AGAINST 41 BIS, REVOLUTIONARY SOLIDARITY WITH ANARCHIST ALFREDO COSPITO
Thursday, May 5, the imprisoned anarchist Alfredo Cospito received notification of the provision against him of the penitentiary regime of 41 bis. At the moment Alfredo is still detained in the prison of Terni, in the dedicated section. We do not know if this is a provisional destination and if it will be followed by a transfer to another institute. The decree has been ordered, as foreseen by the law, directly by the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia, former president of the Constitutional Court. Let us recall, very briefly, that 41 bis is a particularly afflictive penitentiary regime, which provides, in order to prevent any form of communication, isolation, absence of sociability and any internal activity, silence, censorship of correspondence, one hour of monthly meetings with the glass partition and the “intercom”, then the recording of the meeting itself, 10 minutes of phone calls per month with an authorized family member forced to call from inside a Carabinieri barracks. Inmates are forbidden to receive newspapers and books, most correspondence is blocked in advance because of its contents, moreover, it is not possible to buy newspapers and there is a strong limitation in the availability of objects inside the cell (books, clothes, food, paper and pen are limited).
It is not the first time that such a measure is applied to revolutionaries, in 2006 four prisoners of Brigate Rosse were interned in such facilities (one of them, Diana Blefari, committed suicide in October 2009, shortly after being declassified from 41 bis). This is a precedent that, despite the mobilizations, has not yet been disarticulated.
In these first hours of anger, we must dwell on two issues.
On the one hand, we note the personal, physical attack on an anarchist comrade who in these ten years has never lowered his head: a comrade who claimed to have shot in the legs the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, Adinolfi. The fact that Alfredo could not be isolated and his revolutionary contribution silenced was a thorn in the side for investigators. This has led in recent years to further restrictive measures against him, such as the censorship of correspondence and the serving of an arrest warrant in prison for Operation Sibilla on November 11, through which the repressive forces have attempted to remove from circulation a newspaper and publications that over the years have reported the articles and contributions of the comrade. We must make Alfredo feel the solidarity of a movement that is not tamed, that has not forgotten him, that does not leave him alone; we must make sure that this solidarity breaks the bans and breaks the isolation.
On the other hand, we see in this fact a precedent against the entire anarchist movement. We need an effective international mobilization that makes the Italian state pay the price for this umpteenth choice. In other words, the precedent must not pass.
Revolutionary struggle, however, is always one step ahead of the ambiguity of law and brings clarity. This is demonstrated by the actions taken against the attempt to move closer to 41 bis, manifested in particular in 2019 with the transfer of the women’s AS2 (“High Security 2”) section to the prison of L’Aquila. In the face of the blanket of isolation that the state intends to impose on Alfredo, it is necessary to reaffirm solidarity as a constant necessity in communication between revolutionaries, an element that in recent years has not been lacking internationally.
Being anarchists is difficult, but we do not care if this is considered a crime or not. Those who starve, exploit, drop bombs on the people, are the same men and women who take care to bring anarchism into the schemes of law, depotentiating the tensions, suppressing the possibility of concrete action. This transfer is also a warning to all those who believe that there are no “freedoms” granted by masters and rulers, a message to those who – combining thought and action – intends to destroy the state and capital.
We need a mobilization capable of counterattacking. We cannot and do not want to conceal the political and personal responsibilities of Minister Marta Cartabia. The jurist, with her measure, seems to have decided to anticipate by twenty days the sentence of the Court of Cassation in the Scripta Manent trial, scheduled for May 25, a trial in which Alfredo was condemned on appeal to twenty years of imprisonment for subversive association with the purpose of terrorism and massacre with the purpose of terrorism (to which must be added the nine and a half years of the already mentioned trial for the action against Adinolfi). In Italy the crime of massacre is foreseen even without deaths and injuries, based on the potentiality of an explosive attack. It is precisely the crime of massacre that could have been the pick that allowed the provision of 41 bis against Alfredo. The same crime of massacre is charged, also in the Scripta Manent trial, to the anarchist Anna Beniamino, and, in another trial, to the anarchist Juan Sorroche. Demonstrating how the precedent is already potentially fraught with consequences for other comrades.
Minister Cartabia is strongly sponsored as president of the republic as a candidate by those progressive groups that have launched the campaign to finally have a female head of state in Italy. Let’s remember that in Italy the president of the republic assumes also the functions of maximum hierarch of the judicial system and presides over the superior council of the magistracy (CSM). We are not going to complain about the abuses and violations of the law by those bureaucrats who manage it, but we cannot fail to observe how Minister Cartabia has deliberately chosen to impose all her political weight – as a jurist, as a minister, as a possible future head of the judiciary – with a provision that, among the various iniquities, also contains that of assuming the possible final sentence for Alfredo and the other defendants. For all these reasons, we cannot wait a single minute. We therefore call for an international mobilization under the sign of a revolutionary continuity that makes its field of action wider and wider.
Against 41 bis, break the isolation!
If you try to shut us up, we will bite your hand!
Against censorship, we persevere in anarchist propaganda!
Revolutionary solidarity with the anarchist Alfredo Cospito!
Anarchists
[Published by: https://fuoridallariserva.noblogs.org/post/2022/05/07/contro-il-41-bis-solidarieta-rivoluzionaria-con-lanarchico-alfredo-cospito/]