STATEMENT OF THE SECRETARIAT OF THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF ANARCHISTS

 

Jean-Marc Raynaud and Thyde Rosell of the French Anarchist Federation are founding members of the Buenaventure school. This is an important and creative experiment in libertarian education, an alternative to the usual dull and often repressive education we’ve all received in traditional schooling. Their aim is to educate children in such as way that they grow up into responsible and free individuals, instead of just domesticated labour force. On Tuesday, November 30^th,  they are arrested as terrorists. Why?

Several years ago a couple ask them to admit their four-year-old son, as they have to travel a lot and can not offer him the stability he needs for a proper education. Our comrades didn’t go very thoroughly through the parent’s papers. They considered the right of the child to education and his need for care, stability and love to be above the regularity or not of his parents’ papers. They took him on board in the house-school. He lived with them and learned his way through life in a caring environment, visited every now and then by his parents. However, the child’s parents turned out to members of the Basque separatist movement ETA, and so our comrades are arrested under anti terrorist laws, and held for 96 hours for complicity with the couple. They go through harsh interrogations, deprivation of sleep, threats and even black mail, when the police threatened to retaliate against their daughter if they didn’t ‘confess’ . It is unclear what the police wanted them to confess to. The only link to terrorism seems to have been to have been through association as our comrades reject nationalist ideologies and are only concerned with offering a liberating education to a child who has been put in their care.

 It is becoming increasingly clear that for the repressive forces of the State any dissident is a terrorist, particularly in the wake of the war against terror. The US has used the war on terror as a way of cracking down on any opposition.  Suddenly, any one not conforming “is against us” and therefore terrorists. This is now happening in Europe as well as this case shows. They are anarchists, they run a school one of which students is the son of someone charged with terrorism, therefore they must be terrorist as well, particularly since they fit in the kind of people the state doesn’t like. It is all very worrying as it can happen to all of us.

We need to confront this increasingly repressive State. As our comrades’ case proves, you don’t know when they will be coming through your front door and charging you with ‘terrorism’. We will not be intimidated and will continue to challenge repression and limits to our freedom whenever and wherever it happens. Against their terror we counterpose freedom, mutual aid, and solidarity, beyond all borders and nation states.

Our comrades have now been released, after the period allowed by antiterrorist laws to hold them without charges had passed, the police unable to come up with any evidence whatsoever. There had been an outpouring of protests and messages of solidarity from, amongst others, the sister federations of the International Federation of Anarchists. .In the end, even the State had to acknowledge the stupidity of the accusations, but we can expect this sort of thing to happen again and we must be vigilant.

 The Secretariat of the International Federation of Anarchists

December 16th 2004