A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #5-26 - The concentration camp on our doorstep. Trial for Moussa Balde, who committed suicide in the CPR (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

There are those who still believe that the horrors are a thing of the 
past, confined to history books, black-and-white photographs of Nazi 
camps, the barbed wire fences that cut across the sky during the 
Armenian genocide, or even in the distant Congo Free State during the 
genocide perpetrated by King Leopold II of Belgium. That "Never again" 
can still be heard like an echo of ghosts in the dark corridors of 
Europe; ironically, it is heard from people not so far removed from 
those who are exterminating the Palestinian population in Gaza and the 
West Bank. And then we move on. But horror does not love the past; it is 
cyclical; it lives where it is tolerated, it lives in the 
totalitarianism of solitude. It is tolerated in Gaza and Sudan, but even 
in the heart of our cities, horror wears many masks: state, genocide, 
fascism, armies, prisons. Or an acronym: CPR.

You no longer need to travel across Europe to see an extermination camp. 
Just go to Turin, on Corso Brunelleschi. There, the Repatriation 
Detention Center is located. It's not hidden among distant forests; it's 
not camouflaged in the desert like in Libya. It's among the houses, next 
to the ordinary lives of those who go to work, take their children to 
school, do the shopping, or go for a relaxing and enlightening hatha 
yoga session. Even the German concentration camps weren't always far 
away: they were often there, in the urban fabric, tolerated, normalized, 
invisible to the eyes of those who didn't want to see, like the Nazi 
concentration camp in the San Sabba rice mill in Trieste, or like the 
pre-Basaglia mental hospitals.

Moussa Balde, a twenty-three-year-old from Guinea, committed suicide in 
the Turin CPR on May 23, 2021. His name in Arabic means "saved from the 
waters," the Arabic form of the name Moses. His story is that of a 
brother who had hope. He was a young migrant, having passed through the 
violent desert of institutions, slave-driving torturers, and the 
blood-soaked sea of Europe's democratic fortresses, ending up in Italy 
with that crazy revolutionary idea of life. After a street attack, 
instead of protection, support, and love, he found imprisonment. Not a 
criminal conviction, but administrative detention: nine days of solitary 
confinement in the so-called "little hospital" of the CPR, a bare, empty 
cell that the prisoners' ombudsman described as an old zoo. There, he 
took his own life, or perhaps he reclaimed it.

On February 11, Annalisa Spataro, the then director of the center, was 
convicted of manslaughter by the Turin court, acknowledging individual 
responsibility. The sentence includes a one-year suspended prison 
sentence, conditional on the defendant not committing similar crimes 
again. Spataro and the French management company Gepsa S.p.A. They were 
also ordered to pay Moussa's relatives a provisional sum of EUR350,000, 
as an advance on compensation that will be determined definitively. 
Doctor Fulvio Pitanti, the facility's medical director, was acquitted.

But the State, the horror, remains out of the dock. It's always like 
this: at worst, an official is sacrificed, and the institution is saved. 
Compensation is paid, consciences are put aside, and democracy continues 
to be practiced with blood and inhuman oppression.

And yet, the issue isn't the fault of a single director or the colluding 
doctors at the CPRs. The issue is the very existence of these 
concentration camps, facilities where people are locked up for a 
bureaucratic "irregularity." Where any human being who is out of place 
is made illegal. Places where freedom is violated in the name of the 
state's administrative order and its political propaganda. In the name 
of a missing piece of paper, they deprive us of heaven and dreams, they 
deprive us of smiles and hugs, of love and life.

What substantial difference is there between a camp of yesterday and one 
of today, when the logic is the same? Back then, it was said that 
certain men were a danger to the race; today, they are said to be 
illegal immigrants to the state and dangerous to "public safety."

Back then, fences were built to defend purity; today, temples of the 
capitalist state are erected, walls of bureaucracy to defend "national 
security." The words change, but the violent idea remains: there are 
human beings who can be segregated because their mere presence is 
considered a problem.

Some will cry foul at the comparison. They will say that the Nazi 
concentration camps were industrial extermination, which cannot be 
compared. It's true: history is never copied identically. But what 
should be disturbing is not the identity of the means, but the 
similarity of mentality. The German camps, too, were born as 
administrative tools, as extraordinary measures for categories defined 
as "undesirable." Even then, they began with isolation, with the 
suspension of law, with the belief that everything was justified by the 
emergency.

Yet it's clear that the state perpetuates industrial-scale death every 
day... femicides, suicides and deaths in prison, deaths abandoned in the 
Mediterranean, deaths from the mafia, a structure the state has always 
covered up and favored, deaths at work... need I mention more? Deaths 
from poisoning by pollutants caused by unscrupulous factories that the 
state should regulate, but which it carefully refrains from doing. We're 
talking about over 1,500 people killed by the state every year. The 
state violates us, abuses us, manipulates us, kills us, and we still 
think it's the best structure for a society responsible for itself and 
for this earth?

Today, as we mourn Moussa Balde, the government, in its elegant black 
linen blouse, announces new restrictions: more power, less control, 
restrictions even on the use of telephones in CPRs. Instead of closing 
these places, they are being strengthened. Instead of acknowledging 
their moral and political failure, the system is being rigidified. It's 
the logic of all power: when a structure generates death, it's not 
dismantled; It is defended in the name of order. Death is scary, 
therefore it serves the regime.

The CPRs are in the middle of our cities, just as the camps were in the 
middle of German cities. The difference is that today you don't see the 
columns of smoke, but you hear a more subtle silence: that of 
indifference. We become accustomed to the idea that someone can be 
locked up without trial, without guilt, without prospects. We become 
accustomed to thinking that freedom is an administrative privilege 
granted to us only if it serves the "common good."

As an anarchist, I cannot accept this normalization. I cannot accept 
that freedom depends on a document. I cannot accept that the State, 
after having produced despair, absolves itself with a sentence and 
compensation. I cannot accept that under my door or 10,000 km away there 
exists a place where dignity is suspended and where life is worth less 
than a sheet of paper.

"Auschwitz on our doorstep" is not a rhetorical exaggeration: it is a 
refusal to look the other way, acknowledging that every time we accept a 
CPR, we accept the principle that freedom can be taken away from the 
weakest. And when such a principle takes root, no one is truly safe.

If we still feel pain at the torture in CPRs and prisons, and this pain 
still shakes us, then let us start here: not with reforms that soothe 
our conscience, but with a revolt against these open-air life sentences. 
Because as long as a soul is walled up alive, as long as Moussa Balde's 
breath is extinguished in a deaf cell, we will carry an abyss of shame 
within us, a horror that contaminates us with its silence, right to our 
very hearts. We cannot remain silent: silence is complicity, silence is 
death, silence is totalitarianism. So, let's bang, let's bang so hard on 
those doors that we can free ourselves and all the damned of the earth, 
so that "never again" is more than an illusion but truly gates that 
fall, walls that crumble, borders that dissolve, and states that 
disappear. Anarchy is solidarity.

Gabriele Cammarata

https://umanitanova.org/il-lager-sotto-casa-processo-per-moussa-balde-morto-suicidato-in-cpr/
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