We are not accomplices!

Mentre domani pomeriggio, come già il 13 ottobre, un corteo itinerante si snoderà fin sotto il Cie di via Mattei a Bologna - per ribadire ancora una volta, come femministe e lesbiche, la nostra non complicità con il razzismo istituzionale e le sue leggi, che legittimano, permettono e strumentalizzano la violenza contro le donne - ecco finalmente la traduzione in inglese di Noi non siamo complici (qui in italiano e qui in francese) a cura di Fabiana e Katia, altre due fantastiche traduttrici militanti. Fate girare, please. E poi se in giro ci fosse qualcuna che ha il tempo di tradurre Noi non siamo complici! in arabo o in altre lingue (o semplicemente fare un report/riassunto di quanto sta succedendo), veramente non sarebbe male. Insomma, noi in silenzio non ci siamo proprio mai state e addirittura ci piace urlarlo in più idiomi ;-)

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How many times, studying 20th Century’s History it happened to ask ourselves why during Nazism, people pretend to not be seeing what was going on in the streets of their cities – mopping ups, abuses, violence – and not to know what happened in lagers? And how many times the answer is “I could not pass by ...” So why today many, too many people, pretend not to be seeing what happens in the streets, pretend not to understand the mortal effects has the so called “security packet” on life of thousands human beings. They pretend not to know that in our towns there are places that – for the way one is locked up there or for some abuses exerted there – recall to our minds the notorious nazi lagers? These places are called Cie – Centre of identification and expulsion, new name for Cpt – Centre of temporary permanence, created in 1998 with Turco-Napolitano Law, spread all over Italy. For long time women and men detained denounce the horrible life conditions inside the Cie, the continuous abuses and humiliations , the beating ups, the not treated illnesses and the doubtful deaths. In spite of that minister Maroni recently announced , in the name of security, the building of new centres of identification and expulsion. They try to tell that in the Cie are locked “i clandestini”, because the foreigners would be all - according to the rhetoric of institutional racism – criminals, potentially rapists, so, even if they didn’t commit any crime, it’s right to keep them closed there even till 6 months and then being rejected from Italy. But we know what is the Security they are talking about. We do Know what Cie are. And we know what is institutional racism. And we do know what violence is. We know that dangerous places for women are above all the houses in which we live, the places where we work, the clergy-man house, and the police station if we have the bad luck to go there. And also the 4 walls of the Cie , where many women suffer tortures, abuses, rapes by their guardians. Humiliations and abuses that migrant women never stop to denounce. As Raya, one of the migrant women in the via Mattei Cie of Bologna, she was beaten up by an officer in civilian clothes, then left on the floor, failed, under the indifferent eyes of Misericordia ( the merciful agency that runs the centre) employers. Or like migrant women that in the centre of Lampedusa have started a long revolt at the beginning of this year, to protest against the repatriations, to denounce the conditions inside Cie and to ask for it being closed. Or like the protest of Mabruka, a woman with Tunisian origin, for 30 years in Italy, who hanged herself in the Cie of Ponte Galeria in Rome, in april, because she didn’t want to be deported, the protest spread also in the men dormitory. Or like Joy, an African woman imprisoned and processed in Milan for her rebellion, last August , to an attempt of rape by the chief inspector of the Cie, Vittorio Addesso and the inhuman conditions in which she and other women and men are obliged to live in the Via Corelli Cie. For her declarations, Joy risks now a process for false accusation, because in the third millennium Italy these lagers can’t be questioned, and what happens there must be silently hidden.Just like sexist violence women suffer inside the family or at work. We know and we don’t want to be silent. We don’t want to be accomplices of violence against migrant women in the name of “security”. The 4th and the 25th of November, as the 13 October – in the same time there was the sentence for the revolt in the Cie of Milan – we chose to meet in front of the Cie of Bologna to express our solid nearness to the women locked there, but also to denounce outside what happen inside this third millennium lagers.

And you? Will you go on pretending not to know?

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