France, Organisation Communiste Libertarie (OCL) - Courant
Alternatif #245 - Repression - Strategies fear and death to
impose liberal project (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]
The assassination of Remi Fraisse, we know, occurred after 8 weeks of a direct and violent
conflict between the opposition and the authorities, the General Council of the Tarn and
the policing of power line (governor, prosecutor, the Interior Ministry). A massive
ongoing policing was introduced from 1 September to protect deforestation site and
destruction of the wetland. From that day, police violence have continued to rage every
time the TV cameras had left the scene: flash ball, tear gas grenades fired tense,
muscular arrests ... but also destruction of tents and shacks, fire the essence of
personal belongings zadistes. To date, more than twenty complaints were filed against the
police. ---- Faced with this desire to physically break the resistance barrier, facing the
rapid advance of the work, facing a balance of power "military" uneven field, opponents
decide several weeks in advance of calling for a rally a whole weekend with debates,
plays, workshops, performances ... It brings together about 6,000 people came to the
essence of the great southwest but with a lot of people from throughout France and beyond
and many young people. The police had to be absent from the valley, the assembly point to
the downstream limit of the site, a distance of 2 km. Now this is where the state has
focused mobile gendarmerie forces, ostensibly to protect ... a type of discount office
container on fire yesterday and the day before grillag the rally, construction equipment
had been moved the site and only one group Generating left behind was burnt on Friday
night. (On the situation of the struggle, see article "Testet Chronicle of a Death Foretold")
The construction of the State speech.
Following the death of R?mi Fraisse, the repressive actions were legitimized by a speech
made of lies and omissions. This happens in three stages. First, trying to hide what had
happened and trying to criminalize the victim, then trying to pass this death as purely
accidental.
Conditions of death were retracted. During the first 24 hours, the authorities of the
communication (prosecutor and interior minister) talking about a body found in the forest.
It was suggested that it was found in the woods, almost by accident, in the middle of the
night. Nothing reveals that the death occurred in the clashes, much less because of the
police, the cause is unknown, the possibility of an overdose even mentioned. The
conditions of the death of R?mi - the already well known to the police and authorities in
real time, in the minutes of the deaths - are deliberately hidden.
The victim is identified as guilty. The next day, the first elements of the autopsy
revealed speak of an explosion in the back and thus reveal that R?mi was in the war zone.
From there, the figure of the victim is built: it can only be responsible for his own
death. Simultaneously, the prosecutor said that death is incomprehensible because the
police had used weapons that can kill, can not be responsible for the death.
This is called back by R?mi bag that could contain substances - smoke, aerosol, gas
cartridge - may cause the fatal explosion. So emerges the figure of the victim responsible
for what happened to him, the press about relaying the authorities then rush in the usual
scenario inevitable "Black Bloc" composed of 100 to 150 heavily armed and hooded
anarchists came to Testet exclusively for battle with the police. The next day, the Remi
personality becoming known. Student Botanical 21 years with no criminal record or police
records, nature lovers, a volunteer in an environmental protection association, known to
have strong convictions but in any case only came to the rally to Sivens clash with the
police. In short, a person who does not fit the prototype of the "bad guy". This
non-coincidence is not detected by the media and commentators. They are unable to conceive
a lover of nature, rather pacifist, was found to be in the middle of the fighting. They
are unable to recognize the complexity of the dynamics that characterize social movements,
revolts of the times, solidarity and radicalization at work, understand that in this
context, occupy land illegally refused to disperse, refuse to bow to the threat and
violence of the cops, face them bravely defend their deadly weapons, does not make you a
"cracker" but-e-e-resistant assuming - its own risk - a degree confrontation as part of a
considered legitimate objective here defending a wetland that is to say, the refusal to
perpetuate and expand the capitalist production model of agro-industrial complex.
Finally, the fable of the fatal accident. With the revelation of the discovery of TNT in
the wound located in the back of Remi, her family filed a complaint for murder. The
autopsy revealed that death was instantaneous, that there were no burn marks, no metal or
plastic particle. Exit therefore the false trail of soft or pyrotechnic substances in the
backpack Remi. Two days after the death, Monday, October 27, the prosecutor Albi loose a
grenade could cause death. It was then that sets up the third episode. The death of R?mi
becomes a tragic accident. While the term "compassion" is spreading among politicians,
Valls said as soon as he can not believe a mistake of the police and Cazeneuve does not
hesitate to say the same thing, namely, that the death of R?mi "not a blunder." On October
28, the National Assembly, Valls adds a layer: "I do not agree and I will not accept the
defendants, the charges that have been brought outside the Chamber against the Minister of
the Interior.[...] I will not accept the questioning of police and gendarmes who counted
many wounded in their ranks. "
The Gentiles, the bad and the defense of law enforcement
The line of the government and the PS will not change, constantly reminding, aided by
police unions, the police were attacked, they were wounded, they are the victims, they n
have done that defense, that there is an intolerable increase in violence on the part of
groups of "thugs", etc., Cazeneuve using the example of the "violence", a series of
downgrades in the town of Gaillac , putting on the same plane two tags on the war memorial
and a split window with the death of a protester. The line "anticasseurs" defense of law
enforcement Sivens and elsewhere in the government will be used to establish a regime of
terror and intimidation. In the week that followed the murder of R?mi, rallies have been
called spontaneously in fifty cities in France, but also in Geneva, Brussels, Lausanne,
Barcelona, Turin, Milan, London.
A week after the fatal weekend, Sunday, Nov. 2, about 4,000 people gathered at Sivens on
the same places where R?mi life was torn from him by reason of state. On Sunday, hundreds
of people come in Tescou Valley for the first time, ask questions, provide information,
demonstrate their solidarity with the opponents. Since the murder of R?mi, new occupants
affluent, settled for three days or three weeks, build huts, stand new camps, particularly
in the area of the site where Remi was killed. ZAD has never been so alive with daily
visitors, curious, solidarity people who bring construction material ... So, if the cops
have indeed disappeared from the site itself, the checks on the roads leading to them are
increasing: identity checks, vehicles with prefectural orders authorizing the search of
vehicles, fines and intimidation ...
While most rallies do not result in huge deployments police, is in four cities that will
focus police behavior to prohibit and stifle protests: Nantes, Rennes, Toulouse and Paris.
For the government, but also part of opponents (EELV, members of associations and
institutional components in opposition movements to Sivens dam projects and the airport of
Notre-Dame des Landes particular) who call "quiet "in a remarkable concert lamentations
for a little messed urban equipment, it is under the law enforcement covered accentuate
the latent split between" moderates "and" radicals "to superimpose a lasting y otherwise,
between "non-violent" and "violent" protest between worthy, responsible, measured and
compassionate and scenes of riots, guerrilla overflows organized by "thugs" extremists,
anarchists and autonomous (M?lenchon saw him, the far right under the hoods of those who
sprayed yogurt). Every day, new revelations from several journalistic investigations
clearly indicate that the power, and especially the chain of command of the security
forces back to the top of government, known since the night of October 25 to 26 Remi had
was killed by a grenade attack gendarmes that firm instructions had been given explicitly
to the police that they "hold" at all costs a small grid square, symbol of the unwavering
commitment of the General Council PS of impose its project and the state to support it.
The presence of the gendarmes in the perimeter of the assembly, that is to say of the
wetland, the site and the ZAD (the same thing), had no other purpose than to mark the
presence State on the territory and provoke confrontations after 8 weeks of uninterrupted
police violence and harassment. The government seems to have succeeded the feat to impose
the terms of the debate and return the state violence that caused the death of R?mi such
as "violent" protesters and "uncontrolled". This ability, which is certainly based on a
political consensus established and relays in mass persuasion, is also indebted to some
shortcomings and disabilities in "our camp" at large. This feat also refers to weaknesses
in the responses and denunciations of state violence.
Increasing police repression
The security forces have continued to tighten their action in recent years - the list of
injured and maimed-es-es by firing rubber bullets and other "non-lethal" is too long to
reproduce - and this emphasis coercion is not the result of chance. It responds to the
conscious will of the State to implement measures that increasingly seek to bring the
whole of society to the interests of big business (hyperflexibility labor market, attacks
against social protection and the standard of living, dismantling utilities, large
unnecessary projects ...). The police still deployed to maintain order, but must now do
with increasing brutality and a new logistics so skip the obstacles facing an
ultra-liberal economic orientation.
This is to terrorize anyone who rebels and becomes struggle to convince that manifest
being dangerous, better to stay at home undergoing, to contain conflict in "civil" and
legal forms, so respectful of acceptability procedures and compatible with the existing
society (of inquiry, institutional mediations ...). The state has the means of
intensification of repression, and this not only in France. We saw the introduction of new
ways FILING (including DNA) forms of collaboration of law enforcement at European level,
particularly during against-tops, blocking protesters outside the areas of rallies,
protesters territory of evictions yet "European" but the opportunity to become mostly
"foreigners" ... Growth also equipment, weapons used, video surveillance ... We also saw
the introduction and spread of new weapons like flash ball (or LBD, defense ball launcher)
containing grenades or explosives called "d?sencerclement" or offensive (OF F1), new
weapons "non-lethal" according to the official terminology, but which wounds, maims and
can kill, or in the case of LDB by the object itself (the rubber ball), or in the case of
grenades by bursts of materials (metal and hard plastic) or blast the explosion (case R?mi
Fraisse and Vital Michalon Malville in 1977).[1] Other "non-lethal" can kill, maim or
seriously injure xommz rifle butts and batons grenade launcher on the head (Malek
Oussekine in November 1986 in Paris), tear gas launched direct fire in the face particular
(Richard Deshayes in 1971).[2]
Repression in the service of a social order
Anger against police violence, necessary and legitimate, is not enough. "Cops, pigs,
murderers" is a slogan that expresses a gross revolt against armed gangs state law
enforcement body, but seems quite weak at the situation imposed by the state, by the
violence of this institution and by the it employs to impose its measures and choices. For
that growth suppression is not the result of a spontaneous swelling. It is the result of a
deliberate policy of control of certain social categories, in some specific areas and
generally manifestation of contention street or outside cities and any type of social
struggle movements when they threaten the social order. Managing the death of R?mi Fraisse
by the state and the mainstream media is to isolate the facts, to separate both the
context of the struggles and protests of recent years, but also institutional violence
diffuse and constant that are the daily "banal" and ordinary suburbs and popular enclaves
in urban areas.
Recalling earlier killings, Vital Michalon Malek Oussekine Sebastien Briat where already
the lies and silences of the political authorities had prevailed in particular is deleted.
So, Monday, October 27 is the 9th anniversary of the death of Bouna and Zied in
Villiers-le-Bel, and October 30, five days just after the death of R?mi Fraisse, a
20-year-old northern districts of Blois lost the sight in one eye after a shooting flash
ball, and on October 17, just a week before the death of R?mi Fraisse is another young,
Timothy Lake, who was killed by the BAC in the St-Cyprien district of Toulouse, in a
supermarket and in the largely unnoticed: everything is done to hide possible and obvious
connections. With few releases and calls for demonstrations, the link has not been
established pourant or in the press or on the part of those who want the "official
opposition" as EELV or the Left Front ...
In the words of Matthew Rigouste in a recent interview, "face the ZAD and their forms of
reterritorializations urban and rural struggles, western fonts also experience new
features of hybrid and modular against insurgency, that is to say where the
military-police dimension grid, of confinement and provocation is centered on a rural and
forest operation theater, but is also able to move quickly or simultaneously "Azur" mode
(urban action). Able to instantly switch the "policing" in "crowd control" of police
repression in the war of low intensity ".[3] Since 2000, official figures count 130 deaths
due to police. Every year, between 10 and 15 people, most living in poor neighborhoods,
are killed by the police, not to mention the wounded and maimed for life. With justice
prison couple is clearly a class violence that appears to be the most formally to exercise
an unvarnished domination, a distancing outside the walls, spatial segregation, a
collective banishment and disciplinary pressure coupled with constant monitoring with a
presence made constant checks of identities and activities ... It is a constant struggle
against the "dangerous classes" and doing practices, and re-appropriations of the
underground economy and survival substitution.
The violence of capital and state
Beyond the violence "police, militarization of police forces, (specifically" hybridization
between the police and the military "[4], beyond the confusion between law enforcement,
anti fight -terroriste, fight against organized crime and strategies against insurgency,
it should be out of the linguistic trap the term "violence" is used both to refer to the
failure of a bank ATM or a simple tag on an official building and ... waves of aerial
bombardment of populated areas, torture, mass murder, a suicide leaving hundreds dead ...
By cons, violent everyday capitalism is never mentioned: wars colonial, poverty and
organized scarcity, more concretely for millions of people here, violence families thrown
after street with evictions and squatted housing (over 10,000 per year with the presence
of the police), the violent shit jobs, arduous and dangerous paid less than 800 euros per
month, the violence of the interim blackmail employment to accept wage cuts, longer
working hours, renunciation "voluntary" the right to strike and work continuously 4 x 8 (7
days 7) messes up a little more health, asbestos violence, chemical pollution,
radioactivity, accidents at work and occupational diseases (who is not recognized for the
most part), the violence of life expectancy in good health less than 10 years for a
workers compared to that of a frame, the violence of the queues lengthen each year more to
restaus the Heart, the 44% increase in the number of homeless people in 11 years, workers
increasingly many who sleep in their car or in a caravan ...
Combat marginalization mobilizations
Let's face it, all the successive mobilizations in the murder of R?mi Fraisse were below
what state murder deserved. The virtual absence forces "left" is obviously part of this
table. In this regard, there is no doubt that if Sarkozy or other right-wing leader had
been in power, we would have seen a wave of condemnations and protests on the part of
parties, trade unions, association, democratic organizations (such as LDH) ...
intellectuals and personalities in public would be outraged calls "unitary meeting" were
organized in all the towns of France, calling for as many demonstrations and rallies in
Paris, Toulouse ... The "left" to power - and that even if a growing part of his
electorate realizes that he is a "second line"[5] - has the effect of neutralizing the
mobilization of the lock in margins, to silence, to prevent themselves constitute
opposition and social protest poles.
That said, one can not ignore the general demobilization at which there was, despite the
dozens of initiatives around, despite the students movement and blockages in Paris and in
93 in Rouen and Limoges, despite AG and student protests of Rennes and Toulouse. If of
course the bans on demonstrations did their effect, if implausible police deployments
intimidated plus a-e, he will have missed a political capacity to mobilize that in the
freeing, which occupies the vacant space left by a absent left, which allows to federate
indignation and anger in the face of death R?mi and trivialization of police violence, the
systematization of state violence. The arrival of Valls as chief executive herald a change
in the disastrous five-year term of Holland. Again, this is a former minister of police
who finds himself in one of the two heads of government to apply an online "liberal" and
police / authoritarian.
He leads a policy that meets the requirements of capitalist time and is based on a
reactionary wave with hints familialist, declinists, New P?tainists which uses part of the
company (demonstration for all, homophobia, xenophobia, identity assertion, defense of a
more hierarchical and authoritarian order, zero tolerance for offenders, sloths,
assistance, defense of a production model and hate everything that refers to the ecology
...), current disparate protest but say all openly take the fight in favor of social and
political inequality - an inequality of rights - in the most diverse criteria: religious,
pseudo-naturalistic, culturalist, racial, colonial, social merit or of belonging to an
imaginary community (National, European, Judeo-Christian, white ...) legal and excluding.
Without developing here politicians games that the left in power now engaged, it is clear
that, even more than before, the government is trying to take the right electorally in
reverse, applying a policy it claims, and that suits him: breaking the struggles and
obstacles to the realization of profits, operating substantial public money transfers to
corporate margins, attacking the "rigidity" of labor and even some guarantees offered by
the employment contract market and social law , reduce costs of social reproduction
(utilities), fliquer unemployed and recipients of social protection and social minima
according to the old republican principle of equality ward democratic principles by
reversing the prior rights on duties, that is to say, to break the unconditional social
rights and thereby recreate a relationship of power and subjugation of the old regime - a
trusteeship and protection in exchange for bonds, chores, duties. Thus, the Sivens dam
project is not canceled but maintained, even modify it a little; Valls and reaffirmed its
support for the airport of Notre-Dame des Landes, but adding that he will play the card
"legalistic" to wait the exhaustion of remedies to make a decision; and Holland visiting
Canada, hastens to visit, accompanied by a swarm of patrons and scientists in the Alberta
region are massively exploited oil shale.
Fighting the maintenance of social order
Even when limited to demonstrations and their violent repression, it has not been said
enough that the "police brutality" were not only police and they corresponded to a state
violence that is growing within a "policing" increasingly brutal, and it is this social
violently defended to be aimed. In 2007 in Nantes, a high school student 17 years old
seriously injured after a shooting flash ball during a demonstration. The same year, a
medical student lost an eye and the taste and smell in Grenoble after receiving in Figure
d?sencerclement a grenade during an anti-Sarkozy demonstration. In 2009, in Toulouse, a
student of 25 years was seriously wounded in the eye by a shooting flash ball during a
collective action of reappropriation in a supermarket. The same year, Joachim Gatti,
documentary, mutilated in the eye by a "mini" flash ball (a gun called "gum-knocks")
during a demonstration protesting against the eviction of a squat in Montreuil (93 ). The
following year, in this same town, another high school student is achieved in the head by
a rubber bullet during a blocking his high school in the context of demonstrations against
the pension reform.
Also in 2012, a protester was seriously wounded by 15 shrapnel of a grenade during a rally
against the construction of very high voltage lines in the town of Chefresne (Manche). In
February 2013, a 25-year Interim young Belgian lost an eye after being hit by a flash fire
ball during a demonstration in Strasbourg. In Nantes and the ZAD, we lost count of the
tens of flash ball shots and their victims since the beginning of the opposition movement
to the airport and the apex in the rampage (and also in criminal proceedings and
incarceration) was achieved at the event February 22: At least three protesters were
injured in the eye. This far from exhaustive list clearly shows that it is a set of social
movements, resistors, who face state violence and weapons called non-lethal that injure,
maim and kill. It is this failure to take into account the totality of the issues that
must be emphasized to try out case by case in such a fight rather than another and the
only denunciation of "cops, pigs, murderers". In addition, difficulties in socializing
experiences of struggle on police violence and institutional hitting the inhabitants of
popular neighborhoods daily are also a boon for the state and the artisans of maintaining
social order and police in the metropolis. With bans on demonstrations - Gaza this summer,
against police violence this fall - the state and the Netherlands-Valls government have
raised a little over the level of coercion and confrontation against those who fight its
policy.
In conclusion
The coming weeks will tell if it is possible to break the purely defensive and emotional
attitude, again justified and legitimate, to imagine forms of responses that do not lend
themselves to safe manipulation and instrumentalization of the state. It would get to
thwart the challenge of marginalization strategies to attack the continuous practice of
the state of division between "good protesters" and "thugs" to violently impose its
policy. The coming weeks will tell if it is possible to boost the mobilizations who do not
intend to yield to the injunctions and prohibitions, which manage to defend the formal and
substantial areas of struggle, of expression and demonstration, which articulate the fight
in the legal field (leading to many surveys against eg[6]) with a working
recontextualization in a global fight that already draws all the struggles and resistance
exposed to police violence, initiatives that express non-negotiable right to protest in
the street against the repressive policies of a government and the social order it defends
by terror and armed violence, for his justice and prisons, but not only.
This social order is maintained by organizing cutting and territorial coverage, with
relegation zones, its invisible walls, with its monitoring, controls, patrols and
checkpoints, curfews and its his incessant police occupation of neighborhoods popular,
that is to say, the public areas of social life, movement and assembly, the spaces of
popular autonomy possible on urban areas that fight tooth and nail State. These preventive
measures against insurgency are part of the arsenal of the ongoing social war to "solve"
violently the crisis of capitalist reproduction (and financial instabilities) in favor of
globalized capital and its large blocks of power ( political and military) and power
(economic and financial) that are fighting for the division of the world - without
certainty of doing this - and without lifting the mortgage of the ecological crisis, even
"civilizational" that characterizes the period. It is not a question here of saying this
for fun to draw short-term prospects unattainable but simply to provide a general
orientation determines both the reasons for the state policy and content of social
resistance that it raises - and find the last common and sufficient reasons to fight together.
Paul Martin
Notes[1] During the demonstration against the Breeder Creys-Malville 31 July 1977 the
grenades were also mutilated one protester had ripped up (Michel Grandjean), another torn
the main (Manfred Schultz). A police officer also lost a hand to the delay in launching
his offensive grenade.[2] The list of maimed by grenades and rubber bullets flash ball is
too long to be included here.[3] "The policing" As long as there money (
http://www.tantquil.net/ ).[4] "Remi's death was not a blunder, it's a state murder"
apart?.com.[5] To borrow the title of a book by Jean-Pierre Garnier and Louis Janover,
published in 1986 and dealing with the Mitterrand era. The second right, reprinted in
Agone in 2013.[6] As has initiated the League of Human Rights (Toulouse) in connection
with the defense and family Remi Fraisse
http://oclibertaire.free.fr/spip.php?article1618
