ABOUT THE CARNIVAL AGAINST BORDERS IN CLAVIERE

On Saturday the 2nd of March there was a day of mobilisation at the Montgenèvre border, in the upper Susa valley. A day in solidarity with the defendants on trial for the demo in Brennero in 2016; a day aimed at disrupting the Claviere and Montgenèvre border device, which for years has been repressing, blocking and killing the dozens of people without the right papers who are forced to pass through the mountain paths every day to escape police controls.
We decided to break the false tranquillity of this area in the hands of touristisation, where the invisibilisation of the border and its violence are the basis of the package that is sold to tourists, to emphasise to those present that this territory is a border that separates, selects and kills, and to remind the municipalities and companies that speculate on the mountains by selling false postcard imagery that the reality is another one, and that we will not stop opposing it.
In solidarity with the Palestinian people, against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, with in our hearts our comrades who are on trial the 5th of March, we gathered at the square of Claviere and then set off on our way to the border, on the terrain where in summer tourists play in the so-called ‘cross-border’ golfcourt and in winter they ski on the ‘borderless’ slopes, the same trails where people without papers are blocked and rejected by French police every day.
In a procession amidst bewildered skiers and tourists, we arrived at the gates of Montgenèvre; the French gendarmes – as usual in large numbers – lined up to defend the ski facilities and were not very keen on letting us enter the village. But at carnival every joke counts, and between interventions, snowballs on their uniforms, and writing all over the place, we headed back towards Claviere, occupying the road, blocking for just some time that border, usually non-existent for goods and tourists.

We report the words of the accused for that 2016 trial, a mobilisation against the Austrian announcement of the construction of an anti-immigrant barrier at the border with Italy – a barrier that hasn’t been built then – in a context of increasing repression towards unwanted immigration.
“While the massacres of immigrants at sea continue, the administrative detention fences widen, and police terror increases towards those who do not have the right documents in their pockets; while workers in logistics and the countryside organise and resist against state racism and employer exploitation; while rearmament and war plans intensify, uprooting millions of humans from their world and striking those who do not align; while technological control increasingly separates the included from the excluded, the reasons why we went to the Brenner Pass on 7 May have only multiplied.
Today, with the war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre in Palestine, the connection between war and borders is more evident than ever, and unfortunately the meaning of that day of struggle is ever more relevant.”

They want to lock up those who rebel and try to jam the gears of this increasingly repressive system with 130 years in jail; they want to break down solidarity and punish those who continue to speak out about sabotaging war and borders; they want to destroy all forms of dissent that are not functional to their so-called ‘democracy’.
To their repressive attempts we reply that no one can imprison our passion for freedom and real social justice. To their attempts we answer by relaunching the struggle!

From the Montgenèvre border, solidarity with those who cross borders, complicity with those who attack them!
From Brenner to Claviere to Palestine, against every border