A new repressive chapter of the Carabinieri from the Ros (political police) in Italy against anarchists, leads to the arrest of seven anarchists who are linked to various insurrectionary attacks… and in solidarity with the imprisoned in the operation “Pánico”.
On this occasion, the version of the anarchist “triangle” going from Greece, Italy to Spain, is transformed into a pentagon, adding Chile and Germany.
The arrested comrades are Claudio Zaccone, 33 years old from Messina, Roberto Cropo, 34 years old from Turin (arrested in France with a European arrest warrant issued by the Rome prosecutor), Flavia Di Giannantonio, 39 years old from Rome, Nico Aurigemma, 30 years from Rome and Francesca Cerrone, 31 years from Trentino (arrested in Spain with a European arrest warrant issued by the Rome prosecutor), on suspicion of forming an anarchic “cell” of the FAI-FRI, based in the “Bencivenga Occupato” social centre in Rome. They are accused of association for terrorist purposes, subversion of the democratic order, attacks against the state and a whole repertoire of acts of sabotage with the alleged aim of reorganising the insurrectionary anarchist movement. The arrests were made with the collaboration of the French central police and the Spanish national police.
The investigation was initiated following the attack with explosives on the carabinieri station of San Giovanni in Rome in 2017, an act claimed by the IAF-FRI, and in which one of the arrested comrades is suspected of having participated.
Five of them are already in prison. When the addresses are made public, we will disseminate them.
We recall that in Bologna seven more anarchists were arrested in the operation Ritrovo.
Indymedia Barcelona, June 12th 2020, http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/531028
Operation Bialystok, part of a strategy
Numerous Italian media reported as a spectacular “success” of “police” and “anti-terrorist” collaboration, the arrest of seven “dangerous” anarchist in Rome (Italy), Saint-Etienne (France) and Almeria (Spain), and the raid on the Bencivenga Occupato social centre in Rome, which they consider the headquarters of an alleged anarchist “cell” to which the detainees allegedly belonged.
In the police operation against the social center, their assailants found nothing to justify the assault. In these operations it is usual to search other houses by the police, but so far there is no evidence that they found anything significant in any of them. These searches are always used to appropriate various materials, personal effects and money. It doesn’t matter that what is seized does not serve to prove anything, since these indiscriminate assaults and appropriations are part of the repressive strategies that seek to leave the comrades without resources, as well as to create in public opinion the imaginary of a serious potential risk for “dangerous materials” and, in the collectives and individuals of political affinity, to internalize the threat of revolutionary solidarity with their comrades and the fear of having certain materials such as books, magazines, T-shirts, music, etc, or to manage publications, websites or other means of dissemination of ideological content and anti-systemic slogans.
In the repressive operation Bialystok, the idea of an international network of anarchist “cells” with “terrorist” aims is insisted on, which according to the prosecutor’s office was intended by its subversive actions, on the one hand, to destabilize the democratic system and its states, and on the other hand, to “reorganize internationally the anarcho-insurrectionist movement”.
The security agencies of the countries, have tried on many occasions, to invent “national and international terrorist conspiracies”, in order to neutralize the groups and individuals of the anarchist community.
Repressive social engineering has in the creation of the speeches of the official versions, one of its main strategies. In these reports written by the political and anti-terrorist police, the dissemination of these discourses or repressive operations never coincide by chance but rather act to complement the criminalising official versions about the detainees and the movement, so that if in a first arrest they are not imprisoned, the cases are not closed and remain linked to subsequent arrests.
The Marini trial in Italy, in the mid-90s, would be a clear example and starting point for this strategic international judicial and police collaboration, in which events in one country unleashed repressive police actions in others, which were attempted to link or relate, creating these imaginaries of anarchist networks and cells organized for terrorist, ecoterrorist, and anarchist insurrectionary purposes.
Thus, in the year 2000, in the territory of the Spanish state and in the context of the struggle against the FIES, there were several arrests of anarchists who tried to link up with other anarchists in prison, creating the absurd criminalising logic that singled out the prisoners as “attack” brains and “target-markers”, and the anarchists in the street, as their executors, inventing the “anarchist triangle of the Mediterranean” that linked the aims of the insurrectionary anarchists of Italy, Greece and the Spanish state, and that could serve to create any situation of alarm against social peace.
It is not a coincidence that the recent arrests in Italy of the Operation Bialystok, have been linked to another anarchist prisoner of Italy, Alfredo Cospito, who is considered the “brain of the cell” and to the detainees who are executors of attacks, anonymous or not.
Nor is it a coincidence that this operation has been carried out, “after years of investigation”, when we are on the verge of reviewing the trial against the comrades charged in the “Scripta Manent” operation, in which among the prisoners with long sentences, is Alfredo Cospito who, from prison, has continued to denounce the criminal Italian state and to spread his ideas of insurrectionary struggle.
The name of the operation has not been a product of a random choice, but of the repressive perversion that already with the name, points comrade Alfredo Cospito as an ideologue, since it has been extracted from a book prefaced by comrade Alfredo, in which the history of struggle of some Russian Jewish anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century in the town of Bialystok was explained.
Italy has placed itself in the vanguard of repressive policies against social and political movements, influencing various countries in European democracies.
These strategies of categorization made by the Italian state and its repressive bodies of anarchists, differentiating between multiple “modalities” of insurrectionism and separating between “good” social anarchists and “bad” individualist anarchists, are explained with total clarity by fellow anarchist Anna Beniamino, sentenced to 17 years in prison for Operation Scripta Manent: “The fact that there are different tensions and tendencies within anarchism is real, but it is also true that this kind of rigid categorization is an inherent characteristic of the mentality and requirements of the inquisitors, who are dedicated to delineating a specific area in order to do their maneuvers as best they can: it is in this space that the next operation resides.
With these repressive strategies, what is being judged is not “the censorship of democratic freedom of expression”, nor a hypothetical “crime of opinion”, but a war against the anarchist foundations of propaganda by the act, which links thoughts and actions. These attacks on the anarchist media and information reaffirm not only their validity but also their fundamental role against silence and domestication.
In the words of comrade Anna, the Italian State “has decided to prosecute a whole anarchist tendency: anti-organisational anarchism”.
To those who turn their backs or look the other way in the face of insurrectionary struggles and repression against insurrectionalists, we inform you that we know with absolute certainty that the states and their repressive forces have never considered stopping there.
Indymedia Barcelona, June 14th 2020, http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/531036
Notes:
Three new arrests of anarchist comrades in Madrid and Oviedo
https://lahaine.org/espana/tres_oviedo.htm
The anarchists are coming!
https://madridapoyomutuo.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/que-vienen-los-anarquistas-1.pdf
Letter from comrade Anna Beniamino about Operation Script Menent, Italy
https://difusionacracia.noblogs.org/post/2017/05/11/carta-de-la-companera-anna-beniamino-sobre-la-operacion-scripta-menent-italia/
Statement by Alfredo Cospito at the trial of Operation Scripta Manent
https://difusionacracia.noblogs.org/post/2017/12/20/declaracion-de-alfredo-cospito-ante-el-juicio-por-la-operacion-scripta-manent/
Publication Anarquista Ecologista Fenrir, in which a paper by anarchist Alfredo Cospito appears
https://vozcomoarma.noblogs.org/files/2018/11/Fenrir-9-ESP_ridotta.pdf
Alfredo Cospito’s hunger strike against censorship and update on operation Scripta Manent, Italy
https://difusionacracia.noblogs.org/post/2017/05/11/huelga-de-hambre-de-alfredo-cospito-contra-la-censura-y-actualizacion-de-la-operacion-scripta-manent-italia/
CrimethInc. report and analysis of state repression against anarchists and antifascists in Russia. What is happening, why it is important and how we can help those who are facing state brutality.
https://eulaliobe.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/importan-los-casos-de-tortura-sobre-los-anarquistas-en-rusia/
About Anarchists of Bialystok. 1903-1908
https://www.todoporhacer.org/ensayo-historico-anarquistas-bialystok-1903-1908/
https://anarquia.info/historia-del-anarquismo-anarquistas-de-bialystok-contra-el-imperio-ruso/
Anarchism in Russia
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarquismo_en_Rusia
Bencivenga Occupato
Via Generale Roberto Bencivenga 15, Roma
https://squ.at/r/16i0
http://bencivenga15occupato.noblogs.org/
Directory of squats in Roma: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/city/roma/country/IT/squated/squat
Directory of squats in Italy: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/country/IT/squated/squat
Directory of groups (social centers, collectives, squats) in Italy: https://radar.squat.net/en/groups/country/IT
Events in Italy: https://radar.squat.net/en/events/country/IT
