Letter – Intervention of the anarchist comrade from Sardinia Omar Nioi
(convicted in the trial of “Operation Scripta Manent”) at the event held in Athens (A.S.O.E.E.) on December 19, 2022 regarding the anarcho-nihilist hunger striker Alfredo Cospito.
Organization:
Anarchist Hangout Nadir(Thessaloniki),
Translation project blessed-is-the-flame.espivblogs.net,
Comrades.
The translation from Italian was done by the Counter-Information Group Radiofragmata.(radiofragmata.nostate.net)
First of all, a greeting to all the comrades who were present in this initiative, a greeting and a special thanks to the comrades who promoted it. To this day, the weaving of international relations, exchanges and comparisons continues, as in the past, to be an essential element and always a living part of revolutionary anarchism, in order to strengthen our intentions.
Scripta Manent:
A political trial against 20 years of the history of revolutionary anarchism
The events:
At dawn on 6 September 2016, 32 comrades throughout the Italian State were awakened by the civil police (DIGOS). The result of the first part of the police operation called “Scripta Manent”, ordered by the Turin Public Prosecutor’s Office through its investigator Roberto Maria Sparagna, is 15 suspects and 7 arrests. On the other hand, an eighth anarchist, in charge of the Anarchist Black Cross publishing project (now closed), is arrested after a house search against him in which batteries and an electrician’s manual were found. In addition to comrades Alfredo Cospito and Nicola Gai, already in prison since 2012 having been tried and convicted for the injury of Roberto Adinolfi, (CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare) action taken by “Nucleo Olga of FAI/FRI”, comrades Alessandro, Marco, Danilo, Valentina and Anna are arrested. For the comrades, articles 270 bis (on association with terrorist purposes), 280 bis (on terrorist acts with lethal or explosive devices) and 285 (on massacre) are triggered for various reasons, which are in question starting from as far back as 2003 and all relating to a series of attacks specifically signed by the “Informal Anarchist Federation” through the cells FAI/Narodnaya Volya (FAI/ People’s Will), “Cooperativa Artigiana Fuoco e Affini FAI/Collaboration of Fire and Artifacts (Occasionally Spectacular))”, “FAI/RAT ((Rivolta Anonima e Tremenda/Federazione Anarchica Informale – Anonymous and Tremendous Revolt/Informal Anarchist Federation)” and “Nucleo Olga FAI/FRI” (FAI/IRF Cell Olga).
Thus, there is the umpteenth investigation of the Informal Anarchist Federation, another attempt to fish in the darkness just to secure a salary, which between the period of investigation and trial, makes as many servants of the State as possible fatten their pockets. During the first months of this operation, the arrested comrades have been subjected to bans on meeting each other, censorship of correspondence, complete isolation and several transfers. In April 2017, the announcement of the closure of the investigation – for those arrested and under investigation in September 2016 – added, in addition to the crimes previously contested, to 12 of the 17 original accused to Article 414 of the Criminal Code (on incitement to commit a criminal act with terrorist purposes) as authors and/or distributors of the work of the Anarchist Black Cross, the newspaper and the blog, making explicit reference to certain opinion articles and other articles from No. 0 to No. 3. With regard to the offence of incitement to crime, the aggravating circumstance of “committing the act by means of computer and telematic tools” is also mentioned.
On 2 June 2017 the second part of the investigation of the Scripta Manent case arrived. 7 other anarchists were investigated under 270 bis and article 414 of the penal code on suspicion of editing (and not only) the Anarchist Black Cross project and the blogs of RadioAzione and Anarhija.info, where all the charges relate to 270 bis (on subversive association with terrorist aims) – as opposed to the anarchist comrades investigated in the first part of Scripta Manent in relation to the FAI – and except for article 414 (on incitement to criminal activity always with the aim of terrorism) for translating communications, preparing, inciting, instigating, seizing and disseminating, always through websites and newspapers, anarchist ideological propaganda material in the context of“insurrection fighters” and collecting money to support imprisoned comrades. In addition to the further charge, 2 of the 7 mentioned above are also charged in relation to article 280 of the penal code for finding printed material during the investigation in September 2016, together with other material published in the Anarchist Black Cross and for a copy of the responsibility statement for the attack in the Civitavecchia court in January 2016, signed by the F.A.I/F.R.I./Fireworks committee for an extraordinary year.
A few days later, at the preliminary hearing on June 5, 2017, the two parties to the investigation joined together, sending everyone to trial, without changing any of the various charges. Practically, after a year of control, censorship (through systematic blocking and confiscation of the correspondence of the arrested comrades, which entered directly into the files of the prosecutor and was added to the documents at the preliminary hearing) and surveillance of the world of solidarity, the Prosecutor and the police managed to include in the investigation even those who continued to maintain contact with the prisoners and continued the editorial activity.
The trial at first instance:
A preliminary hearing was held during July 2017. The trial for all started on 16 November 2017 in the special courtroom of the Turin prison. After more than a year of endless hearings, in which the prosecution even went fishing from old anti-anarchist investigations (between the 90’s and the early 2000’s) recalling the last thirty years of revolutionary anarchism in Italy, with the history of the attacks signed by the FAI, the succession of prosecution witnesses, with technical experts from the prosecution and the defence, in March 2019 the conviction decisions arrived from the Prosecutor and in April of the same year the first degree convictions. Alfredo was sentenced to 20 years, found responsible for the possession and transport of explosives in connection with the bombing of the Parco Ducale in the RIS of Parma in 2005 (he was acquitted of the charge of assault because of the “impossible crime” because the bomb switch was disabled), of the postal bomb package sent to the then mayor of Bologna Cofferati in 2005 (he was convicted of the assault plus possession and transport of explosives), the attacks with multiple explosive devices at the Carabinieri school in Fossano in 2006 and in the Crocetta area of Turin in 2007 (a crime involving the charge of massacre and aggravated by the fact that the target was the police; the aggravating circumstance of political motivation has been reduced), the sending of parcel bombs to the then Mayor of Turin, Chiamparino, the director of the newspaper Torino Cronaca, Giuseppe Fossati, and the company COEMA Edilità in 2006. He is also listed as a supporter of the FAI, recognised as a subversive organisation for the purpose of terrorism. The aggravating circumstance of internationalism has been reduced. Anna was sentenced to 17 years for the Crocetta and Fossano bombings and the 2006 mail bombing, as well as for subversive association with the purpose of terrorism, such as supporting the FAI. Nicola was sentenced to 9 years for subversive association with the purpose of terrorism. Marco and Sandro were sentenced to 5 years for subversive association with a terrorist purpose. All other defendants were acquitted. All convicted persons remain in prison, while Danilo is released from prison and Valentina is under house arrest.
Objection procedure:
The first hearing of the appeal of the Scripta Manent trial was set for July 1, 2020 at the Turin prison bunker. The prisoners/defendants would be there by videoconference, as in all the last first instance hearings. In fact, at the time of the preliminary hearings, there was not yet any legislation mandating videoconferencing. Then, at the beginning of the first degree hearings, the law was passed, but it gave the prisons and courts a year to adjust, imposing that year’s adjustment of videoconferencing only on the defendants accused of being at the top of the “organizations.” After the one-year period, videoconferencing was applied to all, as planned. Most of the hearing was monopolized by the discussion of the various objections presented by the defence counsel to the appeal for the comrades acquitted in the first instance, presented by P.M. Sparagna. In particular, it was evident that he had not complied with the time limits for filing his appeal, but it was noted that the recalculation by the judges late in the afternoon when the appeal was still valid… the proceedings therefore continued for the accused acquitted at first instance. At the subsequent hearings, he requested conviction for all of them, refusing to recognise “ne bis in idem” (i.e. the fact that they had already been tried for the same crimes); he also demanded that no general mitigating circumstances be recognised for all of them and, in particular, that the offence be continued as regards the damage to Adinolfi. It also demanded that the crime of massacre be recognised for the attack on the RIS in Parma.
On 24 November 2020, the decision of the Court of Appeal was issued.
- Anna: 16 years and 6 months (primary: 17 years)
- Alfredo: 20 years (as in primary)
- Nicola: 1 year and 1 month (first instance: 9 years), following his sentence with the right of appeal to 8 years, 8 months and 20 days for assaulting Adinolfi.
- Alessandro: acquitted of all charges (primary: 5 years).
- Marco: acquitted of the charge of “subversive association with the purpose of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order” (primary: 5 years), but sentenced to 1 year and 9 months for “incitement to criminal activity” in connection with the “Anarchist Black Cross”.
The conviction for “subversive relationship with the purpose of terrorism and subversion of the democratic order” was confirmed only for Anna, Alfredo and Nicola. Comrades Nicola, Alessandro and Marco were released from prison.
In addition to the court of first instance, nine other sentences were handed down, also concerning those comrades accused of “incitement to criminal acts”. Convictions related, for various reasons, to the publication of the “Anarchist Black Cross” magazine and website and the management of certain other websites for which they had been charged in the original proceedings. These sentences range from 2 years and 6 months for Gioachino Somma to 1 year and 9 months for Erika, Omar, Alessandro and Lello. In addition to Alessandro, nine other anarchist comrades were acquitted of all charges, including Danilo, who had been in prison since 6 September 2016 and was released with an acquittal at the trial court on 24 April 2019, and Valentina, who was in prison and then under house arrest at the same time, who was also released with an acquittal at the trial court. The other accused comrades were released.
The Supreme Court:
Last July the Supreme Court of Justice reformulated the charge of the explosive attack against the Carabinieri school in Fossano (Cuneo), which took place on 2 June 2006 and was carried out by the “FAI/Anonymous Chaotic Insurgency”, on charges of “political massacre” (article 285 of the penal code), referring comrade Alfredo Cospito and comrade Anna Beniamino to the Control Court of Turin for a recalculation of the sentence with the risk of life imprisonment. Life imprisonment is the basic penalty imposed by the Criminal Code with regard to the provisions on political massacres in Italy. After the retrial of the crime, the Supreme Court postponed the Court of Appeal precisely in order to redefine the sentences. The hearing that will decide the size of the sentence has been set in Turin for December 5, 2022.
On December 5, which just passed, the appeal hearing of the Scripta Manent trial against Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino took place. The General Prosecutor requested 27 years and one month for Anna and life imprisonment with 12 months of daily solitary confinement for Alfredo, surpassing even the previous requests of P.M. Sparagna, which meant 30 years for Alfredo.
The Court of Appeal of Turin failed to issue the conviction and the next target is the Constitutional Court: The judges in Turin are asking whether it is legal to be forced to deny Alfredo Cospito extenuating circumstances because of his criminal record. This is what would, in effect, force them to sentence Alfredo to life imprisonment, even for an act that caused neither deaths nor injuries.
On 19 December a new hearing was held in Turin, a formal hearing to elaborate on the question submitted for consultation.
Alfredo and Anna intervened with spontaneous statements that by today you will be able to read as they are translated and disseminated internationally. Alfredo reiterated that he will continue the hunger strike that began on October 20, 2022 until his last breath against 41 bis and life imprisonment and Anna pointed out that anyone who has at least critical thinking will be able to identify the instigators and perpetrators of Alfredo’s extermination. Those present in the courtroom greeted the accused comrade with chants and shouts.
To conclude this brief summary and analysis of what the procedure of the Srcipta Manent case was, I will try to refer to the essence of the 41 bis regime’s disposition of our comrade Alfredo, his hunger strike and the international mobilization in line with any precedent that has been set. I mention a recent contribution to the debate, with the necessary changes for the occasion. Although there will be more clarification on this from the comrades of the anarchist newspaper Vetriolo, in relation to what “Operation Sibilla” has meant for them and especially for Alfredo.
The importance of revolutionary solidarity.
With the anarchist Alfredo Cospito, his path and his positions.
“We want a present worth living, not just sacrificed to the messianic expectation of a future heaven on earth. That is why we set ourselves up to talk in practice about an anarchy that is realised now, not tomorrow. The ‘all at once’ is a gamble, a game we have thrown ourselves into, where the stakes are our own life, the life of all, our death, the death of all…”…»
– Pierleone Mario Porcu
That morning of 7 May 2012 in Genoa, when the magazine of an old Tokarev pistol was filled, which was then clenched into a fist, shot at the feet of Ansaldo Nucleare CEO Roberto Adinolfi, there were not only two anarchists of action, Nicola Gai and Alfredo Cospito, but there was the most alive and real part of revolutionary anarchism transposed into action. The “Olga Cell”, through the Informal Anarchist Federation, on that day cut bridges with the present and then with the immobility of of the real, where anarchism and its retreat tends towards more and more downward tones. After Fukushima, the return of the nuclear phantom to Europe appears as the reverse side of the tragedy that torments the planet, nature, the human, the same tragedies that trigger strong emotions in our hearts. There are no abstractions, no concepts: but there are men who relentlessly continue their mad and self-destructive course, there are structures that make the progression of death possible, there are slaves who protect each other with weapons. And these men, these structures, have a name and an address. After this action, Nicola and Alfredo were arrested, tried and took responsibility for their act with pride in the courtroom. Pointing out that the destructive direct action and the armed affair were still facts as real as their defence by the anarchists was necessary. After ten years of imprisonment, on May 5, 2022, Alfredo received notice of his transfer from ” High Security 2 ” to ” 41 bis “. On July 6, 2022, the Court of Cassation redefined the explosive attack against the Carabinieri school in Fossano in June 2006, for which responsibility was claimed by the FAI/Anonymous Chaotic Insurgency cell, for which comrade Anna Beniamino and comrade Alfredo Cospito were accused in a “Political Massacre”, referring to a recalculation of the sentence that could include life imprisonment.
Today, once again, Alfredo finds himself giving so much to anarchism and to all of us, placing his dignity and intransigent positions even before his physical condition with a hunger strike from October 20, 2022 against the 41 bis regime and life imprisonment without possibility of parole, which he will continue until the bitter end, using his body as a barricade so that the use of the 41 bis regime against anarchists will not pass. A hunger strike, which has been joined over time by anarchists Juan Sorroche, Ivan Alocco and anarchist Anna Beniamino (who have currently been stopped).
The current situation gives space to various reflections, strong emotions and many diverse initiatives in these two months, initiatives always in these very important contexts, valid and fundamental for this struggle to have the greatest possible impact, but Alfredo’s struggle is currently also becoming a tool of criticism of the 41 bis regime and prison society in general. At this moment, in my opinion, as revolutionary anarchist elements (internationally), the calm, clarity and stability that the situation demands must prevail.
Understand what to do and how to do it, what arguments to support, but above all at this particular moment, and as an indefinite hunger strike demands, to continue to do what we have to do, what was done yesterday and the opportunity to do it tomorrow. A thought in harmony with what has been written above is certainly the need to get out of the grid of a limited specific struggle against prisons, to get out of the deadlock of a generalized mobilization that sensitively looks only at the 41 bis regime, knowing how to read the phase and understand in time the real object of the conflict, starting from the construction of an internationalist, specific, individualist solidarity in the mobilization to prevent the murder of our comrade Alfredo Cospito in an iron and concrete tomb, in solitary conditions.
A revolutionary solidarity that starts above all from the open claim that it is not only the general practices, which ultimately take on the exclusive character of those who practice them, but it is the history, the ideas, the positions, the specific actions challenged by our comrade and the consequent reasons that accompanied them. And we must call this out, it must be this practice that applies to other processes of direct destructive actions, because it is one of the fundamental steps aimed at lifting the isolation around those arrested, proving to the authorities that these actions belong to all anarchists.
Because if we are on Alfredo’s side, it is not only because his current situation torments our hearts, but because we know above all that he is a comrade who has dedicated his life to the anarchist idea, which is also ours. And it is obvious that if we, nihilist revolutionary anarchism and its word, are not able to defend ourselves, no one else will ever be able to do so.
At this point, any discourse, more or less acceptable, is likely to be trapped in this condition, reserved exclusively for the level of human solidarity, diluted in a struggle against the prison in general. In the past, we have dealt with the question 41 bis several times, putting our face forward, even when we did not have an anarchist comrade in this regime, and with the subsequent sudden changes we will continue to deal with it more directly in the future, being able to work out a broader reflection, as a perspective, on how such a regime of detention can be applied to other bands and to increasingly widespread social conflicts.
But what matters today, in this struggle against time, is to get Alfredo out of this regime, to achieve immediate declassification without further conditions.
Alfredo in all these years has never been a victim and if he is today subjected to this regime it is solely because of the will of the authorities to crush him by taking away his relations with what he first always defined as his community.
After all, the possibility cannot be excluded that the State is trying to test the ground of the “anarchist movement”, probably in order to be able to use this instrument of extermination against us in the future more for what we are than for what we do. We can even speculate that this regime might permanently replace the practice of High Custody in case building over time.
It seems clear that the purpose that the state-state system is pursuing, through the power of the judicial police with trials, convictions for terrorism and the imposition of an annihilationist regime like 41 bis, of eliminating and isolating its enemy is the declared order, as the situation of the revolutionary communists Nadia Lioce, Roberto Morandi and Marco Mezzasalma, who have been resisting with exemplary dignity for 17 years in the darkness of 41 bis, shows us. All this reminds us strongly that Alfredo’s battle must also be supported for them. All of this, since it is part of the inherent existence of the judicial police system and its law, cannot be extended from a broader discourse into a dialectic of opposition, of the state against revolutionary struggle, of the anarchist against the global capitalist system that includes the use of 41 bis as an instrument of coercion and blackmail of repentance, when there are no domino elements through which we can recover individuality and revolutionary actions, because it is precisely our own will, revolutionary, which transcends the quick and disorienting of waiting. A will that has the determination and optimistic conceit to transform reality, keeping intact the anarchist nihilistic intensity in which we believe, despite the fact that we have never set aside the idea of social revolution, that this world, as it is today, must be demolished.
It is no coincidence that these are the terms in which the accusations of incitement created in recent years against the “Anarchist Black Cross” and “RadioAzione” are fully formulated; the Sibilla operation against the anarchist newspaper “Vetriolo” and the publication of Alfredo Cospito’s interview “Which international?”. In this sense, in fact, we can say that what has been done in recent years with our publications continues to be invaluable because it allows, in the present day, the anarchists to recover possession of their ideas, to give them space, with the audacity of the always unchanging, with the same propensity for action in the sphere of revolutionary consciousness, building the International.
Out Alfredo from 41bis!
Against the use of 41 bis on revolutionary prisoners!
Always for anarchy.
I close this writing by taking the opportunity to send my most sincere and warmest greetings to the supporters of this initiative, to all the comrades in Greece who continue to struggle for years inside and outside the prisons, hoping that the initiative will evolve beyond the most optimistic expectations and that it will be a stimulus for further improvement of the debates, arming this need for freedom that distinguishes us.
Omar Nioi,
17/12/2022,
Sardinia