Across europe, driven by the desire and need to extract maximum profit from urban spaces, authoritarian handmaidens of capital, in the guise of State-democratic authority, turn their violence on those people who are nothing but obstacles to the management of the economy (through real estate speculation, urban “renewal”, gentrification, touristification, social and ethinic cleansing, and so on).
Across europe, the last half dozen years have seen a marked increase in the eviction of okupied social centres (along with other occupied spaces), spaces which both impede and school resistance to the commodification of the city.
On February 7, the social centre Asilo Occupato in Turin, occupied since 1995, was forcefully closed by hundreds of heavily armed police. Six anarchists were arrested on charges of formation of a subversive association, incitement to crime and the possession, manufacture and transportation of explosives in a public place.
We share below an account of the State’s intervention, the resistance to it, and a call of solidarity. We also share a text of the 1980’s, from the french autonomist fanzine, Molotov & Confetti, which critically addresses the context and the politics of okupation.
Call for Solidarity with the Imprisoned of Operazione Scintilla, Italy
Summary of the recent repressive operation in Italy in connection with the resistance against the Italian migration regime.
On Thursday 7 February 2019, at 4:40 a.m., the eviction of the squat Asilo Occupato in Via Alessandria 12 in Turin, occupied since 1995, began. The eviction was carried out as part of the Operazione Scintilla (Operation Spark). Several hundred Carabinieri in riot gear, police officers and Guardia di finanza with machine guns and plain clothes police not only evicted the house, but also arrested six anarchists. A seventh person is still being searched for.
The charges are serious: formation of a subversive association, incitement to crime and the possession, manufacture and transportation of explosives in a public place. The charges are related to the resistance against the Italian migration regime, namely against the deportation camps/prisons CPR and CIE (Centro per l’Immigrazione e il Rimpatrio, Immigration and Repatriation Centre: Centro di identificazione ed espulsione, Identification and Deportation Centre).
The Asilo was evicted as part of this operation because the state regards it as the logistical and operational base of this subversive, insurrectional association. The eviction of the Asilo was delayed by the squatters for 36 hours because some of them had retreated to the roofs. In the meantime, sympathizers organized wild demos in the city, where there were clashes with the police. The Asilo was made uninhabitable in the last few days (destruction inside, bricked up windows, etc.).
A first court date for the prisoners of the Operazione Scintilla will follow in about 15 days, i.e. on about 27 February.
During the big solidarity demonstrations there were several arrests and over 300 identity checks. Many arrested people report bruises inflicted by the police when they were arrested. At least four people had to go to the hospital because of their injuries. The accusations for the twelve people arrested at Saturday’s demonstration are devastation, looting, resisting orders, bodily harm and possession of weapons. However, in the meantime, these twelve people who got arrested at the demo are again free but have to report daily to a police station (as of 13 February).
…
Freely translated from the communiqué of the solidarity demonstration on Saturday, February 9:
“They wage war on the poor and call it retraining. We oppose the lords of the city.
Behind this banner the demo concentrated. A multifaceted, strong demo, determined to make the hostility against those who benefit from the management of the city concrete and visible. […]
The atmosphere we breathed was an atmosphere of intense emotional participation in the events of the past few days and growing anger at the militarization of much of the Aurora district, a police presence that still does not seem to be diminishing and that restores the sense of normality that the mayor wants to impose on the city. […] The demo fought its way through the streets, leaving barricades of burning dumpsters and shattered cars behind. […] Unfortunately, a final police action at the end of the demo caused the arrest of twelve demonstrators and the injury of four.
[…]
Yesterday’s demo is only the beginning, now it’s time to start a fierce battle that will produce a new flower from the ashes of this repressive operation.”
…
Details of the accusations(taken from Nuova Societa)
The allegations: formation of a subversive association; incitement to crime; possession, manufacture and transportation of explosives in a public place.
The six persons were arrested at the request of the anti-terror group of the Turin public prosecutor’s office. The indictment is that the accused have promoted, constituted, organised and participated in the creation of a subversive association (ex Art. 270 c.p.) which is intended to and can influence national immigration policy through the repeated destruction of the CIE/CPR and through systematic acts of violence and intimidation against the companies involved in the management of the above mentioned structures.
The arrested are accused of 21 subversive attacks in various Italian cities: On the one hand, 15 parcels of explosives were allegedly sent to companies in Turin, Bologna, Milan, Rome (French Embassy), Bari and Ravenna; six other explosives affected the offices of the Italian Post Office (Poste Italiane) in Turin, Bologna and Genoa. Poste Italiane was allegedly hit because, as the owner of the airline MistralAir, it has held the ministerial mandate for deportation flights since 2011.
Two of the arrested (together with two yet unidentified persons) are accused of having placed explosive devices in front of Poste Italiane ATMs in Turin on 30 April and 9 June 2016.
In order to establish contacts within CPR, they threw tennis balls with a multilingual brochure and a mobile phone number with which they agreed simultaneous actions within and outside the CPR structure. Then they put matches and everything needed to start a revolt and setting fire in packages of biscuits and other goods.
Allegedly, the aim of these actions was to weaken or destroy the CPR’s capacity.
Italy’s politicians want to crack down with all their might:
– Police president Messina describes the (imagined) group of detainees as a highly dangerous cell.
– Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini demands prison for these infamous people and wants to close all social centres frequented by criminals.
– Mayor Chiara Appendino congratulates the police on their eviction.
– Alessandro Ciro Sciretti, a Turin Lega-Nord politician, wishes no mercy at all for the demonstrators of the Solidarity demonstrations for the Asilo Occupato. His suggestion: a little bit of the Diaz school is needed.
Not all of the news has been bad:
Shortly after the demonstration on Saturday, an anti-fascist demonstration took place, like every year, on 13 February, against a fascist commemorative torch march of the Casa Pound in the district Vallette.
The antifascist demonstration ends in front of the prison, where the prisoners of Operazione Scintilla are imprisoned. According to the communiqué, this was “a cordial greeting to all the prisoners and especially to the comrades and friends who had been imprisoned for a few days. A shed in the prison yard catches fire by a happy coincidence (a Molotov cocktail according to the media) and is destroyed.
…
Practical solidarity
A lot of money is needed, long prison sentences are imminent. People are very grateful for solidarity contributions to the following account:
Giulia Merlini e Pisano Marco
IBAN IT61Y0347501605CC0011856712
ABI 03475 CAB 01605
BIC INGBITD1
The list of those arrested during Operazione Scintilla:
Rizzo, Antonio
Salvato, Lorenzo
Ruggeri, Silvia
Volpacchio, Giada
Blasi, Niccolò
De Salvatore, Giuseppe
You can write to the prisoners!
Name of the detained person
C.C. Lorusso e Cutugno
via Maria Adelaide Aglietta, 35 e
10149 Torino TO
Italy
…
LARRY, SILVIA, NICCO, BEPPE, GIADA E ANTONIO LIBER*!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE COMRADES IN TURIN!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE ASILO OCCUPATO!
This is an incomplete summary of the events in Turin, in part freely translated from the following sources:
Video of protest against the eviction of Asilo Occupato …
___
To squat … is to struggle
The text that follows was published in the Molotov & Confetti zine no. 1 (Paris, 1984).
The nightmare. Being young and stuck at his parents for lack of money to rent a room. Being unemployed and sleeping on the street because rents are too expensive. Working illegally or precariously and being stuck with friends because the landlords require payslips. Being an immigrant and having to move out into the distant suburbs – when it’s not under other skies – because in the neighborhood, they are renovating. The nightmare.
The nightmare for 50,000 Parisians without a house. The nightmare for 15,000 of them to whom only the squares and the platforms of the metro remain. The nightmare for 300,000 others who have been waiting for months of improbable “social housing”. Not to mention the millions who work like slaves to pay a bed or who, for want of anything better, rot in slums.
The galley, and 300,000 empty homes in Paris alone. Old, new, big, small, clean and dirty. Everything that could make you dream. Except that…
Except that the city of tomorrow, they want it clean, orderly, disciplined and profitable. You go where you are told to go. You work where you are told to work. You pay where you are told to pay. You sleep where you are told to live. Everyone in his corner. All well dispersed, well insulated, well monitored, well controlled. Harmless.
Immigrant ghettos where one doesn’t give a shit about the law and the “French culture”,, where we stick together to survive and fight, where not a cop can enter without risking his health. They want nothing more of this.
Tribes of young people drifting in the city, without worries for the rules and good order, cutting down, delinquency, rodeos, parties, glands, wild music and hellish looks. They want nothing more of this. Battalions of unemployed, little desperados, with nothing to lose and ready for anything. They want nothing more of this!
You bend to their will, you live like they want you to live, you play the game of their society … or you will die. And yet, 300,000 homes are empty today in Paris.
300,000 empty homes, 300,000 dwellings to be taken, to occupy collectively, to squat, as thousands have already done, from “Nationale” to “Vilins”, from “Cascades” to the Rue de Flandres, de “Crimée” to the Champs Elysees.
Except that it does not always work. It works even less and less. Wild squats in the 20th arrondissement, wiser squats in the 19th, rebel squats of the CAO [Centre Autonome Occupé], collaborationist squats or clandestine squats, all were expelled.
But what’s surprising in all of this? If they want to get rid of us, if they want to forbid us, we wonder why they would tolerate our squats!
As long as it was just a question of money, as long as they only sought to protect and make profitable their buildings, we could always appeal to the law and catch the State and the landlords in their own traps. Make things last a year, two years or more.
But now it’s another matter. When, all through the newspapers, we are treated as dealers or killers, it is less the squatter who is attacked in us than the young, the unemployed, the immigrant or the proletarian.
When they allow themselves to go every week to search, to pick up, it’s not the squatter they’re targeting, it’s the “offender”, the guy on the run or the illegal immigrant.
When they give you no more respite, when they chase you every week from the house you occupy, it’s not just the squat they want to destroy: which unemployment you go to register? Which legal address is on your residence permit, on your employment contract or to receive the social security.
Today, we can no longer occupy a building while forgetting everything else. We can no longer pretend to quietly solve our housing problem and stop there. Because the state does not forget what we are. Because its oppression does not stop at home.
A squat, today, it can not live alone. It cannot stand alone. Because far from being a simple question of housing, it is also, necessarily, a story of work, unemployment, residence cards, neighborhood life, food, festivities.
A squat, today, it can survive only if it also faces the problems of work, money, control, collective life. It can only survive if others recognize themselves, the unemployed, proletarians, immigrants, squatters or not, if they are there to support it, to defend it.
A squat today, if it’s a ghetto among the ghettos, it dies. For this to work, there is only one condition: struggle.
…
All issues of Molotov & Confetti are archived on the Internet by Archives Autonomies.
According to the Archives Autonomies website, the three issues of Molotov & Confetti were published in 1984 and 1985 in the wake of several attempts to open an “Autonomous Occupied Center” in Paris. Molotov & Confetti’s team was also linked to Radio Mouvance, a free radio station founded in 1983 that wanted to be “anti-racist, antifascist, anti-imperialist, anticolonialist and anti-Zionist”. Squatting literally the frequency 106 MHz reserved in principle to the army, and refusing stubbornly to ask permission to transmit from the High Authority, the radio suffered the wrath of the state. No less than six seizures between 1983 and 1986 (five under leftist governments and the sixth and last under a right-wing government, 24 April 1986).
In solidarity with the Asilo Occupato of Turin: To occupy, to squat is to resist
Across europe, driven by the desire and need to extract maximum profit from urban spaces, authoritarian handmaidens of capital, in the guise of State-democratic authority, turn their violence on those people who are nothing but obstacles to the management of the economy (through real estate speculation, urban “renewal”, gentrification, touristification, social and ethinic cleansing, and so on).
Across europe, the last half dozen years have seen a marked increase in the eviction of okupied social centres (along with other occupied spaces), spaces which both impede and school resistance to the commodification of the city.
On February 7, the social centre Asilo Occupato in Turin, occupied since 1995, was forcefully closed by hundreds of heavily armed police. Six anarchists were arrested on charges of formation of a subversive association, incitement to crime and the possession, manufacture and transportation of explosives in a public place.
We share below an account of the State’s intervention, the resistance to it, and a call of solidarity. We also share a text of the 1980’s, from the french autonomist fanzine, Molotov & Confetti, which critically addresses the context and the politics of okupation.
Call for Solidarity with the Imprisoned of Operazione Scintilla, Italy
(Squat.net 14/02/2019)
Summary of the recent repressive operation in Italy in connection with the resistance against the Italian migration regime.
On Thursday 7 February 2019, at 4:40 a.m., the eviction of the squat Asilo Occupato in Via Alessandria 12 in Turin, occupied since 1995, began. The eviction was carried out as part of the Operazione Scintilla (Operation Spark). Several hundred Carabinieri in riot gear, police officers and Guardia di finanza with machine guns and plain clothes police not only evicted the house, but also arrested six anarchists. A seventh person is still being searched for.
The charges are serious: formation of a subversive association, incitement to crime and the possession, manufacture and transportation of explosives in a public place. The charges are related to the resistance against the Italian migration regime, namely against the deportation camps/prisons CPR and CIE (Centro per l’Immigrazione e il Rimpatrio, Immigration and Repatriation Centre: Centro di identificazione ed espulsione, Identification and Deportation Centre).
The Asilo was evicted as part of this operation because the state regards it as the logistical and operational base of this subversive, insurrectional association. The eviction of the Asilo was delayed by the squatters for 36 hours because some of them had retreated to the roofs. In the meantime, sympathizers organized wild demos in the city, where there were clashes with the police. The Asilo was made uninhabitable in the last few days (destruction inside, bricked up windows, etc.).
A first court date for the prisoners of the Operazione Scintilla will follow in about 15 days, i.e. on about 27 February.
During the big solidarity demonstrations there were several arrests and over 300 identity checks. Many arrested people report bruises inflicted by the police when they were arrested. At least four people had to go to the hospital because of their injuries. The accusations for the twelve people arrested at Saturday’s demonstration are devastation, looting, resisting orders, bodily harm and possession of weapons. However, in the meantime, these twelve people who got arrested at the demo are again free but have to report daily to a police station (as of 13 February).
…
Freely translated from the communiqué of the solidarity demonstration on Saturday, February 9:
“They wage war on the poor and call it retraining. We oppose the lords of the city.
Behind this banner the demo concentrated. A multifaceted, strong demo, determined to make the hostility against those who benefit from the management of the city concrete and visible. […]
The atmosphere we breathed was an atmosphere of intense emotional participation in the events of the past few days and growing anger at the militarization of much of the Aurora district, a police presence that still does not seem to be diminishing and that restores the sense of normality that the mayor wants to impose on the city. […] The demo fought its way through the streets, leaving barricades of burning dumpsters and shattered cars behind. […] Unfortunately, a final police action at the end of the demo caused the arrest of twelve demonstrators and the injury of four.
[…]
Yesterday’s demo is only the beginning, now it’s time to start a fierce battle that will produce a new flower from the ashes of this repressive operation.”
…
Details of the accusations(taken from Nuova Societa)
The allegations: formation of a subversive association; incitement to crime; possession, manufacture and transportation of explosives in a public place.
The six persons were arrested at the request of the anti-terror group of the Turin public prosecutor’s office. The indictment is that the accused have promoted, constituted, organised and participated in the creation of a subversive association (ex Art. 270 c.p.) which is intended to and can influence national immigration policy through the repeated destruction of the CIE/CPR and through systematic acts of violence and intimidation against the companies involved in the management of the above mentioned structures.
The arrested are accused of 21 subversive attacks in various Italian cities: On the one hand, 15 parcels of explosives were allegedly sent to companies in Turin, Bologna, Milan, Rome (French Embassy), Bari and Ravenna; six other explosives affected the offices of the Italian Post Office (Poste Italiane) in Turin, Bologna and Genoa. Poste Italiane was allegedly hit because, as the owner of the airline MistralAir, it has held the ministerial mandate for deportation flights since 2011.
Two of the arrested (together with two yet unidentified persons) are accused of having placed explosive devices in front of Poste Italiane ATMs in Turin on 30 April and 9 June 2016.
In order to establish contacts within CPR, they threw tennis balls with a multilingual brochure and a mobile phone number with which they agreed simultaneous actions within and outside the CPR structure. Then they put matches and everything needed to start a revolt and setting fire in packages of biscuits and other goods.
Allegedly, the aim of these actions was to weaken or destroy the CPR’s capacity.
http://www.nuovasocieta.it/operazione-scintilla-sgombero-dellasilo-e-anarchici-arrestati-per-associazione-sovversiva/
…
The political climate in Italy and other notes
Italy’s politicians want to crack down with all their might:
– Police president Messina describes the (imagined) group of detainees as a highly dangerous cell.
– Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini demands prison for these infamous people and wants to close all social centres frequented by criminals.
– Mayor Chiara Appendino congratulates the police on their eviction.
– Alessandro Ciro Sciretti, a Turin Lega-Nord politician, wishes no mercy at all for the demonstrators of the Solidarity demonstrations for the Asilo Occupato. His suggestion: a little bit of the Diaz school is needed.
Not all of the news has been bad:
Shortly after the demonstration on Saturday, an anti-fascist demonstration took place, like every year, on 13 February, against a fascist commemorative torch march of the Casa Pound in the district Vallette.
The antifascist demonstration ends in front of the prison, where the prisoners of Operazione Scintilla are imprisoned. According to the communiqué, this was “a cordial greeting to all the prisoners and especially to the comrades and friends who had been imprisoned for a few days. A shed in the prison yard catches fire by a happy coincidence (a Molotov cocktail according to the media) and is destroyed.
…
Practical solidarity
A lot of money is needed, long prison sentences are imminent. People are very grateful for solidarity contributions to the following account:
Giulia Merlini e Pisano Marco
IBAN IT61Y0347501605CC0011856712
ABI 03475 CAB 01605
BIC INGBITD1
The list of those arrested during Operazione Scintilla:
Rizzo, Antonio
Salvato, Lorenzo
Ruggeri, Silvia
Volpacchio, Giada
Blasi, Niccolò
De Salvatore, Giuseppe
You can write to the prisoners!
Name of the detained person
C.C. Lorusso e Cutugno
via Maria Adelaide Aglietta, 35 e
10149 Torino TO
Italy
…
LARRY, SILVIA, NICCO, BEPPE, GIADA E ANTONIO LIBER*!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE COMRADES IN TURIN!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE ASILO OCCUPATO!
This is an incomplete summary of the events in Turin, in part freely translated from the following sources:
Round Robin https://roundrobin.info/2019/02/torino-aggiornamenti-e-iban-per-benefit/
Macery, anarchist blog from Turin: https://www.autistici.org/macerie/
Radio Blackout , – subversive radio station from Turin: https://radioblackout.org/
Corporate media
This is an English translation of the original article in German, published by Barrikade Info.
https://roundrobin.info/2019/02/call-for-solidarity-with-the-imprisoned-of-operazione-scintilla-italy/
…
Video of protest against the eviction of Asilo Occupato …
___
To squat … is to struggle
The text that follows was published in the Molotov & Confetti zine no. 1 (Paris, 1984).
The nightmare. Being young and stuck at his parents for lack of money to rent a room. Being unemployed and sleeping on the street because rents are too expensive. Working illegally or precariously and being stuck with friends because the landlords require payslips. Being an immigrant and having to move out into the distant suburbs – when it’s not under other skies – because in the neighborhood, they are renovating. The nightmare.
The nightmare for 50,000 Parisians without a house. The nightmare for 15,000 of them to whom only the squares and the platforms of the metro remain. The nightmare for 300,000 others who have been waiting for months of improbable “social housing”. Not to mention the millions who work like slaves to pay a bed or who, for want of anything better, rot in slums.
The galley, and 300,000 empty homes in Paris alone. Old, new, big, small, clean and dirty. Everything that could make you dream. Except that…
Except that the city of tomorrow, they want it clean, orderly, disciplined and profitable. You go where you are told to go. You work where you are told to work. You pay where you are told to pay. You sleep where you are told to live. Everyone in his corner. All well dispersed, well insulated, well monitored, well controlled. Harmless.
Immigrant ghettos where one doesn’t give a shit about the law and the “French culture”,, where we stick together to survive and fight, where not a cop can enter without risking his health. They want nothing more of this.
Tribes of young people drifting in the city, without worries for the rules and good order, cutting down, delinquency, rodeos, parties, glands, wild music and hellish looks. They want nothing more of this. Battalions of unemployed, little desperados, with nothing to lose and ready for anything. They want nothing more of this!
You bend to their will, you live like they want you to live, you play the game of their society … or you will die. And yet, 300,000 homes are empty today in Paris.
300,000 empty homes, 300,000 dwellings to be taken, to occupy collectively, to squat, as thousands have already done, from “Nationale” to “Vilins”, from “Cascades” to the Rue de Flandres, de “Crimée” to the Champs Elysees.
Except that it does not always work. It works even less and less. Wild squats in the 20th arrondissement, wiser squats in the 19th, rebel squats of the CAO [Centre Autonome Occupé], collaborationist squats or clandestine squats, all were expelled.
But what’s surprising in all of this? If they want to get rid of us, if they want to forbid us, we wonder why they would tolerate our squats!
As long as it was just a question of money, as long as they only sought to protect and make profitable their buildings, we could always appeal to the law and catch the State and the landlords in their own traps. Make things last a year, two years or more.
But now it’s another matter. When, all through the newspapers, we are treated as dealers or killers, it is less the squatter who is attacked in us than the young, the unemployed, the immigrant or the proletarian.
When they allow themselves to go every week to search, to pick up, it’s not the squatter they’re targeting, it’s the “offender”, the guy on the run or the illegal immigrant.
When they give you no more respite, when they chase you every week from the house you occupy, it’s not just the squat they want to destroy: which unemployment you go to register? Which legal address is on your residence permit, on your employment contract or to receive the social security.
Today, we can no longer occupy a building while forgetting everything else. We can no longer pretend to quietly solve our housing problem and stop there. Because the state does not forget what we are. Because its oppression does not stop at home.
A squat, today, it can not live alone. It cannot stand alone. Because far from being a simple question of housing, it is also, necessarily, a story of work, unemployment, residence cards, neighborhood life, food, festivities.
A squat, today, it can survive only if it also faces the problems of work, money, control, collective life. It can only survive if others recognize themselves, the unemployed, proletarians, immigrants, squatters or not, if they are there to support it, to defend it.
A squat today, if it’s a ghetto among the ghettos, it dies. For this to work, there is only one condition: struggle.
…
All issues of Molotov & Confetti are archived on the Internet by Archives Autonomies.
According to the Archives Autonomies website, the three issues of Molotov & Confetti were published in 1984 and 1985 in the wake of several attempts to open an “Autonomous Occupied Center” in Paris. Molotov & Confetti’s team was also linked to Radio Mouvance, a free radio station founded in 1983 that wanted to be “anti-racist, antifascist, anti-imperialist, anticolonialist and anti-Zionist”. Squatting literally the frequency 106 MHz reserved in principle to the army, and refusing stubbornly to ask permission to transmit from the High Authority, the radio suffered the wrath of the state. No less than six seizures between 1983 and 1986 (five under leftist governments and the sixth and last under a right-wing government, 24 April 1986).
(infoquiosques.net)