it ‘instigation to committing crime’ is bullshit typical of the Italian police, and it also appears almost offensive towards us.

To tell you the whole truth, even if it might sound strange to you, it was the prisoners who have ‘instigated’ us in these months, and they have done it in a very simple way, by revealing their stories so that we could tell about them, by organising themselves in secret so that photos of beatings and films of police charges became known outside, by teaching us that one can climb on a roof and shout ‘freedom!’ even if he or she knows the response will be a severe beating. The terrifying images of soldiers charging inside the cages of the migration centre of Gradisca are images that oblige us to do something because they put our conscience against a wall.

The real problem of this city, therefore, is not ‘who instigates who’; the problem is those who do not let themselves be instigated, those who see and go on as if they had not seen anything.

But this is another story.

SOLIDARITY TO THE ANARCHIST COMRADES AND TO ALL IMIGRANTS IN ITALY

FROM US ACTFORFREEDOMNOW.

Rebellion in Madrid and Rome

Madrid and Rome: Revolts in Detention Centers

All over Europe, new prisons for migrants people are built. National or multi-national collaborators invest in this business, and harbour the local fascist politics.

In Madrid, around March 8th, detainees put fire in several rooms. From the street, one could hear them screaming: „fire!“, „tell people what happens here!“[..].
„I‘m racist and i‘ll send you back to your fucking country!“. That what said a policeman to an Angolan detainee when he refused to enter the plane, kicking him in his chest and putting him a straitjacket. He came back to the Center almost unconscious. Some hours later, he was taken to the hospital (besides, he’s seriously ill). This is what started the revolt.

In the meanwhile, we learnt protesting movement rose last month: collective revolts, clash with police ( several policemen have been injured).
For information, the Red Cross entered the site several weeks ago, with a financial help from the Interior Minister, that would be about 200 000 €

<>

..................................

Saturday March 13th, Rome: Demonstration and revolt infront of Ponte Galeria detention Center.

Since a while, a demonstration in front of Ponte Galeria Detention center is announced. Before arriving to the gathering, the walls of the train station and the Rome-Fiumicino lines are covered with posters.
Then, at the center, some pass food and drinks on to the detainees: food with no antidepressant nor sedative, in opposition to those usually given by the Auxilium cooperative, that manages the center since two weeks.

Just after that, about 20 detainees go up to the roof of another building, where they will stay several hours, resisting to the threats and the police attempts to chase them away.
Attempting to escape, one persone clings to the streetlight, others gash their arms, and some others threaten to hang themselves with their blankets.

When the gathering comes to an end, and when the individuals coming in solidarity (about one hundred) move away, police charge at the detainees one the roof: with billies and handcuffs.
At that point, the comrades decided to occupy the rails in „Fiera di Roma“ train station, blocking the trafic on both sides during 40 minutes. Around 7pm, a group (still 100 people) gather at the place in front of the Trastevere train station and starts a wild walk in the town, blocking the traffic behind a banner „Close the centers for migrants – Anti-racists against all prisons“.

The shouts and the speeches in the megaphone remind the saturday morning passing people there’s a camp at Ponte Galeria, and in that camp there are people who struggle and rebel.
When the ‚carabinieri‘ [italian police] arrive, the demonstrators don‘t break up and continue the demonstration in the alleyways to Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere.

The day after, national papers, that couldn‘t hide the happening, talk about an elected representative, whose visit was cancelled when police refused he enters the Center!

< href="http://www.autistici.org/macerie/?p=25413">Maceri

………………

In Paris, Sunday March 14th, some people meeting at the Vincennes detention Center after a walk in the forest, salute teh detainees- shouting „liberty!“ Some fire works come also with the walk. People try to send balls inside, knowing police forbide them to have some. But people say the walls are really high… Some detainees have the time to go out of the buildings and to answer them, but are quickly threaten by dogs and cameras.

In Venna, in the Rodopi Counties of Greece, there are prisons that degrade human lives.

Xanthi, Thursday, March 11, 2010

Venna is one of the eight functioning immigration detention centers in the Rodopi and Evros counties of Greece. Centers like Vena have been created within the framework of the states anti-immigration policies, to be used normally in ‘exceptional’ circumstances.

All detention centers operate are outside the legal framework, and particularly in the case of Venna there isn’t even an official legal document defining its function.

Rodopi is not included in the list of counties eligible for the placement of ‘Special places for the residence of foreigners’ ‘ΕΧΠΑ’. Even Artcle 81 of Law 3536/2005 that provides for the creation of ‘Special places for the residence of foreigners’ fails to define the terms and conditions of their operation.

According to reports by lawyers who have visited the centre, hygiene conditions are appalling, there is no medical staff, and the number of prisoners far exceeds the capacity the centre was designed to accommodate. Prisoners have no contact with the outside world (lawyers, family members, interpreters, local community) and have inadequate information on their rights. The behavior of the prisoner guards towards the prisoners is often degrading to the dignity of the detainees

On Wednesday, February 3^rd, prisoners in the Vena detention centre rebelled over the inhuman conditions of detention and their prolonged imprisonment. The previous day, the guards had asked the police to transfer 30 detainees as a temporary solution to the centers extreme over-crowdedness.

Nevertheless, the immigrants rebelled, setting their mattresses and clothes on fire. The police intervened and presented 42 people to the prosecutor as ringleaders of a criminal incident, indicting them for attempted escape and damage of public property.

In express proceedings on Friday February the 5^th, without lawyers and interpreters, they were sentenced to 4 and 6 months imprisonment and legal deportation for the contempt of the law, and damage to public property.

To prevent the possibility of an appeal of the decision by a group of concerned lawyers who had shown interest in doing so, the convicted were moved to Drama and Kavala.

To answer back to these incidents, in Xanthi and Komotini, initiatives have been taken against these concentration camps, involving an information campaign for the local community around the issue of Venna and the suppression of the uprising, as well as holding a protest in Komotini (February 19th) and Venna (February 20^th).

Arriving to the nightmare that is Venna, we managed to verify the true conditions of detention, as well as the every day terror endured by the imprisoned.

Following negotiations a group of people managed to enter the centre upon which they discovered that the prison population was falsely grossly understated (there were in-fact over 200 prisoners ‘hosted’, as opposed to the official ‘46’). Furthermore it was discovered that 4 individuals were on hunger strike. The patients had not received any essential medical attention (one person was even refused post- operative transfer to a hospital).

We see in the case of these 42 defendants and the prisoners on hunger strike, the immediate response of the State, towards people who are struggling for their human dignity and freedom.

The policy of humiliation, torture and repression carried out by the Greek state is fully consistent with the requirements of ‘Fortress Europe’. The state even refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the centers it establishes. Of course we don not expect any legal framework to define what dignity means and under what conditions it is violated. We believe that the right to free movement, to human dignity and the freedom to choose where to live is inalienable. The struggle for life, dignity and freedom is not illegal, it is just. No one is illegal.

We demand the immediate abolition of the concentration camps.

Immediate release of all the imprisoned immigrants. Acquittal of the 42 accused in the uprising at Venna that took place on February the 3^rd.

Initiative against the detention camps of Evros and Rodopi.

Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died Tuesday after an 80-day hunger strike to demand better jail conditions, according to dissidents.

"He got much worse last Tuesday and was brought to Havana," said Laura Pollan, one of the leaders of the Ladies of White, a group of wives and relatives of political prisoners.

"But sadly he died at around 4 p.m."

According to Pollan, Zapata, 42, went on strike to demand a separate cell from common criminals and permission for his family to bring him food. She said he also refused to wear the prison uniform.

He was transferred from his prison in central Holguin province to a prison in Havana when his health deteriorated, and eventually to a hospital in the capital, she said.

"For us, this is a terrible situation," Pollan said in a telephone interview. "We didn't think this government would let a political prisoner die at this point in time, but we were wrong."

Zapata was arrested in 2003 during a crackdown on dissidents, Pollan said.

According to an Amnesty International report, he was jailed for disorderly conduct among other crimes.

Monday 15th February 2010

• Intensity in the pigs' station of Tripoli town after suicide attempt of a 35 years old Palestinian who was imprisoned in purpose to be deported. Other migrants prisoners, also under deportation, looted blankets so a small fire was caused. The pigs entered the detention centers and evacuated the imprisoning cells by transfering the prisoners to a room beside. Later, the migrants were also transfered to the Panarcadic Hospital for health checks, where also the Palestinian was transfered whose deportation is planned to take place in two weeks.

An Egyptian national was reportedly stabbed to death on Saturday13/2/10

by Latin American immigrants in a street fight in Milan, Italy. The incident has been followed by angry demonstrations by members of Egyptian and North African communities across Italy.

Egyptian Hamed el-Fayed, 19, along with two friends from Morocco and another from Cote d'Ivoire, reportedly engaged in a street fight with five as-yet-unidentified immigrants from Peru. After stabbing el-Fayed repeatedly in the chest, the Peruvian immigrants reportedly fled the scene.

According to Italian police sources, members of Italy's Egyptian and North African communities soon took to the streets to protest the incident, setting a number of cars on fire.

The Egyptian Consulate in Italy reassured protesters that it planned to investigate the incident.

Egyptian Assistant Foreign Minister for Consular Affairs Mohamed Abdel Hakam said that Italian police were in the process of reviewing video footage taken from street surveillance cameras installed where the incident took place.

Egyptian Consul in Italy Amr Abbas, for his part, is scheduled to meet Milan's security director on Sunday to follow up on the case. According to Abbas, Italian police are close to identifying the perpetrators.

Translated from the Arabic Edition.