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MARCO LIBERO!
CALL FOR INTERNATIONAL ACTIONS OF SOLIDARITY: MARCO LIBERO!
We call for actions of solidarity with Marco Camenisch on the days from the 20th to the 22nd of June 2015 who has been continuously imprisoned since 1991 in Italy and Switzerland. Marco is a steadfast green-anarchist revolutionary with a political history that goes back into the 1970s. He was first imprisoned because of explosive actions against high voltage power lines, but he managed to flee. After years of living in illegality, he was arrested in Italy in 1991 after being policed by cops and was imprisoned there until 2002. He went to trial again for explosives against power lines. Then, he was transferred to Switzerland in 2002 where he still had to absolve the imprisonment from his first trial and was taken to court for the death of a frontier-guard. Marco has repeatedly confirmed that the dead officer wasn't his doing.
Marco has not let go of his political identity in the past 24 years, he communicates with numerous people around the world, participates in political actions, and thus supports the revolutionary process from behind prison bars. This isn't looked upon kindly by those who have to decide about a possible easing of his conditions. They always deny him any step towardy liberty and argue that he has a “point of view which encourages delinquency”. To be clear: he isn't allowed out of prison because he is an anarchist. This argument is repeated both by the responsible state office and by the courts whenever a decision is due in his case.
One aspect in this conflict is certainly his political identity as it is. Attacks against Marco must be seen in the general political conflict where the bourgeois state aims to make an example of in this case of a prisoner who continues his struggle. They aim to scare people, just as in the cases of other longterm prisoners (such as Mumia Abu-Jamal or Georges Ibrahim Abdallah) that aren't allowed out because of their political identity.
Another factor which is special to Marco's case, is the growing importance of forensic psychiatry in the prison regime.While in other cases of longterm prisoners the reasons for non-release are openly political (as with Georges Ibrahim Abdallah), the responsible office uses an explicitly psychiatric argumentation in this case. The main man here is Frank Urbaniok. The political attack is disguised behind words of psychiatry, such as rehabilitation or problem-focused coping. Yet it must be clear that a political identity cannot be looked at from a psychiatrist's point of view. Being an anarchist is not a psychic problem.
This has been proven yet again in the latest developments in Marco's case. Because of the verdict of the highest court in Switzerland, the responsible office had to check whether forms of easing his prisons regime were possible. One part of this was the publication of a so called 'risk oriented sanctions regime report' (ROS). Psychiatrists evaluate how high the risks are if his regime would be relaxed. Through this, psychiatry receives a large weight in all decisions concerning imprisonment. As Marco refuses to have his political identity be the focus of psychiatry, they have litte left. They too argue that the projection of his possible future actions is negative, as 'he continues to strongly and actively debate his ideology and is in contact with many such comrades', which is shown 'by his statements and his social relations in the scene'. To summarize: 'it has been shown that Marco's stances are strong and that imprisonment have hardly changed them.'
The report dictates sanctions which would improve the likelihood of a relaxation of his prison regime. But these sanctions are not acceptable. They demand that Marco find a new social network with the aid of prison officials. They ask him to break with all his comrades:
• 'control for indications towards contacts with violent comrades'
• 'Marco shall declare that he agrees to controls of his activities and to agree with the prison officials concerning common goals of resocialisation.'
Marco Camenisch is not liberated because of his political identity. The end of his prison sentence is in 2018. Until then, there will be an annual review whether a conditional release is possible. It is very likely that they will repeat the talk of his political identity to sabotage any kind of easing.
We think that is important to act in solidarity with Marco right now. Let's connect our multifaceted struggle outside with his struggle inside!
INTERNATIONAL DAYS OF ACTION WITH MARCO CAMENISCH – 20-22.6 2015
Red Help Switzerland – www.rotehilfech.noblogs.org
Red Help International – www.rhi-sri.org
More about Marco Camenisch:
http://rotehilfech.noblogs.org/post/tag/marco-camenisch/ (en / dt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK1isWg0r3o (fr / en / dt / it / gr)