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Title: Italian Farce Author: El Paso Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: Italy, repression Source: Retrieved on August 23, 2011 from https://web.archive.org/web/20110823074327/http://nihilpress.subvert.info/nihil1.html Notes: Published in The Nihilist #1.
A short while ago the Nobel committee disclosed that this years Nobel
prize for literature has gone to radical Italian playwright Dario Fo.
Many of you will remember Fo’s dark humor and subversive message in
plays like”Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” The burlesque scenes in
Fo’s plays are not just a product of a creative artistic imagination,
they are a reflection of the realities of Italian public life and system
of justice. In the early 70’ies a bomb went off at piazza Fontana in
Milan, killing dozens of people. The anarchists were blamed, and an
anarchist named Pinelli “accidentally” fell from a 5^(th) floor window
of Milan police headquarters while being interrogated. Today, a quarter
of a century later, the judiciary itself has had to admit that it was
the State secret services who placed the bomb.
Today a new farce is being played out in Italy’s courtrooms. The first
act took place in September 1994 when four anarchists were caught
robbing a bank in Trento. The four declared that the robbery was
committed for reasons of personal needs. This, however, was not good
enough for the prosecution, who, with the help of the media, concocted
the existence of a secret paramilitary anarchist group that was given
the name ORAI (Organizzazione Rivoluzionaria Anarchica
Insurrezionalista). In the following three years, raids against
anarchists have taken place all over Italy and more than 60 individuals
have been arrested and charged with being part of this fictitious armed
band. The “ORAI” has been blamed for a number of bank robberies, a
kidnapping, several attempted murders, in addition to car bombs and
bombings against the police, the military, and against the supermarket
chain Standa (owned by right wing politician and billionaire Berlusoni).
The prosecutors only “evidence” is a bought witness, the former
girlfriend of one of the fore mentioned bank robbers. This star witness
had her debut in court last year. Here she claimed to have participated
in a bank robbery together with five other anarchists. Despite the fact
that this was the only criminal action she claimed to have taken part
in, she couldn’t remember any details from the robbery. She didn’t
remember the name of the bank they supposedly robbed, she didn’t
remember how the building looked, she didn’t remember who took the
money, whether she wore gloves, whether she fired a shot or not, nor
what kind of gun she held. One of the few things she did remember was
that her accomplices wore worker’s overalls. However, the bank’s
security cameras showed the robbers wearing jackets and ties. Despite
this rather unconvincing testimony, the judges handed down guilty
sentences.
The latest act in this farce of justice is just starting, as 58
anarchists stand trial for “subversive association” — a crime inherited
from Mussolini’s fascist legal system — and for being members of an
armed gang, an organization that only exists in the head of an Italian
prosecutor, Judge Marini, with the ambition of “arresting a gang of
terrorists” before he retires.
On the 10^(th) of July 1997, an alternative radio station in Turin,
Radio Black Out, received a 14 page internal memo of the ROS, the
Italian political police, dated December 1994. The document, which had
been sent by an anonymous source, was the subject of a press conference
by Radio Black Out on July 16^(th), and has later been circulated over
the Internet. It discusses activities to be carried out to artificially
create evidence sufficient to incriminate the so-called
“insurrectionalist” anarchist circles in view of the failure of 15 years
of investigative activity on the part of the very same police. The
document then goes on to suggest the possibility of using a young woman
described as “a vulnerable element and particularly malleable,” prepared
to cooperate with the police, and “available to make any contribution.”
In essence the document confirms the frame up of the 58 anarchists now
on trial.
Instead of waiting for an investigation designed to verify the
authenticity of the document, the judge in the case of the anarchists
declared the document a forgery and an “awkward attempt to put off
preliminary hearings past the date of cautionary custody.” Judge Marini
then issued a search warrant for the location of Radio Black Out and the
residence of the two editors, in connection with the crime of “forgery
of an official document.” The two hour search resulted in the seizure of
a copy of the document itself and of a computer. It should be mentioned
that the editors of the radio station had already personally delivered
another copy to the Turin Police Headquarters.