Declaration of Loïc after 16 months in prison - Hamburg G20
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
Finally, we are nearing the end of this trial, which began in December 2018. I didn't know a trial could last this long.
I was arrested a few days after my 22nd birthday, in August 2018, the police broke down the door of my parents' house shouting, my little sister had to get down on her knees with her hands on her head. When I heard the door being smashed down, I had images in my mind of police violence during stops, of how the police let loose and hit people. I got scared and went through the roof and ended up in the neighbour's yard and went to the other side of the subdivision. But the police had cordoned off the whole neighbourhood, and a person walking in socks on the road is soon suspected. A plainclothes policeman started running after me, shouting: "Come here you little shit". Having sensed a certain animosity in his voice, I thought it best not to respond to his invitation, which, if I had said "shitty", would have been an outrage.
I found myself in the garden and then in a neighbour's garage, trapped. Being against the wall, forced to wait for the policeman to arrive, the latter jumps on me and twists my right wrist as I let myself be. I remarked to him about his useless violence and he replied: "You're lucky I didn't shoot you". Seen in this light, I am indeed happy that I am still alive. It is true that many police arrests have an unfortunate tendency to turn into the death penalty. But this sad fate is more reserved for racialized people living in working-class neighbourhoods. In France, not a month goes by without a death during an arrest. The garage door finally opens, police officers, gendarmes, bacqueux and hooded civilians appear, automatic weapon in hand. Perhaps thirty members of the "forces of law and order".
The neighbour, who owns the garage, comes out of his house and discovering the scene spontaneously says to me: "Ça va Loïc? Do you want a glass of water? ». This remark made a blank in the seriousness and heaviness of the interpellation, I did my best to choke a laugh and refused the glass of water because my hands were tied. Back at my parents' house to put on my shoes, I couldn't manage to tie my shoelaces and asked the gendarmes to take off my handcuffs: "Nah, it's possible to do it with them," replied one. I've always liked challenges so I try, but since my hands are tied behind my back - and even with a lot of willpower - it's just not possible. The policemen laugh and make fun of me. My little sister is standing right next to me with a serenity mixed with emotions like I've never seen on her face, her eyes are powerful. She spontaneously and forcefully throws to the gendarmes: "But take off the handcuffs so that he can put on his shoes! "Her voice contains a divine power, the mockery has turned into a gene. I saw the eyes of the gendarmes lose themselves to the ground and one of them hastened to remove the handcuffs. My little sister would have said: "But take off the handcuffs and let him go free! "The gendarmes might have left and I could have given my little sister a hug. Because then will come 1 year and 4 months of imprisonment, 1 year and 4 months where even in the visiting room, the guards prevent hugs.
When I arrive at the prison in France, a 2-metre-high guard tells me: "If you burn my car, I'll cut you in half". Between the policeman who is ready to shoot me and the guard who wants to cut me up, I think I'd rather get shot than end up in two pieces. But what is worrying, besides the threat of death, is that this guard thinks I burned a car. I realize at that moment what a monstrous deception the upcoming trial is. By accusing someone of all the violence that can happen at a demonstration, you create a blur in the simplistic minds of the guards and police officers. By making a disproportionate accusation, you create disproportionate treatment.
This guard goes on with dubious speed: "It's useless what you've done, now look where you are, where are your friends? Now you're here..." I point out to him that he too is here, but he goes on: "... You are alone, you have failed in your life. You've changed nothing and you're useless, etc.". "I don't even have the opportunity to make a statement, or to have an exchange, he cuts me off. I don't even have the opportunity to make a statement or to have a discussion, he cuts me off. He doesn't even sweat what he says, I have the impression that he has the mission to demoralize me. I am then strip-searched when I enter the prison, and then also when I leave the prison and go to the court to judge on the legality of the arrest warrant. I am transferred by the Eris. The Eris are mastodons, hooded and armed with machine guns, they are eight in two 4×4 armoured cars with tinted windows. Arriving at the Nancy Court of Appeal, in a waiting room before the hearing, an Eris, after chaining me hand and foot, tries to win on the field of ideas: "You know you're expensive? "he says. I answer him: "Do you know that 40 million euros are poured into the Meuse every year to get the project to bury nuclear waste in Bure accepted? "He: "What do you want me to do about it? ». Me : " Oh nothing, I just wanted to specify what is expensive. "End of dialogue.
During the hearing, I walk in front of the judge with two hooded Eris officers, one on my right and one on my left. It's a totally surreal situation, I'm handcuffed. My family and friends are there to support me. My big brother pastor then throws me a little piece of paper with a few words of encouragement, I catch him despite the handcuffs but I am tackled to the ground by an agent Eris. The judges withdrew immediately and my brother was evacuated from the room. While I'm still on the floor, I try to keep the paper in the palm of my hand with all my might. The agent puts pressure on my neck and I scream in pain as I let go. The hearing resumes. The indictment is translated in a way that implies that it was me personally who burned nineteen cars and injured a person in a building.
In this French prison, I found myself stuck in the "arriving ward" for a month waiting to be transferred to Germany. What traumatized me was the passage of a guard every two hours, even in the middle of the night, who checks if I am still alive by sliding the door cover with a lot of noise before turning on the light. I've never been able to sleep more than two hours straight. I had the opportunity to meet a scrap metal collector of Romanian origin. His crime was that he had not declared how much money he had earned by collecting what he found on the sidewalks. He had been given four months for a lack of 400 euros in taxes to the state. There are tax evasions, tax havens, money laundering, panama papers, luxleaks, billions and billions of euros that disappear into the hands of the rich. But I haven't seen rich people or bankers in prison, not everyone can afford to escape in a double bass trunk. The 500 richest people in France have tripled their fortunes since the financial crisis of 2008, reaching 650 billion euros.
Equality means being able to enjoy the same material capacity, but a cleaning lady cannot live in a villa on the Elbschaussee. And the gentrification in Hamburg, which is currently continuing, is not expected to help matters. Inequalities are growing. The young Italian Fabio, a former prisoner of the G20 in Hamburg, told the court (in 2017) that the 85 richest people in the world had the same wealth as 50% of the poorest population. The situation has worsened since then. An appeal by the yellow jackets in January 2019 stated that it is now 26 billionaires who own as much as half of humanity. The education offered by the judicial institution on this point is that it is immoral not to pay taxes when one is poor but that it is acceptable when the wealthy class can afford it. This is called class justice. And I have learned nothing in your institutions that beautifies the human soul, all the depravity.
Here's a quote from Michel Foucault:
“The illegality of property has been separated from that of rights. A division that covers a class opposition, since, on the one hand, the illegalism that will be most accessible to the working classes will be that of goods - the violent transfer of property; on the other hand, the bourgeoisie will reserve for itself the illegalism of rights: the possibility of circumventing its own regulations and its own laws; of having a whole immense sector of economic circulation assured by a game that unfolds in the margins of legislation - margins provided for by its silences, or freed by a de facto tolerance. And this great redistribution of illegality will even result in a specialization of judicial circuits: for the illegality of property - for theft -, the ordinary courts and punishments; for the illegality of rights - fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial operations - special courts with settlements, accommodations, reduced fines, etc.; for the illegality of rights - fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial operations - special courts with settlements, accommodations, reduced fines, etc.; and for the illegality of rights, special courts with settlements, accommodations, reduced fines. The bourgeoisie has reserved for itself the fruitful domain of the illegality of rights. ”
When I was transferred to Hamburg in a German police car, the driver put on some music and then turned it up when it wasL’Internationale, the "Soko SchwarzBlock" officers certainly wanted to see my reaction. I could not prevent myself from telling them that I prefer La Makhnovtchina. I found interesting to be able to talk about permaculture with a policewoman even if, between two vegetables, she tried to ask me questions to know if I had gone to the G20 and what I had been able to do there. I think I finally managed to awaken in her a greater interest in vegetables. When I arrived in Hamburg, I was transferred by another truck and other police officers to the UHA detention centre. We made several stops in the evening and in the evening I was joined in my small cell by others who had been arrested for various reasons. There is no seatbelt so we sometimes hit the wall. We found ourselves in a tight group of four and two men were completely drunk. One of them banged on the wall to ask to go to the toilet several times, even when there was a stop to add a person arrested in the second cell, to no avail. He finally could not hold himself back and peed on the floor. So I stayed balanced on the bench with my two feet up, another tried the same tactic. The one who peed and the last one who was also drunk did not seem to be aware of the situation and left their shoes on the floor. The puddle of piss, following the truck's movements, ended up wandering all over the surface, sometimes escaping under the door where my boxes of stuff from the prison in France were located. Part of one box absorbed some urine, but it was a guard who transported it without noticing it. In a way, we can say that justice has been done. Because it is not good to prevent someone from urinating.
After a few days of observation in a cell where the light was always on, I found this ritual of the guard looking inside every two hours. The advantage is that there was no cover to slide in here because the door contained a small window. In an empty cell where nothing happens, every two hours I would see the face of a guard for a few seconds. If I put myself for a moment in the place of this guard who has to look at each inmate, I think I would burst into tears to see so much distress. I think most guards learn to stop having emotions. They're almost like automatons or robots. And I also believe that most don't dream of doing this job, but that the choice to become a guard is often made because there was no other visible alternative. I say visible alternative because there are plenty of opportunities in peasant or market gardening collectives. Sowing seeds or sowing despair in the hearts of those who are locked up. As long as this planet is not completely ruined, I think we have a choice. I stayed for the first four months in little building A which runs parallel to the courthouse where we are now. I also talk about this building in my testimony of leaving prison through the text: Breaking the prison wall that separates the area from the outside, from which I will take up some passages:
This building is the newcomers' building. There, we have to stay 23 hours a day in a cell, 7 days a week. It's a dark place where inmates crack, scream and bang on the walls. I was there for four months. During the first month, I only had the clothes I had on when I arrived. I couldn't get my things back even though they arrived at the same time. In this building, there were mainly foreigners whose crime was to have been checked without papers, small-time drug dealers or people accused of theft. I saw hateful glances from the guards at length at the racialized inmates. Most of the foreigners I met on a walk through Building A defined the guards as Nazis. It made me feel strange to hear that today, knowing that in that same prison, less than a century ago, Nazis killed several hundred people. After a month's wait, I finally got my change of clothes. With now a good dozen underpants, knowing that the other inmates have only one, I started to make distributions during the hour of the walk. My family sent me about 50 underpants. It gave me a lot of energy to be able to help other people in prison by distributing them, there was this sentence written in pen on a wall of a cell "When you help someone, you help yourself". It was in building A that I was first put in solitary confinement because a guard caught me giving bread to the pigeons on the floor.
After 4 months in building A, I was able to move to another building where there were more open cell hours during the day. One inmate bought the board game Risk, but since it was only possible to play with a maximum of 6 players and there were 12 of us upstairs, I started building expansion cards on boxes of Kellogs that the other inmates could buy from the shopkeeper and making miniatures with flour, salt and water. In order to colour them, I bought a kit of coloured pencils that I would grind into powder, taking care to remove the pieces of wood before adding water to make liquid paint. It is possible to imagine a lot of board games with flour, water and a little salt. Another inmate even started to copy the territories I had imagined in order to make the game board in 3D. I think I must have played at least 50 games of Risk in prison. One game could be spread over several weeks as we were up to ten players. To give you an idea there are 42 territories on the base game, the largest of the game boards I created was 189 territories. I was often the first person to get eliminated from the game because I was constantly trying to fight the strongest and motivate others to balance the game by attacking him. I noticed that in prison there is often a prisoner who thinks he's the leader and as everyone fears, nobody dares to fight him in the game so as not to create tension, so he always wins. I also wrote about fifty pages of alternative rules for Risk to make it more collaborative and less competitive. Unfortunately, when I got out of jail, I could only retrieve the game boards, the cards & miniatures remained in my cell and were not taken with my stuff.
What I will never forget is every morning at 6:45 a.m. the guard who opens my door and says: "Morgen". At first I would answer and I found it interesting that someone would take the trouble to say hello to me in the morning, it's giving you a little consideration, a little humanity. But then, one morning, in a bad mood, I didn't feel like answering, the guard then started to insist "MORGEN! MORGEN!" I put my head under my pillow and he left. Yet I hadn't said anything, I hadn't answered the greeting. The next day, when another guard said "MORGEN" to me, I did a test by simply lifting my foot, he also left. I then grasped with dread that every morning "morgen" was not a morning greeting, but a question: "Are you still alive?". And that any gesture or answer meant for the guard: "It's all right, I haven't killed myself yet". That word still continues to chill my blood to this day.
There are other texts I have written explaining my prison adventures in more detail. For example, how I found myself in solitary confinement on two other occasions on false accusations of having shouted out of my window during two demonstrations of support. When this happened for the second time, the other inmates each signed a handwritten petition stating that I had not yelled out my window. When I found out about this, I got shivers down my spine. I was able to experience some very strong moments in prison. Often we allow ourselves to be ironic in our lives and in our interactions with others. In prison, there are exchanges & people that I was able to meet with an intensity that I will never forget. Another text "Escalation of arbitrariness, disciplinary procedure and release of a bird" also explains how I discovered a dead baby bird in a holding cell during the breaks in the trial. I had brought it back to the court because I knew that no one would believe me if I told it without evidence. It's one of those little dungeons that is next to every courtroom. It smelled like a fermented corpse. I also tell the story of how a female guard let me catch a skinny pigeon in a prisoner's corridor into the courtroom. I was able to let it fly out of the courtroom window.
To this day, I still dream two or three times a week that I get arrested by the police in different situations or places. Once a month I dream that a policeman shoots at me during the arrest. I find it difficult to take initiatives because in prison they don't let you do anything of your own free will, you have to constantly submit to an outside will. I notice that I now let myself be carried away more easily by others and that it is difficult to assert myself or simply to be myself. I don't even know who I am anymore. I no longer have an identity and all the people I meet know me through the trial: "ah he's the one on trial". This trial becomes my new identity. And even when I am asked a question about what I am doing in Hamburg, I inevitably have to talk about the trial because otherwise I would not be here but close to my relatives in France. I don't see any sense in this city and it seems very sad to me. I've always hated cities. I think they should be dismantled by offering free and tax-free plots of land to anyone who wants them. Cities are not healthy places, there is no self-sufficiency in food or energy. They are going to collapse one day or another. I miss my family and friends. Because one of the principles of incarceration is to separate you from your loved ones and from where you live, I feel that even though I was released from prison in December, I am still locked up. I only went to see my family in France once, finding a time between court hearings and work. And since the Coronavirus, it's impossible to cross the border. A friend called Monique Tatala was very seriously ill in February, and when I finally managed to free up a weekend to visit her in hospital, I learned that she had died a few days before I left.
I was born in Nancy, a town in the north-east of France, 80km from the village of Bure, where there is a project to bury the most radioactive nuclear waste 500 metres underground. Before starting law school to practice as an environmental lawyer, I made long solitary trips by bicycle where I began to read all the favourite books of Christopher McCandless, the young man whose life inspired the film "Into The Wild". I was able to discover Tolstoy, Jack London and Henri David Thoreau, my favourite author. The latter lived 2 years alone in the woods refusing to pay his taxes to the American state that practises the "tax system".
“In my brief experience of human life, I discovered that the obstacles that stood in my way were not living men, but dead institutions. Men are as innocent as the morning to the early riser, to the confident pilgrim or the early traveller he met on his way to poetry. While institutions such as church, state, school, property, are grim and ghostly ghosts because of the blind respect shown to them. When I surrendered myself to the poetic dream of an earthly paradise, I did not consider being disturbed by a Chippewa Indian, but I thought he would likely be swallowed up by a monstrous institution. The only highwayman I ever met was the state itself. When I refused to pay the tax that he demanded for this protection that I did not want, he stole from me himself. When I asserted the freedom he proclaims, he imprisoned me. I love humanity, I hate the institutions of his forefathers. Not thieves or highwaymen, but gendarmes and judges; not fishermen, but priests; not ignorant people, but pedants and teachers; not foreign enemies, but armies in marching order; not pirates, but warships. Not gratuitous malevolence but organized benevolence. For example, the jailer or gendarme simply considered as a man and a neighbour - with the last 70 years to live - may prove to be an upright and dignified man with a brain capable of thinking; but as an officer and instrument of the State, he has no more understanding or heart than the key to his prison or his club.
What is most saddening is that men voluntarily adopt the character and function of a brutal nature. Surely there are plenty of ways in which a man can obtain bread without it making him a nuisance as a neighbour and companion. There are enough stones in the way of the traveller without a man adding his own body to them. To take but one example: There has undoubtedly never been a worse crime committed since the beginning of time than the present Mexican War [in which Mexico was forced to surrender Texas, California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona to the United States]. This is the implacable commandment: move and you will be dislodged; be the master of your actions or you will become the instrument of the most insignificant slave without even realizing it. Anyone can govern who does not govern himself. All men are more or less buried in the tomb of customs, and for some, only the few hairs at the top of their skull emerge from the ground. Those who are physically dead are better off, for at least there is life in their decomposition. Those who have an estate to defend that they have usurped by deed, slaves to keep in their service, those who would like to hold on to their last breath and keep it forever, those demand the help of institutions, of this stereotyped and petrified testament of the past. But those who are, in themselves, something to be defended, who are not enslaved, who are in tune with their times, do not want this kind of subjection.”
The first thing that saddened me when I read his diary was to know that there is hardly any wilderness left today. I came to the conclusion that it would even become criminal to lead a life of contemplation as he did, because at present our industrial civilization is destroying 200 species of animals and plants every day. That would be contemplating disaster. On July 7, 2020, that will make 219,000 plant and animal species exterminated by our industrial & capitalist civilization since the Hamburg G20. To my knowledge, the demonstrations have not caused the extinction of any species, not even a single luxury brand company. I don't want to list here the extent of the disaster, of the collapse that is taking place, I think everyone has heard about it and can find out by doing some research. In the debates that may have shaken this court, I have heard that it may be understandable to fight violently under Nazism, but that it is not appropriate in a democracy as we know it today. The problem is that we are not in a democracy but in a representative regime. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, just after the French Revolution, in his speech of 7 September 1789, said :
“France should not be a democracy, but a representative regime. The choice between these two methods of making the law is not in doubt among us. First of all, the very great plurality of our fellow citizens have neither enough education nor enough leisure time to want to deal directly with the laws that must govern France; they must therefore limit themselves to appointing representatives. ...] Citizens who appoint themselves as representatives renounce and must renounce making the law themselves; they have no particular will to impose it. If they dictated their will, France would no longer be this representative state; it would be a democratic state. The people, I repeat, in a country that is not a democracy (and France cannot be one), the people cannot speak, can only act through their representatives.”
This person who actively participated in the development of the political system after the French revolution has the intellectual honesty to recognize that a representative system is not a democracy. Today, the ruling class, in order not to lose its interests and risk disappearing under a new popular discontent, lulls us from school and repeats on television that we are in an "advanced democracy". This pretentious formulation would have us believe that we would have gone even beyond democracy when in reality we have never reached that stage but are still today under a representative regime.
I have decided to act rather than surrender my power to a representative.
"You send your representatives into an environment of corruption; don't be surprised if they come out corrupt," wrote Élisée Reclus in his text Do not vote, act. Parliaments are infested with lobbies, big business and financial interests.
So I started by joining the Anonymous movement, where I only write texts and make videos against big useless and imposed projects. The idea was to target the websites of big industries or the French government involved in different projects like the Sivens dam, the nuclear wastebasket in Bure or the Notre Dame des Landes airport, for example. At the same time, I went to the October 2014 demonstration in Sivens where Rémi Fraisse was killed by a police grenade about 100 metres away from me. It was one of my first demonstrations and I was traumatized by the police violence, the 400 explosive grenades indiscriminately thrown into the night, the state lie that masked the circumstances of his death, the media propaganda of criminalization, and the indifference of the justice system, which dismissed the case despite the demands of Rémi's family to obtain a symbolic sentence. The next morning I called my little sister directly on the phone, and I cried, realizing that I could have been there too with all those grenades exploding all around me. Since then I have also had worsening hearing problems and continuous high-pitched tinnitus in my ear. But the most serious thing for me is that today I can say in front of you that a young man of my age died almost next to me in a demonstration, that I can say it with a cold bloodedness. Something died inside me during the incarceration, I lost part of my emotions in prison.
In order for you to understand a little better, I would like to say a few things about this day of mobilization which was held in the middle of nature in the Tescou valley (South-West of France), the prefecture had promised not to deploy gendarmes in order not to generate tensions by even removing, just in case, the construction site machinery. The Sivens dam was carried by the CACG, a public-private organization, which allowed it to make a declaration of public utility and thus get its hands on taxpayers' money: nearly 4 million euros of public funds to build this dam to support intensive agriculture. But to top it all off, the Fourrogue dam, built just before this Sivens dam project, was declared illegal and unsuitable by the administrative court after its construction. In other words, it could not even fulfil the purpose for which it was built, namely the irrigation of crops. This shows that the interest behind these projects is essentially the misappropriation of public money. The project holders want to build about 50 dams in the region and they are currently thinking about redoing a dam project not far from the place where Rémi, a young man of 21, was killed by the police. A river must be able to flow freely to the ocean. Is it healthier to adapt to nature or to adapt nature to capitalism?
I would like someone to explain to me where the progress is when large groups like Bayer/Monsanto patent life and carry out mutations on plants so that it is impossible to reuse the seeds every year without having to buy them back. It has now been shown that in old seed varieties a genetic code is transmitted from generation to generation through the seeds, the plant adapts to its environment, it has intelligence, it improves and gets stronger every year. Bayer & Monsanto are responsible for the death of several tens of thousands of people through illness or suicide, in particular by banning the use of certain seeds and imposing genetically modified seeds.
In India, for example, peasants are indebted to have to buy them back every year, but you will never see the managers of these companies do 1 year and 4 months in prison for these reasons.
Getting back to Anonymous, I found out about the nuclear waste disposal project in Bure, a few steps away from my house, on the internet. I hadn't heard about it at school, on the news or in the papers. So I did some research and discovered that for more than 20 years, people have been fighting and mobilizing against this project. There has even been a petition signed by hand by over 50,000 people asking for a local referendum to find out if people agree with this project. That petition was ignored. It would indeed be a pity for the local authorities to lose the €80 million distributed each year to "economically support" the landfill project. Up to the schools, nuclear money is flowing, and school walks are organised in the underground tunnels where already two workers have died in a collapse of the galleries.
When the National Agency for the Management of Radioactive Waste was reminded that there will eventually be a collapse of the tunnels, the answer given by one official was: "It's planned, Cigéo will collapse, but we prefer to talk about convergences of rocks. "I rather believe that a convergence of struggles will prevent the madness of this project. In the same way as the Italian writer Erri de Luca said about the planned Lyon-Turin TGV line in Italy, I believe that the project to bury nuclear waste must be slowed down, hindered and therefore sabotaged for the legitimate defence of health, soil, air and water.
Germany theoretically stopped nuclear power after Fukushima, but nuclear waste remains a problem. In France, while we also don't know what to do with the waste, we are going to renew the fleet of power plants and launch a new generation of reactors (EPR), mainly so that we can sell them abroad.
In view of the laborious management that the nuclear subsidiary carried out in Somalia and then by throwing drums of nuclear waste into the ocean and into various landfill sites at multiple accidents (in New Mexico and Germany), it seems obvious that nuclear waste management should not be left to these irresponsible individuals.
““You don’t solve problems with the ways of thinking that created them.””
It is important to honestly admit that we do not know what to do and we have never known what to do with nuclear waste. Therefore, stopping the production of its waste immediately is a matter of course.
This issue of management should be taken into account by society as a whole, by funding independent research. Where can the money come from? There are 80 million euros dumped in the department of Meuse and Haute-Marne every year to buy the consent of those who will be irradiated tomorrow. In the language of the time, this is no longer called "corrupting" but "working on the social acceptability of a project". Let us redirect this money into the search for alternatives. For the existing waste, let us try to find solutions through science, rather than the purchase of consciences. There are the nuclear CEOs, nucleocrats and other people who have made millions, even billions of profits on the back of our lives, they will also have to give the money back, for the survival of humanity.
I would like to remind you that Germany will probably be more affected by this landfill project, because Bure is located in the north-east of France under the prevailing westerly winds.
It is this commitment in the computer field against Bure and the Sivens Dam that led me to a first court conviction after the visit of 7 DGSI agents to my parents' home. The 48 hours of custody that followed was a horror. Refusing to collaborate, the agents went so far as to threaten to take my best friend into custody because he appeared on the rush of a video montage. They managed to break me by putting pressure on this close friend who does not share my political views. I want to insist on this monstrous baseness of the French police elite. When I was young, I didn't think it was possible to go that far. To put pressure on people close to me, I thought it was only in films or under dictatorships. I was given a four-month suspended prison sentence as well as a five-year ban on taking competitive exams in certain professions in the public domain. Being in my first year of law school at the time, I decided to appeal to ask that this trade ban be removed so that I could continue my studies and try to become an environmental lawyer. Unfortunately, the court of appeal upheld the ban, which also became active again for five years at that time. That's when I had to forget about this career plan and turned to permaculture. Land in which the state has not yet hindered me.
In France, the German police are seen as the kings of de-escalation, but in Hamburg I saw thousands of demonstrators climbing a wall to escape the police bludgeoning their skulls. It was the first day of the demonstrations against the G20 in Hamburg, the positioning of the water cannons, which from the beginning were almost in contact with the procession, and the police charges on all sides did not even allow the opportunity to escape. There were several dozen very serious head injuries. So why do courthouses remain silent in the face of police violence? Where are the photos of police officers bludgeoning skulls in the media and their post-G20 whistle-blowing columns?
I accuse the judiciary of being part of a closed group of people who practice violence on the basis of a division of labour between the police officers who carry out their duties and the courts, which condone and encourage crimes through their laxity. The courthouses in general, belonging to this group, are complicit in all the police violence of the G20 because none of them have distanced themselves from it. There have been no convictions of police officers since the G20, despite the many videos and citizen documentation. But it is also a structural problem of the police institution, the police do not bring up investigations against themselves. Bertolt Brecht said:
“A river that carries away everything is said to be violent, but nothing is ever said about the violence of the banks that surround it.”
Should we welcome the G20 or prevent it by protesting?
The summit brings together the world's five largest arms dealers - the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain, all of whom are also permanent members of the UN Security Council. "When you're for peace, you don't sell arms," these are the words of a Guinean paperless man in the courtyard of Building A. He told me a lot about Guinea and Africa in general, a continent that is very rich in resources but poor because of the plundering by the capitalist system. If the Thomas Sankara or Patrice Lumumba didn't end up each time assassinated by weapons built in the countries of the North, Africa would have a different face today.
During the G20 in Hamburg, France and Germany were selling arms to Turkey. Weapons that were probably used during the Turkish offensive against the Kurds in the Rojava Mountains in northern Syria. Turkish journalists are still imprisoned for revealing that Erdogan had delivered weapons to Daesh. If a person gives a stone to a demonstrator, he can be charged as an accomplice to an act of extreme violence and could end up in prison. But selling arms is a legal act. Perhaps the problem is that it is a gift and it would be fairer for you to become a stone merchant. Or it has nothing to do with the financial interest and it would be a moral issue: it is good to sell arms because they are used to make war for peace, an inconsistency already described by George Orwell in his work "1984". Anarchists have recently been tortured in Russia. Torture that can be found in Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Do you have any idea of the extreme violence embodied in your summit, this meeting of the 20 richest states on the planet?
There is something particularly serious about this, with five people having to answer for all the damage caused by a demonstration. Ninety-nine per cent of the charges are not directed at the accused personally. The accusation extends to more than EUR 1 million of damage. The prosecutor is trying to construct and impose a very broad vision of complicity, to the point that he even wishes to extend it beyond the presumed presence of the accused. In concrete terms, imagine yourself in a demonstration, someone burns a car 50 metres away from you: you are considered responsible for the damage.
But that is nothing! Now imagine yourself leaving a demonstration, 10 minutes later a molotov cocktail is thrown: although you are no longer present, you are also considered responsible. There are many problems in this trial, in the prison, in the police, in capitalism, in the state and its world. These different themes have, among others, as common rottenness: the thirst for management, globalisation, classification. The personality of the individual, his identity, his creativity, his uniqueness, must fit into a box, a group.
Here is another quote from Thoreau:
“A man’s uniqueness is manifested in every feature of his face and in every action he takes. To confuse one man with another and always consider them as a whole is a mark of stupidity. Obtuse minds distinguish only between races, nations or clans, when the wise man distinguishes between individuals.”
I'm not going to be able to explain what I didn't do, and if you ask me what I think about it, it might fit into this other quote:
“No matter what my judgments on this or that act or this or that individual, I will never mix my voice with the cries of hatred of men who set armies, police, magistracy, priests and laws in motion for the maintenance of their privileges.”
You still have a little time left before the end of this trial in order to limit the indictment only to what I have been able to do, until that is the case, I refuse to speak on the charge against me on the Elbschaussee demonstration. Namely: if I was indeed present, if you have confused me with other people, or if I was simply not there, proof in support.
In France, I was accused of having cut a fence around a nuclear waste burial project, I claimed in court to explain this gesture. The transcript of this trial is available in a brochure entitled "Know that I expect nothing from your institution" also translated into German. Other trials against anarchists such as that of Alexander Marius Jacob also contain a claim and explanation of the acts carried out before the court. This is a strategy of rupture. I understand the attitude of not wanting to speak out and keeping silent and I want to stand in solidarity with those who choose not to speak out in court. However, I detest false narratives from prosecutors or police. And it is in the courts that their versions are established and taken up by judges and then the media. I am speaking today to tell you about something I experienced on the streets of Hamburg.
On the afternoon of 7 July 2017, the German police made another demonstration of their de-escalation. In an incessant ballet of police officers charging as they repeatedly passed around Rota Flora. On several occasions I have seen the police bludgeoning people on the pavements and people sitting at the terraces of bars, drinking a drink for no reason. Maybe in a police mind, just being present around Rote Flora is enough guilt? In the small park just behind, 4 policemen ran towards a person who was in a corner near a bush, she got beaten up out of sight & away from the cameras. I saw a reporter getting beaten up by the police. And while yet another person was being severely bludgeoned in front of Rota Flora, I spontaneously walked forward with other people, shouting in indignation. A policeman gassed me in the face. I then put my backpack on the ground and threw 2 bottles of beer in front of me towards the police. There is police violence behind this gesture, I don't want to apologize for it. Especially since I didn't manage to reach the police and the bottles landed next to them (as you can see on a video). Of course, in your eyes, whether or not the projectile hits a police officer remains illegal, just as your law prohibits bludgeoning at head height or putting tear gas in the face. But has there ever been a court case against a police officer who bludgeoned in the wind next to a head without touching it? No. There hasn't even been a single trial against a policeman who bludgeoned a skull at the G20. So do you have to wear a helmet during a demonstration?
A little later, on a police video, I am seen running towards an elderly lady pushing her bicycle. She had stopped in the middle of the road as a water cannon was moving towards her. I helped her get to the sidewalk and once we reached the sidewalk, we caught a jet from the water cannon clearly aimed at both of us. You are always very imaginative and extremely sensitive when you write in your indictments that this particular projectile was thrown at the police and add "accepting that it could have seriously injured the police officers". For before imagining that, you might have to show that the projectile did indeed hit a police officer. Once that is done, it must be recognized that it is difficult to seriously injure a police officer when he is wearing protective gear, unlike protesters who do not wear any. In the meantime, the powerful jet of water clearly hit us and no one blames the police officer who fired the shot for "accepting that it could have seriously injured this elderly woman". After checking that she was well, I picked up 2 stones and threw them in the direction of the water cannon. The police were in position behind the water cannon.
Not finding myself in your definitions of good or bad demonstrators, I want you to know that I stand in solidarity with anyone who finds themselves facing justice following demonstrations: whether it be the G20 or the yellow vests, whether it be in Minneapolis or the working-class neighborhoods, whether it be in Chile or Hong Kong. For once again, whatever my judgments on this or that act or this or that individual, I will never mix my voice with those who put armies, police, magistracy, priests and laws in motion to maintain their privileges.
There have been many attempts to block the G20 with non-violent sittings, I also took part in this strategy and one person next to me ended up with a black eye while another policeman kicked me while we were sitting. I noticed that it was less dangerous to use this tactic if there were cameras filming the scene. The police seem very sensitive to his image and refrain from showing his violence in the spotlight, but they do not hesitate, once a little shadow appears, to deploy their darkness.
“Passive non-violent resistance is effective as long as your opponent adheres to the same rules as we do. But if the peaceful demonstration only meets with violence, its effectiveness ends. For me, non-violence was not a moral principle but a strategy. There is no moral good in using an ineffective weapon.”
There is a February 1989 analysis of the effects of uniformity by the Correctional Service of Canada. The study showed that a person will be more likely to be aggressive if he or she wears a uniform. That is why I am not particularly angry at individuals, but at the situation created by being a police officer. It is likely that soon, as in Minneapolis, it will become necessary for more and more people to dismantle the police.
Finally, the German press often highlights the economic impact of demonstrations. I believe that for the whole of the G20 in Hamburg I had heard that it was 10 million euros of damage. I will show you that a person who eats healthy and does some damage during a demonstration costs society less than a McDonald's regular. An article in the newspaper "Liberation" for the year 2019 estimated that the cost of junk food for health in France is 55 billion euros per year. There would have to be 5,500 demonstrations each year with 10 million euros of damage to match the economic impact of junk food. Knowing that the mobilisations were spread over 4 days, it is not possible to carry out more than 92 of them in a year. Unless one allows oneself to imagine several events at the same time. It would therefore be necessary that 59 events such as those of the G20 in Hamburg take place simultaneously, repeating themselves continuously for a year so that the economic damage equals that of bad food in France. I haven't found any figures for Germany but I think it's pretty much the same. Rounding off, we can say that junk food costs EUR 100 billion a year in Germany and France. So 300 billion euros since the Hamburg G20, isn't it wiser to sue the food giants who poison our food and our lives?
Here are a few words from Ravachol:
“En créant les articles du Code, les législateurs ont oublié qu’ils n’attaquaient pas les causes mais simplement les effets, et qu’alors ils ne détruisaient aucunement le crime ; en vérité, les causes existant, toujours les effets en découleront. Oui, je le répète : c’est la société qui fait les criminels, et vous jurés, au lieu de les frapper, vous devriez employer votre intelligence et vos forces à transformer la société. Du coup, vous supprimeriez tous les crimes ; et votre œuvre, en s’attaquant aux causes, serait plus grande et plus féconde que n’est votre justice qui s’amoindrit à punir les effets.”
I heard the court was concerned about whether the sentence was sufficient for the education of the accused. I was surprised to discover this form of education. You believe that punishment by confinement is a means of compelling a person not to do it again. There are open prisons with a 20% recidivism rate in Norway, the place where I was locked up for 1 year and 4 months has a 70% recidivism rate. In this Norwegian prison the guards sometimes sing a song to newcomers, there is listening, love and consideration. When I arrived in your prison, I stayed 1 month with the same underpants locked up 23 hours a day, crossing the severe looks of the guards who despise the prisoners. But at the risk of not having been clear, because one could believe that I am satisfied with a Norwegian prison. Just like Ravachol saying "it is society that makes the criminals" and the criminologist Alexandre Lassange saying "society has the criminals it deserves". I believe that it is by transforming society that we can eliminate all crime. And I believe that there is a 0% chance of recidivism in this trial, because the cause has disappeared, there will never again be a G20 in Hamburg.
My next declaration will contain a text imagining a G20 without police, which I see as alternatives to your summit, as well as a critique of the industrial civilization & renewable energies of green capitalism. I will also table in your court a potato comic book I made in prison explaining how all the states of the world could get rid of their atomic bombs.
Loïc, Hamburg, 17 June 2020.
This text is free of rights.
Next week, the prosecutor will make his requisitions. Loïc should normally be allowed to speak a second time on July 9th. The judgment is expected before mid-July.
Find more information on the website in support of Loïc: https://laneigesurhambourg.noblogs.org/
German version here: https://de.indymedia.org/node/89481