Yesterday saw the start of this year’s International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners (August 23rd-30th). The campaign is spearheaded by Till All Are Free aiming to highlight the plight of anarchist prisoners and to make sure our comrades sacrifice against the carceral state are not forgotten by those of us not yet ensnared by its ever-increasing reach.
Anarchists have always known that the prison is a State tool for suppressing radical ideas and dissuading direct action. Many comrades who have been captured by this tool of repression continue the struggle in private, personal ways, keeping the flame of a world without prisons alive despite their confinement, while others even in the depths of their confinement have managed to build networks of solidarity with those imprisoned around them.
It is incumbent on anarchists all over the world to take stock of the political implications of the prison, not only in the abstract, but to challenge their supposed legitimacy with every tool at our disposal. Solidarity is the watch word of every anarchist and we should make pains to practice that solidarity with comrades who have paid the ultimate price, putting their own bodies in the jaws of the state for a freer world.
With the recent charging of Palestinian activists under the Terrorism Act alongside imprisonment, as well as more than 20 JSO climate change activists being jailed to date, our freedom to contest the State is being stripped from us in an alarming manner. It will take all the support from members of the community to keep the flame burning within those who have found themselves on the receiving end of the State’s own brand of carceral terror.
I would like to highlight a few anarchists currently being held in prisons, such as Evgeny Rubashko, an anarchist from Belarus who was a member of Food not Bombs Minsk and several FreeMarket initiatives. He was detained on 29 July 2021 and arrested on charges of organisation of actions that disrupted public order during post-election protests in Belarus and participation in an extremist organization. On April 22nd 2022 he was sentenced to five years in prison. He has reported instances of torture by the security services, including beatings and plastic bags over his head in order to constrict his breathing.
Then there is the horrific injustice that has come to be known as the ‘Network’ case. In October 2017, FSB officers arrested six antifascists who played airsoft in the woods. The FSB planted weapons and explosives in some of their vehicles, and tortured them in pre-trial detention– beating them, hanging them upside down and electrocuting them. This torture was used to force the arrestees to validate forged testimony professing that they are part of an alleged terrorist “network.” At the end of January 2018, four more antifascists were arrested in St. Petersburg. They were also beaten, tortured by means of electrical shock, and forced to agree that they too were members of this invented “network.” The two Russian anarchists involved in this horrifying case of state oppression are, Ilya Shakursky, sentenced to 16 years and Viktor Filinkov, sentenced to seven years.
And finally, Ryan Dwyer and Ryan Roberts. Two anarchist protesters in Bristol’s ‘Kill The Bill’ protests. After police assaulted protesters on March 21st 2021 with pepper spray, riot shields, horses and batons, the protesters took their safety into their own hands and defended themselves against the brutality of the officers deployed against them. By the end of the evening, several police vehicles had been set on fire. The media, the police spokesperson and then-home secretary Priti Patel went on a campaign to demonise the Kill the Bill protesters, using dehumanising language like ‘thugs’ and ‘wild animals’ to lay the groundwork for a stiff prosecution and heavy reprisals, including the use of the riot charge – the most serious of all the public order charges. Dwyer was sentenced to four years and six months in prison, while Roberts was sentenced to 14 years.
An anarchist prisoner letter writing session will be taking place tomorrow (Sunday August 25th), promoted by North East Anarchist Group and coinciding with the International Week of Solidarity with Anarchist Prisoners. The session starts at 12pm and will be conducted online. A call out and prisoner list (including the prisoners discussed above, who can all be written to) has been made available on the Till All Are Free website and they ask for you to send your events and actions to tillallarefree (‘at) riseup.net.
~ Daniel Adediran
Update: While this was being written an article on another anarchist prisoner, Toby Shone (whose case Freedom has covered extensively), was published over at Bristol Cable, noting the interest counter-terror police seem to have in Bristol’s BASE social centre. It’s a useful read.
A longlist of anarchist prisoners worldwide, including Dwyer and Roberts, can be found here [pdf].
