Europe – Recent Anarchist Activity Tasking

Italy: Bullet mailed with 'anarchist' threats against three politicians

http://www.adnkronos.com/IGN/Aki/English/Politics/Italy-Bullet-mailed-with-anarchist-threats-against-three-politicians_311488571498.html

ultimo aggiornamento: 03 gennaio, ore 15:07

Putative Italian anarchists have issued threats against three centre-left Italian opposition politicians in a letter mailed with a bullet to Italy's Adnkronos news agency in Rome. The authenticity of the letter has yet to be verified.

Rome, 3 Jan. (AKI) - Putative Italian anarchists issued threats against three centre-left Italian opposition politicians in a letter mailed with a bullet to Italy's Adnkronos news agency in Rome. The letter was signed by an anarchist group which claimed responsibility for parcel bombs sent to three embassies in the Italian capital in late December. Its authenticity has yet to be verified.

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"After the end-of year 'fireworks' we will strike again and will set our sights on the symbols of a sterile state and policies that are groping around in the dark," read the letter printed in handwritten blue-inked capital letters and signed by the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI).

The names of opposition MPs Luciano Violante, Piero Fassino and Massimo D'Alema were printed in red capitals at the bottom of the letter.

Two letters and bullets threatening Violante and his wife were sent to Adnkronos last autumn and were signed by Italy's far-left Red Brigades.

Violante, a former parliament speaker and anti-terrorism judge, is an MP for the centre-left Democratic Party. D'Alema is a former Italian prime minister and Fassino a former foreign minister.

A package bomb was found on 27 December outside the Greek embassy in Rome. Nobody was injured in the incident. But two parcel bombs at the Chilean and Swiss embassies in the Italian capital on 23 December seriously injured two people who opened them.

A note attached to the Greek embassy bomb in Rome said the FAI was "striking again" in response to the appeal made by "comrades" in the Greek anarchist group the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, according to police.

Greek police in November arrested two alleged members of the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, which claimed responsibility for sending 14 letter bombs to embassies in Athens last month.

Panagiotis Argyrou, 22, and Gerasimos Tsakalos, 24, have been charged with terrorism offences and they and other alleged members of the group are expected to go on trial on 17 January.

The letter received on Monday by Adnkronos mentioned Argyrou and Tsakalos.

FAI would continue to act "in solidairity with Greek comrades Gerasimos Tsakalos and Panagiotis Argirou, who were injustly arrrested in November by global capitalism," said the letter.


Greece: motorcycle bomb damages court buildings

Text of report in English by government-affiliated Greek news agency ANA-MPA website

A bomb planted on a motorbike generated a power explosion, recorded at 8:22 a.m. (06.33 gmt), outside the administrative first instance courthouse in central Athens.

An unidentified caller to an Athens-area television station at 7:38 a.m. warned of an explosion in 40 minutes outside the specific building. Damages were reported to the modern glass-and-steel building's facade as well as to nearby parked cars.

Police said the explosives-rigged motorbike was parked on the median of the wide two-way street where the courthouse stands, Louizis Riancour St - near Panormou metro station in the Ambelokipi district.

A cloud of smoke was visible in the area. There were no reports of injuries and authorities managed to vacate the building, while the immediate area has been blocked off.

Source: Athens News Agency-Macedonian Press Agency website, Athens, in English 30 Dec 10

BBC Mon Alert EU1 EuroPol ap

Small blast at Greek embassy in Argentina

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101230/ap_on_re_eu/eu_greece_explosion

– 21 mins ago (12.30.10)

ATHENS, Greece – Greece's foreign ministry says a small bomb exploded outside the Greek embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, causing minimal damage and no injuries.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigoris Delavekouras told the AP said the device was very small and that there was no one at the embassy when it went off Thursday.

Authorities in Europe and elsewhere say violent anarchist groups are showing greater international coordination.

In Greece, a bomb hidden on a parked motorcycle exploded outside two court buildings in central Athens on Thursday, damaging cars and shattering windows but leaving no one hurt.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A bomb hidden on a parked motorcycle exploded outside two court buildings in central Athens on Thursday, damaging cars and shattering windows but leaving no one hurt, officials said.

The powerful rush-hour blast occurred at 8:20 a.m. (0620 GMT) following a warning telephone call to a newspaper and private TV station, authorities said. Police had evacuated the targeted buildings, which are used for administrative purposes. State health officials confirmed that no one was injured.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but suspicion fell on Greek militant groups, which have stepped up attacks in the past two years. A group of suspects facing trial next month.

The blast occurred in a densely populated area in the city's Ambelokipi district, shattering windows and nearby shop storefronts, and damaging cars. It sent up a cloud of smoke that was visible across the city.

"It goes without saying that we condemn this attack. Violence does not solve anyone's problems," Spyros Vouyias, a deputy public works minister, told private Skai television. Vouyias served previously at the public order minister, in charge of police and the anti-terrorism service.

At least a dozen suspected members of the violent anarchist group calling itself Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire are due to go on trial on Jan. 17. The group also claimed responsibility for a spate of parcel bomb attacks targeting embassies in Athens and other sites in November.

A violent Italian anarchist group carried out a string of embassy bombings in the past week, in solidarity with jailed Greek militants.

Attacks by far-left and anarchist militant groups jumped by 43 percent in 2009 in the European Union compared to the previous year, according to the EU police agency, Europol, with most of the incidents in Italy, Spain and Greece

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Blast outside Athens court: police
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20101230/twl-blast-outside-athens-court-police-3cebad0.html
AFP - 7 mins ago – Dec. 30

A bomb exploded outside a court in Athens on Thursday, causing damage to the building after a warning phone call had enabled police to evacuate the area, a police source said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries as television footage showed smoke billowing in front of the Athens court complex near the city centre. Several of the building's windows were smashed.

"I am 100 metres (yards) away and all my wares have fallen off the shelves," he said.

There was no claim of responsibility for the bombing, which comes some two weeks before the scheduled trial of more than a dozen suspected members of a radical anarchist group.

Bomb blasts at right-wing party HQ

An Italian anarchist group has claimed responsibility for sending three letter bombs to embassies in Rome in the past week which wounded two people.

It was not known if the attacks were linked.

The Northern League - whose founder, Umberto Bossi, lives close to the party headquarters - once advocated secession for Italy's prosperous north.

   http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101228/ap_on_re_eu/eu_italy_embassy_blasts

By NICOLE WINFIELD and DEREK GATOPOULOS, Associated Press Nicole Winfield And Derek Gatopoulos, Associated Press – 25 mins ago

ROME – A loosely linked movement of European anarchists who want to bring down state and financial institutions is becoming more violent and coordinated after decades out of the spotlight, and may be responding to social tensions spawned by the continent's financial crisis, security experts say.

Italian police said Tuesday that letter bombs were sent to three embassies in Rome by Italian anarchists in solidarity with jailed Greek anarchists, who had asked their comrades to organize and coordinate a global "revolutionary war."

Identical package bombs exploded at the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome on Dec. 23, badly wounding the two people who opened them. A third bomb was safely defused at the Greek Embassy on Monday.

"We're striking again, and we do so in response to the appeal launched by our Greek companions," the Italian group known as the Informal Anarchist Federation wrote in a claim of responsibility for the third bomb that was released by police here Tuesday.

Extreme left-wing and anarchist movements have existed for decades in Europe — waging deadly attacks across the continent in the 1960s and 1970s that trailed and became sporadic in recent decades. Officials, meanwhile, focused far more intensely on the threat of Islamist terrorism.

But the European Union's police agency, Europol, reported this year that attacks by far-left and anarchist militant groups jumped by 43 percent in 2009 compared to the previous year, and more than doubled over 2007, with most of the incidents in Italy, Spain and Greece. Spain and Greece have been hit particularly hard by government cutbacks and unemployment resulting from a continentwide debt crisis. Italy has also been growing tense in recent months in response to austerity measures and a political duel between Premier Silvio Berlusconi and a former ally that for weeks threatened the government's survival.

Last month, 14 letter bombs were mailed to embassies in Athens by a Greek group that urged stepped-up attacks by anarchists worldwide. Two of the devices exploded, causing no injuries.

"Anarchists-insurrectionists work to try to raise the level of clashes when there are problems" said Marco Boschi, a criminologist who teaches a course on terrorism at the University of Florence and has written about anarchists. "They exploit every occasion."

A Greek group calling itself the Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire claimed responsibility for sending the 14 mail bombs in Athens. Panagiotis Argyros, 22 and Gerasimos Tsakalos, 24, were arrested on Nov. 1 in connection with the mailings and were charged with terrorism-related offenses. At least a dozen suspected members of their group are due to go on trial Jan. 17 for other offenses.

The Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire called on militants around Europe to step up their actions before the trial.

"We will organize internationally and take aim at the enemy. We can't wait to see the subversive elements flooding the streets and the guerrilla groups striking again and again," the group wrote.

But European anarchists are not always in step.

The solidarity boasted by the Italian anarchists who targeted the Rome embassies apparently irritated a Greek militant group, whose membership included Lambros Foundas, who was killed in a shootout with police in Athens earlier this year.

Three imprisoned members of Revolutionary Struggle claimed in a communique Tuesday evening that their group never carries out actions "that would result in the injury of someone, like a random embassy official." The Italian anarchists, in their claim of responsibility for the embassy bombs, said their cell was named after Foundas.

Italian officials have said the Swiss Embassy was targeted by the latest attack in Italy because intensified Swiss-Italian cooperation led to two well-known arrests of anarchists.

Swiss anarchist and environmentalist Marco Camenisch, a hero to many anarchists, was arrested by Italian police in 1991 and imprisoned over the 1989 murder of a Swiss border police officer. After serving nine years in an Italian maximum-security prison, he was extradited in 2002 to Switzerland, where he was later sentenced for the murder.

In April 2010, Swiss police with the help of Italian authorities arrested two men and a woman who idolized Camenisch and were members of an Italian eco-terrorist group. They were suspected of planning to bomb an IBM Corp. research facility near Zurich.

Chile, meanwhile, was targeted because a Chilean anarchist, Mauricio Morales, was killed when a bomb in a backpack he was carrying blew up in Santiago in 2009, Italian officials have said.

Alessandro Ceci of the Center of Superior Studies for the Fight Against Terrorism and Political Violence theorized the Italian anarchists may be trying partly to take advantage of the political climate in Italy: Premier Silvio Berlusconi has seen his parliamentary majority fall and just barely survived a no-confidence vote this month. In addition, protests against university budget cuts turned violent on Dec. 14, thanks in part to anarchist infiltration of student demonstrators.

"If I were an Italian (police) investigator, I'd be worried," Ceci said, comparing the highly charged atmosphere to that of the late 1960s, just before the Red Brigades leftist domestic terror group launched into action.

But political science professor Franco Pavoncello at Rome's John Cabot University said he didn't foresee a return to that era of leftist terror.

"If this were the anarchists' goal, they would not be focusing on embassies," he said.

He noted that no one really knows how many people are behind the group that claimed responsibility.

"They are surely not of an international level, maybe European, but I would better describe them as the result of pathological behaviors often of an individual nature, and very domestic," he said.

Another Italian anarchist group, the Italian Anarchist Federation, which happens to use the same acronym as the one behind the letter-bomb campaign, discounted the possibility of highly coordinated and organized anarchist offensives in the future.

"Anarchism by its own nature is not a hierarchal organization, and all the participants enter in a confederation on the same level and act freely," said Donato Randini, who edits the group's periodical.

___

(This version corrects anarchist group name from Association to Federation.)

--

Michael Wilson

Office: (512) 744 4300 ex. 4112

Email: michael.wilson@stratfor.com

Letter from Chilean Insurrectionists to the Informal Anarchist Federation

Monday, January 03 2011 @ 06:14 AM UTC

Contributed by: Admin

Views: 96

We want to salute the FAI – Revolutionary Group Lambros Foundas, on the recent attacks against the embassies of Chile and Switzerland, in Italy. And with regard to the criticisms made about these actions by the political prisoners of Revolutionary Struggle (Greece), the comrades Pola Rupa, Nikos Maziotis and Kostas Gornas, we say they are within their rights to issue communications and to criticize the actions of other insurrectionalist groups.

Letter from Chilean Insurrectionists to the Informal Anarchist Federation

Collaborative Solidarity

We want to salute the FAI – Revolutionary Group Lambros Foundas, on the recent attacks against the embassies of Chile and Switzerland, in Italy. And with regard to the criticismsmade about these actions by the political prisoners of Revolutionary Struggle (Greece), the comrades Pola Rupa, Nikos Maziotis and Kostas Gornas, we say they are within their rights to issue communications and to criticize the actions of other insurrectionalist groups. But we want to say that any civil servant of an embassy of the State of Chile is a political target, and we do not view them as we would another person because they are representatives and protoges of the system and it’s institutions.

Today we indicate that any civil servant of a diplomatic institution, the ambassador of the borders, is a potential target of attack, as a representative of the terror machine which are the nation-states. From here we want to say to the Informal Anarchist Federation – We hope that they get to hear our voices – that we are proud of the federated group called “Brothers in Arms – Nucleus Mauricio Morales/FAI”.

With words and deeds, this is our internationalism. To the dear Mauricio, we took it into our hearts. His death, and of all the revolutionaries fallen in combat, is an eternal call to fight. They will be vindicated by all comrades who send themselves to the joy of the combat, anywhere in the world. Their names and their examples fly freely. They are not the property of anybody.

A recent spate of letter bombs dispatched to foreign embassies in Rome, as well as the headquarters of a far-right Italian political party, focused attention upon a rogue group of anarchists that claimed responsibility for the attacks. The Informal Federation of Anarchy says it is a cobbled-together coalition of anarchist outfits in Italy, and boasts ties with like-minded groups across the world. Their parcel bombing campaign follows a similar wave of deliveries sent in November by Greek anarchists to embassies in Athens. But security experts aren't wringing their hands over an emerging global threat. One told TIME that the aborted bombings were simply "something [the anarchists] have to do from time to time to show that they exist."

Anarchist organizations in Italy and elsewhere today may be as fringe as analysts say they are, but they are the heirs of a political credo that deeply impacted the past two centuries of world history. The term "anarchism" stems from the ancient Greek anarchos, or "without rulers," and historians see anarchist strains in everything from the writings of certain Daoist scholars in pre-modern China to the emancipatory zeal of early Christianity. But anarchism, as we know it, is a distinctly modern phenomenon, crystallizing in the wake of the French Revolution, as more and more people in the industrializing world chafed both under the yoke of despotic monarchs and the growing power of capitalist elites. (See the anarchists who claim to be behind the bombs in Rome.)

The man credited as being the first self-proclaimed anarchist and one of anarchism's most influential ideologues, Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, famously said in 1849: "Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy." Contrary to contemporary notions of anarchists as trouble-making, chaotic nihilists, Proudhon championed anarchism as the most rational and just means of creating order in society. Among other things, he advocated what he called "mutualism," an economic practice that disincentivized profit — which, according to him, was a destabilizing force — and argued far ahead of his time for banks with free credit and unions to protect labor. What cemented Proudhon's anarchism was his vehement distrust of the state and even electoral politics.

Yet, anarchism also had a strong violent streak, with many radicals arguing for direct confrontation with the oppressive state — what could incite revolution better than the "propaganda of the deed" itself? An anarchist assassinated Russia's Czar Alexander I in 1881; in 1896, a Polish-American anarchist shot U.S. President William McKinley. Not surprisingly, governments spied and loudly denounced lurking anarchist threats in all sorts of cases, from the controversial Sacco and Vanzetti trials in 1920s Massachusetts to unrest in colonial India. (Comment on this story.)

Anarchism's last great, albeit fleeting, moment under the sun came at the time of the Spanish Civil War. For a few years in the 1930s, anarchist collectives thrived in Catalonia. George Orwell, who threw in his lot with an anarchist faction, wrote admiringly of his Spanish comrades: the fiercely egalitarian anarchist militias, said Orwell, "were a sort of microcosm of a classless society... where hope was more normal than apathy and cynicism." Of course, as Orwell charts in Homage to Catalonia, the anarchists' downfall comes not at the hands of Gen. Franco's fascists, but during an internal putsch among Spain's Republicans, led by U.S.S.R-backed Communists. An ideology that loathed hierarchy could never be tolerated by Stalin. (See TIME's 1936 report on anarchism in Spain.)

In the decades since, the allure of anarchism as a viable political system has faded. Its adherents and symbols — the black flag of anarcho-syndicalists and the "A" enclosed by a circle — remain. The tradition of "antifa," or anti-fascist mobilization and activism popular throughout Europe, particularly in politically polarized societies like Greece and Italy, draws on the support of self-proclaimed anarchist groups. Anarchists have also fueled the "anti-globalization" movement, a legacy that has twinned the ideology with images of crunchy protestors hurling stones through Starbucks windows or chaining themselves to trees.

It's unlikely the 21st century's anarchists, raging against the collusion of multinationals and the state, will ever have the same appeal as their predecessors more than a century before. The U.S. itself had a rich tradition of anarchism, whose guardian angel was the famed New York writer and activist Emma Goldman. It can be argued be that the logical heirs to Goldman and her anti-government fellow travelers are, in some form, today's Tea Party — only in the past half century has a distinction been made between the term "libertarian" and "anarchist." But Sarah Palin probably hasn't read Proudhon or Bakunin; nor did they likely have someone like her in mind.