On 11 November 2008, twenty youths were arrested
in Paris, Rouen and the village of Tarnac, in the
Massif Central district of Corrèze. The Tarnac
operation involved helicopters, 150
balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen, with
studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths
were accused of having participated in a number
of sabotage attacks against high-speed TGV train
routes, involving the obstruction of the trains'
power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars,
causing a series of delays affecting some 160
trains. The suspects who remain in custody were
soon termed the 'Tarnac Nine', after the village
where some of them had purchased a small
farmhouse, reorganized the local grocery store as
a cooperative, and taken up a number of civic
activities from the running of a film club to the
delivery of food to the elderly.
The minister of the interior, Michèle
Alliot-Marie, promptly intervened to underline
the presumption of guilt and to classify the
whole affair under the rubric of terrorism,
linking it to the supposed rise of an
insurrectionist 'ultra-Left', or
'anarcho-autonomist tendency'. The nine were
interrogated and detained for ninety-six hours.
Four were subsequently released. The official
accusation was association of wrongdoers in
relation to a terrorist undertaking', a charge
that can carry up to twenty years in jail. On 2
December, three more of the Tarnac Nine were
released under judiciary control, leaving two in
jail, at the time of writing (early January
2009): Julien Coupat and Yldune Lévy.
Giorgio Agamben and Luc Boltanski wrote
editorials decrying the disproportion and
hysteria of this repressive operation. A petition
was circulated by Eric Hazan, publisher and
friend of Coupat, and signed by Badiou, Bensaïd,
Butler, Rancière, iek and several others. In
Tarnac (a village proud of its role in the
Resistance, and represented by a communist mayor
for four decades) a committee of support was set
up, conveying a virtually unanimous show of
solidarity of the villagers with those arrested.
<http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=27700>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/04/war-against-pre-terrorism-tarnac-9-and.htm>monochrom
at 4/16/2009 12:29:00 PM
