Statement From Comrades From Wotta Sitta At Novara Prison

"And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows more solid
and infalliable so that the effectiveness of every kind of support
given to the struggling people were increased, how great the future
would be, and how near. (Ernesto Che Guevera)

    Five years ago, Peruvian Army and Navy troops carried out
attacks on the prisons around Lima (El Fronton, Lurigancho, El
Callao), under the order of that scoundrel Garcia, and massacred
300 communist and revolutionary prisoners, both men and women;
militants of the opposition movements and guerrillas of Sendero
Luminoso.
    We are remembering this infamous massacre not only as further
proof of imperialist barbarity, but also, and above all, in order
to strengthen the consciousness of the deadly attacks that bring
the international proletariat and oppressed peoples into opposition
against the ruling system and capitalist exploitation in Latin
America as well as all over the world.
    The revolutionary's struggle in imperialist jails has always
been an important factor in the revolutionary process as a whole.
In this current phase, the revolutionary struggle's course in the
main areas of struggle against imperialism is both reaffirming and
advancing this political factor.

1. At the end of the 80's the imperialist bourgeoisie backed by
world-wide reformism, announced the start of a "peace epoch", in
which the end of the "cold war" between the two superpowers and
"the defeat of communism" would eliminate "the threat of war in the
world", and which would lead to the settlement of regional
conflicts by political settlement and high-level mediation.
    However, imperialist advancement in the main crisis areas over
the past few years has made everyone aware of the reality: the fall
of the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua through the blackmail of the
contras and the US, the American invasion of Panama accomplished
with the bloodshed of 5000 people, the annexation of the DDR in the
so-called "Great Germany", the Gulf War and the destruction of Iraq
and the death of hundreds of thousands due to the most massive
bombing since World War Two carried out by the massive U.S. and
West European military apparatus.
    These are only some of the most important events of the "new
peace epoch" which show the real intentions of western capitalism
in this stage: to give a lasting blow to the revolutionary and
liberation movements, to restore their hierarchies in the face of
those nationalist bourgeoisie carrying out a discordant policy, and
to reaffirm a new balance of power to its own advantage after the
collapse of the East Bloc, within the context of the growing "new
world order".
    However, this illusion of power is quickly disappearing before
the eyes of the imperialist strategists, due to the growth of the
very contradictions and conflicts that they would eliminate. Every
stone that imperialism raises up, falls back down onto their own
feet!
    The lords of the imperialist war have not been able to silence
the revolutionary and liberation movements, rather these movements
have spoken through their struggle, advancing the revolutionary
process in the world, from Palestine and Turkey, to Peru and
Central America, as well as in West Europe.
    With this growing balance in the confrontation, every
revolutionary movement and force, and every militant , must
strengthen their own position about consciousness and class roots,
and the connections between each others' struggles. It is just this
political factor that describes the circumstances and struggles of
the revolutionary prisoners in imperialist jails.

2. In the context of the imperialist offensive marking the early
90's, the governments, parties, "cultural associations",
capitalists and mass-media in Europe and other western countries
are preparing for the 5th century celebrations of the discovery of
the America, for 1992. It is necessary to pay attention to this
date, for several reasons.
    First and foremost, because it is a great political, economic,
and ideological operation with the aim of intensifying the
exploitation and oppression of the people in the Tricontinent (the
south of the world) and Latin America, and not only a celebration
of the "victory of capitalism" or "western civilization". Speaking
concretely, Spain, in this context, wants to create its own area of
political and economic influence in its ex-colonies, on the basis
of the Commonwealth model. This project is in reality the bridge-
head in an attempt by the EEC to carry out a penetration process in
the Center and South America, in which also Italy, USA, Japan and
..'Israel' are involved!
    Another important factor is the growth of a large movement in
Latin America, USA, and Europe around this "deadline", that
includes the different paths of the historical struggle against
capitalist oppression, and which intends to turn this
"commemoration" of the imperialist bourgeoisie into a time of
internationalist struggle and radical opposition to the imperialist
system.
    In the Latin American revolutionary movement there is a more
and more a deep-rooted consciousness that imperialism can only be
overthrown by a process as a whole in which every struggle is
linked to the other revolutionary realities in the world.
    It's a schedule of initiatives and mobilizations directly
concerning the revolutionary and anti-imperialist European
movement, on the international level.
    For us as prisoners, this dimension is also the basis for
connection and interaction between the different realities of
struggle in the imperialist jails, in order to face this special
confrontation in the context of the international revolutionary
movement.

3. In this framework we want to focus on the situation of the
revolutionary prisoners in the U.S.; it's a reality having
important links - at the objective level as well as at the
subjective level - with the anti-imperialist mobilizations against
the 5th Century Celebrations, and with the nature of the struggle
that we are outlining.
    In U.S. prisons there are over 150 revolutionary prisoners.
The majority are New Afrikan; former members of the Black Panther
Party and the Black Liberation Army. There are 20 white anti-
imperialist prisoners, several Native American prisoners, and over
30 belonging to the Puerto Rican independence movement.
    Most of them have heavy sentences such as Native American
Leonard Peltier, New Afrikan Geronimo Pratt, in jail for about 20
years, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death in 1982 and
is locked down in Huntington, Pennsylvania, on death row.
    Bush - as well as his predecessors - have always denied the
existence of political prisoners in the US, but this is a
discredited myth.
    In the last few years, in spite of the ever-present
counterrevolution against any opposition to the state, there has
been built up meaningful mobilization through initiatives on
several levels, ranging from demonstrations against maximum-
security units and militant information campaigns, all the way to
legal actions on the grounds of human rights. All these things have
broken the blackout about the struggle of the prisoners, giving
rise to great support, on the international level, from the anti-
imperialist movement.
    The PP's and POW's are an expression of a movement that has
shaken American society in the past 20 years; this movement was the
result of the contradictions in the establishment of the framework
of this society.
    "U.S. history is a product of the conflict between European
invaders and Native Americans, white masters and Black slaves, the
colonizing army and the colonized, bosses and workers, male
supremacists and women, anti-imperialists and imperialists", so
wrote the Weather Underground in 'Prairie Fire'
    The U.S. imperialist metropole contains in its heritage all
the stages of the exploitation and destruction of entire peoples,
and this has resulted in the growth of this social structure,
within the historical context of world-wide capitalist development.
    This then is the close linkage connecting the anti-imperialist
and liberation struggle in the U.S. with the revolutionary
movements in Latin America and the Third World, as well as with the
class confrontation in Western Europe; and this then is the
significance of the PP's and POW's struggle in the North American
prisons.

4. In Western Europe we are faced with the quick development of the
economic and political unification project, pursued by several
governments, capitalistic multi-national groups, and the
bourgeoisie, in order to counterattack the crises and confront the
competition among the capitalist economical groupings in the world.
    The effects of this economic and political concentration are
going to be more and more obvious, by the penetration of european
wealth into the East and by military re-structuring.
    Recently, NATO governments have announced the construction of
a "Rapid Deployment Force, of 100,000 British, German, Belgian,
Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish soldiers, under
American command, having the job of intervening "outside of the
conventional area of intervention", in order to "defend the
interests of Western Europe". The Gulf War has given rise to an
model of intervention which has been adopted by the European
states, and this has escalated noticeably their importance and
responsibility in the global strategy of western imperialism.
    Due to this imperialist move, the forced pacification of the
social conflict which has been going on throughout the continent
for 20 years is the goal of the European governments.
    It's not just the case that the counter-revolutionary strategy
is at the forefront of the national policies of the various states
as well as the EEC.
    The tested TREVI group (a body leading and centralizing the
repression in the EEC) and the "Schengen Agreement" (in order to
control the flow of immigrants from the south of the world), are
the pillars on which they are building up a whole 'security' policy
in Europe.
    Right now, the revolutionary movement, the vanguard
organizations, the antagonist collectives, proletarian struggles,
and prisoners also, must build their own ways and means to struggle
against a counter-revolutionary strategy and apparatus that is
strongly linked on the continental level.
    European unification, with the "Great Germany" at its center,
cannot tolerate the activity of the antagonist movement, of the
guerrilla organizations; it cannot even tolerate the existence of
the prisoners carrying out the struggle in prisons as a vital part
of the revolutionary movement.
    This is the sum of the West-European policy that has
underlined the struggle between the imprisoned comrades of GRAPO-
PCE(r) and the Gonzales administration concerning their
regroupment.
    After about 15 months on hungerstrike and force-feeding
torture, after the death of comrade Jose Manuel Sevillano Martin,
the struggle was interrupted in order to avoid a stalemate, on the
heels of a deeply changed situation due to international events.
    Nevertheless,in this very heavy struggle, the Spanish comrades
have shown their own political steadfastness and revolutionary
firmness in the faces of the Gonzales administration and the
strategists of the preventive counter-revolution.
    They were conscious that the attempt by the PSOE to disrupt
their identity and collective militancy by means of solitary
confinement and dispersion to a number of prisons was part and
parcel of a more general attack against the class and the
revolutionary movement. This consciousness led them to confront
this strategy. They rejected the state of powerlessness in which
the State would have forced them, and they took up the initiative
for regroupment, clearly setting themselves inside the interests
and goals of the revolutionary struggle in Spain and Europe.
    Therefore, there is no defeat, this struggle is only
interrupted, and the consciousness, the solidarity and the
communication network which resulted from it will provide the
conditions necessary to begin anew, with greater strength, so that
an end may be put to the isolation of the comrades.
    In Germany, after the annexation of the DDR, the German
government is madly busy, by means of its security apparatus,
trying to prevent the revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements
form embodying and politicizing the contradiction resulting from
the process of the so-called "Great Germany".
    In the former DDR a huge political and economic operation is
occurring which is liquidating all the factories in order to be
able to re-build, from the ground up, the framework and the people,
in order to make them more useful to the exploitation and
oppression project of the new capitalistic German power.
    But the aspirations of Kohl concerning the development of this
process are being frustrated by the mass struggles in the East,
which are obviously not going to disappear, as well as because of
the revolutionary initiative of the movement, especially the RAF
guerrilla.
    The "running dogs" of the "Chancellor" are not able to stop
the actions of the revolutionary forces. As well as leading a
general attack against the movement (the squatters, the info-shops,
the antagonist collectives), they are leading a repressive campaign
against the RAF and resistance prisoners with their usual fury. As
well as the pressure on the relatives and solidarity groups. there
is occurring a manoeuvre to misrepresent the RAF experience (such
as the rumours about the Stasi), trying to link the attack against
the guerrilla and the destruction of the former East Germany.
    It's such a mistaken interpretation that even the words put
into the mouths of some traitors (former RAF members) are not able
to give any credibility to it.
    There is an increase in the provocations and the media-
campaigns against the prisoners. Lately, all this is culminating in
an explicit threat to restore total isolation also for those
militants who have gained by the '89 hungerstrike, the right of
minimal collectivity (4 in a jail!).
    The comrades of Action Directe are in a similar situation.
They have lost step-by-step the rights gained by their hungerstrike
of '89. They are faced with physical and communicative isolation,
along with the other usual provocations.
    The "socialist" Mitterand administration, along with its staff
of democrats and former 'sessantottini' [refers to those people who
were involved in the French student uprising of 1968 who have now
become reformists in the ruling parties - ed.] is much appreciating
- and applying! - the TREVI counter-revolutionary science.
    Against this situation, the four AD comrades have been
struggling since January 1st, by means of hungerstrike.
    This confrontation is faced in a different manner also by the
comrades of the CCC (Communist Combatting Cells), in solitary
confinement in the Belgian jails for over 5 years; by ETA prisoners
who are in the same conditions as the GRAPO prisoners; and by
prisoners of the IRA and other organizations who have been carrying
out a very heavy struggle against the British prison policy for
over 20 years. Actually, over 200 of these comrades are sentenced
to life and imprisoned in the H-Blocks.
    Finally, there are several Arab, Palestinian, Kurdish fighters
detained in many prisons on the continent, showing clearly the role
of European imperialism against the revolution and liberation
struggles in the Middle East.
    All movements have prisoners. On account of this they cut
across the lines of the confrontation between revolution and
counter-revolution, between international proletariat and
imperialist bourgeoisie.
    It is this factor that makes it necessary to face the "issue"
of revolutionary prisoners in an international perspective.
    Moreover, the design of the U.S. penitentiaries, as well as
the West European ones, is reproduced in every imperialist state
and their satellites.
    There is not much difference between the U.S. and Canadian
special jails and those of West Europe or Latin America. As well,
the "repentance-reinstatement" ploy, well known in Italy, is
catching on elsewhere, by and large.
         The logic that led the German government to murder the
RAF comrades in Stammheim in '77 is the same logic that led to the
bloodshed of the Peruvian prisoners in '86; it is the same logic
that leads De Klerk to imprison thousands of the fighters of
Azania, who are carrying out an hungerstrike in order to get their
freedom, and it's the same logic that leads the Zionist government
to build concentration camps for the Palestinian fighter in the
Negev.
    In Turkey, the 'special' prisons full of Kurdish
revolutionaries, Dev Sol militants, and other revolutionary
organizations, with many comrades sentenced to death, have been
planned by American engineers. The Ozal governmnt wants to make
acceptable to the EEC the current massacre of Kurdish and Turkish
revolutionaries and proletarians, by means of 'amnesty-traps' and
ridiculous settlement operations.
    Wherever the anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements are
growing, imperialism focuses on the prisoners as grounds on which
to pursue its counter-revolutionary strategy.

6. In Italy, the imperialist bourgeoisie, via the state, is
speeding up the re-structuring of the political system, in order to
take the lead in the integration of the Italian economic,
political, and social structure in Western Europe.
    This move, coupled with the re-structuting of the production-
structures, is leading to strong pressure against the proletariat
in the metropoles.
    In fact, the struggle is growing is every class reality.
    In the face of an increasing of the social unrest that has
always characterized the Italian reality, and in the face of the
possibility of a new politicization of the struggle, the
bourgeoisie rearranges its counterrevolutionary policy.
    The so-called "social-security", along with institutional
reform and intervention in the huge economic-financial deficit in
the budget, is a foundation point in the current schedule of the
state.
    The repressive and counterrevolutionary policy here is now
even more comprehensive than before as 'old' contradictions are
added to the new ones (i.e. the struggle of the immigrants and the
growth of the difference between North and South), and is aimed at
preventing a social confrontation. For this reason, the entire
apparatus of social control network, the prison conditions, built
up by the State for over 20 years of confrontation, are put forward
by the State in a more directed manner.
    But, in actuality, it's really about the whole counter-
revolutionary policy of the Italian state, from post-World War Two,
until the present.
    The leadership of the Democrazia Cristiana (the ruling party
in Italy) is arrogantly defending and claiming the legitimacy of
"Gladio", which has been the hallmark of the imperialist strategy
to push back, by mass slaughters, the class and revolutionary
movements in Italy from the early '60s, and into the '70s and '80s,
within the European framework of the anti-communist strategy of
NATO and the CIA.
(...)
    This then is the context within which the new proletarian's
struggles and the revolutionary path should resist, and within
which they should develop their perspective. This is also the case
for the those in prison, of course!
    According to the government, the political parties, and the
bourgeois media, the only "political prisoners" in Italy would be
those who have 'renounced'and who aim at being reinstated socially
into this society.
    For those who are continuing the revolutionary struggle in
Italy, there are only life-sentences, trials, and the hardness of
the treatment in the maximum-security units, in small group
isolation, undergoing continual pressure and physical and political
isolation. It is a strategy that, now as before, aims at enhancing
a political contradiction that the State cannot recognize.
    It does not make sense to approach the political struggle
around prisons as an issue "apart", or only in a "local" context.
The struggle of the revolutionary prisoners should be understood as
part and parcel of the struggle for the growth of the Italian
revolutionary movement.
    On this basis it should take its lead from the most advanced
points of the struggle of the revolutionary prisoners in West
Europe.
    The struggle for regroupment and against isolation, undertaken
for many years by the RAF prisoners, and also by the AD prisoners
in France is the outline around which a united discussion on the
subject of the struggle against the imperialist prisons is growing.
There has grown around this struggle a large initiative and network
within the revolutionary movement and among other prisoners in many
European countries, within the process begun by the Revolutionary
Front. In this sense it constitutes a starting point for all who
understand this struggle as part of the road for the revolutionary
movement and the anti-imperialist struggle.
    Obviously, the framework of the experiences on which we rely
is growing larger and larger, ranging from the important struggle
of the Spanish comrades, from the struggle of the IRA and ETA
militants all the way to the Palestinian, Arab, and Kurdish
fighters imprisoned in Europe.
    There is one issue that is highlighted in the struggle of all
these prisoners: isolation and the imperialist policy against the
guerrilla can be defeated for good only by working to further the
discussion around the struggle against the imperialist prisons in
Europe, within the development of the revolutionary process as a
whole.
    The struggle by the prisoners in the FRG, France, Spain, and
Belgium, against isolation and for regroupment, serves as a
foundation for a comprehensive initiative. This struggle is a
concrete dimension by which the movement's issues can establish the
proper relationship between proletarian struggle and this special
struggle, turning it into a successful force for the entire
revolutionary struggle.
    The revolutionary prisoners are linked to the other class
issues not only by the unconditional solidarity that should always
exist among revolutionaries and proletarians in struggle, but,
above all, by the relationships and unified feelings between those
working in order "to send imperialism to hell"!
    Strengthening the struggle of the revolutionary prisoners here
in Europe, and building up all the possible contacts with the
struggle of the comrades imprisoned in Latin America, the U.S., the
Middle East, and everywhere in the world, means to contribute to
the developing of the revolutionary movement in those areas, and it
means also to advance, by and large, the revolutionary process
world-wide.

June 1991

The comrades of Wotta Sitta Collective from the maximum security
unit of Novara.

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