This is a summary of resent support events in Finland for the repressed comrades in Russia.
On the 4th of February, Anarchist Black Cross Helsinki organized “Amazing Vegan Sunday Soli Lunch” at Lymy. The event was a success. In Tampere a support gig was held on March the 2nd. There were four bands playing and vegan food for sale. Varis Tampere that organized the event and TAL (Tampere Anarchist Union) were also selling t-shirts and books about anti-fascism. Also in Helsinki Varis organized a support gig on the 4th of March with two hardcore bands, raffle, tofu burgers and info about the situation in Russia. The income of these events have been delivered to Russia to be used for lawyers’ salaries and other support for the repressed anti-fascists and anarchists in St.Petersburg, Penza, Tšeljabinsk and other locations in Russia.
Turku 18.3.2018
Turku 18.3.2018
On the Russian presidential election day there were demonstrations in Turku and Helsinki against the torture committed by FSB and more generally against Putin’s regime. In Turku a group of anarchists and antifascists gathered in front of Russian consulate holding a banner with the text “Free anarchists in Russia! Stop FSB torture!”. The banner was later dropped above a highway. In Helsinki about 50 people stood outside of Russian Embassy shouting slogans and holding banners against FSB and Putin and for liberation of the imprisoned anti-fascists. The people on their way to vote in the election could not avoid paying attention to the demonstration organized by local a anarchist group A-ryhmä, ABC Helsinki and Varis.
Demonstration at Russian Embassy in Helsinki 18.3.2018.
All in all, awareness of the situation in Russia has risen during the past months and people are motivated to act together against the repression and for our common goals. We will keep on supporting the comrades in Russia.
This campaign was started to give an anarchist answer to the repression following to actions of the 31st of May 2017 in Nuremberg. For further information about that day and why it is important to combine our anti-rascist, anti-repression and anti-state struggles within this campaign, view the text below.
Contact us:
If you have questions, wish for further translations and/or want to send us information about solidarity actions to be published on this blog, please write us an encrypted message to: ausbruchaufbruch[at]riseup.net.
On the 31st of May 2017, a student of a vocational school in Nuremberg (Germany) was to be deported to Afghanistan. His classmates did not accept this and reacted, together with hundreds of others, with a blockade to the attempted deportation. The police‘s answer to this was as typical as it was brutal: In the end, there were several injured and arrested people.
To penalize those who opposed the deportation, the judicial authorities made use of remand prison and are applying the recently tightened law about „resisting and/or attacking an officer of the law“ (§113/114 StGB). Dozens of people are accused of participating in the blockade. To distract from the good reasons for the demonstrators‘ actions, their anti-racist protest is being criminalized. This proves to be a strategy that the german state frequently and willingly uses to prevent an effective approach against its racist practices of sorting out and deporting people. The fact that the 31st of May was a great example of how successful direct action in solidarity can be, is probably just another reason for the state to show exceptional harshness against the accused.
With Jan being one of the accused (among many others), the repression now is also directly concerning an anarchist. We – friends, comrades and supporters of Jan – are convinced that this link is no coincidence. Right after the 31st of May, the Bavarian government tried to split the protesters into ‚non-violent students‘ and ‚militant radical-left autonomists‘. This division is supposed to support their tale of a friendly, peaceable police, which only had to become excessively brutal to react to the attacks, that militant opposers of the deportation allegedly had started.
As a consequence of steadfast antifascist action, Jan has been condemned in court before. This earlier conviction makes him perfectly suitable for the picture of an activist who is threatening to the state and to cops. Somebody who they successfully criminalized in the past already for his anti-authoritarian actions.
It have been Jan‘s anarchist ideals which made him oppose the violent deportation of a young person on that 31st of May. Because of his radical anti-state convictions it is to be expected that the legal authorities will feel called to aim at an extraordinarily rigorous penalty for him.
And yet, despite having been criminalized before, in the end Jan is only one of so many accused after the 31st of May, some of who face trials under similar conditions. And with regard to the large number of anarchists who currently are threatened and affected by state oppression, his case appears to be almost insignificant.
But the repression against Jan must not be seen isolatedly. It is part of the list that is growing longer each time when the state once more tries to silence anarchists. Our bitter anger against the penalty that is threatening Jan, fans the same fury that we feel when we read about the cruel arrogance, with which the german state locks up comrades after the g20-summit.
It is the same cold rage coming over us when we hear about the state murdering an anarchist in Argentina, who fought against capitalistic land-grabbing. It is the same relentless fury that drives us, when we find out about the greek government tearing down refugees‘ squats; when we see the turkish state invading and trying to destroy the free and emancipatory communities in Rojava.
It is our struggle for freedom that unites us with all of these anarchist comrades and friends all over the world. For a freedom in solidarity, where society no longer feels like it needs to guard itself with prisons and oppression from those ideas, that could actually put an end to the omnipresent exploitation and inequality. Where ‚state‘ and ‚police‘ have become nothing more than a very bad joke, and where prisons and the repression authorities have been torn down once and for all!
So let us give an appropriate answer to the state‘s attempts to intimidate us: Let us give a clear expression of our rage against the attacks on Jan and all of us! And let us keep on taking no matter which actions to oppose racism in state and society in each and every possible way!
On November 29, 2017, in the Korydallos prison court, started the trial on 2nd degree (appeal court) of the comrades Argyris Dalios, Giannis Michailides, Dimitris Politis, Nikos Romanos and Gerasimos Tsakalos (member of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire). The accusations were bank and post office expropriations, possession of ammunition, forgery, incendiary attacks, while initially (in the 1st degree) the comrades were accused of participation in the revolutionary organization Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, an accusation that falls under the antiterrorist law 187A.
In the 1st degree court (presiding judge Konstantinos Ganiatsos) the comrades were acquitted for the accusation of participation in the CCF, but the court claimed that they are “individual terrorists” and that their actions were of “terroristic” nature, sentencing them to many years of imprisonment.
In particular, the court decision of March, 26 sentences the comrades A. Dalios to 27 years (29 in the 1st degree), N. Romanos to 18 years (20 in the 1st degree), D. Politis to 12 years and 2 months (13 in the 1st degree), G. Michailides to 11 years (as in the 1st degree) and the CCF member, G. Tsakalos, to 5 years (as in the 1st degree). This is the first time in Greek court history that the article about “individual terrorism” is being implemented, at least on anarchists.
Specifically, the district attorney Sofia Apostolaki suggested that just being an anarchist is enough to characterize a person’s acts as “terroristic”, and that if a person is not a member of a group, they act as “lone wolves”. This interpretation of the deliberately vague anti-terrorist law 187A allows the state to accuse any anarchist of terrorism, creating a precedent of heavy accusations and long sentences for the anarchist movement. Till now the accusations for participation in a “terrorist” group were based on DNA samples, friendly and family relations, non-existing witnesses and “disappeared” elements, leading either to acquittal or to vindictive decisions, that were unexpected even for the civil justice. From now on, simply being an anarchist is enough of an “element” to lead to condemnation. A simple district attorney motion is enough to target the anarchist movement in total as the “internal enemy” and condemn our comrades to long sentences.
At the same time fascists, mafia members, businessmen and shipping magnates are treated favorably by the state and the law, everyone that struggles against them and the values they represent, against all kinds of oppression, are lead to the dungeons of civil democracy because of their political identity.
The gravity of this precedent, which the state attempts to establish, concerns us all, all members of the movement, who choose to act outside the framework of civil law and attack the state and its mechanisms. It concerns everyone who does not stand indifferent in the face of the capitalistic brutality and with solidarity and comradeship chooses the side of the oppressed. In this time of intense inter-systemic shocks, amidst scandals, memoranda, thousands of forthcoming foreclosure auctions and the total devaluation of our lives, this particular trial decision is a message to all who choose the difficult but necessary road of revolutionary action. A message that we, the anarchist movement, must reverse.
Last year, we reported on some anarchists building a space ship vessel for Murry Bookchins “Lifestyle Anarchism or Bust” bread book. We are very sorry to report that a Russian backed Syrian army jet shot down the space ship as it took off towards the heavens. The remnants of the craft are currently held by some USA govt backed rebels there.
We strongly condemn this and will no longer announce our projects on ANEWS.
Yesterday, the cycle of our criminal cases ended with the state condemning us for dozens of years of imprisonment as «individual terrorists» with elements and accusations that would be a routine case in a formal court of ordinary criminal law.
The decision of yesterday’s court is a decision point for the political trials and the new correlations that are shaped on the map of criminal repression against the anarchist movement.
They claimed the legal weapon of the state, the instrument of «individual terrorism», which is nothing less than the criminalization of the anarchist political identity, as sufficient evidence for the condemnation of fighters under the counter-terrorism law (187A). Even so, if a comrade has been irrevocably acquitted for their participation in an organization, as with us, their political identity may be the vehicle for conviction with 187A, as has been said many times from the mouth of Prosecutor Apostolaki –“they are anarchists, so their acts are terrorist”, “they have not changed their views so that their actions can be characterized differently”. At the same time, a new upgraded field to expand 187A is created whereby an anarchist action which goes beyond the bounds of civic legitimacy will be described as “individual terrorism” increasing the length of sentences and time remaining in prison.
Characteristic is my own example, while for the expropriation in Velvento, Kozani, I was sentenced to 11 years in prison without the provisions of 187A, for some cartridges and three arsons I was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment, it is obvious even for a first-year law student that these acts have much less criminal weight than an armed expropriation of a bank. So, for the reason that I entered prison, I would have been released from prison for some time while I am held with tens of years on my back based on the repressive innovation of individual terrorism which for the first time is applied against anarchist prisoners.
Of course, this fact is not a neutral finding, nor is it a victimized presentation of reality, it is the best proof that anarchists are a real threat to the system even during periods of reversal for the anarchist movement. Because, in fact, yesterday’s convictions were nothing less than the condemnation of anarchist identity. The condemnation of the political defence of our actions and our choices in the bourgeois courts, the condemnation of the fact that we do not bend to kiss the cross of repentance, or kneel in front of our oppressors as is the case every day in the halls of the Court of Appeal and [the court of] Evelpidos, but we stand with our heads held high against them.
In fact, what yesterday’s sentences wanted to impose was a resounding message of state terror to those who give subversive battles on the lines of the anarchist movement. An attempt to leave the poison of fear in the midst of radical ventures, to cast doubt on the effectiveness of struggle, to prevent new comrades from lighting and spreading the flames of solidarity within the metropolis, to separate the means of the anarchist struggle into permissible and non-permissible on the basis of the criminal repression and the extension of 187A, which is nothing more than a sharpened knife in the hands of the police and judicial complex, to become the captive trophies in the zoo of the correctional colonies that will be there to remind you what you might suffer from any attempt to attack the system. Moreover, it is not by chance that until the condemnation was reached there was complete silence on the matter from the media, as soon as it was delivered the decision became a matter for news stories as a permanent reminder that the state is taking revenge on its political opponents.
And it is indeed a reality that the state and its mechanisms of imprisonment reserve the most vengeful attitude to those who have disputed its omnipotence. It is also a fact that speaking the language of truth, our heart hurts. It hurts for the years of our one and only youthful life being thrown onto the wastes of prisons, hurting for our relatives who are experiencing a merciless psychological war and turning into the collateral damage in a war they did not choose, it hurts for our friends and comrades who grow up together in the prisons, it hurts for our people who leave the courtroom with dismal steps, hurting for those who cry feeling the rage choking them. But it is also a reality that this pain could never be compared to the pain of a life choking in apathy, indifference and self-interest. Those for whom turning back the crimes of the state and capital has never been a realistic choice.
The pain that the state and capitalism generously distributes in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, concentration camps and refugee camps, on the land and sea borders, in the workshops of the civilized West and the deathshops set up by multinational monopolies in the countries of the Third World to expand their productive base by pressing on the corpses of children, can not be overcome by turning away our gaze, by closing our eyes, with a harmless protest within the framework defined for us by the system.
The pain that is felt by a person devoted to the struggle for the cause of freedom is the one who feeds the hearth of disobedience and insurrection against the state and its servants. They are the one who produces radical theories, who becomes an accomplice in the historical formation of subversive events, it is the tightness in the stomach when they find themselves with a book in hand studying the stories of the past historical experiences of comrades who by their action contributed to our common cause by adding their stone to the development of revolutionary history.
On the opposite side, the pain of a life drowned in compromise and apathy is a pain that is existential, it is the pain of a new life that has learned to obey orders, to be disciplined in front of the powerful, to be indifferent to the oppression and exploitation of those next to them so long as it does not touch them, it is the pain of the psychologically damaged, the homogenization behind the produced social standards, the diffuse individualisation, it is the pain of the existential vacuum which in the era of capitalist prosperity was covered by car rentals, a new set of home furniture, cheap entertainment, and now remains trapped in the OAED [unemployment service] queues, in the church meals, in the choice of tolerance to this condition, and not in organizing resistances to overthrow it.
Therefore, as many times as we could turn time back, our hearts would choose to walk through the wild and special beauty of the anarchist struggle, on the paths of conflict with power in all its forms, in all those moments where the murderous class of a civilized world is disturbed by insurgent slaves, by those who refuse to be slaves, by fighters who bear the flames of freedom within them.
Those who are anarchists are proud, and all these contemptible and petty people like Ganiatsos, Apostolakis, Mouzakis and the like who are raving to extinguish us, can invent new legal terminologies, build indictments, tear up the criminal code itself in their fury against those in front of them.
The anarchist movement has spilt its blood and has proven in its long history that it will seek with perseverance and persistence the ways to respond to those who consistently organize its extermination. The responsibility for the judicial coup belongs to many with each individually assigned their own part. From the political responsibilities of the SYRIZA government, which relate to anti-terror laws and its selective sensitivity to cases where it may have a political interest, in the blocked mouths of all those “of the movement” or “of rights” seeking the issues they will raise to change the current political agenda, to the names of those involved in the particular coup d’état till the anti-terrorist unit and the investigators who carved up the charges and built indictments for the purpose our legal extermination.
A nexus of power that independent of its inner conflicts finds a common field of action in dealing with the “internal” enemy and fighting it with every available means.
If anything is certain it is that this particular judicial coup will not be forgotten in oblivion, but will be a springboard for struggle against the anti-terrorist policies, current terror trials and the regime of exception against political prisoners. The names of Ganiatsos, Mouzakis, Apostolakis and all the rest will be engraved in the memory of all those struggling faithfully for anarchy and freedom and the feet of the movement will make sure that they kick the stools out from under those standing, throwing them from the pedestal of arrogance and vengefulness to a new discredit and stigmatization. There the false idol of the blood-painted god these people worship will watch them fall.
In conclusion, we can safely say that the condemnations of the state and its appointed servants neither bend us nor terrorize us, neither us nor the comrades who are fighting for our common cause. Anarchy in our heart will continue to burn until it burns the last remnants of this aged world which generates all that technocratic ugliness that covers every centimetre of this planet. Until that beautiful day when free and captive comrades will have the smile of satisfaction for the just act of our struggle imprinted in every gesture, the struggle continues and will continue against the architects of all the small and great blows against our lives.
Strength and solidarity to all those comrades who stand next to us each in their own way.
How the Tactics that the Russian State Uses against Anarchists Could Spread
Grisly news keeps coming in from Russia about the activities of the Russian Federal Security Service—the FSB, which is descended from the KGB. In account after account, anarchists and anti-fascists describe how the FSB kidnapped them, planted weapons in their cars, and used torture to force them to sign false confessions admitting to participating in an obviously invented terror network.
Why should we care about the Russian torture cases, specifically? At first, it may strike people in the US and Western Europe as yet another abstract tragedy, just one more call for international solidarity with unfortunates in a faraway land. But the stakes here are much more significant. What is taking place in Russia is a nightmare scenario that could recur closer and closer to us if we don’t take it seriously.
For decades now, the security agencies of many different countries have repeatedly attempted to fabricate national and international “terrorist conspiracies” in order to frame anarchists. To date, all of these efforts have been embarrassing failures. Now, the Russian secret police have introduced an innovation: by kidnapping anarchists without warning, planting weapons in their cars, and torturing them until they agree to sign forged “confessions,” they hope to finally make charges of participating in a “terrorism network” stick. If they succeed, we can expect to see other police agencies across the world emulate their tactics.
In the following analysis, we will review the history of this model of repression, explore the details of the Russian torture cases, and outline how we can respond. The Appendix lists the details of the arrests and torture in chronological order and provides corroborating evidence of the reports herein.
We’ve also prepared posters expressing solidarity with those targeted in this wave of repression. Please print them out and paste them up to draw attention to this case. The same posters are available in Spanish here.
Then the man in gloves cranked the dynamo. The current flowed to my knees. My calf muscles contracted, and I was seized by paralytic pain. I screamed. My back and head convulsed against the wall. They put a jacket between my naked body and the stone wall. This went on for about ten seconds, but when it was happening, it felt like an eternity to me.
One of them spoke to me.
“I don’t know the word ‘no.’ I don’t remember it. You should forget it. You got me?” he said literally.
“Yes,” I replied.
“That’s the right answer. Attaboy, Dimochka,” he said.
The gauze was stuck in my mouth again, and I was shocked four times, three seconds each time. […] Then I was tossed onto the floor. Since one of my legs was tied to the foot of the bench, when I fell, I seriously banged up my knees, which bled profusely. My shorts were pulled off. I was lying on my stomach. They tried to attach the wires to my genitals. I screamed and asked them to stop brutalizing me.
“You’re the leader,” they repeated.
“Yes, I’m the leader,” I said to make them stop torturing me.
“You planned terrorist attacks.”
“Yes, we planned terrorist attacks,” I would reply.
One of the men who measured my pulse put his balaclava on me so I would not see them. At one point, I lost consciousness for awhile. […] After they left, a Federal Penitentiary Service officer entered the room and told me to get dressed. He took me back to my solitary confinement cell.
The next day, October 29, 2018, I broke the tank on the toilet and used the shards to slash my arms at the wrists and elbows, and my neck in order to stop the torture. There was a lot of blood from the cuts on my clothes and the floor, and I collapsed onto the floor. They probably saw what I did via the CCTV camera installed in the cell. Prison staffers entered my cell and gave me first aid. Then the prison’s psychologist, Vera Vladimirovna, paid me a visit.
Wounds inflicted on Ilya Kapustin by torture with electrical shock.
A Brief Summary of the Cases: Lies, Forgery, and Torture
The story begins in Penza in October 2017, when the FSB arrested six anti-fascists who sometimes played airsoft. According to the FSB, all the detainees were members of the unimaginatively titled organization “Set” (“Network”) and were planning to use bombs to “destabilize the political climate in the country” during the presidential elections and the FIFA World Cup. They alleged that the network’s cells were operating in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Penza, and Belarus.
FSB officers planted weapons and explosives in the vehicles of some arrestees and tortured them in the pre-trial detention center, beating them, hanging them upside down, connecting electrodes to their bodies with which they electrocuted them, and threatening them with even worse. Using these methods, the officers forced the arrestees to agree to validate forged testimony professing that they are part of the alleged terrorist “Network.” At the end of January 2018, two more antifascists were arrested in St. Petersburg. They were also beaten, tortured by means of electrical shock, and forced to agree that they too were members of the invented “Network.”
As of now, seven anti-fascists are behind bars and another is under house arrest, facing up to a decade in prison.
Solidarity demonstration in Berlin on March 18 coinciding with the Russian presidential elections.
After news spread about the arrests and torture, activists organized solidarity actions in Russia and elsewhere around the world. The Russian state responded with additional crackdowns. In Moscow, officials detained participants in solidarity actions and pressed criminal charges against them. Anti-fascists from Chelyabinsk were detained, tortured with electric shocks, and now face charges as well.
On March 21, the FSB admitted to inflicting electrical shocks on at least one of the arrestees. Members of the public supervisory commission of St. Petersburg had visited defendant Viktor Filinkova a few days his arrest and recorded dozens of marks from electrical torture on his body. The FSB acknowledges that officers inflicted these injuries on Filinkova via electrical shock attacks, but maintain that this was necessary “to prevent him from escaping.”
The appendix, below, includes a chronological list of the arrestees, including excerpts from their accounts and accounts from lawyers.
Arrestee Victor Filinkov.
Previous Precedents in Europe and the US
One of the first contemporary attempts to fabricate a far-reaching criminal conspiracy in order to frame anarchists took place in Italy in the mid-1990s, in what became known as the Marini trial. As one of the birthplaces of the original anarchist movement, Italy has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to strategies of repression. It’s worth quoting at length from the analysis of the Marini trial that anarchists published at the time, as it offered an ominous portent of everything that has followed in the years since:
“With the so-called Marini trial, they have taken a more sophisticated approach. They have invented a fictional criminal anarchist organization with two tiers: the larger aboveground tier consisting of publications, presses, occupied centers and so on; and the clandestine portion, the armed gang. Using this fictional construction, state prosecutor Antonio Marini charged dozens of anarchists with “subversive association” and “armed gang” (and a few with crimes related to actual events). The only evidence for the “subversive association” and “armed gang” charges are the letters, periodicals, e-mails, conversations, and visits among those charged.
“Because these charges (particularly that of “subversive association”) are, in fact, not very defined, they give the state a sword to go on holding over anarchists’ heads. If one trial fails, new investigations can be opened, and the Italian authorities keep on opening investigations involving raids, searches, bugging, harassment—all the usual police tactics. Even if the number of convictions that these charges succeed in bringing about is low, this process can easily lead comrades to focusing their energy on self-defense rather than attack against the social order. When this occurs, the strategy of the state has been successful.”
In 2008 and 2009, police carried out raids with the intention of establishing the existence of nationwide anarchist terror networks in France (the “Tarnac 9” case) and the United States. Neither of these efforts ultimately succeeded.
In an article we published in 2010, “The Age of Conspiracy Charges,” we reviewed over a dozen high-profile political conspiracy cases initiated in the US between 2004 and 2010 targeting anarchists and their associates. Several of these efforts sent people to prison for years or decades, but none of them succeeded in demonstrating any evidence of worldwide or nationwide terror networks.
After the high-water mark of popular struggles in 2011, police around Europe counterattacked with another wave of attempts to invent anarchist terror networks. In late 2014 and early 2015, police in Spain and Catalunya carried out Operations Pandora and Piñata, arresting dozens of anarchists and charging many of them with being part of a terrorist group—on the basis of evidence such as their having co-published a book entitled Against Democracy. By the beginning of 2018, this attempt, too, had proved to be a dismal failure. An important factor in the defeat of this wave of repression was the broad support the defendants received throughout the Iberian peninsula, including a solidarity campaign on the theme #YoTambienSoyAnarquista (“I too am an anarchist”).
Police in Czech Republic imitated the Spanish example, initiating their own Operation Fenix in April 2015. This also did not turn out well for the authorities, with the trial ending with all defendants acquitted and the state scrambling to invent new justifications to continue harassing its targets. Thanks to strenuous solidarity efforts and the laziness, incompetence, and stupidity of the police, the authorities failed to convince even their own reactionary legal officials that these fake terror networks existed.
For more background on repression throughout Europe during this period, read “On Repression Patterns in Europe,” which offers a critical overview of repression and solidarity in six countries.
Seeking to improve on all these failures, in 2017, the Russian security services introduced an innovation: using horrific methods of torture, they set out to terrorize arrestees into signing statements proclaiming their guilt themselves. Thus far, they have succeeded in forcing a half dozen people to acknowledge membership in a far-fetched “terror network” that had not actually carried out any actions.
Arrestee Igor Shishkin.
Why the Russian Model Could Spread
The police of all nations are interlinked in a global network. They exchange tactics, strategies, and training; innovations in one field or region are swiftly passed on to others. It is plain for all to see that governments and the models of policing that they employ have become increasingly authoritarian since the turn of the century. In this context, it’s no stretch to imagine that police in Europe and the US might emulate the Russian model for concocting a conspiracy and forcing their targets to confirm its existence by means of torture.
Does this really seem hard to imagine?
The authorities in Europe and the US are certainly not above fabricating excuses to press charges. As we outlined in Bounty Hunters and Child Predators, the police are often too lazy to target actual anarchist organizing. Bringing the negligence of all cynical employees to their work, they frequently find it easier to entrap inexperienced individuals who are peripheral to anarchist movements. In the US, this is adequately illustrated by the entrapments of Eric McDavid, David McKay, Bradley Crowder, Matthew DePalma, the NATO 3, and the Cleveland 4, to name just a few examples, by FBI agents provocateurs like Andrew Darst and Brandon Darby. None of these people would have engaged in illegal activity had it not been for pressure and, in some cases, outright seduction from FBI operatives. All of them served years in prison as a result. Eric McDavid’s conviction was overturned nine years into his 19.5-year sentence when it came out that the FBI had concealed evidence that exonerated him; but in all of these cases, the authorities used roughly the same approach.
There are also reports of US government interrogators using electrical shocks and mock executions being used to force them to sign forged “confessions.” This is the FSB model.
Nor is it unrealistic to imagine that police in Europe or the United States would use torture against anarchists. Italian police tortured arrestees during the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, as the European Court of Human Rights recently acknowledged. There were reports of police torturing arrestees during protests against the 2003 Ministerial planning the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami. Since then, various city governments have paid out countless millions of dollars as a consequence of police misconduct; it takes a long time to get external confirmation of torture, but over the coming years, we will surely see many more cases from the past fifteen years come to light.
The current US administration is outright eager to see torture employed more widely. Just as the agenda of the Trump administration has been a driving force in unprecedented new crackdowns such as the J20 prosecutions, it is realistic to expect that the enthusiasm Trump and his cronies have shown for Russian “toughness” will be reflected in the activities of police and federal agents in the years to come.
By the time the authorities get around to trying out new strategies on anarchists, we can be sure they will already have employed them against Muslims and poor people of color. This is yet another reason for us to engage in solidarity organizing with communities more targeted than our own, so we can keep abreast of police tactics that are likely to be employed against us next.
Wounds inflicted on arrestee Ilya Kapustin from handcuffs.
Previous Precedents in Russia
The tactic of forcing defendants to validate false testimony is not new to Russia, as a cursory review of the history of the USSR will show. Likewise, this is not the first time that the Russian security services have attempted to frame anarchists and anti-fascists by means of a concocted terror conspiracy.
For example, during the year before the presidential elections of 2012, the Nizhny Novgorod Counter-Extremism department concocted the so-called Antifa-RASH case, in which they accused several anti-fascists of laying the groundwork for an armed coup; they even fabricated blatantly false “membership cards,” which were riddled with errors. Three of the defendants were eventually amnestied, but two remain in exile to this day.
Obviously fake “membership card” fabricated by the Nizhny Novgorod Counter-Extremism department to entrap anti-fascists in 2011.
After the parliamentary elections at the end of 2011, massive protests broke out in Russia and continued through the presidential elections. Apparently, this popular reaction struck fear into the Russian government. When Putin returned to power, new repressive legislation was introduced in order to systematically suppress all protest movements and criticism of the government.
Until 2014, the authorities had cooperated with far-right nationalists. But after the Maidan uprising in the Ukraine, they cracked down on nationalists and fascists as well. And after the annexation of Crimea, the authorities brought more and more criminal cases against so-called terrorists and extremists: against Moslem people from “non-traditional” denominations, against Crimean Tatars, against nationalists, anarchists, and anti-fascists. For example, in the case of Sentsov and Kolchenko, an anarchist was sentenced to ten years imprisonment alongside an accused member of the Ukrainian fascist party Right Sector—despite his only connection to nationalists being that he had been beaten by them.
For some years, the nationalist Vyacheslav Maltsev promoted the idea that there would be a revolution on November 5, 2017. Maltsev himself left Russia due to a criminal charge against him (“Public calls for extremist activity”). Starting in October 2017, the authorities arrested many people connected to Maltsev and his movement throughout Russia and accused them of preparing terrorist attacks.
This is how it came to pass that, in the city of Penza, antifascists who had an airsoft team called “5.11”1 were arrested, tortured, and accused of terrorism. When the secret service understood that the arrestees had nothing to do with nationalist revolution, they fabricated a conspiracy charge: participation in an invented anarchist terrorist group, “Network.” Thus the FSB sought to smash both right-wing and left-wing movements at the same time.
All this took place in advance of a new round of presidential “elections” on March 18. Putin and his colleagues wanted these elections to occur without protests afterwards. That’s why they set out to intimidate everyone who could potentially bring people into the streets.
Meanwhile, Russia is preparing to host the FIFA World Cup. As we documented in reference to the World Cup in Brazil, mega-projects like the World Cup offer oppressive state governments the opportunity to carry out massive new initiatives of restructuring and repression. The Russian Secret Services were determined to show that they could effectively prevent terror attacks—and the easiest way to do so was to invent a threat. This is another factor that explains the new wave of repression against anarchists and antifascists in Russia.
The fact that the state intensified its attacks against anarchists and anti-fascists after finally cracking down on far-right groups should serve as a reminder that anti-fascists should be careful, in the course of their organizing, not to legitimize any form of state repression, even against the most dangerous fascists. Whatever the state does to fascists today, it will surely do to anarchists and other rebels tomorrow.
A map of the Russian election results: the dictator Putin was unanimously reelected. Democracy works in not-so-mysterious ways.
What We Can Do
What can we do to support the Russian defendants and thwart the attempt to innovate a new model for repression?
At the very least, we have to direct attention to the Russian torture cases in order to discredit the Russian police, in hopes of discouraging the security services of other nations from following their example. This much should be possible. Only a few years ago, Pussy Riot became darlings of the liberal media, filling the time-honored role of “Russian dissidents.” At a time when Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia dominates the news, it should be possible for us to use the same channels that publicized the J20 cases to draw attention to these cases too.
In responding to fabricated conspiracy cases, we can draw on our previously mentioned text, The Age of Conspiracy Charges:
1. Don’t let the state intimidate us out of confrontational public organizing.
The state targets public organizers because they are effective. Even when it is framed as a strategic choice, retreating from public organizing can only play into the hands of the authorities. Repression is intended to cause militants to back away from engaging with the public, losing connection with a broader social base and deepening the false dichotomy between passive “community organizing” and clandestine direct action. This is not to say everyone must organize publicly—on the contrary, one function of public organizing is to prepare a favorable ground for more generalized and anonymous actions—but that it is a necessary aspect of anarchist struggle.
2. Minimize our vulnerability to conspiracy charges.
There are many ways we can do this. Perhaps the most obvious is to practice appropriate security culture, sharing sensitive information on a need-to-know basis and doing our best to keep informants out of our circles. Security culture is not only for those who may be party to illegal activity; it is important for everyone connected to networks that the state is interested in mapping or disrupting.
Likewise, it’s important to keep an eye out for federal bounty hunters preying on naïve young activists. Often they prefer to target the least experienced or connected individuals in a social milieu instead of tangling with longtime militants. We can also inoculate ourselves against disruption by sorting out internal conflicts before they offer infiltrators or prosecutors opportunities to divide us against each other.
Whenever someone is targeted with a politically motivated conspiracy case, it’s important that we mobilize the very best legal defense we can. Every conspiracy case against radicals sets a precedent for more of the same; defending one of us is literally defending all of us. Good lawyers serve two functions. First, they intimidate the state, which will be more likely to bargain or drop charges if it knows pressing them will be expensive and risky. Second, they can win cases or get them thrown out. Raising the money to defend one person effectively can save a lot more money and heartache in the long run.
Public support campaigns are equally important. On one side, this means going public when you are targeted—both so you can receive support and so that repression will be brought into the spotlight. On the other, it means organizing long-term support for defendants, so they will feel invested in answering to the community and so the authorities will have to factor in public relations challenges when they consider whether to target us. Support campaigns can target the most vulnerable individuals in the power structure; the supporters of the RNC 8 did this by concentrating on county attorney Susan Gaertner, who was eventually forced to drop the terrorism charges against the defendants.
Finally, though this should go without saying, we can protect ourselves from conspiracy charges simply by not cooperating with the authorities. Many of these cases would never have gotten off the ground if people had not been intimidated into making statements against their former comrades. Nobody talks, everybody walks—that goes for our whole community as well as specific groups of defendants.
Defendants who cooperate with the government never come out ahead. As detailed below and elsewhere, not only do they lose friends and community support, they rarely get significantly shorter sentences—and doing prison time is much harder as an informant.
3. Craft an effective narrative discrediting the state’s use of conspiracy charges and circulate it to the general public.
If the authorities come to rely on pressing conspiracy charges against anarchists as a central strategy of repression, we must take advantage of the ways this makes them vulnerable. Many in our society—and not just radicals—are uncomfortable with the idea of people being persecuted for thought crime. We need to find ways to address people outside our social and political circles about the prevalence of conspiracy charges, so as to utilize this opportunity to discredit the state and delegitimize conspiracy-based cases. The broader the range of people who disapprove of this tactic, the more the hands of the authorities will be tied.
Most of this work has yet to be done. If you are concerned about government repression, consider the ways you can approach others outside radical communities about this issue.
When we talk about conspiracy charges and witch hunts, it’s important to emphasize that we’re talking about the state, which exists to carry out violent repression. As long as there are inequalities and injustices, there will be resistance, and those in power will attempt to repress it. If we take ourselves seriously as a revolutionary movement, we need to see ourselves in the larger context and histories of resistance movements and the repression they have faced; we would do well to learn both from the successes and the failures of the past. It’s also important to remember that repression is a daily fact of life for countless people in communities on the wrong end of power and privilege; anarchists are far from exceptional in this regard.
Obviously, it is much more difficult for people to resist the pressure to cooperate with the authorities—and even to agree to validate outright lies—when they are grievously tortured. This makes solidarity and publicity efforts all the more important in this context.
To donate money to support the legal defense of the arrestees, you can use Paypal to send funds to the Moscow Anarchist Black Cross at abc-msk@riseup.net. Add a note that the funds are for “St. Petersburg and Penza.” Send euros or US dollars.
Here are some other ways to donate:
Yandex (wallet of the Anarchist Black Cross St. Petersburg) : 41001160378989
If you need another option for transferring money, contact the Anarchist Black Cross of Moscow: abc-msk@riseup.net
Arrestee Victor Filinkov.
Appendix: The Arrestees (In Chronological Order)
In the city of Penza
Egor Zorin— Arrested October 17-18. He was the first arrestee, and the first to make a confession. Currently under house arrest.
Ilya Shakursky— Arrested October 19. Shakursky was trying to find Zorin, after Zorin disappeared. He was arrested after exiting a bus on his way home. Law enforcement planted two grenades and a pistol under the back seat of Shakursky’s car. Tortured with electricity in the basement of the pre-trial detention center, he eventually agreed to a “confession.” His mother was fired from her job after the news was published about the case and torture. He wrote a formal complaint about torture. Currently in pre-trial detention.
He said the plan was to implicate them in the Maltsev case. He said this. I was surprised. What was the connection? In my view, this case was fabricated on formal grounds. They grabbed one comrade by the name of Zorin. He was the weakest of them and testified against all his friends. Moreover, his testimony is absolutely far-fetched. It was grounds for detaining the other guys on suspicion of having committed the particular crime.
This is where it gets interesting. According to my client, all of them were tortured in the basement of the remand prison. The torture was sophisticated. Officers in masks and camouflage uniforms would enter their cells. They took them to a room in the basement, forced them to strip, attached electrodes to their fingertips, and cranked up a so-called dynamo.
Vasily Kuksov— Arrested October 19. When officers brought him along to search his home, his trousers and jacket were torn and bloodstained and his forehead and nose were badly injured, as if he had been smashed against the pavement. There is speculation that he was tied to a car and dragged behind it. Guns were planted in his car (the lock of which is broken). He still has not agreed to offer or validate any testimony to the police. Currently in pre-trial detention.
Dmitry Pchelintsev— Arrested October 27. Pchelintsev had left the house at approximately six o’clock in the morning to meet his grandmother when he was arrested and brutally tortured. Accused of being an organizer of the supposed terrorist “Network,” he validated the narrative of the FSB. He made a formal complaint about torture, but asked to rescind it after a few days—a likely sign that he was tortured again. Currently in pre-trial detention.
“After I tried to commit suicide by slashing my veins open, I was put under special watch in the remand prison. The cuffs were not removed from my hands even when I was signing interrogation reports.
I want to add that, when I was tortured with electrical shocks, my mouth was full of “crushed teeth” due to the fact I gritted my teeth since the pain was strong, and I tore the frenulum of my tongue. My mouth was full of blood, and at some point one of my torturers stuck my sock in my mouth.
I was beaten so badly I had open wounds on my head.
Andrey Chernov— Arrested at the beginning of November. In jail, Chernov met Pchelintsev, who told him to agree to everything in order to minimize the extent to which he would be tortured. Subsequently, he proclaimed his guilt. Currently in pre-trial detention.
Arman Sagynbayev— Arrested at the beginning of November in St. Petersburg. Sagynbayev is reportedly experiencing serious health problems and needs medical attention. During the police custody extension hearing in mid-December, he said he constantly felt sick and vomited. According to other detainees, Sagynbayev was brutally tortured. Currently in pre-trial detention.
In the city of St. Petersburg
Viktor Filinkov— Kidnapped in an airport by the FSB on January 23. Filinkov is an anti-fascist, a computer programmer, and a Kazakh citizen. Officers took Filinkov to the woods, where they tortured him with electrical shock. He made a formal complaint about torture. He initially cooperated with the FSB, proclaiming his guilt, but now he wishes to retract his testimony. Currently in pre-trial detention.
For some questions they didn’t have the answers themselves.
“Where are the weapons?”
“What weapons? I know nothing,” I replied, and was shocked.
“You know everything, where are the weapons?” Bondarev K.A. pressed.
“Tell me, I will say what you tell me!” I hoped for mercy, but was still shocked. After several rounds, these questions were changed for ones which there were answers.
The masked man shocked me in different places: handcuffs, neck, chest, crotch, but the most convenient place was the right leg—he pressed me against the window, fixed my body in place, pressed the Taser in, pushed the button and held it like that, and I couldn’t move my leg anywhere. Bondarev K.A. repeated punches on the back of my head from time to time—all in all, he hit me at least 10 times.
Igor Shishkin— Kidnapped when he left to walk his dog on January 25. Shishkin was missing for two days, then reappeared at a court appearance which no one was permitted to attend. He had many marks on his body from torture and from electric wires. He made a deal with investigators. In pre-trial detention.
Ilya Kapustin— A witness. Kapustin was seized by masked secret service officers on the evening of January 25 on his way home. He reports that he was tortured with an electric cattle prod while being asked questions. He is free.
When I was returning home in the evening and was quite close to my house, five or so men in black uniforms and masks attacked me from different directions. They pushed me on the ground and dragged me into a minivan while kicking me. I tried to call for help. I yelled, but to no avail. I was knocked down on the floor of the vehicle, and the men searched me while continuing to kick me. I was handcuffed very tightly, so tightly I still have cuts on my hands.
The vehicle drove off, and I was interrogated. When I did not know the answer to a question, when I did not understand who or what they were talking about, they shocked me with an electric cattle prod near my groin or the side of my stomach. They shocked me so I would say some acquaintance of mine or another was planning to do something dangerous. There were questions about whether I was a member of certain organizations, where I had traveled, and whether I had been to Penza. They asked me to tell them details about the lives of my acquaintances.
So, from time to time they poked me with the shocker. At some point, one of them said they could dump me in the woods somewhere and break my legs. I was looking forward to this moment when it would all be over, because they had tortured me for such a long time it was quite unbearable.
I was in the vehicle from roughly nine-thirty in the evening to one-thirty in the morning when we arrived, apparently at an FSB office. When they took me out, they pulled a hood over my head and forced me to look down, and I could not figure out where we were, but later, when they took me home to search my flat, I guessed that I had been in the FSB office on the corner on Shpalernaya Street. I saw many secret service people in the office, only they were dressed in plain clothes. An investigator questioned me for something like an hour. Other secret service guys would sometimes stop by. One of them told me that if I did not want a second round, I should answer all the questions.
Then we went to the flat where we live, and there they let us read a search warrant issued by a court in Penza. During the search, I refused to switch on my laptop and telephone. That made them act very stridently. They threatened to hide a grenade and come back in a couple of days and find it in a search. Ultimately, they confiscated my laptop, telephone, and hard drive.
5.11 is the name of a sports clothing company. It is also the date of the shooting of anarchists in the Arbekovo forest of Penza at the beginning of the 20th century. ↩
Last week saw a new wave of repression targeting anarchists in France, with raids occurring almost simultaneously in several locations. On March 27 in Toulouse, two houses were raided and two people were placed in detention, but they were taken 300km away to the city of Limoges. These two people were released 38 hours later, after a long interrogation on their political positions and social networks.
At the same time, there was also a raid in Limoges itself, and one person was placed in detention, while 500km away in Amiens their family was also facing a raid and interrogations. This person has been placed under an order for up to one year of investigative custody that can then be renewed.
The next day, March 28, the little town of Ambert saw raids against three houses. Two people were placed in detention and they're now also held in investigative custody for up two four months, renewable twice. The charges mention mischief in an organized group; the investigation is still ongoing.
The information released by the mainstream media so far only mention Limoges, invoking the arson of several vehicles at its gendarmerie compound. Let's recall that during the trial for the burned police car last October, there were incendiary solidarity actions all across France, notably in Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand, Limoges, Grenoble, the Paris area, Marseille...
Based on what was said during the interrogations of the two people from Toulouse, we can gather that there has been audio surveillance and physical surveillance over several months during a judicial investigation that was then followed with a surveillance warrant, opened October 20 2017 and renewed December 13 2017. It's safe to assume that this surveillance doesn't only concern those interrogated or only these cities.
It seems that the state is using the vague designation of 'criminal association' to try to criminalize people's relationships, the spaces they visit, their ways of organizing, their political ideas and practices. This gives them a lot of leeway of who they can implicate: eating in a squat, using secure mailing lists, participating in actions, organizing meet-ups, playing sports together, communicating, or moving around.
However, dealing with repression is nothing new and over these past few years in France, prison has become more and more concrete for anarchists and anti-authoritarians.
Following the burning of a police car in 2016, several people were imprisoned. Among them, one comrade has now been in prison for over a year, with a five-year sentence of which they will serve half. The prison administration has been trying to make his stay particularly difficult through disorienting transfers to new cells or institutions or by depriving him of visits and mail.
Along with this, other comrades have been locked up in connection with the struggle against the nuclear dump site in Bure. Another person spent a month in prison before being released with a four-month conditional sentence, while three others are still in prison, including one person inside since November, sentenced to eight months, and two others sentenced to three.
At the end of 2017, some squatters got a taste of prison for … squatting. The state has found a a new way of preventing squatting through the use of burglary charges. Three people spent a week in jail over this, while another was inside for four months. The prosecution was seeking a year custodial sentence against this person, but at the last minute the judges decided to sentence him to two months custodial and four months conditional. This meant that with his pretrial detention ,he spent two months more in prison than he was sentenced to.
It's important to remain clear about our solidarity and to continue to struggle and stay solid, to defeat these judicial strategies. And let's remember that solidarity knows no borders and that the French state, with its wide cultural and economic reach, is present in the four corners of the world.
A police investigation has shed light into a clash between drug and arms dealers and anarchists in the central Athens neighborhood of Exarchia, Kathimerini has learned.
Meanwhile 29 Greek and Albanian nationals are to face charges in the wake of a major police crackdown in the area.
During the operation carried out between December and March 9 police tapped phone conversations and infiltrated the ranks of the suspects as they sought to control the drug trade in Exarchia Square and nearby pedestrian Mesolongiou Street.
The suspects allegedly sold cannabis to users in 2- and 4-gram bags at 10 and 20 euros respectively. They also sold 1-gram cocaine wraps for 55 euros. Police say the drugs were mixed with adulterants before being sold on the street.
Police say the racket employed Algerian migrants as dealers and often resorted to threats and violence to intimidate the competition. In a tapped conversation dated January 19, one of the suspects urges a 25-year-old accomplice, nicknamed “Levendis,” to join him in an attack on Egyptian street vendors. “The Egyptians are here, let’s go slap them about a bit,” he says. “I’ll have something to eat and I’ll join you,” says the other.
Investigators found that the suspects were also selling weapons. Speaking to one of his accomplices in December, one of the suspects brags about a newly purchased air gun. “Oh brother, you know what I just bought? It will blow your mind. It can take out the best of them at a distance of 3 meters.”
The drug traffickers were repeatedly targeted by anarchists, who have a strong presence in Exarchia.
In early February, a group of anarchists vandalized a restaurant on Andreas Metaxas Street believed to be a gang hangout. Two weeks later, anarchists raided an apartment used as a drug den by the racket.
“The regular assaults and the daily drug trafficking made the members of the organization undesirables in the area, resulting in initially sporadic and subsequently more frequent attacks by hooded [individuals] against members of the criminal organization,” a police report said.
Over a year ago our website and group in vk.com (the most popular social media site in post-USSR countries) were blocked by decision of court, considering information on the website to be extremist. Several weeks ago new round of attack from Ministry of information came. The new group, created after the blocking, was blocked also. At that moment it had around 1450 subscribers.
Several accounts of a users, that were running the group, were also blocked on territory of Belarus. Apart from that Belarusian government has added to the black list mirrors of the website in other social networks – Tumblr, WordPress, Livejournal and Diaspora. Before that our group in Facebook was blacklisted as well.
And although it is not possible for Belarusian government to block Facebook, Diaspora and Twitter due to some technical decisions made by those social networks, other networks and our mirror on WordPress.com are not available anymore on the territory of Belarusian state: notification about illegal information appears in your browser instead.
“This material is blocked on a territory of Belarus according to the decision of a Ministry of information of Republic of Belarus”
It is worth mentioning that last year the Ministry of information have blocked several major liberal oppositional news websites with hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. On top of that at the end of 2016 Belarusian government have successfully implemented blocking of tor network leading to 50% drop in users of service [1].
Belarus haven’t achieved level of China in censorship of the internet yet. There are still oppositional websites running online, however the trend points in negative direction with possibly few year away from total Internet censorship. This is also proven by the new law on mass media that is expected to pass in April, which tightens even more possibilities for non-govermental media to operate. One of the demands of this new law is an obligation to identify each user who posts a comment.
As for our collective – although the website is blocked, in Belarus the user base is steadily growing. Our mirrors in social networks give possibility for the people to follow our activity and we are continuing to fight and hope that you too!
On 12 March 2018, a Minsk court sentenced Sviataslau Baranovich to three years in prison. He admitted that he had hit police officers in civilian clothes during the brutal arrests of anarchists.
In recent years, the anarchists have become the most persecuted group opposing Alexander Lukashenka’s regime. They remain the most extreme organisation with a capacity to organise street protests and radicalise them.
However, it remains difficult to call some of the anarchists’ actions, such as the burning of billboards, politicised or even rational. Therefore anarchists have become a serious dilemma for human rights organisations because they do not know how to view them, although the government clearly sees anarchists as a political problem.
Origins of anarchism in Belarus
Anarchism in Belarus first appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, although it took a very different form to the contemporary movement. At that time Bialystok (then part of the Hrodna region in the Russian Empire) became the centre of the Belarusian anarchist movement; anarchists organised economic strikes, expropriations and the killing of police officers. The anarchists in Belarus had strong links to the movement in Russian (perhaps even belonged to it). For instance, the first Belarusian anarchist, Siarhiej Kavalik, followed the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, one of the principal founders of anarchist theory.
Anarchists often had Jewish origins and their victims were also Jews, since they often represented the capitalist (exploitative) class. But in general the movement proved something of an alloy, including intellectuals, the unemployed and criminals, according to a recent Russian-language book by Jury Hlushakou called Revolution Is Dead! Long Live the Revolution! Anarchism in Belarus 1902—1927.
Despite differences from earlier eras, contemporary anarchists’ choice of a specific ideology faces some restraints since communism remains an origin of Belarusian anarchism. As Mikalai Dziadok, one of the representatives of the movement, explained in an interview to Euroradio in 2017, anarcho-communists comprise the majority in the Belarusian anarchist movement. Where other versions of anarchism, popular in other countries, emphasize individuality, Belarusian anarchism remains primarily collectivist.
Meet the Belarusian anarchists
In all countries anarchists annoy the state authorities, but the Belarusian government has a much stronger feeling.
Undoubtedly, the Belarusian anarchists remain the most radical opponents of Lukashenka. In 2010 they threw smoke grenades and set fire to the Ministry of Defence and a casino; in 2016 they threw paint at the main entrance of the state television company; and in 2017 showed themselves the most organized group of the protesters against the law on parasitism, the most popular protests in the Belarusian regions in history. In Brest, a city in western Belarus, anarchists initiated those protests.
The movement’s structure remains opaque, so no one knows exactly how many people it comprises and their capabilities. The movement has a number of public representatives, including Mikalai Dziadok and Ihar Alinevich, known publicly because the court previously sentenced them to 4 and 8 years respectively in 2011. Their publicity is the result of their criminal record and not their wishes. Both, along with Alexander Frantskevich, formed part of the “anarchist case”, but Alinevich received the longest prison term. The court found him guilty not only for the aforementioned 2010 actions, but also for attacks on a branch of the Moscow-Minsk Bank and the Isolation Centre for Offenders Minsk.
Photo: Svaboda.org
Even without traditional methods of organisation during their actions, anarchists look like they have the most effective organising capacity. Although it remains difficult to assess the size of the anarchists’ regional structures, for sure the figures are not small. For instance, the organisation of “Revolutionary Action” has four-and-a-half thousand subscribers on the social network VKontakte. No opposition group has as many subscribers. Recently, the Belarusian authorities blocked the page, but it still works through a virtual private network (VPN) or outside the country.
However, such repressions do not mean that the government represses all activities of anarchists. The movement still has its own media website, pramen.io, which actually has a modest number of followers in social networks of around three thousand people; a“Free Thought” library operates in Minsk, although it is open just four hours per week; a “Food Not Bombs” initiative feeds poor people each week at three locations in Minsk, but also has some smaller groups in several other towns; and an “Anarchist Black Cross” helps anarchists and others somehow connected to the movement that have been imprisoned. Although Sviataslau Baranovich’s political views remain unknown, he will receive the help of the “Anarchist Black Cross”.
Political radicals or criminals?
The authorities see them at the same time as the most extremist enemies, able to radicalise protests and criminals, says the respected human rights defender Nasta Lojka in a comment to Belarus Digest. Accordingly, the prosecution of anarchists stems from mixed motives; it remains difficult to know whether Belarus’s authorities are defending public safety or Lukashenka’s regime. In fact, the government shows that it sees anarchists as political activists. For instance, before the presidential election in 2015, when Lukashenka pardoned a group of high-profile critics of the regime, the group included politicians such as Mikalai Statkevich and anarchists such as Dziadok and Alinevich.
Photo: 1reg.by
In some ways anarchists supply a convenient enemy for the authorities since they often break the law, giving the government an excuse to move against them. In 2017 members of the movement burned a billboard of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ivacevichy. Afterwards, three anarchists (17, 19 and 21 years old) received three years of probation. Independent journalists and human rights activists devoted little attention to this trial because it held no political significance. But, as Nasta Lojka says, police used the burned billboard as a pretext for searches in other cities, which looked quite far-fetched.
In 2017 Belarus held a long trial against an anti-fascist group of football fans, who received from 4 to 12 years for fighting, drug distribution and leading an unregistered organisation. However, authorities stretched some evidence in the case against anti-fascists so as to intimidate the entire community of informal youth groups.
The politicization of other cases looks more obvious still. During the protests against parasitism police arrested dozens of anarchists or others close to the movement. As a result of the protests, one activist, Zmicier Paliyenka, went to jail. Belarusian human rights activists have recognized him as a political prisoner.
However, the example of Paliyenka remains one of several. In practice, human rights activists try to avoid such criminal cases, especially involving violence. If anarchists consciously use violence, the human rights activists are forced to close their eyes to violations of rights against them.
However, it’s not just the official state cops that have been attacking those who don’t want to negotiate with the state. On March 20th, 5 masked people, armed with baseball bats and teargas sprays, raided a squat on the ZAD. This squat opposed the divide-and-rule compromise with the state, which involved legalising some people’s land and houses, but not others. These scum beat up people at the squat and then kidnapped the most outspoken opponent of the compromise, tied up his hands and legs, blindfolded him and gagged him with duct tape. They put him in the boot of their car and drove off. Later, they beat him again, broke one of his legs and arms, finally abandoning him in the night next to a psychiatric hospital. The most vociferous defenders of the compromise in the assemblies there have been the Invisible Committee, the “Appelistes”. They’ve done this kind of thing before, though less brutal (gagged and bound a guy who’d burnt out a tractor, bundled him into a carboot and left him in the middle of the woods). So most people are 99.99% sure that it was the “invisible committee” who’d done this red-fascist shit. They’ve always sat on the fence, playing revolutionary anarchists to the revolutionary anarchists, reformists to the reformists, leninists to the leninists. In this instance they were playing the filth to the filth. And not the kind of “playing” that’s fun. See here https://www.non-fides.fr/?Vivre-le-pouvoir-repandre-les-barbouzeries-Cec... in French.
We are writing with the smell of tear gas rising from our fingers. The springtime symphony of birdsong is punctuated by the explosive echo of concussion grenades. Our eyes are watering, less from the gas than the sadness; because our friends’ homes, barns and organic farms are being destroyed. Bulldozers, supported by 2500 riot police, armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, are rampaging through these forests, pastures and wetlands to crush the future we are building here on the to the zad (The zone à defendre).
We are calling on you to take solidarity actions everywhere, it could be holding demos at your local french embassy or consulate, or taking actions against any suitable symbol (corporate or otherwise) of France ! And if you are not too far away, bring your disobedient bodies to join us on the zone. If the French government evicts the zad, it will be like evicting hope.
For fifty years, this unique chequerboard landscape was the site of a relentless struggle against yet another climate wrecking infrastructure – a new airport for the nearby city of Nantes. Farmers and villagers, activists and naturalists, squatters and trade unionists wove an unbreakable ecology of struggle together and three months ago on the 17th of January, the French government announced that the airport project would be abandoned. But this incredible victory, won through a diversity of creative tactics from petitions to direct action, legal challenges to sabotage, had a dark shadow. In the same breath that declared the abandonment, came the announcement that the people occupying these 4000 acres of liberated territory, the 300 of us living and farming in 80 different collectives, would be evicted because we dared not just to be against the airport, but its WORLD as well.
Since that victorious day, the battle has transformed itself and is now no longer about a destructive infrastructure project, but about sharing the territory we inhabit. We stoped this place from being covered in concrete and so it is up to us to take care of its future. The movement therefore maintains that we should have the right to manage the land as a commons (see its declaration The Six Points for the Zad because there will never be an Airport). Today this is the struggle of the zad (zone to defend) of Notre Dame Des Landes.
The zad was launched in 2009 after a letter (distributed during the first french climate camp here) written by locals inviting people to occupy the zone and squat the abandoned farmhouses. Now the zone has become one of Europe’s largest laboratory of commoning. With its bakeries, pirate radio station, tractor repair workshop, brewery, anarchitectural cabins, banqueting hall, medicinal herb gardens, a rap studio, dairy, vegetable plots, weekly newspaper, flour mill, library and even a surrealist lighthouse. It has become a concrete experiment in taking back control of everyday life.
In 2012 the French state’s attempt to evict the zone to build the airport was fiercely resisted, despite numerous demolitions 40,000 people turned up to rebuild and the government withdrew. The police have not set foot on the zad since, that is, until Monday morning, when at 3am the gendarmes pierced into the zone.
On day one they destroyed some of the most beautiful cabins and barns, but yesterday we stopped the cops from getting to the Vraies Rouge, which happens to be where one of our negotiators with the government lives. Destroying the house of those that agreed to sit at the table with you was a strategic mistake. The fabulous zad press team used this as the media hook and today we are winning the battle of the story. If enough people get to the zone over the next days we could win the battle on the territory as well. We need rebel everything, from cooks to medics, fighters to witnesses. We doubt this rural revolt will be finished before the weekend, when we are also calling people to come and rebuild en mass.
Already solidarity demonstrations have taken place in over 100 cities across France, whilst the town halls of several towns were occupied. Zapatistas demonstrated in Chiapas Mexico, there were actions in Brussels, Spain, Lebanon, London, Poland, Palestine and New York and the underground carpark of the french embassy in Munich was sabotaged. They will never be able to evict our solidarity.
Post your reports on twitter @zad_nddl #zad#nddl and to our solidarity action email soutienzad@riseup.net for more info in english see www.zadforever.blog and watch this video to see what is being destroyed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqrtUkBmv8s
Benjamin Zephaniah is still angry. The legendary novelist, actor, playwright, poet and musician has spent a career raging against the racist machine – and he’s not about to stop any time soon. As a young black man growing up in the 70s and 80s, he saw more than his share of police violence – and spent a stint in prison himself. Those experiences informed a body of work which pulls no punches in its critique of institutional racism.
For Benjamin, success didn’t come easy. He left school at thirteen, gaining a reputation as a wordsmith on the dub poetry scene before publishing his first book of poetry by the age of just 22. The following year, police stop and search brutality gave rise to the Brixton Riots of 1981. Benjamin was in the thick of it, and chronicled those experiences in the 1983 album, Rasta.
“When I was picked up by white police officers I told them they were being racist, so they sent in a black officer to beat me instead. Could I tell a black copper he was being racist? He was with the institution. It happened a lot back then. They’d just jump out the car and beat me up and drive off. That’s why we had a lot of riots.” TheScarman Report of the time concluded the police were not racist – rather, the black community harboured the dangerous misbelief that they were being treated unfairly by the institution.
Benjamin speaks about this incident on the album track, Dis Policeman Keeps Kicking me to Death (Lord Scarman Dub) with the lyrics:
“I am living in de ghetto / trying to do my best / when dis policeman tells me / I’m under damn arrest / Him beat me so badly / I was on the floor / him said if I don’t plead guilty / him gwan kick me more / I was feeling sick, I pleaded RACIST ATTACK /another policeman come to finish me off, dis one was black. In dis war we have traitors who don’t think to sell you out. In dis war der are people who refuse to hear de shout for human rights to be regarded as a basic right. Still dis policeman kicks me every day and every night.”
He notes that the recent influx of deportation stories circulated by UK news media show how little has changed since those times. From therelatives of migrant victims of Grenfell Tower fighting to extend visas so they can see through thepublic inquiry– to former members ofCommonwealth nations living under the radar from fear of deportation: institutional racism, he said, is still here.
Benjamin himself is a patron of theUK Chagos Support Association, which was launched in aid of ‘illegal’ islanders who have lived most their lives in the UK. He said the UK’s treatment of them is ‘shameful’ and proves the system was built to start as it meant to go on. Another reason, he said, for it to be dismantled and rebuilt.
“I find it really astonishing and depressing that racism is still here. We had movements around Thatcher and racism and sexism in the eighties. By the 90s, I thought ‘it’s calmed down a bit.’ But suddenly, it’s just got worse. We’ve gone back. It’s unbelievable.
“So it’s crazy when people say the system isn’t racist, because it’s built on racism, it’s built on empire and its wealth has been gained from racism. And when you get people who are defensive and say it doesn’t exist, maybe it’s because sometimes, they’re guilty of it themselves?”
When riots erupted across the UK in 2011, many drew parallels to the 80s era experienced by a young Zephaniah: a time when rioters cited police violence and discrimination as key reasons for their participation. But when Channel 4 asked him to write a poem about why people riot, he decided to do the opposite: “I decided to write about why they don’t riot instead, so I told them:
“you don’t riot if you have a nice job and a home to come to at night. You don’t riot if you’re well fed and unemployment doesn’t pressure your head. You don’t riot if you live in the city but have a country cottage with a view so pretty. You don’t riot. Riot happen too late. And that’s South Africa, Britain is great.”
He notes that anti-immigrant propaganda spun by the mainstream media pits poverty-stricken white working class people againstBAME communities. This is why, he said, unity has the power to defy such divisions and prevent the empowerment of institutionally racist structures.
“White marginalised communities are the ones we should be uniting with. Making us hate each other is a conscious method of divide and rule. It means those in power won’t have to set up black and white armies because we would already have divided ourselves. So the last thing they want is for poor people from black and white communities to unite and say, ‘shit, we’ve got the same oppressor’.
“But when you speak to people in the BNP and the National Front, you realise they’re just poor little white kids. And when you ask them ‘what is it you want?’ They’ll reply, ‘we just want somewhere to hang out and play, like in a community centre – and those guys over there said if we follow them, we can.’ This is exactly what Hitler did. He’d say: look at how downtrodden Germany is; follow me and I’ll make you great again.`”
In fact, he said, a former neo-Nazi who fought him on the streets of east London got in touch once to say he’d become a Buddhist monk – a spirituality with echoes of Benjamin’s own Rastafarianism. But when it comes to uniting against a common enemy, he said racists can also be reformed in other constructive ways.
“When Imeditate, I feel connected with the trees, the animals and everything around us. I feel like I’m part of them, that we’re all one. But when you’re arguing politically, you can’t exactly tell someone, ‘you need to go meditate because you’re a fucking racist’. Reforming racists is more effective when it’s coming from someone who used to be one. It’s a bit like when I go into prisons. I don’t lecture prisoners. I tell them I was a prisoner too. It’s how I use my energy to fight the system.
“Seriously though, the solution to getting rid of systematic racism is to tear it down. I’m a revolutionary and these institutions, including the police, need to be fucking disbanded, torn down, and we need to start again.
“Not many people talk about revolution like me though because most are reformists. But there’s lots of different ways of having a revolution, though no one can really imagine what it looks like until it happens. Look at the Arab spring: some of it was successful, some of it less, and it began in Tunisia of all places.
“Revolutions have started because of poets or because somebody spoke up at just the right time when everybody else had just had enough. What we need is a grand swell of people saying, okay, we recognise all the other stuff we’re trying is not working.
“But they keep going on about reforming. Reforming does nothing. That’s why I’m an anarchist. I really sincerely believe this – but we will have a revolution in Britain one day.”
Benjamin Zephaniah’s autobiography ‘The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah’, will be published by Simon and Schuster on 3 May, and he will be touring 19 towns and cities in May and June.
via Reuters, see more images and video after the link
NOTRE-DAME-DES-LANDES, France (Reuters) - French police fired teargas and stun grenades and were pelted with stones during a dawn swoop to clear eco-activists and anarchists from a site in western France that had been planned as a new airport.
The site in Notre-Dame-des-Landes had been squatted for years by opponents of the plan to build a 580-million-euro ($710 million) airport which the government decided to drop in January.
Some 2,500 police took part in the evacuation which authorities said started at 6 a.m. (12 a.m. ET). Police had already blocked surrounding roads as early at 3:30 a.m., a Reuters journalist saw, while protesters set fire to barricades.
One police officer sustained an eye injury and a protester was arrested, said a police official who described the clashes as sporadic and relatively minor.
Ministers said the squatters had been ordered to leave after they had succeeded in getting the airport project halted. “We want to put an end to a lawless zone,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
“Illegal constructions must be brought down for things to come back to normal in Notre-Dame-des-Landes,” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told Europe 1 radio.
Plans for a “Great West” trans-Atlantic gateway to France and Europe were first considered in the 1960s and the Notre-Dame-des-Landes site was identified in 1967, but the project stalled until being revived in 2000.
Supporters of the airport plan, designed to handle 4 million passengers a year initially, said it would have helped economic development in the Loire-Atlantique region. An old, inner-city airport 30 km (20 miles) to the south was congested and a security risk, they said.
But opponents said it was too costly, environmentally damaging and that there was another underutilized airport 110 km (70 miles) to the north, near Rennes in Brittany.
Construction giant Vinci has said it is ready to discuss government compensation for the loss of its contract to develop Notre-Dame-des-Landes.
Reporting by Guillaume Frouin in Notre-Dame-des-Landes and Emmanuel Jarry in Paris; Writing by Ingrid Melander and Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Robin Pomeroy
Organisers with the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair have announced they will refuse to hold this year’s event at secondary school the City Academy following revelations that its parent Trust is sponsored by arms-merchant Rolls Royce.
Rolls Royce is heavily partnered with Turkey building jet engines for its military aircraft, and has faced strong criticism for effectively enabling autocrat Recep Erdogan in his vicious campaign against the Kurds in northern Syria. Thousands have been killed by the Turkish assault against Afrin and surrounding villages.
The short-notice decision means the event will instead have to go ahead in a much-reduced form at a smaller venue, meaning some sellers will not be able to get stall spaces.
The Bristol Anarchist Bookfair 2018 has had to cancel the booking with our venue. As a result the full-scale bookfair has been postponed, and a smaller event will run on the same day at the Black Swan.
The primary reason for this is that it has been brought to our attention that the Academy Trust who manage City Academy have a sponsorship deal with arms-selling dickheads Rolls Royce. Rolls Royce do very big business with the Turkish military, who are currently blasting the Kurdish region of Afrin, in northern Syria, to pieces. They also blew up the convoy that resulted in the recent tragic death of the Kurdish womens army (YPJ) British volunteer Anna Campbell, along with many Kurdish revolutionaries. We had a chat, and decided there was no way we were comfortable going ahead with the Bookfair in that venue. We’re a small collective running at reduced capacity, at this difficult time for Bristol’s anarchist community, and the loss of our venue means our only realistic option has been to radically downsize the event. We did have a last minute search for alternative venues available on the day, but there were none free that would allow us to run the full bookfair extravaganza we had planned.
But don’t be too downhearted, as the committed and the anarcho-curious amongst you will be able to get a flavour of Bookfair on the 12th. Our afterparty venue the Black Swan (at 438 Stapleton Road in Easton) has stepped into the breach and during the day we’ll be cramming the venue with as many book, zine and campaign stalls as we can and hosting a tasty vegan bbq in the garden! Plus 30 seconds up the road at BASE (formerly Kebele social centre) we’ll be choosing some of our favourite workshops for you to get involved with and along with all this there’ll be a kids space. We have our party all set to be a banger long into the night in the same space and we hope to see you there.
In the evening the Black Swan will play host to a bookfair after party of epic proportions taking us all the way through till 6am, and raising money for anti-arms trade campaigning.
Outside the bookfair, of course, the weekend before, the Bristol Radical History Festival takes place on Sunday 6th May. You may also be interested in attending radical/anarchist bookfairs around the UK throughout 2018 – see here.
Massive apologies to stallholders, workshop hosts and anyone else that has been inconvenienced by this – we could have spotted this earlier, but it passed us by. If you have contacted us regarding a stall or a workshop, we will be in touch separately.
The Bristol Anarchist Bookfair will return in all its glory – and if you want to get involved in making sure that that happens, please contact bristolanarchistbookfair[at]riseup.net!
The Tarnac Verdicts: Unraveling the Logic of Anti-Terrorism After Ten Years, the “Tarnac Affair” Concludes in France
In 2008, the state of France accused the Tarnac Ten of terrorism, charging that they had formed “a group of the ultraleft, of the autonomous type, maintaining links with international extremist movements.”1 After a decade-long ordeal, the remaining defendants received their final verdict on April 12, 2018.
All of the defendants were found not guilty of the charges of sabotage, rioting, and conspiracy; the terrorism charges had been dropped much earlier. Christophe Becker was sentenced to six months of probation for possession of fake IDs and a fine of 500 euros for refusal to give a DNA sample to the authorities. Julien Coupat and Yildune Lévy were also found guilty of refusing to give DNA, but face no sentence on account of the amount of time that has passed. Considering how many resources the French state had invested in this court case, this represented a massive victory for the defendants.
What can we learn from this passage of a few people through a rather long trial for terrorism? Let’s review the background of this story, the details of the case, and its implications for the future.
The defendants, prosecutor, judge, and police embark on an absurd field trip to re-enact the alleged crimes.
All the Unsettled Debts of History
As popular movements around Europe collapsed in the 1970s, anti-imperialist armed struggle groups formed—including Action Directe in France and the infamous Red Army Faction in Germany. Taking on the state in symmetrical warfare proved a doomed venture; by the early 1990s, all that remained of these groups was the repressive apparatus that the state had generated in the course of destroying them. Capitalism appeared to have permanently triumphed, with few signs of revolt visible within the core countries. Nonetheless, in the United States and in France, a few strange young people began reading the Situationists and plotting their escape from the 20th century.
In the United States, the mid-1990s saw the emergence of the CrimethInc ex-Workers Collective, a decentralized network of aspiring revolutionary dropouts, whose publication of Days of War, Nights of Love upturned traditional revolutionary dogma. Across the ocean, a mysterious review of “critical metaphysics” called Tiqqun appeared, advocating for the formation of a Society for the Advancement of Criminal Science, repurposing the concepts of thinkers like Deleuze and Foucault who had long been neutralized by academia.
Shortly thereafter, to everyone’s surprise, the so-called anti-globalization movement precipitated the fiercest clashes Europe had seen in decades. In France, in the wake of the protests against the G8 summit in 2001, a mysterious anonymous text entitled The Call appeared, demanding “a new kind of international that will not make the same mistakes as the old.”
In fall 2005, ahead of the global wave of uprisings that were to begin with the Greek insurrection, France experienced an outbreak of riots in the banlieues followed by a powerful student movement against the Contrat première embauche (CPE). In 2007, the Invisible Committee’s L’insurrection qui vient took the French radical milieu by storm much as Days of War, Nights of Love had taken the North American milieu. In the seven years that separated these two books, rebellion had acquired a sharper edge: to go into exodus no longer meant simply withdrawing from the feedback loops that reproduce industrial capitalism, but entering into open battle.
When revolutionary ideas spread rapidly throughout society, those whose task it is to preserve the prevailing order get nervous. It appears that the French state decided to employ the same strategy of repression that had been so effective against armed struggle groups in the 1970s against these new anarchist-inspired movements. The more fluid structure of anarchistic networks made it more difficult for the state to determine the precise membership and leadership of these groups, but nothing is impossible for the authorities if they are prepared to be dishonest enough. In 2008, police and intelligence services carried out one of the largest anti-terrorism operations ever coordinated on French soil. The French anti-terrorist police (SDAT) arrested nine young people, then added another for good measure. Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie declared victory, proclaiming that the “inner circle” of the Invisible Committee was now arrested and their head, Julien Coupat (a former associate of Tiqqun), had been cut off the body. If only it were so easy to suppress revolt!
Ten years later, what seemed impossible has already come to pass. It is widely agreed that capitalism is in a state of terminal collapse; propositions that seemed outrageous in the late 1990s are now regarded as self-evident. On April 12, 2018, the no-longer-quite-so-young people accused of forming a conspiracy to overthrow capitalism heard their final verdict for being, literally, “an association of wrongdoers.”2
The British Undercover Inside the Anti-Globalization Movement
When we organize demonstrations, discuss anarchist theory, and commit ourselves to direct action, it can be easy to feel that our individual efforts have little effect. But the Tarnac case confirms that the headmasters of global capitalism take very seriously the possibility that our actions—and even our words—can change the world.
At the G8 counter-summit in 2001, the confrontations in the streets of Genoa reached such a pitch that the Italian police openly murdered a participant in the black bloc, Carlio Giuliani. In order to prevent such revolts from occurring again, European governments established new agreements about sharing intelligence and deployed long-term undercover agents into the anarchist movement with the goal of disabling international anti-capitalist protests.
The British intelligence service had been infiltrating radical circles since at least the 1960s, but the influx of people newly curious about resistance gave them a new opportunity. A longhaired and tattooed radical calling himself “Mark Stone” showed up at the 2003 EU Summit protests in Dublin, taking the front lines against the police. His real name was Mark Kennedy; he was an undercover police officer from the National Public Order Intelligence Unit sent to infiltrate the anarchist wing of the anti-globalization and ecological movements.
A comparative anthropological study of the police of different nations would be revealing. Police infiltrators in the United States set out to get immediate results by entrapping protesters and charging protest organizers such as the RNC 8 of “Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism.” By contrast, British intelligence, drawing on their experiences with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), used undercover police officers over a long period of time to map the social networks that mobilized the anti-globalization and ecological protests around Earth First! in the UK.
All the undercover cops in the world cannot stop a protest whose time has come: Mark Kennedy and his handlers failed to prevent the G8 protests in Great Britain, as we described in “Can’t Stop the Chaos.” While Mark Kennedy focused the attention of the London Metropolitan Police on arresting the WOMBLES at a pub in Glasgow, he completely missed the primarily German black bloc that emerged to wreck havoc from a seemingly eco-hippie camp outside Stirling. To prevent this from recurring in the future, he was ordered to infiltrate the infamous “German Autonomen” that were to be key in the 2008 G8 in Heiligdamm, Germany. After gaining the trust of the notoriously security-conscious German anarchists by burning a car, his attention turned to a group of French revolutionaries, including Julien Coupat, a participant in Tiqqun.
In January 2008, Mark Kennedy showed up in New York City at an international discussion on the future of social movements. His targets were Julien Coupat and Yildune Lévy. These discussions focused primarily on how to go about occupying social space, an obvious necessity in New York City that prefigured #occupy. At the same time, Japanese intellectuals arrived in New York City who were interested in organizing an anti-globalization protest at the G8 in Japan. Mark Kennedy enrolled the FBI to help him keep tabs on Julien and Yildune.
Based on a televised statement from the New York City Chief of Police, it appears that police thought that Julien and Yildune might have been connected to the “Times Square Bicycle Bombing,” but as it turned out, neither of them were in the US at the time of the attack. The following year, raids on a house belonging to New York City anarchists turned up no useful evidence. Even the FBI eventually lost interest.
Meanwhile, the French police, too, were descending into a state of paranoia, as the 2011 G8 was slated for Deauville, France and the authorities were terrified of a massive black bloc taking the streets. The French police set their sights on a group of young people who had established a commune in the remote village of Tarnac3 as the locus of a subversive virus that had the potential to spread throughout all of France.
The Anti-Terrorist Police Strike
Like an old king in a Shakespeare play, the state was terrified of its own doom. Alain Bauer, foremost theoretician of the security apparatus, discovered The Coming Insurrection and mailed 40 copies of it to police forces, claiming that the book represented the re-emergence of the left-wing armed struggle groups that the police thought they had defeated in 1970s. President Sarkozy had combined the foreign-facing anti-terrorist group, the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire), and the internal Renseignements généraux together into a single new intelligence agency, DCRI (Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur). Inside this new word salad, the two agencies detested each other and began jockeying for power. In order for Renseignements généraux to be taken seriously, they had to prove that there was indeed a serious threat to the internal stability of France.
The French state decided that the debut party of the new French FBI, the DCRI, would be to eliminate their new “anarcho-autonomous” terror cell. The DCRI prepared for the SDAT (Sous-direction anti-terroriste) to carry out arrests throughout France on November 11, 2008.
The excuse the state put forward was that co-ordinated sabotage had taken place along four lines of the French national SNCF train system on the evening of November 7, utilizing a technique from the German autonomous movement in which the saboteur places an iron claw on the electrical lines of the railway so that the claw “unplugs” the electricity of the train. The purported sabotage occurred on the day that the infamous Castor nuclear trains carried nuclear waste from France to be dumped in Western Germany. Local farmers and various German movements have protested these nuclear waste transports for decades. The same evening that the train lines in France were shut down, a communiqué in German was sent to newspapers claiming the anti-nuclear action.
The French police claim that they had 18 police officers following Julien Coupat and Yildune Lévy on November 7, starting at 10 am. The surveillance was heavy-handed; frustrated at the oppressive atmosphere created by their police escorts, the two left Paris in hopes of getting some time to themselves. There followed a cat and mouse game as the young couple tried to lose the police who were tailing them. They stopped to eat a pizza, then tried to find a hotel room, but all the hotels were full. They decided to sleep in their car for a little while, then drove back to Paris.
In Rouen, in the region of Normandy, the police were monitoring well-known collective houses and noticed that Matthieu Burnel, Aria Thomas, Bertrand Deveaux, and Elsa Hauck had mysteriously left their house on the evening of November 7 as well. Benjamin Rosoux, Manon Glibert, and Gabrielle Hallez were also hassled by the police while sleeping in their car on November 7.
Three days later, on November 11, anti-terrorist police stormed Tarnac in an operation involving helicopters and hundreds of police. They arrested Julien, Manon, Gabrielle, and Benjamin; a similar operation seized Matthieu, Aria, Elsa, and Bertrand in their collective houses in Rouen. Yildune was arrested in Paris. Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie took the stage to declare victory to the media, announcing that the police had stopped a terrorist cell that was preparing to violently overthrow the state.
The Tarnac Nine were accused of being part of an association of wrongdoers in relationship with a terrorist enterprise (assocation de malfaiteurs en relationship avec un enterprise terroriste). The equivalent in American or British law would be a conspiracy charge with terrorist enhancements. The number of defendants was expanded to ten after the arrest of Christophe Becker in Tarnac for creating documents found on Manon Glibert’s computer, which had been seized in a house raid.
The state thought it was finally safe, and yet no amount of undercover police and preemptive arrests can uphold a dying order for long.
The Insurrection Arrives
“Everybody knows it’s about to explode!” chanted occupiers at an impromptu release party in Barnes and Noble for the English translation of The Coming Insurrection in New York City.4 And explode it did. As the anti-terrorist operation was rounding up the supposed masterminds of a new terrorist network throughout France, the financial crisis of 2008 pitched the world into global crisis, underscoring that the greatest risk to humanity is not those who threaten the system, but the system itself. As hatred of the banking system increased, riots spread throughout Europe like flames from a Molotov cocktail. Although there was no international barbarian horde to tear down the gates of the G8 at Deauville in 2009, it was because no one besides the police even cared: the G8 was clearly impotent in the face of generalized financial meltdown and increasingly decentralized unrest.
Meanwhile, the Tarnac defendants were imprisoned as political criminals and terrorists. Some arrestees were released quickly, while others were jailed for months. The accused “chief of the terrorist enterprise,” Julien Coupat, was held the longest, spending over six months in jail before public outcry over the emerging weakness of the case finally forced the authorities to release him. This reflected the challenges of bringing terrorism charges against young white people: it is likely that a Muslim charged with terrorism in those days would have remained in jail for much longer.
Unexpected friendships blossomed during the defendants’ imprisonment; Benjamin Rosoux befriended Maka Kantè from the banlieue of Villiers-le-Bel, who was accused of shooting at the police during the clashes of November 25-26, 2007. Villiers-le-Bel had erupted into open insurrection against the police after officers murdered two young locals. Despite their differences, the “anarcho-autonomous” arrestee from a middle-class family in Brittany and the second-generation African immigrant found common cause: “Nous savons que nous sommes toujours plus nombreux, de tous horizons, déterminés à ne pas les laisser marcher sur nos têtes.”5
Across the world, solidarity groups were launched from Russia to the United States. In Greece, beside an official French administrative building that had been attacked with Molotovs, graffiti appeared reading “From Tarnac to Athens, the insurrection has arrived.” Sales of The Coming Insurrection skyrocketed to 80,000, with the English translation prompting right-wing radio-host Glen Beck to state that it was an “evil book” but “it’s important you read this.”
In response, the state did everything possible to isolate the Tarnac Ten from each other even after they were released from prison, instituting strict rules of non-association. This controle judiciare restricted their movements to a small geographical area. In some ways, it is more humiliating and boring to be kept under house arrest at your parents’ isolated residence than to be kept in jail where you can fraternize with other victims of the state. Somehow, however, the idea of Tarnac as a collective political project survived, as comrades from places as distant as Switzerland and Italy moved to the tiny town to keep the Magasin General open. 6
In December 2009, the Tarnac Ten decided to wilfully break their non-association rules, announcing in Le Monde that they would no longer abide by them. A lawyer representing them had officially asked the Court of Appeals to drop the charges restrictions, but they boldly posted their statement two days in advance.
“But what we desert first is the role of public enemy, that is to say, basically, of victim, that they wanted to make us play. And, if we desert it, it is to be able to resume the fight. ‘For the feeling of hunted game, we must substitute the initiative of the combatant,’ said Georges Guingouin, in quite similar circumstances.”
Protests in Geneva in solidarity with the Tarnac Trial.
While Julien, Benjamin, Manon, and Gabrielle returned to Tarnac, the forces that had set the operation in motion were beginning to fall apart. In England, Mark Kennedy’s identity as an undercover police officer was revealed in 2011 when his activist partner discovered his real passport and later found a birth certificate with the father’s profession listed as “police officer.” Confronted by his old friends, Mark Kennedy claimed to repent and even offered to help roll back the charges for previous court cases he had been involved in. There followed a uniquely English sex scandal that engulfed the London Metropolitan police and disrupted an undercover operation to infiltrate social movements that dated back to 1968. However, Mark Kennedy was no friend of the Tarnac Ten. He insinuated that stopping them justified his other less glorious undercover activities, such as sleeping with activists under his false identity.
As the Arab Spring kicked off in the former French colony of Tunisia, Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie proposed that the same anti-insurgency expertise responsible for the Tarnac arrests could be exported to Tunisia—along with a little tear gas—to help quell the unrest. When public sympathy turned in favor of Arab Spring, she was forced to resign; Sarkozy lost the French election in 2012 to the Socialist François Hollande, a deputy from Corrèze, the administrative division of France that includes Tarnac. In a statement entitled “Paris, Texas,” the Tarnac Ten wrote that Sarkozy should return to his paymasters in the United States in the same manner Mubarak did when he fled for Saudi Arabia during the Arab Spring: “Mr. President, there are ranches for sale in Texas, and your plane is waiting for you at the Villacoublay airport.”
Police officers worked themselves into a state of complete paranoia. Christian Bichet, one of the officers who had been surveilling the Tarnac Ten since at least 2007, opened no less than seven different blogs personally attacking them. The attacks of this particular disappointed intellectual-turned-police officer were so venomous that they appeared to come from disappointed ex-comrades from the anarchist milieu. This police officer formed fake support groups in order to obtain the names of supporters, wrote letters of support to the real support committees, and started leaking evidence of a global conspiracy to newspapers. When he was revealed, Bichet was removed from his position and demoted to tend the police archives.
One of the chief witnesses for the prosecution, a local farmer who had accused the defendants of burning down unemployment buildings and training for armed struggle, not only admitted to having signed the deposition that included these allegations under police pressure without reading it, but he also appeared to have lost his sanity. In an unrelated case, he was charged with fabricating death threats against himself, among other things. So much for that evidence! However deranged the authorities may make rebels out to be, you can count on ordinary people to be stranger.
The “investigating magistrate”7 Thierry Fragnoli behaved like a jilted lover. After announcing to a journalist that he wanted to be played by Brad Pitt in a movie about Tarnac, he ordered more house raids and arrests in Rouen in hopes of turning up actual evidence of terrorism. Fragnoli imagined that Charles Torres, a blacksmith and the grandson of a Spanish anarchist veteran, had manufactured the iron claw used to shut down the train lines. However, during a house raid, the blundering French police accidentally left a dossier containing files on everyone they were surveilling in Rouen on the table—along with one of their police phones, which they had to meekly return to pick up! When the dossier and personal emails expressing his virulent hatred of the defendants were leaked to the French press, Fragnoli sent a paranoid letter claiming that a conspiracy existed between the French media and Julien’s Jewish lawyer, Jérémie Assous. This letter was duly published in the media. In response to subsequent pressure, Fragnoli quit the case and was effectively Limoged3 to a French colony in the Pacific, Petite-Île.
While politicians, police officers, witnesses, and judges struggled with incompetence and delusions, the villagers of Tarnac were at first divided on how to respond to the arrests. On one hand, their quiet rural lives had been disrupted by the terrorist raids; on the other hand, the young people that the state was targeting were clearly bringing life back to the little village. The terrorism trial revived the historical memory of the old communist mountain farmers of Tarnac, who had resisted the Nazi occupation and bore more than a passing resemblance to Julien Coupat. At the local general store, the conversation turned to the topic of “collaboration” as the villagers recognized the latent fascism hiding under “anti-terrorism.” The very evening of the arrests, a solidarity committee formed in Tarnac, echoed shortly thereafter by dozens more solidarity groups across France. Together, they began raising funds and publicly speaking on behalf of the arrestees.
“Fuck the state of emergency”: Tarnac locals demonstrate at the Tarnac Magasin General in March 2018 ahead of the trial.
By and large, anarchists and—more surprisingly—the broader Left united around Tarnac. By 2011, this solidarity had given the defendants such courage that many of them publicly participated in a massive public direct action to stop the very same Castor nuclear-waste carrying trains that they had been accused of sabotaging in 2008. Such public support for an action that had been labeled as terrorism only a few years earlier highlighted how the context in France had changed since the arrests. When the Hollande government attempted to push through the construction of an airport near Nantes, eco-anarchists set up the autonomous ZAD (Zone À Défendre) occupying the proposed site. When the French state sent over two thousand police to evict them in the hilariously misnamed “Operation Caesar,” more than forty thousand people showed up from all walks of life in support of the new barbarians.
The Tarnac Ten continued their process of collective theorization, repairing their raided farm at Goutailloux in order to host seminars on everything from feminism to cybernetics. This helped to reinvigorate the French autonomous movement, eventually resulting in the first new book from the Invisible Committee since the arrests, To Our Friends, which hazarded an analysis of the insurrectionary process after 2011. It was published in 2014, not a moment too late; #occupy finally hit France in the form of the Nuit Debout protests, followed by massive black blocs at the anti-austerity protests against the Loi de Travail in 2016. These protests undermined whatever remaining credibility President Hollande possessed, leading to the historic collapse of both the French Socialist Party and the right-wing Les Republicains. In the wake of this final wave of protests that shook France to its very foundations, the Invisible Committee published a new book in 2017, Maintenant. Finally entering the internet era, associates began producing on online newspaper, lundi.am.
As the French state continued to face one popular uprising after another, the charges of “terrorism” seemed increasingly quaint. Scandal after scandal had sapped the police of legitimacy; the illegal involvement of the British undercover Mark Kennedy could not be denied when notes detailing his surveillance of Julien in his handwriting were revealed, by accident, via court disclosures in the United Kingdom. At the same time, France was rocked by attacks carried out by fundamentalists affiliated with the Islamic State. This made the tremendous amount of resources the state had poured into trying to make a “terrorist” menace out of the ultra-left appear ridiculous. The new investigating magistrate, noting the fate of her predecessor Fragnoli and the popularity of the Tarnac Ten, decided that the terrorist charges were to be dropped.
The original charge was essentially terrorist conspiracy—seeking “to severely disturb public order through intimidation or terror.” The alleged crime consisted of taking part in international meetings in Germany, the US, and Greece, inciting violence against police officers and destruction of property, and destroying train power lines. The anti-terrorist prosecutor was determined not to let the narrative of terrorism collapse, and presented appeal after appeal against the dropping of the terror charges. Eventually, the prosecution took the accusation of “terrorism” to the highest court of France, the court de cassation. In 2015, the court ruled that the charge of a “terrorist enterprise” was to be dropped, but that a criminal trial without the charge of “terrorist enhancement” would continue.
The accused of Tarnac were downgraded from terrorism defendants to an association de malfaiteurs, a charge introduced in 1894 for the express purpose of sending anarchists to jail in France for supporting direct action in newspapers such as l’Anarchie even if no other charges could be brought against them. Without the terrorism charge, the case was held together by the barest of threads. Gabrielle Hallez and Aria Thomas saw their charges completely dropped, reducing the Tarnac Ten to the Tarnac Eight.
Matthieu Burnel and Benjamin Rosoux were charged with refusing to give their DNA to the police. Manon Glibert and Christophe Becker faced charges for faking documents. Bertrand Deveaux and Elsa Hauck remained charged with association de malfaiteurs, but not on account of the sabotage, which everyone maintained they had nothing to do with. Rather, they were accused of participating in an anti-fascist demonstration against an EU summit on blocking immigration that was organized in Vichy—ironically, during the occupation, the seat of the collaborationist government that deported Jews and communists to Nazi death camps. Only Yildune Lévy and Julien Coupat retained the sabotage charges and the charges of being part of an association de malfaiteurs. Julien had been demoted from being the chief of a terrorist conspiracy to a mere animateur, dovetailing with his current job as part of a theater group.
The attempt to introduce the logic of anti-terrorism had failed. The French state had tried to use a massive media operation to convince the public that the “anarcho-autonomous” movement was a “pre-terrorist organization” in 2011, but they were defeated on their own territory. The Tarnac Ten withstood the pressure and managed to convince the vast majority of the French population that autonomy was not synonymous with terrorism.
At the same time, in the end, the prosecution was able to avail themselves of all the special resources reserved for pursuing terrorism cases to target what turned out to be a handful of perfectly ordinary activists. All the evidence gathered under the auspices of “fighting terrorism” was still admissible in the trial. The lead anti-terrorist prosecutor was still prosecuting the case, despite the merely criminal nature of the trial. Above all, the tremendous, debilitating repression reserved for terrorism cases was directed at paralyzing the defendants and their communities. This gives us a foretaste of what we can expect from the security apparatus in the future. We can see this process somewhat further along in Russia and Brazil.
The “Tarnac Process”
“Before the judges of the bourgeois class, the revolutionary does not have to account for his acts nor does he have to respect any so-called truth of theirs.”
-Victor Serge
In every court case, there are certain roles: the solemn judges, the defendants pleading guilty or innocent (but above all, pleading), and a well-paid supporting cast of parasites, from lawyers to journalists, who stand to profit from the case. The entire procedure requires everyone to play by the rules. Even denouncing the entire juridical procedure, as popularized by Algerian revolutionaries and illegalist anarchists,8 has become a formalized part of the procedure. But when the court case opened on March 13, 2018, it became clear that the defendants were not playing the game.
How might the accused avoid playing the game of the state? Perhaps, first, by treating all the members of the trial, including the prosecutor and the judge, as everyday people: laughing when they say something stupid, chiding them when they forget a key point, refusing to put them on a pedestal. The judge, irritated, demanded that the defendants either denounce the court or continue in a respectful manner: “You are free to adopt a defense of rupture,” she railed, “it’s your right. But if you don’t want this, you need to respect the court.” The Tarnac defendants refused either approach, discussing the facts of the case in detail but according the pomp and circumstance of the judicial sphere no respect. The proceedings resembled a decidedly more philosophical version of the Chicago Seven trial, with the defendants constantly interrupting the judge, the police, the lawyers, and each other.
Another way the defendants subverted the justice system was by neither denying the charges nor validating them. While the act of sabotage itself was clearly defensible as an anti-nuclear ecological measure and the French court attempted to suppress the fact the police had received a communiqué from German groups claiming responsibility for it, the defendants never denounced the action. Likewise, the prosecutor showed picture after picture of the accused at a demonstration in Vichy against the opponents of immigration, at which they were alleged to have brought ropes to pull down the fencing around the meeting. Finally, Christophe emerged and noted that it was ridiculous to question the defendants about a demonstration that had taken place ten years earlier, but asserted that he was proud to have participated in a demonstration for immigration. The entire court broke into applause. The defendants never recanted any of their actions but, one by one, gave reasons for them. Julien, for example, justified his illegal border crossing into the United States from Canada as a refusal of a fascist biometric system.
More importantly, the defendants never refused their cause. While the defendants proclaimed their support of the autonomous project of Tarnac in public, the police and intelligence officers hid their identities behind masks, referred to by numbers rather than names.
The judge attempted to go through the file in chronological order. She hastily pushed through the files on Mark Kennedy and the infamous trip of Julien and Yildune Lévy to New York City after Julien openly mocked FBI reports about a Network of Worldwide Anarchists (NWA). Even in France, NWA sounds like an acronym for a hip-hop band or wresting federation; the defendants took the opportunity to hold forth on the history of hip hop in the USA. Still, the judge refused to acknowledge the crucial role played by the intelligence of Mark Kennedy, seeking to avoid blaming the English spy for the initial frame of anti-terrorism.
As the trial continued, the question of the authorship of The Coming Insurrection came up again and again. The book states that,
“To sabotage the social machine with some consequence today means reconquering and reinventing the means of interrupting its networks. How could a TGV [high speed train] line or an electrical network be rendered useless?”
This quote was used as evidence to demonstrate conclusively that there was a plan to “paralyze” the city. While expressing agreement with the contents of the book, the defendants never admitted to authoring the text. Strangely, the charge of thoughtcrime premised on authorship of The Coming Insurrection had been the raison d’être for the terrorist charges. Since the charges had been pressed, it had become one of the best-selling political books in France; legions of intellectuals, paranoid police officers, and journalists had agreed that the book was of high quality. The terrorism charges created a paradox for those who wished to see themselves as the defenders of society: if the authors were terrorists, was the popularity of the book a sign of popular support for terrorism?
The Tarnac defendants and their supporters demonstrate their contempt for the proceedings.
The court embarked on outright Dadaism when it was decided that both the police and the defendants had to re-enact the original sabotage. As if on a school field trip, the judge, the prosecutor, and the defendants rode together to Dhuisy in a bus to re-enact the purported sabotage. Five anti-terrorist police officers who participated in the trial as masked anonymous witnesses rode along in one of the 30 police cars that escorted the bus; a police helicopter flew along overhead the whole day. The police and intelligence agency witnesses had to keep their masks on the entire time. As the court had to verify elements of the police testimony both in daylight and at night, the court and the defendants had to wait in a festival hall surrounded by dozens of gendarmes. The defendants ate and drank wine in this surreal situation while the antiterrorist witnesses had to stay outside to maintain their anonymity. When the police reappeared for the last verification of the night, they complained to the judge that they couldn’t eat. The defendants’ lawyers answered that there might be some crumbs left over, hinting that—in a reversal of the ordinary relation between rebels and the lackeys of the state—they should eat the defendants’ trash. Of course, the police refused their just desserts.
As the trial closed, the judge struggled to maintain order against the Tarnac defendants. Mathieu Burnel, in his final statement, used the court as a platform to indict the state apparatus itself rather than submit to the judgment of the state. Julien took the stand and noted that it was indeed their privileged roles as intellectuals that saved them: “The peculiarity of this trial is that the judicial apparatus has come up against people who are prepared to defend themselves and determined not to let themselves be crushed. We are conscious of having had the chance to defend ourselves, of being able to speak, of having three weeks in which to do so. Since we’ve fought, we have benefited from certain privileges. Having spent a little time in prison, I would like to dedicate this trial to all those who haven’t had to means to defend themselves, who are not listened to and who are convicted in silence.” The court broke into a final applause for the alleged terrorists.
There’s No Justice—It’s Just Us
So what can we learn from the Tarnac case? First, that with a little luck and perseverance, it can be possible to face down the full force of the state. The Tarnac case could have turned out much worse had the defendants not stood together uncompromisingly. At the beginning, the situation must have looked grim indeed.
After the Tarnac arrests, at previously tame French demonstrations, more and more young masked people attacked the police. The police have also learned from the Tarnac affair, continuing to repress revolutionaries with absurd charges, although somewhat more discreetly. We cannot say that either party has really come out ahead in this conflict. What we have seen over the past ten years is a parallel development of both forces. On one hand, the idea of a few revolutionaries being really dangerous as a small self-contained group has been dispelled, yet everything that the police targeted spread throughout the French society: anonymity, riots, the refusal of all institutional politics. At the same time, if the Tarnac prosecutions did not entirely succeed, the police are rapidly learning how to employ their intelligence gathering more effectively. Conspiracy cases are more and more common; surveillance and police violence are intensifying by the day. The end of this story has yet to be written.
Anti-terrorism is a peculiar kind of logic. As the enemy is potentially anyone, all it takes to label someone a terrorist is to frame the actions of the accused in such a way that they potentially undermine the stability of the state. As the state edges closer to dissolution, there are more and more excuses to accuse people of undermining its stability. The security apparatus is on the lookout for anyone who refuses the logic of capitalist individualism—a category that can include anyone from Islamic fundamentalists to anarchists who want to live in a commune. Benjamin Rosoux observed this irony in court when he noted that life in Tarnac was based on openness and sharing, while the police were hiding in the forest taking photos of their houses.
What is terrorism? Terrorism is the panic put into the state apparatus by the fear of its own demise. Terrorism, defined by the state, is not a matter of human anguish but of institutional loss of control. The Tarnac Ten struck a chord of terror in the state—not because of the force they could muster, but because of the uncontrollable potential they represent. The specter of insurrection that had disappeared in the 1980s returned, as new groups of young people appeared who were prepared to defy the existing order.
One should never underestimate the power of small groups. The Paris Commune was not brought about by a great organization or Party, but by myriad small conspiracies: the Vigilance Committees that met in each arrondissement, the networks of friends and neighbors on each street in the faubourgs. When the stars align, little conspiracies like these can spread like wildfire until they are innumerable; that is what creates the conditions for uncontrollable insurrection. This is why the state apparatus always attempts to nip these conspiracies in the bud; it is why they targeted the Tarnac defendants in hopes of forestalling the wave of unrest that surged in December 2008; and it is why no amount of repression can ultimately stem the tide of insurrection, for it can spring anew from any of the countless nodes in the vast web of relations that makes up this society.
It is the intensity of feeling that we can share that the state fears above all, the capacity to generate new dreams and ambitions together. This is the very stuff of life. For those who can find it together, it is worth any ordeal, any degree of repression.
Some have criticized the way the Tarnac Ten engaged with the media and with the public notions of legitimacy represented by the intellectuals who came forward to speak in their favor. We should never make the mistake of believing that media exposure or social legitimacy are tools that can in themselves serve to advance the cause of liberation; but nor can we always afford to do without them entirely when the forces of repression use those tools to set the stage to destroy us. As anarchists, we are always fighting against the terrain itself as well as against our adversaries. This is not a reason not to fight on the terrain of media or perceived legitimacy; it simply means that we must find a way to operate in that territory that enables us to outflank the authorities without absorbing their logic. Every blow they strike against us must cost them double: in this regard, the explosion of interest that the Tarnac arrests produced in The Coming Insurrection sets a good example for how revolutionaries can prepare to make the phase of repression just another step in our plans—a phase in which we can continue to advance.
At the same time, spectacular fame is dangerous, above all because it enables the spectator to sit back and let another protagonist stand in for his or her own agency. We must not look to any particular cadre of heroes for the next brilliant theory or courageous action. If the promise of the Invisible Committee is that perhaps, in a world of Maoist academics and hipsters spouting empty words, someone somewhere might be putting their thoughts into action, that someone must be us.
There are still many battles to be fought, and many thoughts yet unthought, and many acts for which one must try not to get caught. The fear of imprisonment should not prevent us from unifying our thoughts with our actions. Indeed, the possibility that we might do so is the last, best hope of a dying world.
Appendix I: Extracts from Mathieu Burnel’s Closing Statement
“You have all claimed that this trial was exceptional. What we’ve seen on the contrary is something extremely banal: different parties disagreeing who debate, argue, and talk. This is what has been happening forever in all human aggregations. It’s banal and normal. What you actually consider exceptional is that we come into this court without looking down and without kowtowing. That we didn’t submit to all this, this little theatrical ritual of submission that makes your daily life…
“We came here out of curiosity, but to be honest, Madame judge, we haven’t discovered much in this court that we didn’t expect. A ritual, some theater, robes, gildings, and all this petty quiant staging. Everyone playing his role, playing his little music, his little indignation, his little seriousess, his little articles of law and even sometimes his ‘great and just authority.’ In reality, what I believe, Madame president, is that what we obliged you to tolerate those three weeks, what you condemned yesterday evening9 is that we were the only people in this room to not play a role, to not pretend, to not play the petty game of justice…
“What actually happened during those long days of trial that you call ‘exceptional’? A small displacement, a tiny step aside. You came here with some expectations. You were going to see this famous ‘Tarnac group.’ Gurus, a sect, ‘political activists,’ ‘anarcho-autonomous,’ professionals of riots or theoreticians of violent revolution, what else? But in the end, you ended up in front of us: Manon Glibert, Julien Coupat, Benjamin Rosoux, Yildune Lévy, Christophe Becker, Bertrand Deveaud, Mathieu Burnel. And we appeared banal, normal. You even asked us some really curious questions: Manon, what is the musical instrument she’s playing? Benjamin, his political science degree, he received it in Rennes or Paris? And how do you manage to live on 750 euros a month?
“This tiny step aside, we probably provoked it, but it is within yourself that it operated. You’ve gathered in the course of these three weeks of trial that what is the most singular about revolutionaries is that they are made of what is infinitely common.
“We don’t need any empathy, we actually never complained. What we did during those 10 years is what we know how to do: fight. This is what people like us do: resist, fight back. It was about holding ourselves to a central and sovereign refusal: not to accept to be crushed. The forces joined against us were massive and powerful. We had to find resources, time, strength, and complicities. We held ourselves to this tiny but irreducible truth: you won’t crush us. The ‘us’ here not being limited to the eight of us, of course, but to all those who were indirectly targeted by this political, media, and juridical operation. We and our friends, who are numerous. Whatever the outcome of this trial will be, we’ll come out of it stronger than we entered it, stronger than ten years ago.”
Appendix II: A Few Snapshots from the Intelligence Documents
An English translation of the French intelligence documents about the Tarnac defendants.
FBI response to French intelligence service request for information on the US anarchist movement.
Report on the “bicycle bomber” in New York City.
Authorization of Mark Kennedy to continue to spy on anarchists.
Authorization of Mark Kennedy to commit crimes in order to legitimize himself to the targets of his infiltration.
The quotation is from the intelligence files gathered on the defendants. Roughly translated, the report is entitled “From the CPE Movement to the constitution of a European pre-terrorist network”—suggesting a link with the student movement three years before the arrests. ↩
The so-called Loi Scélérates (“Scoundrel Laws”) of 1893 and 1894, which were passed specifically for the purpose of repressing anarchists, introduced this charge as a way of targeting those who did not themselves engage in illegal activity, but associated with those who might. ↩
To give a sense of the remoteness of Tarnac, we need only note that the nearest town of any note is Limoges, the name of which has entered the French lexicon as a verb meaning to be fired or to be sent into exile. Of a judge who was demoted from a position in Paris to serve in one of the outer colonies, for example, it could be said that he was “Limoged.” The expression derives from the First World War, when Limoges was so far from the action that General Joffre sent senior staff there that he considered useless. ↩↩2
To illustrate the common soil from which early CrimethInc. and Invisible Committee grew, we need only point out that this model was borrowed from a similar unpermitted release party at an unsuspecting corporate bookstore in the year 2000, at which a CrimethInc. cell in Connecticut celebrated the publication of Days of War, Nights of Love. The difference was that at the earlier event, the participants did not invite a reporter from the New York Times.↩
“We know that we are always more numerous, from all walks of life, determined not to let them step on our heads.” Maka Kantè and Benjamin Rousoux. ↩
An investigating magistrate is a judge, supposed to be neutral, who is charged with assembling a dossier representing the “truth” of the court case—a rather Enlightenment tradition. ↩
In France in the 1960s, during the Algerian war, a lawyer who later became famous “invented” what he called the “defense of rupture,” in which the accused did not recognize the legitimacy of the trial. In the context of fighting colonization, it meant that FLN members did not recognize the right of French courts to judge them on Algerian soil. Afterwards, some extreme-left groups used this approach up to the 1980s to denounce “bourgeois justice,” as opposed to some sort of imagined “proletarian” justice. ↩
When she said the defendants were the most ill-mannered people she had ever met. ↩
Libera Community Space is organized by a group of anarchist-minded people in a horizontal and egalitarian way. We promote issues such as gender & sexual liberation, economic equality, and other socio-ecological issues, be it in forms of writings, arts, or social movement.
We are openly egalitarian and not dogmatically ideological or religious. We are open for participation from all people, regardless of their backgrounds. However, we do not want to get involved with political parties, NGOs, or anything institutional. We are committed in making a true grass-root and self-organized community.
Background
In 2016, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Libertas collective was formed. It initiates several discussion panels, anarchist classes, and is also involved in running one of anarchist websites in Indonesia, anarkis[dot]org. Then, one of the individuals in the collective decided to establish a small coffee shop and infoshop: Libera Community Space (Coffee, Books, and Infoshop).
Inspired by anarchist tradition, we decided to put our efforts, seize the moment, and get our own venue. We host a wide range of activities, such as a providing a meeting place for cultural and political initiatives, movie screenings, library running, and a building a stronger network of antifascist movement.
What We Do
In collaboration with several anarchist publishers—such as Ikarus Press, Pustaka Catut, and Nihilis Media—Libera also serves as an infohub for curious people who are interested in anarchist and radical thoughts.
During 2016 until 2017, there was an intiative to build antifascist network in Yogyakarta and Libera became the base for the initiative. Up until now, individuals who are active at Libera are involved in many projects such as:
- Antifascist organizing
- Book Publishing (Ikarus Press, Pustaka Catut, & Nihilis Media)
(We have translated and published books from wide range of anarchist thinkers, such as Emma Golman’s “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For”, Murray Bookchin’s “Ecology of Freedom”, Alfredo Bonnano’s “Armed Joy”, “On the Poverty of Student Life”, “Under the Black Flag: Anarchist Writings in Dutch-Indies”, and we are currently working on translating Alfredo Bonnano’s “Anarchism and National Liberation Struggle”.)
- Running a counter-info site: agitasi.noblogs.org
- “Dapur Nomad” Kitchen Cooperative
Since then, even with all of our limitations, Libera has been thriving. We have been hosting all different kinds of people: travelling and local anarchists, students, activists, curious people, even Marxists, trying to convert people to Marxism. Libera has achieved much, and we intend to achieve more.
Libera is not just an infoshop or a cafe, but it’s also a community space, a library, and a free internet access zone at which we always work to empower networking communities, broaden our network by outreach, and fight for our cause. However, since there has been growing number of anarchist circles within Central Java, we would like to rearrange our work place, cafe, co-ops, and provide a place for travelling activists/anarchists to crash at or for meetings with collectives and organizations from different cities.
If any of you friends are in Yogyakarta, our place can be easily found. You can just type “Libera Coffee and Book” on Google Maps. Of 6 individuals who are involved at Libera, we mainly work as freelance writers & translators, illustrators, and baristas.
Most of us don’t have a college degree, but we have managed to allocate some of our personal income for the infoshop. I hope this short introduction can convince you to help us.
What We Need
Most and foremost, we need a bigger place. We hope, by having a bigger place, we would be able to have a collective house where travelling anarchists and activists can have a place to stay while they are in Yogyakarta. Our current place is too small for that. We also hope that at this new place, we would be able to do several other projects that we are not able to do at our current place due to its space limitation, such as establishing a bigger library, home gardening, self-defense classes, and other ideas that might come up once we already have the place.
The estimated cost is about USD 1,800 . Therefore, we would like to invoke your solidarity, be it in forms of books, financial-aid, or a help in spreading the words.
There would be a token of gratitude from us if you decide to help us. We would send you some collections from Ikarus Press and Pustaka Catut. If you would like to claim them, please contact: anzimatta@gmail.com feldasit@riseup.net
And if you’re in town, our token of gratitude will include an art print.
Despite the state of siege imposed by the government, a crowd of 15,000 to 20,000 people has succeeded, whatever the cost, in reaching different points of the ZAD this Sunday. This afternoon new groups are arriving all the time. Since this morning, the state has done everything possible to break this huge surge of solidarity: there are road blocks and checkpoints everywhere; police checkpoint policeman at the exit lanes of the motorways, asking drivers not to to try to go to the solidarity gathering. This is the first time that the state has tried to prevent a big demonstration of this kind on the ZAD, and to wind up the tension. But here the collective spirit has not allowed itself to be intimidated by any such thing: the ZAD’s supporters know the country paths, and the fields, and they have been moving in groups in order to get round the police blockades. The movement that succed in forcing the abandonment of the airport project is here again today, in all its strength and diversity, to defend the ZAD.
At 2.00pm there was a solemn moment at the Bellevue Farm. The thousands of sticks and clubs (batons) planted on the 8th of October 2016 were dug up from the ground. We had made a solemn promise to come and collect them if ever the ZAD came under renewed attack. That time has now come!
People of all ages have set off along Le Chemin de Suez, escorting a large wooden framethat is being carried by a convoy of tractors. This beautiful construction has been created this week with timber from the ZAD, under the Hangar de l’Avenir [the ’Barn of the Future’] by dozens of carpenters. For the moment it is mounted on the field of the Wardine, with a view to moving it later. Hundreds of people are carry pieces of wooden constructions by hand. It was on this same field in 2012, at the time of the Demonstration of Re-occupation, that human chains had carried masses of materials to build a village at La Chataigne [the ’Chestnut Tree’].
Today, hundreds of sticks and clubs were immediately planted around construction site to protect this new building, a market hall and meeting space which was initially planned to be brought directly to the Gourbi to replaced the communal area that was destroyed [by the police] last Thursday. Meanwhile other large groups of demonstrators, with batons in hand, have spilled over from all sides of the police operation on the D81 road, and have crossed the road to pass to the east, into the forbidden zone, which has been occupied since this morning by columns of gendarmes. A mobile construction has been carried across the fields. Meanwhile more than a hundred people have been kettled since since this morning at the La Grée farm. Supporters are trying to reach them. We are informed that the Prefect [local representative of the state] has arrived at the Saulce crossroads. After yesterday’s solid demonstration of more than 10,000 people in Nantes, involving trade unionists, students and supporters of the ZAD, she will once again be able to see with her own eyes that nobody can crush our collective desire by the use of terror and destruction!
Especially because this weekend solidarity actions are continuing in many cities in France and around the world.
The ZAD has been wounded, but it is always magical!
We shall shortly send an update on the events of this afternoon
For further information, see the regular updates at the ZAD website: Zone à defendre - http://zad.nadir.org/
Many of you are wondering what is happening here, wanting to listen at the doors of our cabins, our trucks, our rooms, our houses, our tents and makeshift shelters .
As spring brings the renewal, in our lives it’s still winter. Both the cold breath of internal battles within our beautiful Zad and the winds of the battles to come against the world closing up on us are blowing strong.
I had a dream of unconditional solidarity between all those who fought against the construction of this airport. Just like two friends ready to take a blow for each other, even when in disagreement with each other.
The end result is well below my expectations.
We find ourselves divided even within the occupation movement. Various setbacks have happened. Pressure blows, overriding of rules, confiscation of collective communication tools (inter-committee contacts, press contacts); attempts of uniforming the movement; centralization of relations with the other components of the movement, decisions bypassing collective processes; violent and authoritarian political policing.
It now seems necessary to take back what we fought for. To reaffirm our identity against the fascist actions of those who used to be our companions or comrades in struggle.
Almost all of us arrived here with a marginal status that makes us ungovernable, mysterious, disorganized, unknowable and wary of power and its centralization. We applauded each initiative from the most violent to the most inefficient without dissociating ourselves, without individualizing the actions.
Most of us were Camille, we were all Zadists.
We mainly legitimized and explained the political acts of ours equals rather than condemning them. We accepted the chaos and lack of control we had over our neighbours.
Today for me this is no longer true.
Some people have emerged over the years as amazing strategists, bureaucrats, politicians and journalists. Many of us are now the good little soldiers for the political strategies of these groups. We must stay in the rank and file so as not to disturb their tactics and their communications. We must obey and not speak too loudly, or expose ourselves to the threat of being despised or of ending up in a car’s trunk.
I am not against the idea of building a united, shared and resilient political future with other components of the movement. It’s even my greatest hope. But it will not happen at the cost of what I am.
Many of us want the Zad to remain a front line against liberal and patriarchal thoughts, while persisting to be a zone of political, social and peasantry experimentation.
For we have arrived damaged, marginal, impulsive, borderline, pirate, teknohead, druggy, syndicalist, in psychological distress, hypersensitive, engaged, primitivists, drug addicts, alcoholic, hippy, punk … or just fragile.
Some of us are still so, and we will not dress up in a certain way in order to give an “acceptable” image.
Many of us are ready to wage an internal and silent war against those who impose their collective vision or tactics over individual freedom of action and opinion against those who make use of psychological or physical violence for diffirent politics.
In my opinion, the formal groups of the Zad (chips, cmdo, pomps) should officially dissolve, no longer publish texts and no longer come to the assemblies on the Zad as a composant of the movement but as individuals.
Today we see the result of this group-based sectarianism in the minds of each and every one of us, and in this way we are moving away from the humanist values of sharing and solidarity. It drowns the individual and makes them question everyday: Am I legitimate to give my opinion in front of this group of people strongly united to block? Do I have enough affinity to go to such an appointment or assembly? Is this project open if it’s this group that is carrying away with it? Will I be despised by this group of people when I have a contradictory position? Will I be supported by my own group?
The peculiarity of the group is the unified language, the group airs its concerns. Ironically the group often agrees to despise the same thing or the same person, while on the other hand the group can itself be despised without taking into account the individuals that compose it.
I don’t deny the usefulness of federating to carry out a job, a battle, an action. But the group should appear and disappear according to circumstances. It is ephemeral, it must not be named or coagulate, if it is formed, it is already too late. It must change to avoid collapse. If a group is created in the group then it is dead.
And especially if the group silence its individualities then it no longer exists.
The Zad is not a group, it is a territory. The Zad is only a group when it has to organize its daily life, defend itself, communicate, gather or talk about itself. And in these moments it can not bear yet another group acting on its behalf, even from within.
The Zad is a palette of individuality with all colours as rich as each other with a common front.
It is useless to deny the differences which compose it nor to hide them under the sacrosanct concept of unity.
I affirm my desire, as others do, to deconstruct power wherever it is and wherever it is born . Whether it’s a person or a group of people.
It is a daily effort on power that one incarnates or that the other person embodies. As tiring as this work is, it is the foundation of our individual liberties.
I advocate a diversity of tactics, choices and political views, ways of life, past or future experiences, as long as they do not impose themselves on us individually and they do not harm our daily life.
That is to say, I would fight to defend those who will become in necessity of defense, without distinctions, so that we can continue to make exchanges relative to conflicting issues and to the convergences that drive us forward.
(It appears necessary to clarify this: If an isolated political action provokes a repressive state answer on each and every one of us, our values advice us against dissociating ourselves from it. Even if it is it contradicts with our tactics and general opinion. It seems easier to applaud a burnt police car burnt 300 km than to support a smaller action near home.)
Exarcheia was once the scene of riots and political gangs, but now it’s a buzzing cultural hub, says Anastasia Miari
Bathed in spring sunlight, sipping on iced coffee and surrounded by young people playing backgammon, this hardly feels like anarchist central. Yet many Greeks still steer clear of Exarcheia, widely known for its politicised riots and Molotov cocktail-throwing far-Left gangs.
Neoclassical buildings with wrought- iron balconies are covered in a plague of graffiti. Tags from the inane to the profane mark each and every wall — a reminder of the area’s anti-Establishment ties.
Today, however, this central neighbourhood is a cultural must-visit in Athens. With a distinctly different vibe to any other part of town, Exarcheia has retained its old-world Greek charm while welcoming in a new artistic crowd. Galleries Hot Wheels and CHEAPART host a regular rotation of shows featuring local and international artists. With new openings every month and a handful of pop-up artists’ studios such as 3137, this is the place to see the city’s burgeoning underground art scene.
Attracted by cheap rents and plenty of studio space, a new generation of creatives is giving Exarcheia its new buzz. “There are empty shops and abandoned buildings,” says artist David Robert Fenwick, who left London to open a studio here. “Exarcheia is in an important European city but it has the feel of a more far-flung guerrilla republic.”
Exarcheia has long been a symbol of opposition to the Establishment. It was here that, in 1973, the Athens Polytechnic uprising took place, when students demonstrating against the dictatorship were confronted with a tank that killed 24. More recently, in 2008, violent riots exploded here, with residents setting police cars alight in anger at the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy.
Today, graffiti tours of the area (try Magda’s through guruwalk.com) offer an alternative insight into Athens’ political and economic situation, while the lively kafeneion (café) and meze scene is a draw for those wanting to rub shoulders with city creatives in an authentic Greek setting.
Coffee culture is strong in Exarcheia, with a kafeneion on every street corner. Stroll down Koletti Street in central Exarcheia on a Tuesday afternoon and you’ll find twentysomethings pouring out of trendy café-bars such as Cusco and Karagiozis, whiling away hours in the dappled shade of orange trees, nursing sludgy Greek coffees. Coffee shops here aren’t sterile spots to plug in your MacBook; neither are they the preserve of old men smoking Camels as is the case in many a kafeneion.
At Chartés (facebook.com/hartes.exarhia), old-school jazz floats out of the open doors and into the street where young people smoke, sip coffee and play backgammon as their grandparents might have 70 years ago. Meanwhile, Mauros Gatos (facebook.com/MavrosGatosBluesBar) on Koletti serves as the sweet spot between an afternoon coffee slot (that’s 7pm-9pm on Athenian time) and cocktails in speakeasy surroundings.
If you can handle the cigarette smoke, the tiny Intriga Bar (intrigabar.gr) is a local favourite. Inconspicuously tucked off Exarcheia’s main square and open till late, it serves cheap drinks, plays classic rock and gives a glimpse of the anarchic side of the neighbourhood.
In the city centre but much more affordable than moneyed Kolonaki next door, Exarcheia is a bewitching mix of neighbourhood institutions drawing a young crowd. “People like the restaurant’s character because it used to be old-school,” says our waitress at Ama Laxei (facebook.com/amalaxeiresto), the long-standing taverna on Kallidromiou Street which draws well-seasoned locals to its fairy-lit garden.
The colour-saturated weekly farmer’s market (or laiki) on Kallidromiou Street every Saturday is another institution. Next to Lofos Strefi — a verdant hill where people gather to meet, drink Mythos and watch the sunset over Athens and the Acropolis — Kallidromiou is a microcosm of Exarcheia’s diverse residents.
Every Saturday, from 8am to 4pm, families, young artists, refugees, pensioners, and even the anarchists hit up the laiki for cheap, bountiful fruit and veg. After they’ve done their shopping they spill downhill, the hipsters heading to Yesterday’s Bread (facebook.com/yesterdays breadathens), a vintage shop packed with Seventies, Eighties and Nineties finds — think Nineties Tommy Hilfiger for under €10.
Meanwhile, Café Paraskinio and Café Erodios are in prime position for people-watching. Or, to really live the Exarcheia lifestyle, grab a beer and take it to the steps leading up to Lofos Strefi. That’s where most locals perch for a full view of Exarcheia’s colour: fruit, people, graffiti and all.
Aegean (aegeanair.com) flies from Heathrow from £164 return. Andronis Athens (andronisathens.com) has doubles from €120.
All in all, awareness of the situation in Russia has risen during the past months and people are motivated to act together against the repression and for our common goals. We will keep on supporting the comrades in Russia.
