Mass protests against jailings
By Olivier Delbeke
Rome, Florence and Naples saw large demonstrations on Saturday 16 November against the police swoop which arrested 20 activists after the European Social Forum in Florence and the huge anti-war demonstration on 9 November in the same city.
Despite a lot of scaremongering in advance by Italy's right wing government, there was no violence at the Forum or the demonstration. Police kept away from the demonstration, and it was efficiently stewarded by activists from Rifondazione (the Party of Communist Refoundation) and the CGIL union federation.
However, on Thursday-Friday night, 14-15 November, the 20 activists were arrested in Italy's notoriously right-wing-controlled South. The best know of them was a leading Naples activist, Francesco Caruso, who has been shut up in a high-security jail normally reserved for mafia figures and terrorists. The 20 have been charged with "subversive association".
Those arrested also include two members of the national leadership of the Cobas union federation. Piero Bernocchi, leader of Cobas, denounced the arrests as "grotesque" and designed to "step up the strategy of tension round the movement". The "strategy of tension" was a policy of the Italian far right in the years of high working-class, student and community militancy in the 1970s: they unleashed indiscriminate violence, culminating in the killing of 85 people by bombs at Bologna railway station in August 1980s, in order to create the conditions for mass arrests and sackings of the left.
There were impromptu protests against the arrests on Friday 15th, and then 10,000 on the streets in Rome, another 10,000 in Naples and at least 5,000 in Florence, demanding the release of those arrested.
