Senza Censura N.4 - Marzo 2001

EDITORIAL

Here we are again in (militant) diffusion. This issue, the first in 2001, comes exactly after a year of an editorial work which, surpassing the previous experience as a bulletin of the National Committee against the repression in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and still resuming some topics emerged at that time, wanted to undertake the purpose to build, as a political and autonomous collective, an instrument of information (or better of conter-information) at the whole antagonist and anti-imperialist outline's disposal of the left class.

As in each issue there would be so many things to talk about, also if we just liked to list them. Moreover it's enough to skim through the final part of the journal, the one devoted to the news on "fights and repression", to find an immediate confirm to that! So we want to try to focus these few redational lines on a specific matter, that is on what is happening in Turkey, a matter of which we already talked about widely in the last issue and to which, we think, is obligatory to give still much space.

Last December, the fascist and oligarchic Turkish Government, legitimate and well representative of 1980 military coup d'état, lanched a "strange" and "humanitarian" campaign supported by the national and international media. The preparations lasted almost two months, all the time therefore coincident with the hunger strike of thousand Turkish revolutionary prisoners, belonging to different organizations (among which DHKP-C, TKP m-l, etc.), an extreme fighting act against the introduction of the prison confinement system.

This campaign, named "return to life", had its peak with the military operation that saw the involvement, as more and more happens, of the special corps of the Turkish army (well trained by the Usa/Nato special forcies) that assaulted the prisoners in struggle bursting from the roofs of over 20 prisons in the country.

Result of the "Return to Life" "humanitarian campaign": 30 prisoners died (among which 6 prisoners burned alive), hundred wounded prisoners (obviously not only political prisoners), and the effective opening of the confinement cells for an approximate number of prisoners of which nobody has known anything about their health state for two months now, except that they are carrying on the hunger strike started on October 20, 2000.

On December 19, 2000, day of the military operation against the resistance of the imprisoned militants, the streets of the major Turkish cities filled up with people, workers, students, human right associations and above all with prisoners' relatives and friends that have faced for years the "democratura" made in Turkey, leading a popular and heroic fight. And, as happened some hours earlier in the max security prisons, special police corps entirely armed tried, without succeeding, to prevent militarly that on an international level one could anyhow doubt the "steadiness" of the government. A "steadiness" that has little to do with the false/parlamentary coalitions (also if it's right to punctualize that today the "Grey Wolfes" sits in parliament as part of the majority coalition). A "steadiness" that instead represents politically a much higher valency at an imperialist level, and that goes further this or that president, this or that principal private secretary.

With the end of the Second World War, Turkey represented historically a new port on that area, chiefly with regard to the United States, carrying out principally two functions fundamental for the past and actual imperialist order: a "control" function on the different, internal and close to its boundaries, nationalities (Kurdish, Armenian, etc.); and a stategic, "grass-roots" (military and economic) function from which developing the "investment" policies accomplished by the various capitalistic forces. Without forgetting that, all over the area, Turkey holds today the running of the water.

Getting back to the fight of the prisoners and to the relative conter-revolution, intended to prevent violently the development extended beyond the national boundaries (there are prisoners in fight in Spain, Germany, France, etc.), we should say that no one of us was particularly surprised at the policy adopted by the Turkish government on the prison field, just for the role that Turkey holds on the imperialist front. A policy already experimented in the USA, Germany, Italy ...

To an imperialist society must correspond an imperialist prison. There will be different times, different instruments, but the aims and the subjects always remain the same. And in Italy, as in rest of Western Europe, we have examples that testify it continuously.

The aim of opposing imperialism, here and everywhere it reveals itself, cannot get out of dealing with and fighting firstly the "imperialist prison", historically its advanced expression.

A work we tried to resume through Senza Censura, both on a complaint level and, where possible, going into and analysing the prison institution on the whole, no more only as the "hinge of the capitalistic contradictions", but included with a central role on a more general level of the counter-revolution.