Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne PO Box 1364 Collingwood 3066
abcmelb@yahoo.com.au abcmelb.wordpress.com
MAY 2012
Welcome to the Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne Bulletin. We have some groundbreaking grassroots articles coming up. Report backs from a Candle Vigil organised and hosted by Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne. A report back also on a solidarity action organised by the Free Pussy Riot Melbourne group and more.
FREE PUSSY RIOT
On 20 April 2012 The Free Pussy Riot Melbourne Campaign organised a Solidarity Action for an Underground Russian Feminist punk band called “Pussy Riot”. They are being charged with “Hooliganism” for performing outside a cathedral, singing anti Putin songs. The solidarity action took place in Melbourne Australia on Parliament steps, at 4pm as part of an International Day of Action to protest violation of human rights, trumped up charges and unfair imprisonment by the Russian Government. Feminists, punks, and a diverse array of activist groups got together to support Pussy Riot.
Casey from the DIY group called Cross Stitch and ‘femme fight’ helped people make balaclavas on the steps. She also spray painted a “Free Pussy Riot” banner on the steps too. Police presence was minimal, but she was asked what she was doing. Then Izzy Brown from a Hip Hop band called Combat Wombat did some rapping beats along side a double bass.
The speakers after that speakers were Marisa from Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne, who did a did a powerful speech and linked the Feminist punk band from Russia with Indigenous struggles in Australia. Peter from Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne read out a statement by Pussy Riot. Sue Bolton from Socialist Alliance spoke about Pussy Riot being an inspiration to the feminist movement. At the last minute Dale from 3CR community radio “Girrls radio offensive” spoke about diy punk. Lots of colourful people were there. The Action ended with a fantastic wave of people running down the steps of Parliament, yelling “Free Pussy Riot”. This final act was recorded on Video to send to Pussy Riot in Russia. We send our love and solidarity to
Pussy Riot.
Peter from Free Pussy Riot Melbourne. For more information please visit face book page freepussy riot Melbourne or email freepussyriot@riseup.net
Transcript Of Speech For the Free Pussy Riot Rally
On 20 April 2012
Welcome to the Free Pussy Riot Action. I’m Marisa and I’m from Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne. We act as watchdogs for Police powers. We are also committed to fighting genocide of First Nations people. We are a small organisation that supports political prisoners in need all over the world. We create Defence committees for arrestees when needed, and I wish I was over there in Russia creating a Defence committee for our Russian sisters. I’m also a radio broadcaster at 3CR community Radio broadcasting a prison show called Doin Time, every Monday from 4 till 5 pm Australian time.
I’m here in solidarity with the Russian Women who’ve been arrested on trumped up charges in Russia. A Russian punk band, expressing anti Government sentiments and feminist perspective, they have been severely railroaded. What an absolute gross violation of human rights to be thrown into prison, to be humiliated by church and state! The Catholic Church in Australia is, along with the Government trying to take away the reproductive rights of Women. Women are constantly being oppressed. And yet, these Russian feminists have to apologise to the church? What for? They didn’t damage any property.
Charged with “hooliganism”, these women have been remanded in jail, facing up to 7 years criminal punishment for allegedly participating in the punk-prayer Virgin Mary, sending an anti PUTIN message. They’re publicly demonstrating for human rights and against the current oppressive regime under Putin.
This case has serious implications for Australia. International solidarity is important. Civil liberties are severely lacking in Australia. Lex Wotton, respected Palm Islander is on parole now as we speak, and under a gag Order. No freedom of speech for him! In the same way, these courageous Russian Feminists are suffering degradation and humiliation in a Russian prison just for speaking out. Amnesty International sums it up beautifully when they say that:
“Pussy Riot have done peaceful performances in highly visible places, the band has given voice to basic rights under threat in Russia today, while expressing the values and principles of gender equality, democracy and freedom of expression contained in the Russian constitution and other international instruments, including the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the CEDAW
Convention.”
Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne stands in solidarity with Pussy Riot. Free all political prisoners! Cease the oppression of all women. Provide equal rights for all. Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne admires the tenacity and strength of our Russian sisters. For an injury to one is an injury to all. As well as taking care of our own backyard, we need to also develop a global Internationalist perspective otherwise we lose the fight for human rights, mutual aid and community control. Always was always with be Aboriginal land.
Marisa Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne. For more information about ABCM please email:
ABC Melbourne : abcmelb@yahoo.com.au
The Editor recognises that the below article was prepared by Amnesty International.
Amnesty International: Urgent Call for Actions
ALLEGED FEMINIST PUNK SINGERS DETAINED
Three young women are being detained by the Russian authorities for allegedly performing a protest song in a cathedral as part of a feminist punk group Pussy Riot. On 19 April, a Moscow court extended the detention of the women until 24 June.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina were arrested on 4 March, and Ekaterina Samutsevich was arrested on 15 March. The three women, who are all in their twenties, have been charged with hooliganism under Article 213 of the Russian Criminal Code, for allegedly performing a protest song in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral on 21 February. If
found guilty, they could be jailed for up to seven years. The three women deny any involvement in the protest in the cathedral. The defence has appealed against the extension of the three women’s detention. The date of the appeal hearing has not yet been scheduled.
Since the three women’s arrest, some of their family members as well as one of their lawyers have received threats. Even though the police and the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office have been informed about these threats, there appears to be no investigation into the incidents. In addition, the tax authorities have reportedly blocked the bank account of the lawyers’ association where the lawyer of one of the three women works. The lawyers think that this is intended to put pressure on the lawyers
to withdraw from the case. The protest song titled ‘Virgin Mary, redeem us of Putin’ was performed
by several members of the Pussy Riot group with their faces covered by balaclavas. The song calls on Virgin Mary to become a feminist and banish Russian President- elect Vladimir Putin. It also criticises the dedication and support shown to President-elect Vladimir Putin by some representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. The performance was part of wider protests against Putin and unfair elections in Russia. This, and the anti-clerical, anti-Putin content of the song’s message, appears to have been reflected in the severity of the charges that have been
brought against the three women.
RECOMMENDED ACTION
Please write immediately in Russian or your own language:
* Calling on the Russian authorities to drop the charges of hooliganism and immediately and unconditionally release Maria Alekhina, Ekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova;
* Urging the Russian authorities to immediately and impartially investigate threats received by the family members and lawyers of the three women and, if necessary, ensure their protection;
PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 11 JUNE 2012.
Prosecutor of the Moscow’s Central Administrative District,
Denis Gennadievich Popov,
Prosecutor’s Office of the Central Administrative District,
ul. L.Tolstogo, 8, str.1,
Moscow 119021,
Russian Federation.
Fax: +7 499 245 77 56
Email: prokcao@mosproc.ru
Salutation: Dear Prosecutor
Prosecutor General,
Yurii Yakovlevich Chaika,
ul. B.Dimitrovka, d. 15a,
Moscow, GSP-3, 107048,
Russian Federation.
Fax: +7 495 692 1725 (if the fax number is answered by a live operator please say clearly “FAX”)
Email: prgenproc@gov.ru
Salutation: Dear Prosecutor General
COPIES TO
Head of the Investigative Department,
Igor Victorovich Litvinov,
Investigative Department of the Directorate of the Internal Affairs (YVD) for Central Administrative District,
Ul.Sredniaia Kalitnikovskaia, 31,
Moscow 109029,
Russian Federation.
Fax: +7 495 675 39 80 (if the fax number is answered by a live operator please say clearly “FAX”)
Ambassade de la Fédération de Russie,
Brunnadernrain 37,
3006 Berne.
Fax: 031 352 55 95
Script and From The Candle Vigil held as part of Occupy Prisons
Welcome to the Occupy political prisoners vigil this evening hosted by Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne. Show your support to Occupy
arrestees, Lex Wotton Aboriginal deaths in custody, political prisoners asylum seekers
from Palestine, greenscare activists, Tibetan political prisoners world wide. We are holding this vigil to draw attention to many issues: high imprisonment of aboriginal and tore strait islander people, mental health care within the community, and we all know that of poverty and poor housing and homelessness leads to higher rates of incarceration. It is with great honour that we would now like to begin the candle vigil. Aboriginal deaths in custody feature very strongly in Australia. Very briefly, here are our demands for tonight.
Build the movement to stop Aboriginal deaths in custody.
Free all political prisoners.
Stop police brutality and racist police attacks. Anarchist Black Cross
Melbourne condemns these draconian parole conditions on Lex Wotton
and all political prisoners.
Article 19 of the 1966 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that:
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression.
It makes you think why the Queensland government has put a gag on Lex Wotton what are they hiding? Lift the gag on Lex Wotton and all political prisoners This wont stop us from voicing our rage of these laws that the state controls. Let us now begin lighting the candles. Let’s keep the candles coming, for Lex Wotton who is under a severe gag order while on parole. He’s not allowed to speak to the media. Authorities want to silence Wotton because of the death in custody of Cameron Domaggge. Light a candle also for Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier Lynne Stewart. Keep the candles coming also, for Aboriginal deaths in custody, the latest one being in January. Light a candle for Terrance Daniel Briscoe, TJ Hickey, Mr Ward, John Pat and the list goes on. Stick around for this vigil.
Jaan Laaman American Political Prisoner imprisoned in Arizona.
A Message for the Australian Occupy 4 Political Prisoners Rally
Occupy for political prisoners! Occupy for economic and social justice! Occupy for real freedom and Human Rights for Aboriginal people and all people! Hello everyone. This is Jaan Laaman, anti-imperialist political prisoner sending you these words from a U.S. federal prison located in the desert in the state of Arizona.
I am very glad to be joining all of you in words and spirit, in this important occupy for political prisoners rally today. Western corporate media and government figures, Australia included, are quick to criticize and demonize countries and leaders they dislike, for holding political prisoners and calling for their release. We hear this in the corporate papers and TV all the time, about political prisoners in Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, even Russia. What about the prisoners of conscience, the political prisoners in Australia? What about the political prisoners in the United States? We very rarely hear much about them on any TV report.
Political prisoners are being held in Australian prisons. The government might try to mislabel them as common criminals, but these are people who are in prison for their political beliefs and activities. These activists are struggling for the rights of indigenous people and for all people. These are people who are fighting for freedom and justice.
The same is true in the United States. There are over 100 men and women held in U.S. prisons right now, who are officially recognized as political detainees by numerous national and international Human Rights and legal organizations. Additionally there are thousands upon thousands of other prisoners who have been victimized because of their race, ethnicity, religion or ideas.
Many U.S. political prisoners have been locked up for decades. I myself have been in captivity for over 27 years now. A few U.S. political prisoners have had some media coverage. You may have heard about indigenous Native elder Leonard Peltier, or Black leaders like Mumia abu Jamal and Sundiata Acoli, or the Puerto Rican Nationalist leader Oscar Lopez, or the recent political imprisonment of the lawyer Lynne Stewart, the 72 year old grandmother who for decades courageously represented political dissidents and revolutionaries.
U.S. political prisoners are Black, white, Native, Puerto Rican and Mexican, women and men who have and continue to struggle for social and economic justice, for peace, equality, the protection of our planet and a free non-imperialist future. We send our greetings and solidarity to all Australian political prisoners, and salute you good people outside at this rally, and all people who support political prisoners..
Anyone interested in checking out more about U.S. political prisoners, is invited to go to http://www.strugglemag.org, which is the main political prisoner magazine in the U.S.
And remember, today’s political activist could well be tomorrow’s newest political prisoner!
And if you will give me just a minute more, I’d like to raise one other issue with you good Aussie activists. Recently the U.S. government announced that it was setting up permanent U.S. military bases in Australia. Even as U.S. imperialism is still engaged in a major long ongoing war in Afghanistan, still actively involved in Iraq, and threatening a new war against Iran, it now is preparing additional military bases against China. Australia should really think twice before quickly becoming
a little junior partner or yes man for U.S. imperialism’s schemes against China. Here’s a question, why would an independent nation allow or accept another country to come on their land and establish a foreign military base, except perhaps during time of war? There is no war going on. Australia is not a U.S. colony.
There are no Australian military bases in the United States, and the U.S. would never allow any other country to set up a base on it’s territory. And just one final thought on this, many people say the U.S. military are like coch roaches, once they get it, it’s awful hard to get rid of them.
FREE ALL AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL PRISONERS NOW!”
statement From John Perotti American Political Prisoner
Greetings from The Rectum Of The Beast!!!!!!!! I have been asked to submit a statement for the event coming up. I was just released from the hole after a set up attempt by USP Florence officials. They threw contraband in my outgoing legal property due to the amount of complaints and legal work I filed against them there, as well as assisting others. I was able to prove it was a set up by using their own paperwork to verify that I neither packed up the property in question, nor saw it for a year previous to my transfer here. Normally a prisoner would not have been found not guilty of this offence by a prison disciplinary hearing officer. It is only because of my litigiousness and tendency to file every guilty finding of an infraction in federal court. for review by a judge that resulted in the dismissal of charges. Prisoncrats hate to be “fronted off” and shown to be incompetent in front of a federal judge, so would father error in our favor.
I have been transferred from prison to prison the past year and a half, mainly due to wannabe prisoner cops. Previous to these efforts, I did “good time” in Indiana and KY, even turning down transfers to lesser security prisons. One day an Associate warden showed up who I had sued 5 years previously, and within thirty days of her coming to Indiana, she had me transferred out to Florida, thousand of miles away from my home. It’s taken almost two years to get back to the Midwest, where hopefully, the yard police won’t play prison politics and I’ll do my time without problem.
There has been mass turnouts for the Occupy Wall Street protests in all the states and different countries. I never thought I would see the day when so many people turned out to protest the ruling class’s. The only problem I see is the bad publicity put on our people for using “all means necessary” during these protests.. Mass cries go up when fellow at broke out windows in banks and financial offices. I can’t understand this. The people protesting have not come up with a clear agenda, or “voice” that can bring about change of the problem. All the group massing and discussions of the problem do not bring about change, it is Direct Action that brings about change. You have to “walk the walk”, not just “talk the talk.” In France when the workers feel they have been treated unjustly, the truckers block every highway and means of production and STOP those in power from conducting their businesses’, thus hitting them in the pocketbook, which is all those
in power understand. I had hoped that discussion would lead to direct action events, which would “compel” the minority in power to re-evaluate their system. This has not happened yet, but can still occur. It is my hope that the people become more organized in forming committees and groups for “Direct Action” events, to illustrate the injustice and change the power structure. If necessary, force the politicians to act on our behalf to bring about change.
In any event, any action beats inaction. I applaud all our people for taking the steps to organize and occupy the events. I urge all to take a step further and utilize direct action, in the spirit of Joe Hill, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parson and Bakunin.
In Memory of John McGuffin
On the 10th anniversary of the death of former Civil Rights activist and Anarchist John McGuffin, local activists including former friends and comrades gathered in Derry’s Bogside and gave the iconic monument a fitting rebellious make-over with the red and black colours of anarchism. Over the next fortnight the black flag of anarchy will fly over Free Derry corner in a fine tribute. No Gods No Masters! —-
The history of Free Derry corner
On a gable wall at the end of a row of dilapidated terrace houses in Derry’s Bogside back in January 5th 1969, a local youth scrawled the words ‘YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY’ in the dead of night. To this day there is still a dispute as to who the shadowy youth had been with several names being banded about. However the slogan itself was said to have been taken from a free-speech campaign which was active in BerkeleyUniversity in California during the mid-sixties with ‘You Are Now Entering Free Berkeley’on some of its propaganda.
During that time student activists in Ireland, like the rest of Europe mirrored the actions developing in the Civil Rights movement of the North America. The day before in the outskirts of the city the Peoples Democracy(a radical leftish offshoot from the civil rights movement) march from Belfast had reached Derry after its participants were viciously attacked by loyalist mobs and off-duty B Specials.
The period that followed was amongst one of the most turbulent in the history of the north, as the British Army had been deployed, removing barricades signalling an end to what became known as Free Derry.
Over the decades the wall itself, just as the words adorning it became a symbol of hope and resistance. From the days of the early Civil Rights demonstrations to Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman, the location of Free Derry Corner had always been agathering point for locals in good times and in bad as a place for discussion and debate. Soapbox street politics on the issues of the day, be it from the lack housing or jobs but more importantly were calls were made to organise against those in power.
Not surprising then that Free Derry Corner was the location chosen to pay homage to one of
that era’s most legendary figures, John McGuffin. On the 10th anniversaryof the death of former Civil Rights activist and Anarchist, local activists including former friends and comrades gathered in Derry’s Bogside and gave the iconic monument a fitting rebellious make-over with the red and black colours of anarchism. Over the next fortnight the black flag of anarchy will fly over Free Derry corner in a tribute to John McGuffin.
The ‘Wee Black Booke of Belfast anarchism (1867-1973)’ has a brief introduction to the
life and times of John McGuffin including a personal analysis of his participation in the civil rights movement to his internment and involvement in the republican movement.
John McGuffin (1942-2002)
‘There is an amusing and completely unbelievable story related at the time of John McGuffin’s funeral of his hosting the well-known American‘Yippie’ Jerry Rubin when he visited the north in the late 1960s. Passing through County Down on their way to Dublin through districts swathed in the Down Gaelic football colours of red and black, McGuffin informed his guest of how the whole area was in the grip of anarchist militants. Roadside signs emblazoned with ‘UP DOWN’ further convinced Rubin of the inspiredlibertarian revolutionary ethic sweeping south-east Ulster.
It was, of course, a time of great social and political ferment and this may have made McGuffin’s legendary sophistry all the more believable. Like Rubin, McGuffin was a veteran of that ferment and an anarchist of a very particular colour. Throughout his life, he made no secret of his qualified support for Irish republicanism and centred his politics around issues relative to the state and its powers. Despite his early years in People’s Democracy (PD) and its libertarian socialist focus on issues such as jobs and housing, McGuffin showed no real interest in workplace or industrial struggles and although recognised widely as an anarchist, he along with a number of others moved ideologically further away from anarchism as the 1970s progressed. This was part of a wider trend as sectarianism entrenched, violence increased, and genuinely radical politics withered under the
onslaughts of the state and paramilitaries.
John Niall McGuffin was born into a relatively wealthy middle class Presbyterian family in 1942. Despite this, he had a degree or taint of socialism in his backgroundthrough his uncle, the MP for Shankill ward from 1917 to 1921 and then for north Belfast, the Freemason and first speaker of the Stormont Parliament, Sam McGuffin, a ‘Labour Unionist’.
He was sent to the exclusive Campbell College in Belfast and proceeded fromthere to Queen’s University where he received honours in history and psychology and then took up a lecturer’s post at Belfast Technical College. This throws up a second contradiction in terms of McGuffin’s hostility towards academia and a possible career therein despite his great mind, his academic prowess, and the quality of his written, analytical and oratorical skills.
He was never able to quite overcome his intellectual rigour despite continued attempts at pastiche and ridiculous hyperbole, at which he was no less adept, and McGuffin’s writings are often as academic and thorough as any available. Perhaps this is ironicgiven McGuffin’s distaste for academia or perhaps that distaste is merely reserved for the much vaunted and completely illusory ‘impartiality’ of the universities. Either way, his early anti-intellectualism exhibited a healthy disdain for such institutions and a recognition of their role in the sustenance of class privilege and the power of ruling elites common to many anarchists.
It was, however, within the confines of Queen’s University that McGuffin first came to prominence as one of the leading militants of People’s Democracy (PD), which emerged from among the student body after a frustrated civil rights march and short sit-down protest in Linenhall Street on 9 October 1969. He had already been chairman of the Queen’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) from 1964-65 and a member of the University Labour Group before joining PD. The group contained a significant number of very articulate, and in some senses, very naïve radical students from broadly Trotskyist, Left Republican and Anarchist backgrounds, but from the outset was a markedly non-sectarian, internationalist and libertarian civil rights movement.
It was open to all and had no written constitution, its main aims being
(1) One man, one vote;
(2) Fair (electoral) boundaries;
(3) Houses on need;
(4) Jobs on merit;
(5) Free speech; and
(6) Repeal of the Special Powers Act.
Although the body later became a more rigid organisation with a Trotskyist programme, libertarians and anarchists, such as McGuffin, argued strongly for the openand accountable democratic principles on which the group was formed, and which had attracted him to it initially, to be maintained.
This, however, suffered its first major blow after just a few months when an earlier, albeit conservative, majority decision was taken to cancel the planned ‘long march’ from Belfast to Derry but was subsequently overturned by a minority of Young Socialists, including Michael Farrell and Cyril Toman. They held a meeting at Queen’safter most of the students had left for holidays in December 1968, unsatisfied with PrimeMinister Terence O’Neill’s assurances of addressing the grievances of the civil rights movement, and vowing to carry on with the march where PD had failed. McGuffin did notagree with this tact of usurping the broad democratic will of the students and PD, although he decided in the end to take part while still arguing his politics.(14)
It was during the ‘long march’ and savage attack on the demonstrators at Burntollet by police and Paisleyites, that McGuffin was written into history for having an anarchist banner on the march. Much mileage has been made out of the story that McGuffin allegedly carried the banner on his own at times throughout the march, though it is something confirmed only in some memoirs of the events and finds no verification in the major studies of the protest and period. What actually happened, according to a Belfast Anarchist Group member, was that McGuffin phoned him to bring the banner for the last stage of the march into Derry, and after the Burntollet ambush, these members joined with McGuffin and marched with the banner into Derry. However, at Irish Street in the Waterside the march was attacked by another group of Paisleyites. A Belfast Anarchistveteran takes up the story, ‘I remember sticking my pole into the face of one attacker before I was
punched and kicked and the banner snatched away. The attackers must have had lighter fuel
with them for only a few moments later I looked back to see the banner wellalight’.
It’s not in doubt, of course, that McGuffin did indeed carry the banner, but not all the way from Belfast and certainly not on his own as a demonstration of his political righteousness. Such apocryphal tales may entertain but they rarely enlighten, and they permit those who are not anarchists (though they may even be patronisingly sympathetic), to portray anarchism as a political eccentricity – the last refuge for the impractical and the whimsical on the left – of those convinced but unable to convince.
McGuffin’s embrace of anarchism began in 1967 and he, with Robin Dunwoodyand others, was a founder member of the Belfast Anarchist Group (BAG). However, McGuffin was not present for the Group’s first meeting on 5 October 1968. He had gone off to Derryin company with a 40-strong group of Young Socialists from Belfast for the ill-fated civil rights march in Duke Street, which had been banned and was brutally beaten and broken up bythe RUC, and therefore missed the initial meeting in a candlelit room above a restaurant in Upper Arthur Street. At these early meetings, a member named Roland Carter brought along anarchist books and pamphlets possibly supplied from Freedom Press in London.
The difficulty, however, was that events were moving faster than could be anticipated and ‘the need for new members to have space to grow into a proper understanding of anarchism was pushed into the background by the need to respond to the rapidly-developing situation on the ground’. Nevertheless, the BAG, with some 20 or so members had displayed some good early successes.
Up to 200 copies of the London Anarchist paper, Freedom were sold in Belfast at one stage,
and the Group, mostly composed of young unemployed men and women, and some former
students, was meeting regularly in the city and then, at a later stage, at Queen’s as student activism took off. Some members were still at school and through aninterest in the Free Schools movement in England, got copies of a leaflet on the radical anti-authoritarian campaign, which they distributed in a number of Belfast schools. This led to some expulsions and a front-page article in the Belfast News Letter,which carried a copy of the leaflet in question and a photograph of a picket on one of the schools where disciplinary action had been taken.
People’s Democracy march with Belfast Anarchist Group banner, January 1969
By March 1969, McGuffin was in Manchester as a speaker to the RevolutionarySocialist
Students Federation (RSSF), fresh from the Burntollet march and seems also to have appraised anarchists in England of circumstances in the north and events tocome. He was a principal organiser for the next major PD march from Belfast to Dublin in April 1969, which was attended by many English socialists and some 40 anarchists. Numerous anarchist flags were carried on the march and some women members of the BAG made a number of anarchist neck-scarves, ‘a typically sexist job allocation’,as one BAG member recalled. This splash of anarchist colour, however, even led some journalists to label it an anarchist march. The march was plagued by difficulties from the start, beginning with a violent confrontation in Lurgan (where it actually set off from after problems in
Belfast), and ending with divisions between PD and some of the southern left- wingers.
McGuffin and BAG members decided at one point if they could get the numbersthey would disrupt the Irish state commemoration of Easter 1916, using the opportunityto attack both states, though the tiredness of the marchers and the internal dissensions prevented this. There was also a minor clash with republicans over their insistence people march in military formation, though PD and the anarchists both resisted this. Possibly on this march or another about this time, one Belfast anarchist remembers some marchers even sang the republican anthem, ‘take it down from the mast’, to which the anarchists responded (to the tune of the ‘Red Flag’) –
‘The people’s flag is red and black, and you can fuck your Union Jack;
When you’re out of work and on the dole, you can stick the Tricolour up your hole!’
Some leading PD members quickly suggested this anarchist sing-a-long be abandoned. McGuffin, nonetheless, felt the march to have been a success even if this was only inasmuch as it further raised international awareness of the struggle for civil rights.
Soon after the Dublin march PD talk of electioneering caused much argument between them and McGuffin, and he was cast again in the role of the main opposition to such reformism. He took a lead in opposing Bernadette Devlin’s electoral bid, as an anarchist, but also partly because PD did not officially back her and because she was standing,in his words, as the ‘pan- papist candidate’. The two were lifelong friends but the tension between her and McGuffin (as between McGuffin and many people), never entirely dissipated, even in the days before his death in 2002.(18)
When the north erupted again in August ’69, McGuffin was in far-flung Morocco and unable to return until September. When he did so PD was advancing steadily towards a more authoritarian structure and an expressly Connollyite aim, though McGuffin still contributed to the Free Citizen newspaper of the group and Belfast anarchists played their part in selling it in the city. Radio Free Belfast was broadcasting regularly and McGuffin was heavily involved in the running of it behind the barricades in West Belfast. He also continued to argue for libertarian ideas and methods within PD and outside of it, though difficulties continued to arise in relation to breaking out of the student ghetto and addressing and supporting workers. McGuffin conceded this in an interview in the early
1970s, saying, ‘To a certain extent we would accept that we haven’t hadan industrial policy. Our best policy would be to make shop-floor contacts but we can’tsucceed there as long as the sectarian divide remains’. This was despite leafleting foraysat factories in and around Belfast, such as Courtaulds, ICI and Rolls Royce.
John McGuffin was picked up in the first internment scoop on 9 August 1971,and held until
14 September that year, initially at Girdwood Army Barracks and then Belfast’s Crumlin Road gaol. His internment was to have a profound impact on his politics andhis later writings and may have been akin to the transformation it inspired in fellowPDer Michael Farrell. Arguably, both men left their fellow internees with a more pronounced sympathy for Irish republicanism, scepticism about the tactics of the civil rights movement in the face of mounting state repression, and a stronger sense of anti-unionism. Within a few months both men had also come to support the Northern Resistance Movement (NRM), founded as a rival to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, and which developed what Arthur has called a ‘curious symbiotic relationship’ with PD and the Provisional IRA.
It was within PD, however, that McGuffin maintained what he called ‘an anarchist wing’ with his two closest comrades, Robin Dunwoody and Jackie Crawford, a formerstudent of McGuffin’s at Belfast Tech who was also interned briefly. However, at a time when PD’s Free Citizen newspaper became the more pointed, perhaps more cynical, Unfree Citizen and expressed an increasing level of equivocation over IRA atrocities such as on ‘Bloody Friday’ in Belfast on 21 July 1972 when 9 people were killed and 130 injured in a city centre bombing spree, McGuffin was among the few (possibly the only PD member) to speak out publicly. He wrote in Internment, ‘Twenty-two bombs in the heart of acrowded city in broad daylight are bound to kill people no matter what warnings are given, and the Provisional IRA must bear the full responsibilities for these murders’.(21) It should also be noted that while McGuffin and his comrades were drawing closer politically to one side
of the widening sectarian divide, and he personally was discovering an empathy and admiration for many individual Provisionals, they do not appear to have engaged actively in the armed campaign of the Provos or in solidarity with that campaign.
Since about 1971, the BAG had been meeting irregularly, and some members had even drifted
away or been subsumed into PD activism. Differences of opinion with regard to the armed
campaign of the IRA had also started to emerge. The break finally came in 1973, when police in London alleged that local anarchists were aiding the IRA. A BAG meeting of about a dozen members or so got together and decided to draft a statement and send it to all the local papers refuting this. It read: ‘the Belfast Anarchist Group refutesaccusations from the English police that the Provisional IRA are being aided by Anarchist Groups. Anarchist groups, both here and in Britain, have continuously refused to support any group that hasn’t the interests of the ordinary people at heart, but instead keeps itself in existence through authoritarian means and nationalist ideology (whether Irish nationalists like the IRA or Ulster nationalists like the UDA). Anarchists support the struggle of ordinary people to control their own destiny, whether Protestant or Catholic, white or black. And while we realise that social and political conditions make the rise of such
groups as the IRA and the UDA almost inevitable, nevertheless although these groups rise from the people they can’t be considered to be fighting for the people. The conditions that divide the working class are perpetuated by these groups through theirinability or refusal to escape the trap of nationalism and sectarianism’.
This statement enraged McGuffin, who felt that not only should they not be attacking the IRA, but, he insisted, they couldn’t issue such a statement without the full participation of all BAG members. The BAG, of course, hadn’t been meeting as often and rarely with more than a few members present, but the criticism of McGuffin persuaded 4 members of the Group to leave and form the Belfast Libertarian Group, a move that had been coming for some time. This led to the collapse of the BAG, and none of McGuffin’s supporters sought of resurrect it thereafter. The degeneration of a potentially revolutionary situation and the sectarian entrenchment that had been increasingly apparent since the start of the 1970s, contributed in no small measure to this anarchist split. It had arisen out of the need for anarchists to provide an alternative (class) analysis to the nationalist and
sectarian ones gaining in potency, and as a result of the theoretical support extended to republicans by some anarchists, rather than as an attempt to deal with practical anarchist support for the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’.
There was, on the other hand, one particular incident early in the Troubles occasionally cited as evidence of direct anarchist violence complicit with or sympathetic to the ‘war’ of republicans. The involuntary participation of at least one genuine anarchist and one who merely claimed for himself the label ‘anarchist’, has drawn the criticism of McGuffin himself, but remains an episode which needs clarification.
The story of a bomb plot against Queen’s University hatched by a German anarchist, a New
York photographer, a Belfast journalist and an unemployed salesman in the bar of the Wellington Park Hotel was, from the start, an unlikely tale. It did, however, prove a salacious one for a continually salivating media hungry for even a glimpse of the mad anarchist bomber bogeymen as a new angle on, or alternative to the grindingpredictability of nationalist and sectarian violence. Step up James Joseph McCann, with a petty criminal past in Belfast and England, a slightly unhinged quality and a talent for invention. As a self-proclaimed‘anarchist’, McCann had been hanging around the revolutionary tourist set based in the Wellington Park, close to Queen’s from around about 1970. This had included, most famously, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the American Yippies (Youth International Party), and the singer and poet, Phil Ochs. McGuffin and his comrades had also spent some time in the august company of these ‘friends of the revolution’, as McGuffin called them, and also knew McCann, of who he had a very poor opinion.
The basic bones of the story are that McCann in the company of Felix de Mendelssohn, Joseph Stevens and Peter McCartan, all working in one way or another as journalists, met him at Queen’s on the promise of an exclusive, or perhaps after some drinks and goading from McCann. They were then treated to the spectacle of a Molotov cocktail attack on Queen’s Common Room, a chase by a passing plainclothes RUC patrol and an armed standoff, before McCann surrendered his sawn-off shotgun and the unlikely quartet were arrested and remanded to Crumlin Road gaol. After some pre-trial theatrics and four months inside, McCann, who spent his term informing his Provo cellmate that the jail hadn’t been built which could hold him, he broke out of the prison by sawing through the cellbars. The escape was the first since December 1960 and gained McCann some, largely self- generated, notoriety as the‘green’ or ‘shamrock pimpernel’ and the original ‘border fox’. McCann’s
subsequent escapades are well-documented by dope dealer Howard Marks in hisautobiography,
Mr. Nice, but basically he took up cannabis-smuggling and re-used a proportion of the profits to send arms and explosives to the Provisional and/or Official IRA,and was allegedly involved in the bombing of a British Army barracks in Germany in 1973.
None of this, of course, amounts to ‘anarchist’ activity and McCann wasquite rightly seen as simply a fellow-traveller of the IRA who used libertarian ideas to justify a private business enterprise labelled criminal by the state.(24) His fellow-accused in 1971, Felix de Mendelssohn (who was acquitted with the others), had been a genuine anarchist involved with a group in Oxford in the early 1960s, and remembers Jim McCann as ‘anarchic’ but certainly no anarchist, merely ‘a psychopath who used political labels where they suited him’. De Mendelssohn is now a professional psychoanalyst so can speak with some expertise in the area of McCann’s mental make-up, and while he was impressed with McCann’s escape, this does not affect his overall assessment of him as‘one of the craziestand most dangerous men I have ever met’.
After his arrest in 1979 and beating from the IRA prisoners in Portlaoise prison for the embarrassment of being caught with a large marijuana haul, McCann moved on to involvement
in various capitalist ventures across the globe and has continued to evade conviction to the present day.(26) It is unclear how McCann became identified or associated with anarchism and in many ways it doesn’t really matter, but the appearance of such maverick characters claiming to be anarchists has occasionally occurred over the years and caused no little damage to anarchism. It may well yet occur, and although other crude adventurists and crackpot dictators have claimed the socialist mantle from time to time, anarchism often appears to be judged more harshly whenever freelance lunatics attach themselves to it.
Despite John McGuffin’s disdain for Jim McCann and his activities (he claimed that McCann only managed to smuggle in 4 handguns), some of his own comrades entered upon a ‘criminal’ career as anarchist expropriators. His former student and fellow internee Jack ‘the whack’Crawford, was allegedly involved in the 1983 robbery of the Allied Irish Bank branch in Dun Laoghaire, which netted IR£8,500 for himself and possibly, the anarchist movement. Crawford, who had sold Freedom in Belfast’s Castle Street in the 1960s, worked with McGuffin (like Jack White), as a lumberjack in Canada in the mid- to late 1970s, died sometime in the late 1990s, aged just 47. However, as with many of McGuffin’s chequered memoirs it’s unclear how much of this story is fiction and how much fact.
Neither is it clear who or how many of McGuffin’s comrades were involved in this direct actionist expropriation in Dublin. There may also have been a tie-in between these individuals and the Murrays, Noel and Marie, who were involved in a similaractivism at a slightly earlier stage. At least one contemporary anarchist who was also active in a different capacity in the 1970s feels that the Murray case did little otherthan ‘add to the anarchist = terrorist stereotype’. This, however, pays little or no heed to a period of inveterate state reaction and right-wing repression throughout Europe as a response to rising working class and anti-fascist militancy, particularly in Spain and Portugal. The Murrays and others were part of this European, and indeed, international wave of militancy
and their activism, although occasionally foolhardy and perhaps even naïve, was nonetheless sincere, heroic and a legitimate aspect of the ongoing class struggle. They furthermore, received the full vengeance of the state in a manner far beyond that even reserved for Irish republicans, even though the violence employed by the anarchists was largely discriminate and accidental in a period when both loyalists and republicans, as well as the British state, were engaged in very deliberate, calculated and frequently indiscriminate acts of violence.
After his internment, John McGuffin appears to have concentrated on writingfor a time and it was in this area perhaps that he really excelled. His exposes of internment without trial and state-sponsored torture and systematic human rights abuses catalogued expertly and with great wit in Internment (1973) and The Guinea Pigs (1874) have stood the test of time. They are classic anti-state critiques written clearly from an unabashed libertarian perspective, and are among the very best books written about the north in the last thirty to thirty-five years.
It was also at this time that McGuffin moved from an anti-statist anarchistposition more towards republicanism. His nephew, the journalist Paddy McGuffin, records this transformation in McGuffin and his comrades from ‘pacifist beliefs’ as and towards becoming ‘fully-fledged members of the Republican movement’. As a contemporary of McGuffin’s remembered, a number of anarchists mostly from ‘nationalist areas’ retreated into the wider republican family after the Falls Curfew of July 1970 in solidarity with the nascent armed campaign and/or response of the Provisional IRA. Some even went on to join Sinn Féin convinced in some way that the republicans were genuinely anti-statist and libertarian revolutionaries. McGuffin himself became a columnist for the Provisional movement’s newspaper, An Phoblacht/Republican News writing under the pseudonym, ‘the Brigadier’ from 1974 to 1981, although his acerbic pen was not uncritical of republicans themselves on occasion.
He also sat on an international committee investigating the deaths in custody of Red Army Faction members in Germany, and strengthened a long-standing friendship with various left-leaning German radicals, communists and sympathisers of Irish republicanism, while taking time out in 1978 to write the brilliant In Praise of Poteen, celebrating the ingenuity, talent and anti-authoritarian spirit of the poteen-makers as well as their historic concoctions. McGuffin’s later travails saw him re-locate to San Francisco where he became a criminal defence and human rights lawyer, before returning withhis German partner and comrade, Christiane Kuhn, to settle in Derry in 1998.
McGuffin’s political associations and activity then centred around his internet-based ‘Dispatches’, reporting and critiquing various political developments in the north and far beyond it. He was a supporter of the Garvaghy Road Residents in their campaign against Orange marches and travelled to Portadown to take part in protests there during the marching season. He also supported the calls of the Foyle Ethical Investments Campaign (FEIC) for the removal of defence industry giant, Raytheon, from Derry, and found time to write for the Derry News mainly in a satirical and at times libellous manner. He also produced another two valuable books, one a largely autobiographical collection of apocryphal tales and the other a biography, with Joe Mulheron, of the DerryIRA man,
seafarer and general adventurer, Captain Charles ‘Nomad’ McGuinness. In all, McGuffin
produced nine books, a number of which were solely in German, he finding few publishers in
Britain or Ireland willing to print the works of a man described by many as‘an intellectual hooligan.’
–
Written by a Derry WSM member. To check out Derry Anarchists online go to:
http://www.derryanarchists.blogspot.com. Or alternatively facebook for more photosand up-to-date
info.
Bernadette: One women’s journey from mass protest to hunger strikes to the peace process
http://www.wsm.ie/c/bernadette-devlin-review-notes-political-journey
_________________________________________
A – I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Big Brother ‘legal’ in US: Mumia Abu-Jamal exclusive to RT
RT Telivision
RT has become the first TV channel in the world to speak to former journalist and Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal since he was removed from death row in January. Abu-Jamal will spend his life behind bars for killing a police officer in 1981.
Considered by many to be a flagrant miscarriage of justice, the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal has gained much attention worldwide. The defense claimed Abu-Jamal is innocent of the charges as the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses was not reliable. For decades, supporters have rallied behind him.
After spending almost 30 years on death row, Abu-Jamal told RT’s Anastasia Churkina that “The truth is I spent most of my living years in my lifetime, on death row. So, in many ways, even to this day, in my own mind, if not in fact, I’m still on death row.”
RT:If you were not behind bars and could be anywhere else in the world, where would you be – and what would you be doing?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Since my earliest years I was what one would call an internationalist. That is paying attention to what is happening in other parts of the world. As an internationalist I am thinking about life lived by other people all around the world. Of course as an African American I would love to spend some time in parts of Africa. But it is also true that I have many friends and loved ones in France. I would really like to bring my family, my wife and kids to come see our street in Paris.
RT: Being behind bars you seem to be watching world affairs much closer than most people who are free to walk the streets. Which event of the last 30 years would you like to be a part of, if you could?
MAJ: I think the first would probably be the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Because of course once being South African, it was also global, because it was the touch point of white supremacy versus the freedom and dignity of African people. So South Africa would be a logical first choice.
But wherever the people are fighting for freedom, that wins my eye and gets my attention and moves my passion.
RT:You turn 56 at the end of the month, which means you will have to spend more than half of your life behind bars. Most people cannot even begin to imagine that. What is it like? How has it changed you?
MAJ: The point and fact is I have spent most of my life, the bigger percentage of my life on death row. And it cannot but have had a profound effect on consciousness and on the way one sees and interacts with the world. I like to tell myself that I actually spent a lot of that time beyond the bars, in other countries and in other parts of the world. Because I did so mentally. But mental can only take you so far. The truth of the matter is that I spent most of my living years in my lifetime on death row. So, in many ways, even to this day, in my own mind, if not in fact, I am still on death row.
RT: Your story has really become a symbol for many of a flawed justice system. Do you personally have any faith left in a fair and free justice system? Considering your life has been so much affected by it?
MAJ: When I was a teenager and in the Black Panther party I remember I was going to downtown Manhattan and protesting against political imprisonment and incarceration and threats facing Angela Davis… When Davis attacked the prison system, she talked about perhaps 250,000 or 300,000 people imprisoned throughout all the US as a problem to be dealt with, a crisis, a situation that bordered on fascism. Fast forward 30-40 years to the present, today more than 300,000 prisoners in California alone, one state out of fifty. The imprisonment in California alone exceeds that of France, Belgium and England – I could name 4-5 countries combined.
We could not perceive back then of what it would become. It is monstrous when you really look at what is happening today. You can literally talk about millions of people incarcerated by the prisoner-industrial complex today: men, women and children. And that level of mass incarceration, really mass repression, has to have an immense impact in effect on the other communities, not just among families, but in a social and communal consciousness way, and in inculcation of fear among generations. So it is at a level and at a depth that many of us cannot even dream of today.
RT:You talk about so many important social and economic issues in your work; do you have a dream today? If you could see one of those aspects changed which one would you pick? What do you wish you could see happen in the United States?
MAJ: There is never one thing… Because of the system of interconnectedness and because one part of the system impacts another part of the system, and because, what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony of the ideological system impacts other parts of the system. You cannot change one thing that will impact all things. That is one of the lessons of the 1960s, because the civil rights movement was talking about integration and changing the schools. In point of fact if you look at the vast majority of working class and poor black kids in American schools today, they live and spend their hours and their days in the system profoundly as segregated as that of their grandparents, but it is not segregated by race, it is segregated by race and class.
The schools that my grandchildren go to are worse than the schools I went to when I was in my minor years and my teenage years. That’s a condemnation of a system but because former generations only concentrated on one thing or one side of the problem. The problem has really got worse and worse and worse. And while there is a lot of rhetoric about schools, American schools are a tragedy.
RT: You were monitored by the FBI at the age of fourteen, now with laws such as NDAA being passed in the United States when people are watched, detained and can be held, that has become easier than ever, do you think Big Brother has officially shown his face in this country?
MAJ: If you look back it is clear that FBI and their leaders and their agents knew that everything they did then was illegal and FBI agents were taught and trained how to break into places, how to do, what they called, black bag jobs and that kind of stuff, how to commit crimes. And this is what they were also taught, you’d better do it and you’d better not get caught, because if you get caught you are going to jail and we act like we don’t know you, you are on your own. What has happened in the last twenty and thirty years not just NDAA but the so-called Patriot Act has legalized everything that was illegal back in the 1950s-1970s. They legalized the very things that the FBI agents and administrative knew was criminal back then. That means they can look in your mail, they certainly can read your email, they tap your phone – they do all of that. But they do it in the name of national security. What we’re living today is a national security state where Big Brother is legalized and rationalized.
RT: You have described politicians once as prostitutes in suits giving your apologies to honest prostitutes. It is election season in the US right now and we want to ask who do people trust, who would you vote for?
MAJ: Nobody. I have seen no one who I could in good conscience vote for today. Because most of the people that are out there are from two major political parties and all I hear is kind of madness – a wish to return to days of youth to the 1950s or they talk about the perpetuation of the American empire, imperialism. What is there to vote for? How many people consciously go to the polls voting for imperialism, for more war or voting for their son or daughter or father or mother to become a member of the armed forces and become a mass murderer?
RT:You seem to have endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement that has sprung out the US this year. Is this the type of uprising that you think could change America and do good to the United States?
MAJ: I think it is the beginning of this kind of uprising. Because it has to be deeper, it has to be broader, it has to address issues that are touching on the lives of poor working class people…It is a damn good beginning, I just wish it was bigger and angrier.
RT: You are the voice of the voiceless. What is your message to your supporters right now, to those who are listening to you?
MAJ: Organize, organize, organize. I love you all. Thank you for fighting for me and let’s fight together to be free.
End
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Request from Jock Palfreeman
freejock@live.com.au
Dear Comrades
As of around August 2011 I have been convicted without right of appeal in the highest court of Bulgaria. I was left with a 20 year sentence in maximum security prison. However what did change in the court’s decision was that unlike the first court’s verdict, the court of appeal ruled that there were Roma present and there was a “physical fight between the Roma and the group of boys”. Seeing as the Roma were 2 and the “group of boys” were 15 the use of the word “fight” is being stretched. The neo-nazis from South Division Levski Ultras have denied that there was a “fight” with Roma and even deny that Roma were there at all. Yet the appeal court although contradicting the neo-nazis on this point went on to claim that the statements from the neo-nazis were truthful. Strangely the crux of the prosecutor’s arguments was that there was no fight between the neo-nazis and Roma and there weren’t even Roma there, hence the accusation against me that I attacked them without cause.
This was also the excuse given by the investigator and prosecutor for not bringing the Roma to court as witnesses. Now however the court has ruled that Roma were there and that yes there was a physical fight between the Roma and neo-nazis, but the court stops short at discrediting the neo-nazis as witnesses and made no attempt to find these “new” witnesses. Until today the only evidence used to prosecute me were the statements from the neo-nazis themselves. There is no other collaborating evidence or witnesses to the inditement or court findings that I “for no reason attacked 15 men with the intent to kill them”.
I have not changed my explanation of events from the beginning, and they remain the same after 4 years of being kidnapped by the Bulgarian state, that is that I witnessed the 15 neo-nazis all attack 2 Roma due to the colour of their skin, I intervened to defend the 2 Roma, the 15 neo-nazis then attacked me and I defended myself.
For these reasons and many more we are trying to revitalise the solidarity movement with my case and all the connotations that my case involves IE Racism, violent neo-nazi gangs and their mates who defend them the corrupt police, corrupt courts and the corrupt prison system. The neo-nazis wouldn’t be able to attack people on the streets if it wasn’t for the protection afforded them by the police and courts. It’s telling when hundreds of the state’s agents are needed to stop me, a lone individual. However against their hundreds I have morality, I am right and they are in the wrong and this is why it takes so many of them.
I am putting out a call to action to all those opposed to racism both on the street and in it’s institutionalised form of fascism. This March 2012 organise yourselves to the Bulgarian embassies or consuls in your cilies. Let the Bulgarian state know that the matter isn’t yet settled and that you don’t recognise the colin’s decision to incarcerate me and protect the racists.
I am also trying to transfer to Australia so as be closer to my family and to escape the persecution against me by the prison administration at the behest of those connected with my case, yet the Head Prosecutor-Boris Velchev and his lap dog prosecutor Krassimira Velcheva have already tried to coerce me into retracting my transfer request. I refused to retract my request and as such the Proseeutor’s Office of Bulgaria is refusing to answer my requests based on Bulgarian laws to transfer’ to Australia.
March 2012 solidarity demands are:
Jock’s case is re-opened due to missing evidence primarily the two Roma witnesses/victims
The neo-nazis are punished for their past race hate crimes and prevented from committing more
Jock is allowed to transfer to Australia and all other foreigners who so wish are allowed to transfer to their home countries
.Letters of demand can be sent to the following relevant addresses:
Head prosecutor of Bulgaria, Boris Velchev. No 2 Vitosha Boulevard, Sofia 1061, Bulgaria
Directorate of International Legal Assistance and European Integration, Krassimira Veleheva, No 2 Vitosha Roulevard, Sofia 1061, Bulgaria
Minister of Justice, Diana Kovaeheva, No 1 Slavanska Street, Sofia 1040, Bulgaria
Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Boiko Borrisov, No 2 Dondukov Street, Sofia 1123, Bulgaria
President of Bulgaria, Rosen Plevneviev, No 2 Slavanska Street, Sofia 1040, Bulgaria
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, No 29 “6th September” Street, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria
Solidarity to all my comrades both outside and inside!
Writing to Jock Palfreeman
Mail can be sent directly to:
Jock Palfreeman
Sofia Central Prison
21 General Stoletov Boulevard
Sofia 1309
BULGARIA
When writing don’t stick anarchy symbols etc all over your letter, as he may not get it. He appreciates political books if you can send something.
There are limitations on the size and number of parcels Jock can receive so we suggest that you first establish contact with Jock by writing a letter and asking him what he needs. Usually the limitations don’t extend to small packages including items such as books, magazines and games. If you have any questions about sending Jock letters and packages please contact freejock@live.com.au
Jock support website: http://www.freejock.com/
Photo courtesy: Leeds ABC http://leedsabc.org/
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Anarchist Black Cross Melbourne PO Box 1364 Collingwood 3066
abcmelb@yahoo.com.au abcmelb.wordpress.com
THE ANARCHIST BLACK CROSS 