International Day of the Revolutionary Prisoner (IDRP)

PERU | 12 – 06 – 2009 | In memory of the more than 300 prisoner comrades of the PCP butchered in Peruvian gaols by the army of Alan Garcia, on June 19th 1986.

In memory of all the fallen “in the hands of the enemy” and of all who still resist today in the gaols all over the world.

Appeal for a united IDRP

The political and judicial persecution of the communist movement, revolutionary and of democratic opposition in our country, all over Europe and all over the world, is already today more evident. But it is bound to increase and spread due to the present very serious economic crisis, which will bring the popular masses to face its consequences (dismissals increasing, workers salary reduction, savings depletion, debt grown, loss of democratic rights, etc.) and to search for a way out from the cultural, moral, social and economic impoverishment into which the crisis itself and the solutions imposed by the capitalists will precipitate them.

As a consequence of the worsening life conditions for a wider and wider part of the population, unrest, opposition and fights are increasing. Demands are extending against high cost of living, deaths on the job, environmental devastation, rearmament, massacre of oppressed peoples, marginalization, violence, financing of fascist and racist squads, oppressions and cheats by the bourgeois and their parties. All over our country, from Val di Susa to Taranto, from Vicenza to Pomigliano, demonstrations of restlessness and rebellion spread like wildfire, as well as solidarity expressions with the peoples oppressed by the imperialism.

Immigrants, who represent by now a significant part of the most disadvantaged popular masses in our country (about 4 millions), turned out to be more and more organized and ready to rebellion and struggle.

Strong indications come from more and more crowded manifestations and from revolts in those lagers that the government called Centres for Immigrant Identification CIE (former CPT), in which human rights are suppressed.

The bourgeois state apparatus seeks to raise barriers against the disruption in its own system. The Italian bourgeoisie, the U.S. and Europe’s imperialist groups and the Vatican, which operate driven by their various criminal interests, have not yet decided to unmask themselves. They still prefer not to show openly their real terrorist nature, even if this is easy to realize. They still prefer to proceed on the road marked out in the post war years with the Christian Democrat regime, whose decay we are today living in.

Today, the regime imposed by the masters still aims to spread confusion and diversion among the masses in order to impede, as much as possible, the growth of workers’ conscience. It seeks to appease the working masses promising the satisfaction of some of their requests and needs, while it entrusts trade union leaders, more and more corrupted and compatible with their own interests, with the task of diverting and softening the natural development of the opposing contradiction between capital and work. It corrupts and suppresses communists and all who somehow constitute or may constitute potential reference and organization points, so as to keep the masses tied to the cart of the various bourgeois factions and parties and to discourage the boost towards autonomy.

The bourgeoisie aims to prevent the revolutionary process and social change not yet using openly and frontally terror and violence, but progressively and quickly restricting and abolishing rights and democratic spaces and encouraging the “reactionary” boost, that is “the war among the poor” of the popular masses: the division between Italians and foreigners , between foreigner and foreigner, between Muslims and Christians, white and black, men and women, etc.

The boost toward reaction is continually fed with bills and decrees clearly xenophobic, like the one intending to oblige doctors to denounce illegal aliens under their medical care, like the one forbidding to eat kebabs in the streets, or the one aiming at imposing separate public transport for immigrants, to establish in practice the apartheid.

Thousands of men, women and children, who endanger their lives in the “hope-voyages” to flee from misery, from war zones and from dictatorial and bloody regimes, with the Berlusconi-Gheddafi agreement are “brought back by the hand toward the hell”. The boats with illegal aliens are illegally repelled, when they are still in international waters. The immigrants are prevented from asking for political refugee status and the reactionary Maroni celebrates such regression to barbarity as a victory.

Control over the territory is broadening in suffocating way, with the ever more widespread use of technological instruments (videotaped zones, phone and ambient tapping, picture filings, etc.). The territory is being militarized, the repression is being “privatized” by means of armies of security guards, racist patrols are encouraged under the now-in-fashion government’s slogan: “involved security”.

Fascist propaganda and use of fascist squads by the masters are coming back to be a common practice in our country: comrades are beaten up or killed, immigrants burned alive, proletarian bases assaulted, students attacked like during the anti Gelmini [Gelmini si the Minister of Education, translator’s note] manifestations.

As taught by the “wise” Kossiga and well learned by his worthy successors, Maroni, Mori, De Gennaro  and Manganelli[they are Italian politicians and police chiefs, translator’s note], the bourgeois state gives more and more often dirty works to the secret repression deployments, to intelligence services (see Abu Omar’s case that the government wants to cover up at any cost), to infiltrators, to paid provokers, operating in some cases under the façade covering of the various extreme-right organizations unpunished and allowed to act freely, and finally to the criminal organizations.

The “Stalinists Hunt” group, which in April signed the intimidating flyer delivered to an ASP comrade, a week after the search by Digos [the political police, translator’s note], is one of the many examples of the repressive acting by the bourgeois State.

Political police is more and more arrogant. In the general reaction climate which is being established, very often the policemen, rendered arrogant by their bosses and ideologues, throw away the mask of service for the citizens and show their true face. It’s not long that Reggio Emilia Digos opened fire against some young militants of the CARC Party while they were making anti-fascist graffiti.

Really very little is enough to end up in inquiries, to be beaten and coshed during manifestations, to receive denounces, undertake searches, be filed in, arrested, attacked or intimidated by the police and by auxiliary repressive forces.

On judicial level, political trials become again model trials, like under fascism and during 70s-80s years. More and more often accusatory and judging magistrates use offences like “moral contribution in devastation and looting”, as it happened against anti-fascist comrades defendants for the events of May 11th 2006 in Milan, and like “psychological involvement”, given to the comrades charged for the G8 events in Genova and convicted altogether to 122 years in prison.

On the opposite, the bourgeois Authorities, carrying out a clearly double track justice, promote the killers and torturers who took part in the Naples and Genoa butcheries, in those days of fight against the bosses of imperialism.

The membership offences, of fascist inheritance, like the article 270 bis, are more and more in fashion among judges like Boccassini and Giovagnoli, who stand up, often only to draw attention and to advance their careers, as “modern Torquemada”, as upright champions of the barbaric bourgeois system, by now on the decline.

The repressive line of the bourgeois judicial system entails in practice also the building of new prisons in view of a constantly increasing number of inmates. The reactionary government in office, with its minister Alfano, intends to entrust the management of these prisons to private societies, therefore to the capitalist market, which absorbs everything that can give profit to it, as it already happens for schools, hospitals and other social services.

Regarding communists, revolutionaries, anarchists and anti-imperialists, “rigorous imprisonment” is the natural option that zealous judges, in the pay of the bourgeoisie, apply to them. While overcrowded jails, lacking decent hygienic conditions and services, are the destiny of common prisoners (about 60.000), prisoners who serve political offences must deal with an additional punishment: the torture of solitary confinement, infamous article 41 bis and EIV sections (high level surveillance).

Through such measures, often denounced also by international organizations, many rights are concretely trampled, cut to the bone or abolished (visits, mail, parcels, air-hour, sociality, right to study, etc.).

The purpose of such treatment, that goes without saying, is just one: to induce political prisoners to repentance and to dissociation from the struggle for social change. The breakdown of political prisoners is translated into the following message to the masses: you see, there is nothing to do, it’s useless to oppose, do collaborate with us, the only possible system is capitalism. But just the necessity of our class-enemy to apply such extreme measures shows instead how precarious is his dominance and how great is the apprehension provoked in him by the example of heroic resistance that, from jail, revolutionary prisoners continue to give to the struggle vanguards.

It’s evident how precarious is today the power of the bourgeoisie also from the clumsy and idealistic operations that tries to build up using historical revisionism, with the illusory purpose to endeavour an impossible peace-making between the classes. After the attempts to revisit the history of anti-fascist esistance, “partisans same as fascists”, president Napolitano, former representative of the extreme right of the old Italian Communist party, puts on the same level Calabresi’s death and anarchist Pinelli’s death [Calabresi was a Police commissioner who threw Pinelli out of the window in the Seventies, and later was attempted and killed himself, translator’s note].

The Association Proletarian Solidarity, in this context, has already made its choice years ago, lining up in the front of struggle against repression. A necessary front of struggle, because without resisting to repression it is not possible to advance in the conquest of a better world. There will not be any social achievement for humanity if, around the struggle vanguards of workers and popular masses who are affected by repression, a wide and strong movement of solidarity will not be developed. A movement capable to transform repressive attacks into accumulation of further revolutionary or sincerely democratic forces, able to push forward the necessary process of social transformation already present in reality. This is also what we have been taught by more than 160 years of class struggle.

IDRP seeks to be a moment of reflection, of growth of consciences, of launch of concrete unitary routes aimed to reinforce the struggle against repression and the resistance that popular masses oppose to it. Also in this way, it can be reinforced the whole popular resistance movement against the crisis that day after day goes worse, but that pushes the masses to do by their own, to build themselves their future, a future which the barbarity of capitalism makes always more precarious and dark.

We ask all the comrades, organisms and mass movements (for job, for housing, for a healthy environment, for health, for education, etc.), trade union workers, students, women, pensioners, sincere democrats, to contact the Association Proletarian Solidarity, to advance and organize together enterprises like meetings, debates, garrisons, fliers, fund collects for those banged by the repression of the new bourgeois special courts.

We appeal to everyone so that everywhere, in June, will be promoted enterprises of solidarity with political revolutionary prisoners, who in every place continue to endure inhuman conditions of detention, solitary confinement, torture and killings.

Solidarity to prisoners who resist in imperialistic prisons reinforces the resistance of the popular masses as the crisis moves forward.

Let’s make the IDRP a mass mobilization against an expanding repression, that must be battled with no ifs and buts.

International and class solidarity to all revolutionary prisoners!

Against solitary confinement, tortures, bloodsheds in Iraqi, Israeli, Afghanistan, Turkey, Guantanamo prisons, in our country and in every part of the world!

Against repression, racism, fascist violence and masters’ terrorism!

Freedom for all revolutionary prisoners!