30 August 2019

Ciao, this is an open letter…

My name is Vincenzo Vecchi, I have been wanted in Italy on two European arrest warrants since 2012 because of sentences of the courts of Genoa and Milan, one in 2006 and the other in 2001. I was arrested by the police of the flying squad and it was their captain who told me that he was very satisfied with this operation between the police forces of two European countries. A structure, said the captain, whose collaboration is obviously working better and better.

“It is financed by Interpol…” he told me in a confidential tone… captain I don’t think there is anything new in this…I know well about collaboration in “police operations” and that is precisely why I don’t want to be sent back [ndr. to Italy]. “France is better than Italy?”… just to make it clear, I am not interested in expressing a preference between the prisons of one country or another, indeed I have already expressed my point of view on more or less democratic prisons (and on the countries that are their mirror, as someone rightly said), in broad terms that is the reason I have already done time in prison. They cooperate among themselves on topics such as “regulation”, reception, the movement of individuals on European soil (a subject that concerns me in first person), are able to give birth to monstrous agreements like “Frontex” … they give directives which as a result add to the already macabre figures of boats sunk with their “load of poor” every day. If you want to keep your feet on the ground, aren’t the operations at the borders of Libya or Tunisia where those poor people are repelled home, militarily, (concentrating them in camps on the way) the result of this cooperation? I call this war.

So that is why I don’t want to be dispatched, that is why I don’t want to find myself being the result of a good police (co)operation carried out by two allied States in times of war … even if I still have a chance, since I have still dry feet … I wanted to tell the captain all this, I wanted to tell him that I am against this war … but he was too busy taking selfie upon selfie with his colleagues from the flying squad … and the prison door opened in front of us …

—————————-

Rete Evasioni (Evasion Network)