On June 1st, in Amendolara, a town in upper Calabria, a massacre of immigrants took place: four young laborers were burned alive in a car, at the hands of other immigrants carrying out their dirty and infamous role as gangmasters. --- Their names were Ullah Ismat Qiemi, Safi Iayjad, Amin Fazal Khogjani, and Waseem Khan. They worked in the strawberry harvest. ---- Given the brutality of the barbarity perpetrated, the news immediately hit the headlines, as they say. This immediately sparked the hypocritical whining of professional hacks, as well as the hypocritical declarations of politicians from the ruling party, the opposition, and the so-called union bosses, all ready to shout and write "never again!" and "enough with massacres of this nature." Crocodile tears.
Everyone knows that not only the northern part of Calabria, stretching from the Sibaritide to the Metapontino area, but also other areas in southern Calabria (e.g., the tent city of San Ferdinando), as well as other areas, especially in southern Italy, are infested by the sub-mafia known as gangmastering. This despicable, infamous practice is not only tolerated but actually promoted and protected by a myriad of companies who believe this way they can better blackmail and subjugate immigrant workers.
Everyone knows how immigrants are blackmailed and forced into a system of extreme exploitation, starvation wages, and forced to live and sleep in hovels, crammed ten or fifteen people into a space of just a few square meters. The bosses know it, the government knows it, the opposition knows it, the union bosses know it. They know it, but they pretend not to, until tragedy strikes.
Indeed, not only the established political forces, but also many among the so-called common people, while ranting about security with racist overtones, seem to delight in pointing to immigrants as potential criminals; some do so mildly, softly, with savoir faire, while others do so brutally with a megaphone. Meanwhile, the government, seeking electoral consensus, passes ever more repressive laws, which, coincidentally, do not target the bosses, the gangmasters, but rather those who dissent, those who fight against them and the gangmasters.
For their part, the institutional opposition and the union bosses, still seeking electoral consensus but on the opposite side, verbally express their dissent against the government's authoritarian logic, but meanwhile they let things go.
In short, while the institutional theater continues its course, the real-world effects continue to produce the same old gangrene: wars among the poor, exploitation among the working classes, and imperialist wars across the world, more broadly speaking.
On June 6, in Amendolara, a march promoted by the CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) marched through the town's streets, converging on a central square. A march of several thousand workers, mostly from Calabria and other southern regions of Italy, to say no to gangmastering, to say no to the savage act perpetrated by two immigrant gangmasters that took the lives of three Afghan laborers and one Pakistani. Four young lives barbarically cut short, who, to be considered simply human, had to cease to exist. Otherwise, if they had been alive, according to the labels that the language of power attaches to all immigrants in a derogatory sense, they would surely have been considered simply the lives of illegal immigrants, irregular immigrants, potential criminals. It's time for states and governments, with their majorities and oppositions, union bosses, all subservient to the bosses, to stop their hypocrisy and assume their responsibilities for having built a world of oppressed and oppressors, exploited and exploiters, a world in which workplace deaths occur every day, a world of underpaid workers (and not just immigrants).
But given how well they wallow in this dirty world of theirs, if we wait for them to do so... the proverb goes, "the grass will grow." Therefore, now more than ever, it's necessary to restart grassroots struggles in the workplace, in the community, in the streets. Struggles not mediated by union bureaucracies or anyone else. Struggles of direct action, self-managed and self-administered. Struggles aimed at starting to build, right here and now, a new world founded on freedom. A world that puts an end to bosses and states, to oppression and wars.
D. Liguori
https://umanitanova.org/fragole-e-sangue-padroni-assassini/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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