TARRED WITH A BRUSH

Last November 150 balaclava clad police descended in force on the isolated village of Tarnac in rural France, home to just 350 people. Twenty people were arrested and nine were later charged with ‘criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity’. Amongst the detainees were a Swiss sitcom actor, a distinguished clarinettist, a student nurse and an Edinburgh University graduate who ran the grocer’s shop and its adjoining bar-restaurant.

The French government claimed that Tarnac had been the location of a cell of dangerous anarchist terrorists, who locals had been too simple to detect. The arrests followed months of surveillance and were supposedly in connection with incidents of sabotage of high speed train lines that passed near the village. While a few trains were delayed in the actions, no one was hurt. 

The nine, like a number of other young people in the village, had moved to Tarnac to escape the consumer society and to seek an alternative lifestyle based on community values and ecological principals. They came to the attention of the authorities after attending protests and demonstrations around Europe and the US.

What paltry evidence the police had strongly focused on linking the nine with the publication of the anonymously written and rather optimistically titled The Coming Insurrection.

Despite a complete lack of material evidence the authorities branded the nine as a “hard core cell that had armed struggle as its purpose” and described their home as a “a meeting place, for indoctrination, (and) a headquarters for violent action”. Residents scoffed at the claims: one neighbour, a sheep farmer and the independent mayor of the neighbouring village, Thierry Letellier, was quoted as saying “They were my neighbours, helping me on the farm and selling my meat at the shop. They were kind, intelligent and spoke several languages. They were politicised, on the left and clearly anti-capitalist like lots of people here, but they were people active in community life who wanted to change society at a local level first.”

In spite of the heady claims of the police that these were dangerous terrorists, eight of the nine were rapidly released on bail. Only the supposed ‘ringleader’ Julien Coupat, remained in incarceration. The arrests sparked a worldwide solidarity campaign which has kept up pressure on the government throughout the last six months. Last Thursday Coupat was finally released, although under the terms of his release, he will have to stay in the Paris region and surrender his passport and identity papers. Even though they have completely failed to bring any prosecutions against the nine, they remain under investigation. 

Coupat has dismsissed the ridiculousness of the behaviour of the authorities in his persecution saying such “pathetic allegation(s) can only be the work of a regime that is on the point of tipping over into nothingness”.

* See http://tarnac9.wordpress.com