State concentration camps
Serraino-Vulpitta, 11 years on

Eleven years have passed since the day when, during a revolt by some migrants detained at the “Serraino Vulpitta” detention camp, mattresses were set alight in protest and the guards, unappreciative of the danger of the situation, failed to open the cages. The blaze caused the deaths of 6 people.

Today the situation has not changed at all. Governments have changed, but the racist policies go on and only get worse, fuelling the war between the poor that suits the bosses and our rulers. And so we see the birth of a new, bigger and more isolated structure, a new Centre for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) in Milo, on the outskirts of Trapani.

People continue to die and be imprisoned, guilty only of being “clandestine”, a crime introduced with racist laws such as the Turco-Napolitano and Bossi-Fini laws which set up the CPTs (Temporary Stay Centres), now called CIEs, which are nothing more than modern State concentration camps, a place to lock up all those who are guilty of following their dream of a better life in another country, escaping from wars and persecution, religious or political dictatorships.

The State guarantees the interests of the class that has always protected “the bosses”, who render our lives precarious and attack the rights of workers, who continue to profit greedily from those they exploit, encouraging the enslavement of migrant workers and cancelling out all that the working class has won for itself.

We have seen it all before. History repeats itself and nothing changes as long as society continues to be based on the class-based division of exploited and exploiters, of those who have everything and those who have nothing. So the war between the poor, where the increasing precariousness of life sets workers against each other, migrants against migrants, everyone against everyone else, benefits only and always the interests of the bosses. It also encourages increasingly authoritarian and fascistizing policies of the State through laws such as the “security packet”.

This is why we must increase our counter-information, why we must struggle to resist the State and capital, the Church and fascism.

We must wipe out the notions of nation and fatherland, so that no more barriers can separate the world or divide it up, virtual barriers imposed by those who have an interest in the peoples of the world being divided so that they can profit from it, with wars and the depletion of the land and its resources.

We must struggle against all the differences be they religious, ethnic or social. We must establish united struggles against all those who oppose the construction of a society of free and equal men and women; we must build a new society where there are no exploited and no exploiters.

This is one of the reasons why we will be demonstrating in Trapani on 28^th December, as we have done for years, outside the death camp they call CIE, joining the initiatives of the Trapani Peace Coordination alongside others who, as part of the Coordination or not, have always fought in person against racism.