My name is José Nivoi.
I have been working in the port of Genoa since I was 21,
that is for 15 years.
In the last one a half that years I've only been working for the trade union.
So I am a trade unionist and a spokesperson for the CALP.
The CALP was founded in 2011,
on 15 October, on the way back from a large demonstration in Rome,
where there were large clashes against the Berlusconi government.
That was then.
And on the return journey in the bus,
it was decided
that we needed to rebuild the autonomous collective.
And so we have resumed
the practice of a militant trade union.
We have started up strikes again,
and also supported strikes by workers
who do not have the same bargaining power as we have.
So we have, for example,
supported the strikes by university professors
against the liberalisation of the school system,
or public health care.
And this way of acting has made us grow slowly,
ethically and morally,
over the last four years,
in which we have fought this great battle against the arms trade
in the ports of Genoa.
A battle which, however, is spreading to Italy and Europe.
Let's close the ports for war.
We blockade the weapons,
because this is clearly an ethical and moral issue.
The idea of going to work, and using our work time
to load weapons that will kill thousands of people
in other states, theatres of war where we will never be -
seems crazy to us.
We do not want to become accomplices to these massacres.
We see these missiles explode in the theatres of war.
We think that the production is taking place in the West,
from the universities to the factories and, as a last frontier,
the ports and more recently also the airports.
To try to obstruct this, to obstruct this armament
can be one way of showing that there are people
who no longer believe in this capitalist logic,
or in the logic of those who make profits
by producing weapons.
Then there are other aspects, the question of security.
We are all trade union delegates in the CALP,
and therefore officially recognised by the workers.
So we started
certain kind of discussion
with the port authority about the fact that, at that moment,
when these ships arrive
loaded with missiles and explosives,
into a port like that of Genoa, which is in the belly of the city,
in the event of an accident there could be a problem!
We want to know
what is inside these ships, because what we see
are armoured weapons, gunships, ammunition boxes.
What we do not see is what is inside the containers.
We know that there are explosives inside the containers
because of the labels that have to be on there due to international regulations.
But we are not told what is inside.
We also did a walk-through with the firemen,
who are responsible in case of a disaster or a fire.
They are also not given any information about the transit
of these types of ships, with the containers with the explosives.
To give an example: When there's a container with cobalt,
which is used for X-rays is therefore radioactive,
we're told that there's this many kilos of cobalt inside this ship,
so that in the event of an accident they know where it is and what to do.
In case of weapons: total silence.
In the midst of this logic we continue our struggle.
We try to build the most disparate friendships!
On 23 June last year
we were invited by the Pope to denounce these very things.
So we really do everytning to stop the arms trade
in the ports.
We are talking about a company that has 80 ships.
74 of which transport oil and liquefied gas,
six of which transport military equipment.
On their website, they state this openly,
precisely because they have built six modern ships,
to bring weapons to these theatres of war where a classic military ship
such as the Italian navy would create problems,
diplomatic problems, if you have a ship there from country X unloading weapons.
With this ship, on the other hand it looks like some kind of sale of goods,
when it's actually carrying armaments to theatres of war.
It is a kind of ship that looks like a civilian ship,
but is used for military logistics.
Its' route leads from the USA via Northern Europe, Southern Europe
and then Iskender in the south of Turkey,
80 kilometres from the Syrian border,
and Jeddah, a Saudi Arabian port.
Then it also serves in other forgotten theatres of war,
as in India, with the question of the war in Kashmir.
And then there were other cases,
lucky chances where we identified a container with missiles,
that was en route to Israel in May last year.
That was a coincidence:
one of our comrades came to work
and saw this truck driver that was lost,
driving around the harbour. He stopped him and asked him
where he had to go to unload.
The lorry driver shows him the pass
and says: "I have been driving around here for three hours,
at the risk of all of us all blowing up."
"I come from the Bergamo area,
I have to load onto this ship the 'Asiatica Island'
and I have to go on board."
So he says, of all the dockers in Genoa, this has to happen to me.
It happens to one of the CALP members, he takes a photo of the document
and that's how we discovered that they were missiles
for Israel.
This was at the time of the greatest aggression in Gaza,
so this has also created a diplomatic problem
between Italy and Israel, because we attempted this blockade
with the people in Livorno and Naples.
These were three large mobilisations.
But it was a stroke of luck,
So we don't really know, not really,
how many weapons pass through the port of Genoa.
With the 'Bahri' we can see it because she has open decks
and because we can see with the naked eye the M1 Abrams tanks, the Apaches,
everything they use in the theatres of war.
On 23 February last year,
at around four o'clock in the morning
there are five of us comrades - we are a collective
of 27 people, all from the port area -,
five of us, including me, we all heard the doorbell ring at home.
I thought it was a drunkard from the bars downstairs.
The classic, one who can't find the intercom.
Then I heard persistent ringing.
I look out of the window and there was this police line-up.
They wanted to get into the flat.
They searched the whole house
looking for clues to support their theory
that we are a criminal organisation.
The law we were supposed to have broken
is the subject of the blockade.
The interruption of the public supply route
in connection with the Bahri company,
which is not even a public utility,
quite the opposite, it is private in all aspects.
But it was a way of cutting off the head of this movement,
that had begun to gain ground within the port.
They used against us the fact that we can
determine the economy of the port of Genoa.
By legally restricting us like this,
as soon as you make a wrong step, or you have proof of their
actions, they will put you under special observation,
house arrest, or, in the worst case, prison.
We had not seen such a police action
since the days of the Diaz School
because about 70 policemen took part.
They took us down to the harbour where we had an office,
and a gym.
We used the gym for ourselves and for the young people
who worked in the harbour,
we talk to them about our initiatives a little bit, they can train there,
it was a free hall, with a boxing ring (we did Mai Thai and boxing).
It was a way to get together and to be known.
They closed it down, they cleared us out,
and all this happened when we began to denounce the fact
that the Italian state does not respect the law 185 of 1990
and article 11 of the Constitution.
When we started this legal journey,
the repression came down on us like a cleaver.
Then we somehow got used to it,
because over the years we have always had a certain street practice
on the question of the closure of the headquarters of the fascists,
of Casa Pound and Forza Nuova.
So it didn't worry us, but it also gave an impression
of how the state reacts when you touch supranational economic interests,
because there are supranational interests when a state
no longer respects
its own constitution.
Article 11 says:
"Italy rejects war in all its forms and does not foment conflict,
it works for peace." - Beautiful article, which also has its weight.
Law 185 from 1990
says in one of its' passages,
article 6,
that in Italy the transit of arms to countries
that have war as the ultimate solution is forbidden.
So every war. War has only one way of being war:
two states facing each other.
We also have another case, which is very symbolic of the applicability
of this law, namely the 'Banat' ship, which is the one in the picture.
There we decided to put the Banat ship in the picture
because in that case they did apply article 185 of the 1990 law.
In this case this ship,
which was escorted by the Turkish navy to the coast of Libya,
had brought armaments
for the defence groups connected to the ENI oil companies.
Because there the ENI groups and the Total groups are at war.
There are jihadist groups with links to the Total groups
and a jihadist group, which is linked to the ENI groups in Italy.
The weapons on this ship were for the ENI groups.
And after this ship had unloaded the weapons,
it set course for Genoa and switched off the GPS.
Internationally, ships are required to keep the GPS switched on.
Because these are highways of the sea, so you have to know
where the ships are exactly.
The ship switches off the GPS and near the coast of Corsica
is intercepted by the French navy. That means by Total.
The French navy reports to the European Union
that Italy has welcomed a ship
that supplies weapons to jihadist groups in Libya.
And asks why Italy, which is part of the EU, is supplying those groups.
In this case, when the ship arrives in Genoa
the whole world, the whole official Italy is anti-militarist.
Seizure of the ship, arrests of the crew,
enforcement of the Act 185 of 1990.
However, they did this when no more weapons were on board.
This ship arrives at the exact moment we announce the arrival
of a Bahri ship. In the same way.
But for the Bahri ship the Law 185 is not applied.
It sails in calmly, unloads, loads and departs again.
With the other ship, on the other hand,
around which this political bubble had formed
the law 185 is applied. There is therefore a strong contradiction
with regard to the Italian policy on the arms trade.
There was also a case a few months ago
when a ship that left from La Spezia,
and via a triangulation
ammunition was sold to Panama,
from where it went to a port in Africa
and this port indicated that the international laws
on trade in armaments had not been respected.
So the ship was confiscated.
And it sailed from an Italian port!
Italian ports are a kind of hub
for armament in North Africa or in the Middle East.
We have been organising for a year now,
an attempt,
- we have to see if it works then -,
the attempt of an international strike
against the arms trade or against the fact
that civilian ports are used to transport arms
to the various theatres of war as if nothing had happened.
In the last year we have therefore
worked together with different antimilitarist
and pacifist associations.
At European and international level.
Of course, this all started
after the various blockades that we made in Genoa,
which brought us into the focus of the anti-militarist world.
This enabled us to enter into dialogue with all these groups.
If what we did in Genoa in 2019
happens at an international level,
then it would show,
that the foreign policy of some countries is not desired.
Because in 2019, when we blocked the Bahri ship,
it was decided that in the port of Genoa
no more weapons are to be shipped
to the theatres of war which we have listed before.
We think and hope that if this goes international
the same effect will be created.
We are orienting towards October,
beginning of October and the end of September.
We hope that in the port of Genoa in the port of Livorno, Trieste,
San Francisco, Hamburg, Piraeus and Marseilles
a dockers' strike will take place on the subject of anti-militarism.