Читать книгу The Zad and NoTAV - Mauvaise Troupe - Страница 8

He speaks, without pausing, for several hours straight. His powerful voice fills the small Italian café in the Susa Valley. He tells us the story of his valley, the forests he has learned how to see, the streams that no longer flow, the Juventus soccer games that no longer interest him. Each word is a reverberation of the territory he resolved to defend, now, some several years ago. Each sentence, each intonation emanates from the deepest part of himself, surprising and touching the heart as much as the mind. He sells fish, and has left his stand to devote the whole morning to three strangers curious about his stories and his reasoning.

A few years ago, I was what the system wanted me to be. I worked, I thought I was doing good because I wasn’t harming anyone. I read the newspaper and I thought it told the truth. But now, I’ve decided what to do with my life: to fight for this movement that is also the future. If I have one more day to live, I want to use it to wake people up.

She is in front of her cabin, in the sunlight. She tells us the thousands of reasons why she decided to move to the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. She was a pianist, gave lessons to children, and today she points out the places where she imagines hiding if they try to throw her off the territory. A quality shines forth in her artless words:

I have countless things to do, but earning money is another whole kettle of fish. I could have made 4,000 euros a month working twenty-six hours a week, but when you feel that your life could be useful for something, when you have causes that are really dear to your heart, you can’t just go on giving lessons and only do that. I had to come here.

These are the kind of words that disrupt lives, because they flow from lives that have been themselves disrupted. Poetry can be heard emanating from the ordinary mouths of opponents to an airport on the outskirts of Nantes and to a TAV rail line (Treno ad Alta Velocità – high-speed train) between Lyon and Turin. And a poetry capable of conveying, in simple terms, what is important: lessons and ideas with the capacity to orient and guide future acts, and to make us collectively intelligent just as much as they make us laugh or cry. And all of this was born from a single first word taken to its full consequences: no. Two letters that for years have polarized the lives of thousands of men and women, letters written on barricades, tractors, houses, and that resound in slogans and songs. One syllable that gives birth to others, and that in turn gives rise to dizzying thoughts and questions.

We gathered these hundred or so interviews between the autumn of 2014 and the summer of 2015, walking up and down the muddy paths and twisting mountain roads, the vineyards and the chestnut forests, in the bocage of Notre-Dame-des-Landes and in the Susa Valley. One part of our collective went to the western valley in Piedmont, while another had, for some time already, been engaged in the adventure of the zad, some of us living there. We write from these worlds in resistance and the voice of this book is engaged with the hundred others. This book is our attempt to convey their music, transmit their atmospheres, emotions, the human warmth and astonishment, the anger and hope. These are not small goals, and the task is so ambitious that one book alone cannot suffice. But this book seeks in its own way to convey the trajectory and fate of these struggles, because their success is largely dependent on their capacity to spread the new certainties and hypotheses they’ve generated, and that they might be shared and debated.

The book is organized around several questions that are not ours alone, but are those the struggles themselves gave rise to and try to keep alive. ‘Our era is stingy when it comes to struggles’, a TAV opponent told us, and these two spaces – Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the Susa Valley – indeed represent a radical rupture with the fastidious course taken by two societies at peace. Over and above what they have in common – from their massive oppositions to infrastructural projects to their obstinacy in embodying revolt and resistance now, in the present – what unites them here is the way that the two movements, via a thousand different ways of telling their stories, speak to each other and interrogate each other at the same time. On the one hand, a popular struggle has defined the life of an Italian valley of 70,000 inhabitants for over twenty years. On the other, the zad: a 1,650 hectare bocage that, having freed itself from all signs of control of the French State, has become the outline of an autonomous territory, the beginnings of a free commune.

Peoples

Eyebrows contract, faces take on a questioning look. In the midst of a discussion, one of those harsh, explosive words that command everybody’s attention has been spoken. In French, the term ‘the people’ can barely be pronounced, burdened as it is with associations from the past, vices that have accompanied its political use: nationalism, Stalinism, and so on.

At the zad, we are timidly beginning to use the adjective ‘popular’, by dint of finding ourselves regularly filling up the roadways with crowds of demonstrators and hundreds of tractors. We don’t go so far as to put it on banners or use it in pamphlet titles, but more and more the idea is floating around. Like a slow, minute re-appropriation, an inspiration. In the Susa Valley, they say: ‘The NoTAV struggle is a popular struggle.’ There, it is obvious, no one would say otherwise. There are popular committees, popular meals, and popular marches. We were present at the last one: tens of thousands of demonstrators from Bussoleno to Susa, one more time. So many giant processions have snaked their way through the valley that they couldn’t be counted. On those marches were retired people, school children, unemployed, and firemen. Flags hung in windows, people marched according to their trade, their village committee, their political affinity, all in the ambiance of a village fair. Giacu, the totemic puppet, laced through the crowd and ridiculed a group of mayors, looking a bit awkward in their tricolour scarves. All this speaks to us directly, since it is a dimension of things we are not familiar with. It is perhaps here, somewhere between a territory and a politics, that the NoTAV people has come into being, rich with a common culture and fundamentally open to others.

Out of this popular dimension the power of the movement is generated. On the village billboard, a whole palimpsest of events can be uncovered: breakfast by the work-yard gates, an evening of support for prisoners, a discussion about mountain agriculture, a concert by a Turin rap group … this isn’t the monthly schedule but rather the weekly one. NoTAV is social life, each day there is something to do, a place to meet up. The valley is peopled with a force and a soul in combat.

Territories

Living in the zad is not the same as lodging. ‘Zone d’Aménagement Différé’, or Zone of Deferred Management, is a management acronym – it says nothing about what is lived here, no more than do terms like ‘wetlands’, or ‘lawless zone’. To distinguish ourselves from this programmed, formatted language, we go in search of animals and plants with fabulous names: great crested newt, grand Capricorn, ribbon-leaved water plantain. We pass through the doorways of cabins made of sheet iron and palettes, or of a solid wood frame, each made out of determination and dreams. There are dozens of these living spaces, cohabiting with conventional farmhouses and buildings, those of the inhabitants and farmers who ceded nothing. There is no airport here because the place is taken. And by being occupied it engenders a world. A world where we get our bread every Friday at the ‘non-market’, where we meet up Thursday evenings at the Wardine, and where assemblies decide to barricade all the roadways in the area to prevent a judge from coming in. Everyday life here is intricately merged with struggle. Some 200 people, maybe more, maybe less, live here – what does it matter? Population surveys have evaporated in the kind of life being designed here day after day. Thousands of others join us depending on what is going on. New arrivals have to first put on their boots, to walk paths where your feet sink into the mud. Walking through the bocage, it transmits to us a little of the magic of something that persists. It is not immediately noticeable, but little by little, a difference with the rest of the surrounding region can be detected: the fields and the meadows here are smaller, bordered by hedges and paths while elsewhere agriculture management and redistricting has triumphed. Something persists, too, in the words of a retired farmer: he mischievously tells us that the suppression of the communal lands was not accomplished without resistance, and that by an accident of history, the commune of Notre-Dame-des-Landes was founded in the course of the illustrious year of 1871. He evokes a past that links together easily with present subversions. He continues, enlarging the geography: in a radius of 30 kilometres from here, we can find the sites of the ex-projects for nuclear stations at Pellerin and Carnet – ‘ex’, because the struggles there were victorious. Next, he ticks off the highpoints in the history of peasant struggles of the last century: Vigne Marou, Couëron, Cheix-en-Retz, and so forth. The territory of the zad, ardently defended against all incursions from the forces of order or bulldozers, remains open to the four winds of struggle: past, present, and those to come.

When, having climbed up the Montgenevre pass, you enter the Susa Valley, no boundary marks the transition. From Salbertrand to Avigliana a subterranean valley extends that is invisible on any Italian survey map: the NoTAV valley. A territory, that while maintaining a fusion with the mountain land, has managed to exceed any set of physical boundaries. Those who come to meet it with sincerity are welcomed, and, well outside of Turin, NoTAV insinuates itself inside the best guarded prisons in Italy. A territory both real and imagined, it exceeds the limits of political conflict: ‘NoTAVs came to help me when the wind tore my roof off’, ‘we are going to the funerals with flags when the families ask us to’. There is a community that lives in the space and that gives to the term territory a vertiginous fullness.

Composition

Exploring the extent and scale of these movements cannot be done in a day. We ran into semi-punk naturalists and former railway workers, tenacious farmers and ski instructors, young runaway-squatters and radical women militants from the neighbouring city. We shared a little of the lives of those who are not waiting for a better tomorrow, but who throw themselves, with no railings or safety nets, into the boiling alchemy of the struggle. This is the place where that which comes together is everything that elsewhere is kept carefully apart. How can it seem to hold together? By what magic? NoTAVs like meetings, hundreds of them can be found in the Bussoleno festivals or on an occupied motorway. An old white-haired woman takes the microphone, she climbs up on the central platform so that she can be seen and heard. She is the owner of a chalet who has just been evicted, she begins at the beginning: why they built it there where the construction was supposed to begin, what their aims were, how it all got underway. Everyone listens, even those who are most on top of the situation. She is not trying to inform, she is telling a story, once again, the very real epic saga they are all pursuing together. She takes time for anecdotes and details, even though in this crowd, there is not anyone who has not heard them before. She traces the contours of a common narrative that, patiently, opens a pathway to understanding and to decisions made together. Listening and sharing are vital for keeping together the imperative mandates of political organizations and the azimuth spontaneity of affinity groups that blend into the movement. Something is being invented here on a patch of asphalt, something like a capacity to decide, at the level of gestures and practices, that is the opposite of representation and delegation. A few days later, on the same motorway, now reopened to traffic at 80 miles an hour, a friend unfolds for us, mile after mile, the escapades of NoTAV: ‘There, in front of the tunnel, we made a blockade of burning tires … the fire lit up the whole mountainside’. Farther along: ‘We made a blockade here, and when the police forced us to move and chased us into the village, the villagers opened their doors to hide us.’ The sad concrete of the motorway is transformed into intoxicating décor, the overpass pilings become the crucible for shared gestures and acts.

At Notre-Dame-des-Landes, there is, as of now, no motorway. And yet the motorway-plan designed to serve the future airport is of very high priority on the schedule of construction, this winter of 2016. The motorway is supposed to join up the national roads that, from Nantes, extend to Saint-Nazaire and Rennes: eleven kilometres of road, one going through the zone. Opening up arteries in a hostile territory is as much about getting construction underway as it is a military operation, and the different groups in the movement make no mistake about it. These last months, they have thrown themselves into battle together, breathlessly: pursuing legal judgments, demonstrations, information dissemination, occupations, blockades to assure that none of the announced machinery shows even the tip of its hood in the area. At the same time, all of the anti-airport forces unite behind the so-called ‘historic’ inhabitants threatened with eviction, just as they united in the autumn of 2012 behind squatters who had come to defend the zone. The greater the battle stakes, the greater the solidarity and collective intelligence. The forms, presences and modes of action of the different sensibilities and political lines of the struggle learn to act together, and, in so doing, are themselves transformed. All this is a sketch in what we might call an art of composition.

To Make a Movement

Out of edifying victories in demonstrating strength, came a general desire to make a bit of these struggles come to life elsewhere. A little of these struggles – that is, especially the practices, tactics, and a frank and direct manner of taking on the task of the conflict, making it last, living it. This is also a political leaning, that of seeing in the opposition to infrastructures a space for thwarting the inexorable expansion of a nightmarish world. For this we certainly need more than a slogan like ‘zads everywhere’ or ‘fermarci è impossibile’ (‘we cannot be stopped’). If the myth and the media images sometimes speed up our progress and bring about promising encounters, it is always perilous to try and copy elsewhere a method or a recipe that was elaborated in a specific context. What does it mean to spread combats whose particularity lies precisely in their being anchored somewhere specific? In the Tarn, the Ligure, in l’Isère, in Sicily, the Morvan, Trentin or in Aveyron, some people have not waited to formulate a clear response to that question to seize opportunities. This has led to striking successes and to severe disappointments. There again, the need to understand the long histories of the zad and of NoTAV made itself felt. Not in order to imitate them more scrupulously, but to sharpen our analyses and to understand the powers at work, to learn to ward off foreseeable blows and to make our gestures more certain.

Before we can elaborate these four structuring themes of the book, we need to introduce the two infrastructural projects and devote the first chapter to a narrative of the two epic struggles against them. It will then be easier to find our way and understand the befores and afters that mark the two movements. There are points of transition and of rupture, merry-making and long tranquil years, twenty-five days of battle on one side, forty on the other. Certain accelerations made us lose our breath, others gave us inspiration:

The first day, the old lady brought coffee and cakes to the policemen. She said: ‘Poor souls, they must be freezing, they are so young …’ After the night raid against the cabin with its dozens of wounded, no one in the valley ever again had the idea of feeding the police. Never again!

There is the tempo brought on by modifications in the projects or by political deadlines, there is the rhythm which, despite all that, each movement manages to make for itself, and there are strategies and dreams: ‘We are already together in the post-project’, says someone who lives near Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Nothing is finished and yet we had to stop writing. The adventure continues beyond the final period.

The Two Projects

At first glance, what is striking is the absurdity of the projects: why in hell pour tons of cement and asphalt on a wetland in order to move a perfectly functional airport? Why insist on building a high-speed train line between Turin and Lyon when the two cities are separated by mountain summits over 4,000 metres high and when a railway line already links them? And why these huge projects, when we are bombarded every day with the news that our world is in a state of aggravated crisis – ecological and economic, among others? How can we not notice the blaring contradiction between promoting the construction of a new airport while at the same time bragging about hosting the world-wide climate summit, or between pouring millions of euros into a destructive infrastructure all the while preaching the need to reduce public expenditures?

One need only ask who profits from the crime. And who will be made richer by the destroyed lives of the people living nearby, or by the annihilation of the flora and fauna. It is certainly neither in the ‘public utility’ that is supposed to legitimate these projects, nor in the ‘inutility’ with which they can be accused, that the answer lies. It lies in a certain logic which, however absurd it is, nevertheless reigns over most of the globe. Capitalism quite openly depends on the fantasy of infinite economic growth. Yet, the limits of the resources on which that growth is based having well been reached, a critical phase presents itself – one that torments the managers of the world economy. Never mind! As worthy inheritors of western modernity, rather than working with the world, they will work against it: as long as our environment is a resource, it must be exploited, and if it becomes an obstacle, it need only disappear. And that is the real meaning of large transportation infrastructures: abolishing space.

Ignore the rivers, the dwelling places, the hills, the forests that slow down the circulation of human and non-human merchandise. Thus, the swamps, hedges, fields and those who cultivate them at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the mountains, valleys and those who live in the Susa Valley are so many obstacles, seen from the very particular perspective of a territory-management plan. Exactly in the same way that salaried workers are one burden among others from the point of view of an economic restructuration plan. The logic is implacable, and can assure its own renewal even after the mere ‘crisis’ has become a veritable catastrophe. The more the economy and governmental planning prove destructive of the world that they claim to care for, the more the recipes provided by the economy and planning are mobilized to carve out habitable enclaves. Those who claim to act upon reality free from all its constraints are in fact working to sacrifice the largest part of it, and are always standing by to put a price tag on the non-ravaged areas for the benefit of tourists and the wealthy.

The Airport

Big businessmen from Brittany announced the reasons for ‘displacing’ the Nantes airport in the summer of 2014, at a moment when the construction at Notre-Dame seemed more and more imminent.

Today, it is airplanes that are the vectors of economic development … In today’s economy, we can’t let ourselves slow down. We must always take the lead. I’m not asking for lines that go to the four corners of the earth, but which at least open the doors to all of Europe and connect us easily with all the big hubs.

– Louis Le Duff, founder of Le Duff group

(Ouest-France, April 3, 2014)

We are certain of territorial development and we are working for our children and grandchildren. We need this supra-regional equipment that will allow us to take roundtrips to all the big European cities for our business affairs.

– Patrick Gruau, director of Gruau group

(Ouest-France, April 4, 2014)

So, clearly there are people in this world who are awaiting impatiently a new airport that would respond to their ‘need’ to regularly traverse the continent both ways in a single day. The project has the support of local leaders, on the left as well as the right, who share the same vision of progress, as grey and unbreathable as it may be for lowly mortals. The ‘citizen’s association’, ‘Wings for the West’, in charge of propaganda for the ‘yes’, has its offices in the regional chamber of commerce and industry. At its head reigns an opulent automobile dealership and a band of real estate developers avid to construct their glass and steel towers on the lots close to the old Nantes Atlantique airport, finally opened up to urbanization. The future Airport of the Greater West, a crossroads of the traffic between Saint-Nazaire, Nantes and Rennes, will offer an additional new captive territory favourable to the construction of future zones of ‘competitive’ activity.

These entrepreneurs, certain of their rights, have seen the project stumble in the past few years. But there are others for whom it has proved a trampoline: Mr Notebaert, in charge of the mission to the Ministry of Transportation in 2000 at the time when the project was revived, became director of the Vinci group, the company tasked with building the airport through their affiliated company, AGO, and a multinational at the head of the worldwide market in public construction works. Or Mr Hagelsteen, former prefect of Loire-Atlantique, and then Pays de la Loire from 2007 to 2009, who, after having gotten through the Declaration of Public Utility for the airport, found himself occupying the position, the following year, of counsellor to the President of … Vinci motorways.

By undertaking the construction with the financial aid of local collectivities, within the framework of what is called a ‘public–private partnership’, Vinci was also awarded the exclusive concession and use benefits, first of the Nantes Atlantique airport, and then of its presumed successor at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, for the next fifty years. Not without forgetting to add a clause requiring payment of a sum equivalent to the total of the projected benefits in the instance of the abandonment of the project.

This whole little world, in the AGO offices or in the business centre of the Brittany Tower, is counting on maximizing the returns on its investments. To this end, it can count on the active help of its sponsoring partners, the state and the region, who have not been stingy in finding ways to justify the pertinence of the ‘displacement’ of the airport, in the face of growing opposition. Even if it meant falsifying documents, they had to show that the existing infrastructure was too small and too close to a nature reserve, even though the opinion of their own technical services – kept secret at the time – showed the displacement to be much more prejudicial to the nature reserve. They had to convince people of the urgency to destroy, beneath the tarmac, lands placed at the confluence of two watersheds considered a veritable water-tower for the region. The ultimate argument, at a moment of crisis, is always that of jobs: the public utility of any project can be defended so long as it employs a few dozen interim workers.

Nevertheless, it becomes more difficult to defend the need to augment airport traffic when it becomes clearer each day that human activity in the industrial era and its release of CO2 are irremediably devastating the planet. But since it is always possible to put a good face on things in the era of ‘durable development’, the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes has thus become a project of ‘High Environmental Quality’, with trees to adorn the parking lots, gardens to cover over the smell of kerosene, and terrains purchased in the surrounding areas to compensate for the losses and recreate the swamps and the hedges elsewhere.

The conception of the airport targets an optimal integration with the landscape by proposing an airport built in a single floor, very horizontal and covered with a ‘vegetalized’ (plant-covered) roof. Thus, at a human height, the terminal will appear like a section of the bocage that rises up.

– Presentation of airport project on AGO-Vinci website

The prose wielded by the propagandists of concrete is caught in its own trap, for the bocage has, in fact, risen up. The project has become the very symbol of the harmful and imposed character of market development of the territory – and soon its Achilles’ heel.

The TAV

The Susa Valley has always constituted a privileged route for crossing the Alps, as testifies the Domitienne Way used at the time by the Romans to reach Gaul. A border and a passageway, the valley has always enjoyed this double role, making of its confines not a cul-desac, but a space of exchanges. This was true at the time when distances counted and the borders of motorways were places full of life. The concept of transportation having been modified, the valley was not the same. The hills lost their importance to the Fréjus Tunnel built in the 1980s and from which emerged a bewildering motorway which, from the galleries to the viaduct, absolutely negates the mountainous geography. Truck engines are heard in it at all hours, leaving the two national motorways that snake their way through the bottom of the valley a little freer. The idea of adding a TAV line to all of that, a supplementary projection from the embankment, not surprisingly, gave rise to opposition from the outset.

In the 1990s, the Susa Valley became for Europe a link in the chain of ‘Strategic Corridor Number 5’. This corridor was supposed to link Lisbon to Kiev at great speed, passing through Lyon and Turin. Only one problem: between the two cities can be found the highest mountain range in the continent. No matter, the tunnel entries were pierced: five on the French side of 86 cumulative kilometres, three in Italy of 68 kilometres, and the longest, along the border section, of 57 kilometres. Finally, of the 221 kilometres separating the two cities, 154 would be underground. No matter, either, that a TGV already runs through the valley, on a track that somewhat limits its speed, it is true. And no matter, either, that the trains travelling today between Turin and Lyon are half empty.

The construction work began with opening up descent tunnels perpendicular to the principal gallery, which would serve as access ways from that point on. In France, three of these digs have already been completed, but in Italy, the unique work zone has hardly advanced at all. It is located at the Maddalena, beneath the little village of Chiomonte, in the upper Susa Valley, near an important archaeological site. In an area that has been cleared of trees and leveled, behind imposing barbed-wire fences, an immense militarized zone surrounds the hole, from which thick spouts of dust escape depending on the mountain winds, that climb or descend the valley following the sun’s path. It’s a dust that causes coughing and teeth-gritting when you are aware that the mountains contain asbestos and uranium. The valley is even the principal source of uranium in Italy, and the mines lie a few hundred yards from the construction site in Maddalena. Geiger counters go off crazily at the site and at football games on the Gaglione terrain, made out of fill taken from the mountain – fill, by the way, that has attracted the attention of the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, which has made its transportation their specialty. ‘TAV = mafia’ is written in huge white letters on one of the slopes of the valley, recalling the scandals that came to light inside the companies working the construction. Because there is money to be made there: the digging of the tunnel alone is estimated to cost 13 billion euros, a sum that balloons bigger every year. The European financing plan is so extravagant that a number of Valsusians predict that the construction work will go on eternally, advancing slowly at the rhythm of the waves of subventions, and will be abandoned once these have all dried up. Unless the NoTAVs bring an end to it all sooner …

We are already winning. It would be wonderful to wake up in the morning and read in the newspaper: NoTAV screwed with them so completely by slowing them down that they won. But we’ll never read that! We’ll write it ourselves, on our sites, in our books … and maybe in yours!

– Luca, Bussoleno committee of popular struggle