Good afternoon to all of you,

I bring you the greetings of the Port of Genoa and I thank the organisers for this initiative, which is very important for us. It is important to create this international network at European level to counter this logic of war and of all wars. The war in Ukraine has highlighted what wars are today in the world: the imperialist war striking down all populations, and also the social war we are witnessing today, which, as said in the introduction, is plundering resources. It is a war against the lowest social classes.

We have had an experience of struggle, we did not want to be complicit in this spiral of war, whether at university level, at company level with the construction of weapons, or at port level with the delivery of weapons, which are stored there before being shipped to different countries. When we saw this spiral of war, we decided to launch a series of blockades. From 2019 to now, we have set up 6 blockades in the ports. It concerned the war in Yemen, Syria and Gaza.

We also tried to channel this opposition into a demonstration on February 25th 2023 in Genoa, Italy, in relation to the war in Ukraine but also to other wars, a symbolic opposition, a mobilisation linked to Law 85, an Italian law that prohibits the shipment of arms from Italy. We recalled the existence of this law. The government’s response was to send us 70 police officers who called us a criminal organisation. This demonstration was a wake-up call to create a very important popular imprint against the war. We had no political flag, it was building a mobilisation in the streets, with very clear slogans against the war. It was a big demonstration, with 10,000 people, and we succeeded in marching into the port of Genoa during the demonstration, the very port where the ships loading the weapons were. We thus showed that the industrial areas of the port were economically involved in the war.

That’s why it’s important to build anti-war committees in Italy too, and to move from theory to practice, that is to blockade and to organise demonstrations. I agree with the proposal made at the beginning of the conference to create this network, this international committee against the war. Thank you all.