Anarchist Federation – IAF/IFA
c/o 84b Whitechapel High Street,
London E1 7QX
 info@afed.org.uk
www.afed.org.uk


As an anarchist I am disgusted by the recent attempts to link Italian comrades to the current bombing campaign against targets connected to the EU, including Gary Titley, a New Labour MEP in Manchester. These outrageous claims should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the Italian State’s shameful history of provocations and attacks against it’s own civilians, the most infamous of these being the ‘strategy of tension’ employed by the Italian state during the late 1970s.

In this period worker’s struggles were becoming increasingly numerous and militant. Italian fascist groups, with the backing of sectors of the Italian State, responded with a bombing campaign, which was then blamed on Anarchists, and designed to incite a breakdown in public order and enable sectors of the Italian State to crush rebellious sections of the Italian working classes. The most horrific of these bombings took place in Bologna in 1980, in which a bomb was detonated at a rail station killing 85 people and injuring over 200. The ‘strategy of tension’ is well documented – a report from the Italian parliamentary committee of inquiry into the bombings reported that ‘some Fascists in the group of terrorists in question worked for the Carbinieri (Italian Paramilitary Police), that others had contact with the army or the police and that they received valuable and timely information in the progress of investigation into their activities’ (1). Similar well documented provocations and brutal restrictions of the rights of Italian citizens occurred as recently as July 2001 during the anti-G8 demonstrations in Italy.

I cannot help but notice the similarity between these horrific attempts and the current bombing campaign. Yet again resistance to the Italian state and capital is growing, with anarchists at the forefront of this fight. Whilst the EU, European Parliament and European Central Bank are oppressive institutions there are many worse offenders. For example Italian anarchists and workers see Berlusconi’s government as a much greater threat to freedom. If it really is anarchists behind these attacks why didn’t they attack Berlusconi and his government, which are so much more relevant to their daily lives? Why were the bombs so amazingly ineffectual? A well known fascist, Gabriele D’Annunzio, wrote the book used to hide the bomb sent to Romano Prodi this is not the kind of action anarchists would take. Is it just an amazing coincidence that the ludicrously named ‘Informal Anarchist Federation’ has claimed responsibility? No Italian Anarchist group has ever heard of this organisation before and unsurprisingly, for those who are familiar with the Italian State’s history of provocations, the acronym (F.A.I.) matches that of an ‘above-ground’ revolutionary organisation, the Italian Anarchist Federation (F.A.I.), an organisation strongly opposed to both terrorist tactics and the terrorism of governments and capital.

These attacks throw up more questions about the Italian state and its history of provocations (which I urge all anarchists to familiarise themselves with) than it does about the anarchist movement in Italy. I thus call for an immediate end to harassment and insinuations against Italian Anarchists. If the investigators are serious about stopping this latest wave of terrorist attacks they could do a lot worse than investigating Berlusconi and the Italian State.


National Secretary
Anarchist Federation – IAF/IFA