Guilty of wanting a better world-- in Genoa, Turin, Florence, Rome and Cosenza

The Nodo Solidale Collective of Italy demands an end to the criminalization of the social movements in Italy. We want to stress that the G8 Summit in Genoa is only the best known event with the most media coverage in the country, but there are many cases in which the State is trying to silence social activists.

Just a brief reminder of a few cases:

On December 11, 2007, in Turín, judges sentenced demonstrators who had marched against fascism. The comrades received sentences from 9 months up to a year and 8 months for setting up a barricade against police repression. The demonstration had occurred because several fascists had attacked the Barokkio squat, stabbing two comrades in the process, one of them in the stomach. Naturally, the police attacked the antifascists the next day, the same people now sentenced by the State, while the fascist aggressors were never even identified.

On December 14, 24 comrades from Genoa were sentenced to 11 years in prison for having protested against the G8 meeting in Genoa in 2001, when more than 300,000 people filled the streets to demonstrate against the war and hunger imposed and promoted by the 8 world powers assembled there.

On January 29, a court in Florence sentenced several workers from an autonomous union to 7 years for having confronted the police in a march to the U.S. embassy during a strike against the war. The police violently attacked the strikers, who defended themselves without a single offensive weapon. Now the State has decided that they must pay for their resistance with 7 years of their lives.

In Rome, there’s an open case against 39 out of 105 comrades arrested for “robbery.” In truth, on November 6, just before a march of thousands of “precarious youth,” or youth without steady jobs, along with people from various social centers, entered a shopping mall, demanding popular prices and distributing free merchandize among the people. In the afternoon, during the march, the students and youth with precarious jobs recovered hundreds of books from a store belonging to a major publishing house. It’s outrageous that they’re now unjustly charging them with assault, thereby denying the political nature of the protest.

On February 2 in Cosenza, there was a national march against repression to demand an end to the criminalization of the social movements in Italy. Here, the public prosecutor has just brought charges in city court against three comrades for organizing a network defined as subversive. These comrades are social above-ground activists, who organized and participated in the historic days of struggle in Naples and Genoa in 2001. For the powers that be, their crime is organizing.

So then, we’re all guilty, because we want a better world. We’re going to get it by organizing.