The Flowers of Romance

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday November 21, 2002 23:29 by irony is dead

The Italians have Berlusconi on the run. Support for Disobedient movement growing due to the recent arrests under conspiracy type charges.

The main focus is on the best known leader,
Francesco Caruso, so the last word to him - who manages to
smuggle out statements via the relatives, MPs and radical
priets who are allowed to visit him. There have been some
CGIL flags seen at some of the pickets held outside the
jails, and Caruso has been very strong in his support for
FIAT workers fighting to keep their factory open in Termini
Imerese.
One of the accusations they face is of having been
responsible for organised violence in Genoa. Caruso
answers: "They're reading things back to front, so in
Genoa the attacks were launched by demonstrators
against the police? So maybe in New York the Twin Towers
smashed into two airplanes? Perhaps it was us who tortured
policemen in the barracks, naturally after we had arrested
them? And it is the poor around the world who provoke hunger
in rich people, and it is the sea which pollutes petrol, and
children who kill Bush's Marines."
As regards the future, he says: "We've got to move
forward - you can't stop a rising tide - hopes and dreams
will defeat injustice and the arrogance of the system. They
can arrest us, but our ideas are spreading, growing and
moving. There is a famous poem by a Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda which says 'they can rip up all the flowers, but
they can't stop the Spring'... I might be locked up inside,
but in my heart I'm with the workers of Termini Imerese and
their families, and with my disobedient comrades. And I'll
be with them throughout this Saturday's demonstration in
Cosenza. Keep fighting: and together we'll keep racing
towards freedom."