Italy’s No-TAV Movement Heats Up with Major Sabotage and Court Victory

from Earth First! News

Decem­ber 29th, 2014Advocates of the impos­si­bly cor­rupt and envi­ron­men­tal­ly dev­as­tat­ing high speed rail project known as TAV that threat­ens to cut through the Alps received a dou­ble-blow last week in the form of a major court vic­to­ry for activists, and anoth­er large-scale act of arson.

This month, six fires have been set along the TAV lines in Italy, with mil­i­tant groups like Armed Oper­a­tional Nuclei (NOA) call­ing on activists to join them in armed strug­gle.

As recent­ly as last week, three peo­ple wear­ing hoods set fires at Bologna’s San­ta Vio­la sta­tion. Though pri­vate sur­veil­lance cam­eras caught their image, they are uniden­ti­fi­able. Accord­ing to the Dai­ly Beast, the sab­o­tage was sur­pris­ing­ly effec­tive: “the Bologna fires destroyed the region­al train traf­fic con­trol sys­tem, which put the entire rail net­work in north­ern Italy on hold until it could be repaired.”

Since the first of Decem­ber, six fires have been set along Italy’s high-speed rail, caus­ing the fast-mov­ing trains to screech to a halt.

In spite of accu­sa­tions of ter­ror­ism and the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing fresh sab­o­tage, three anar­chists who were jailed in rela­tion to the block­ade of machin­ery and throw­ing molo­tovs at cops had their ter­ror­ism charges dropped in court today.

Dur­ing the action in ques­tion, the newswire ser­vice ANSA explains, “Police at the time said rough­ly 30 hood­ed mil­i­tants broke into the con­struc­tion site under the cov­er of night­fall and tore down fences and blocked machin­ery. In a near­by inci­dent, sev­er­al oth­er activists con­front­ed police with fire­works and Molo­tov cock­tails.”

The court vic­to­ry sends a mes­sage that activists fight­ing the TAV are not sim­ply ter­ror­ists pre­tend­ing to be envi­ron­men­tal­ists, but mem­bers of a diverse and com­mit­ted move­ment that encom­pass­es large sec­tors of the Ital­ian pop­u­lace.

Inves­ti­ga­tors are not just out to get activists, either. They are also crack­ing down on sup­port­ers of the TAV—chiefly mafia oper­a­tives who have infil­trat­ed the project in order to chan­nel con­tracts and per­mits to their syn­di­cates.

Mean­while, the largest mob of them all, the EU, has made infra­struc­ture a pri­or­i­ty, over and against resis­tant com­mu­ni­ties and mil­i­tant groups fight­ing against the destruc­tion of a sim­pler way of life.