“All with Alfredo Cospito” – Closing Declaration of the International Conference of the International Red Help (March 2023)
The work of the participants’ to the bi-annual Conference of the International Red Help work is now done. It has especially focused on the development and definition of our struggle-fraternity with Rojava and the revolutionary Palestinian Left.
The up-comping trial, on April 14th, against a comrade of the Geneva Red Help has also been brought up. This comrade must appear before the Military Court, in Sion, accusing him of taking part, as an internationalist, in the armed defence of Rojava. This trial is an opportunity to reaffirm the legitimacy and necessity to defend the revolution in Rojava as part of an international revolutionary process.
The struggle of anarchist prisoner Alfredo Cospito against the 41bis carceral regime was one the main points brought up at the Conference. The IRH has now fought for almost 20 years against this regime of total isolation, to which the prisoners of the Red Brigades PCC Nadia Lioce, Roberto Morandi and Marco Mezzasalma have been subjected to since 2005.
The 41bis is not, in the case of revolutionaries, a security measure or a punishment: it is a means of pressure. All they’d have to do to get out of it would be to collaborate with the Police forces to. As Alfredo said: “ The only way I can get out of here is to disavow my anarchy and to give away someone they can put here instead of me”. Making someone suffer to extort a disavowal or informations: this is the very definition of torture.
Opposing this bi-optional alternative – betrayal or 41bis – the Red Brigades PCC activist Diana Blefari took her own life on October 31st in 2009.
This suicide and Alfredo’s hunger strike, if necessary until death, show how much the 41bis is indeed insufferable torture.
Alfredo’s decision, perfectly explained in his declarations, is not a choice from despair, it is the decision of a fighter.
It is as such we must understand it, it is as such we must support it.
In his letter made public on March 1st, Alfred Cospito stated: “I am convinced my death will be an obstacle to this regime”.
This conviction, it belongs to us to make true, by denouncing in every way the barbary of the Italian state and of its police and judicial apparatus. This state and apparatus count a heavy balance of torture and massacres, it is a long tradition to them, taking roots far back into the past.
They are hard-headed, they are ruthless, and they profit from the cowardly complicity of almost the entire Italian and European intelligentsia.
We will have to hit hard, and repeatedly.
International Red Help
Zurich, March 26th 2023.
Annex: Alfredo Cospito’s Declaration during the audience on March 14th 2023.
First of all, I wanted to start off with a quote from my instigator:
“Our juridicial system has introduced this deadly isolation regime that is the 41bis, and it is, under certain aspects, even more uncivilised than this pharmaceutical mutilation. All this to say that our system doesn’t shine by its civility.”
Carlo Nordio March 28th 2019
This is the initiator of the struggle I have begun. I never thought I would get to this point, I have always found melodrama ridiculous, I by far prefer comedy, but this is how it is. After all, aren’t we in the land of melodrama? We must finish on a high note. When I think of it, there is something quite ironic: In the the Occident of democratic progress, I am the only dumbass dying because they won’t let me read or study what I want to, old anarchist papers, historical and scientific reviews, and of course comic books that are so dear to me.
You may admit that it is contradictory and even a little bit funny, but I cannot live this way, I simply can’t, and I hope those who love me understand. I cannot surrender to this non-living, it is beyond me, perhaps because I am a stubborn anarchist from Abruzzo. Of course, I am not a martyr, martyrs repulse me. Yes, I am a terrorist, I have shot a man and have claimed it with pride, even-though, if I may say so, this definition is comical coming from the representatives of State carrying the weight of wars and millions of deaths, and who sometimes, like one of our ministers, make profit off arms trade. But this is how things go, at least until anarchy hasn’t triumphed and true socialism, the anti-authoritarian and anti-state one, hasn’t emerged. ‘It won’t be tomorrow’ you may say, and so do I, for now the only glimmer I see are the acts of rebellion from revolutionary brothers and sisters around the world, and it isn’t nothing, because they are led by their heart, passion and courage, even though they may seem frail and eccentric.
This being said, I wanted to explain the meaning of my relentlessness against the 41bis. I believe a couple of jurists may have perceived it, but very few have truly understood: The 41bis is a metastasis that could indeed threaten the rule of law, and it is in fact already the case, a cancer which, in a State only slightly more totalitarian – and with Meloni’s government we’re almost there – will be used to repress, to silence by terror any sort of political dissidence and any hypothetical extremisms. The court deciding the condemnation to the medieval muzzle that is the 41bis is very much alike the special fascist court, the dynamics are identical: I could only get out of this dantesque circle if I disavowed my political credo, my anarchism, only if I handed in comrades. It always starts with the Roma people, the communists, the radicals, the rogues, the subversives and then the more or less revolutionary leftists.
How could I not have opposed all of this, even in a desperate way, and for an anarchist, precisely because we don’t have an organisation, the given word is everything, that’s why I will go all the way. To conclude, as was said, if I remember this correctly, by the anarchist Emile Henry before being beheaded: “When I won’t enjoy the show any longer I too will get to leave and slam the door.” This is what I will do in the upcoming days, I hope with dignity and serenity, as much as possible.
Big hugs to Domenico who, in the 41bis of Sassari, has gone on hunger strike hoping to get to hold his children and close ones again, fostering my hopes that others who were and are sentenced to the 41bis will break the resignation and join the struggle against this regime that makes both the constitution and the so-called rule of law – for what it’s worth – no more than waste paper.
Abolition of the 41bis regime.
Abolition of incompressible lifelong sentence.
Solidarity with all the anarchist, communist and revolutionary prisoners in the world.
Thanks to my brothers and sisters for everything you do, I love you, please forgive my illogical persistence.
Never on my knees, always for anarchy.
Long live life, down with death.
Alfredo Cospito.