2 march, Claviere – CARNIVAL AGAINST THE BORDERS
CARNIVAL AGAINST THE BORDERS
from Val Susa to the Brenner Pass, beyond all borders against all prisons!
This border, like all borders and walls built to separate and divide lands and peoples, kills. On the mountain paths from Claviere to Briançon and on the ski slopes where tourists walk, more than 10 bodies have been found since 2017. At least 2 are missing. And it was not the mountains, the cold or the snow that killed them, just as it is not the sea or the traffickers the cause of the deaths of thousands of people in the Mediterranean. What kills is the manhunt carried out by the gendarmerie, the border police, the military. It is the policies of ‘migration management’ and externalisation of borders aimed at blocking and controlling that part of the population considered surplus, poor, and then exploiting it if it arrives in Europe. The border does not exist for goods that travel everywhere. In a valley where a railway line runs – and construction sites to build another one devastate the land, the TAV – where there are roads and motorways leading to France, those who do not have the right document are forced to walk higher and higher up the mountain paths, increasingly repressed by increasing militarisation.
On 5 March, the Court of Cassation will rule on the requested sentences for the people who in May 2016 decided to stand in solidarity with border crossers and oppose the construction of an ‘anti-migrant’ wall at the Brenner Pass on the border between Italy and Austria.
The appeal sentence in the trial for that demonstration ‘Tear down the borders, at the Brenner and everywhere’ handed out more than 120 years in prison. If the convictions are upheld in Cassation, many comrades will end up in jail or under house arrest for years for one of the most repressed marches in decades. As the repression progresses, the motives and reasons for that demonstration have only increased.
In recent years, the instruments of integrated border control and management have multiplied: a new European pact on migration to facilitate the processes of registration and repatriation of migrants, detention centres and multifunctional hotspots placed in the most remote areas of the peninsula, agreements with third countries to outsource borders and asylum applications (the latest with Albania to build two detention centres on Albanian territory).
In 2023 there were almost 30,000 documented rejections at European borders. A few days ago there was news of yet another state suicide inside a detentio centre, where a 22-year-old man took his own life by hanging himself with a sheet. Facial recognition devices, fingerprint databases, and control technologies find in borders a privileged place of experimentation.
Despite the instruments of oppression in the hands of colonial Europe, migrants organise themselves to pierce the meshes of the fortress: from Ventimiglia to Monginevro, from Trieste to Calais, from the Brenner Pass to Lampedusa, borders are crossed every day. The detention centres are set on fire (only in these first days of 2024 there were riots in the CPRs of Gradisca d’Isonzo, Milo and Ponte Galeria) and people escape.
From the Montgenèvre border we call a solidarity carnival, Saturday 2 March 2024, to express our solidarity with the comrades under investigation for the demonstration at the Brenner Pass and allə those who defy the control devices every day to beat paths of freedom and hope.
See you on Saturday, March 2 at 11 a.m. in Claviere!
Bring a sack lunch
There will be hot tea and hot wine!
Solidarity with those who cross borders, complicity with those who fight them!
