Former Communist Guerilla Jean-Marc Rouillan Granted Restricted Freedom - the French State Appeals...

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Today the Paris sentencing court ruled in favour of Jean-Marc Rouillan's request for "restricted freedom". This qas quickly followed by news that the State was appealing this decision; the courts will rule within the next two months, but in the meantime Rouillan remains in prison. Nevertheless, this is a step forward...

Along with Georges Cipriani (who remains in prison), Nathalie Ménigon (who was granted restricted freedom a month ago) and Joëlle Aubron (who died of cancer in 2006), Rouillan was captured by French anti-terrorist police on February 21st 1987. The four, who had all conducted armed attacks as members of the communist guerilla group Action Directe, subsequently received double life sentences each, with no possibility of release for eighteen years. In prison they were often subjected to severe isolation, conditions crafted to induce psychological stress and traume; in the case of Ménigon these conditions led directly to a suicide attempt.

The Ne Laissons Pas Faire! Collective, a support group for the Action Directe prisoners, issued this short press release today:

Action Directe: Jean-Marc Rouillan Granted "Restricted Freedom"

The "Ne laissons pas faire!" collective notes the court's decision to grant "restricted freedom" to Jean-Marc Rouillan, a member of Action Directe who has been in prison for over twenty years. Under the anti-terrorist legislation [in France] this is the preliminary stage before one can be granted conditional release.

As with Nathalie Ménigon, this restricted freedom is still a form of semi-incarceration, and comes with a number of exceptional restrictions.

It would make no sense if Georges Cipriani did not now also receive restricted liberty.

Amongst the prisoners involved in this case, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, an Arab communist militant who has been in prison since 1984 and eligible for release since 1999, is awaiting a ruling on his seventh application for conditional release on October 10th.

For our comrades' freedom, the struggle continues!

« Ne laissons pas faire ! » Collective
September 26th 2007

Action Directe was a communist guerilla organization which carried out a number of attacks in the 1970s and 80s, and at one point attempted to build a west european guerilla front with the West German Red Army Faction. Nevertheless, according to newspaper reports accompanying Rouillan's release, the former guerilla no longer sees a place for such actions, having told the court that "armed struggle is no longer on the agenda; anybody would consider the idea ridiculous today."

Over the past twenty years Rouillan has remained politically active behind bars. As the Journal Chretien notes:

In prison, Rouillan distinguished himself by his determination: he supported his comrades in Action Directe, he went on hunger strike, and he continued to write... his most recently published book, Lettres à Jules, a series of open letters to Jules Bonnot, the head of the Bonnot Gang of illegal militants who attacked several banks at the beginning of the 20th century, "expropriating" funds for the "anarchist cause." Lettres à Jules was published by Agone, along with Les voyages des enfants de l’extérieur, Rouillan's memoirs of his days in Spain, and Chroniques carcérales, a series of texts describing prison conditions in France. He is a regular contributor to the CQFD monthly publication.

The following is an excerpt from the Collective Biography of Action Directe members, icluded in the pamphlet Three Essays by Action Directe (available from Kersplebedeb or AK Press):

JEAN-MARC ROUILLAN was sixteen years old in 1968. From a left-wing family, he was nevertheless not very political. He has suggested that this might be what enabled him to engage in the revolt against totalitarianism with no hesitation. He was active with the CAL (Comité d’action Lycéen – Student Action Committee) in events in the neighborhoods north of Toulouse. He then joined the anarcho-communist movement, notably the Autonomous Libertarian Groups (translater’s note: Groupes Autonomes Libertaires – it is important to note that in Europe the word “libertarian” is not associated solely with anarcho-capitalism as in the United States, but also with left-wing anarchism and anti-authoritarianism).

These months were a time of intense learning where direct action was a common occurence in the many struggles within the revitalized revolutionary movement. Occupation committees in the factories, rent strikes in the cities, struggle against the police state…

Given that the city was rightly considered the capital of antifrancoist Spain, he then became involved in support work for the revolutionary struggle against Franco’s dictatorship. In 1970 he was a member of the first nucleus of the Movimente Iberico de Liberacion (MIL), the armed organization of the Barcelona (Catalunya) underground workers movement.

The MIL acquired funds for the solidarity chests and lent its political and technical support to the self-organized groups and the different fighting assemblies that were growing on the ground. It functioned as a network of anti-fascist resistance (the GACs, Groupes Autonomes de Combat – Autonomous Fighting Groups) but it also developed an anti-capitalist praxis tailored to this period: political autonomy for the working class, radical critique and anti-revisionism, against all collaboration with the “democratic” forces that only wanted to shepherd Francoism into a new authoritarian bourgeois regime. The MIL-GAC was destroyed by fierce repression. One of its members, Salvador Puig Antich, was the last political prisoner to be sentenced to death by garrotting (March 2nd 1974). Back in France, Jean-Marc worked to bring together many libertarian and autonomist groups willing to carry out international armed struggle against the dictatorship. Out of this came the GARI (Groupes d’Action Revolutionnaire Internationalistes – Internationalist Revolutionary Armed Groups) which were active at this time in many European countries. Jean-Marc was arrested in 1974, but when Franco died he was amnestied and released in Spring 1977.

He then started working to bring together the post-May ‘68 autonomist movement with the new expressions of autonomous working class struggle that came out of ’68 and the battles of the late seventies, and which found most of their inspiration in the various Italian theses. He worked to set up underground groups like the Coordinations Autonomes (trans: Autonomous Coordinations) and to generalize actions and resistance. The fruit of this labor was Action Directe, born in early 1978.

Regarding todays events, and Rouillan's prospects in the immediate future. one can also read the following article from the AFP press service:

PARIS (AFP) — After Nathalie Ménigon this summer, on Wednesday the Paris sentencing court granted restricted freedom to Jean-Marc Rouillan, a former member of Action Directe, a far left armed organization. The parquet court is appealing this decision.

During the September 4th hearing the Paris parquet had requested that Rouillan remain incarcerated. This afternoon it confirmed that it would be appealing the sentencing court's decision, which effectively suspends the restricted freedom decision.

According to his lawyer Jean-Louis Chalanset, Jean-Marc Rouillan, who has been in prison for twenty years after having received two life sentences, will have his request examined "within two months" by the Paris sentencing appeals court.

The co-founder of Action Directe was supposed to be transferred on October 22nd from Lannemezan (in the Upper Pyrenees) to a halfway house in Marseille, where he has a job waiting for him at a publishing house. This however has been put on hold by the parquet's appeal.

As in the case of Nathalie Ménigon, another former member of Action Directe who has been in restricted freedom since August in the Toulouse area, Rouillan's new conditions will allow him to work during the day though he will have to return to prison at night.

According to Mr Chalanset, the sentencing court's ruling was the result of "the serious efforts at social rehabilitation" of the Action Directe co-founder, whose "behaviour in prison has evolved satisfactorily."

The court has found that "Armed struggle no longer seems to figure in his idea of political action," according to his lawyer.

Along with three other members of Action Directe - including Ms Ménigon, whom he married in 1999 in the Fleury-Mérogis prison - Mr Rouillan received a double life sentence for a variety fo crimes, including the assassinations of the Renault CEO Georges Besse and the arms engineer René Audran in the 1980s.

In 2005, after having finished the 18 years of his sentence for which there was no possibility of release, Rouillan filed an initial request for conditional release. It was rejected by the sentencing court, and then by the Pau appeals court in February 2006.

According to Alain Pojolat, of the "Ne Laissons Pas Faire" collective which supports former members of Action Directe, this time "the court was able to resist the pressure from the parquet".

He nevertheless remained cautious, and worried that the conditions of restricted freedom might be "very restrictive."

In the framework of restricted freedom, Rouillan "must not give any interviews or publish any documents relating to the acts for which he was condemned," according to Mr Chalanset. "He must also hand over 30% of his salary in restitution to his victims and the public purse."

At the Agone publishing house in Marseille, the possibility that Rouillan will be able to start working as an editor "in charge of preparing copy" was welcomed "with much emotion," according to Thierry Discepolo, the head of the publishing house. "We are already getting ready," he told AFP.

After Ménigon and Rouillan, "It would make no sense if Georges Cipriani did not now also receive restricted liberty," according to a press release from the Ne Laissons Pas Faire collective. According to Mr Pojolat, Cipriani is currently incarcerated in Entsisheim (Upper Rhine) and is supposed to file his request for restricted freedom in November.

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Communist Guerilla Nathalie Menigon Wins "Restricted Liberty"

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Good news today from France - it seems that Nathalie Ménigon of Action Directe is to be transfered out of the Bapaume Detention Center to another prison, from where she will be allowed out to go to work on week days. Here is the bulletin from the Ne Laissons Pas Faire! collective which has been struggling for freedom for the AD prisoners for some years now:

Nathalie Ménigon: Restricted Liberty as of August 2nd

Today, July 19th, the Paris appeals court's sentencing board ruled that Nathalie Ménigon, an Action Directe militant, can benefit from a change of her conditions of imprisonment. She is set to be leave the Bapaume detention center on August 2nd.

So the court has finally granted Nathalie a degree of restricted liberty, more than two years after the end of her security sentence. There is nothing compassionate about this decision though, as this restricted liberty, "which could lead to the possibility of conditional release", comes with very restrictive conditions for Nathalie:

• She will be transferred to a prison close to her workplace and, from Monday to Friday, every evening she must return to her cell. If she is late, she will be considered to have escaped. She will be incarcerated on weekends, except when permission to leave might be granted on a case by case basis.
  
  
• She is absolutely forbidden from making any public statements (verbally, in newspapers or in books), a condition which in fact prevents her from doing what she has been free to do so far, specifically in regards to speaking out in support of her imprisoned comrades

The "Ne Laissons Par Faire!" Collective is satisfied with today's decision. It is important to point out that the Action Directe militants carried out their fight together, they were sentenced together and that they all suffered years of the same particularly harsh prison conditions. For over twenty years they collectively resisted the State's efforts to destroy them or bribe them to renounce their beliefs. So far the courts have never wanted to separate their cases, and they were sentenced together. The restricted liberty should thus be applied to each of them equally, the next opportunity to do so being for Jean-Marc Rouillan in mid-September.

"Ne laissons pas faire !" Collective
July 19th 2007

To contextualize: Action Directe grew out of the French autonomist scene, drawing inspiration from both the struggles of the Third World proletariat and the intellectual legacy of the new communist currents of the 1960s and 70s. It carried out a number of spectacular attacks between 1979 and 1987 (for a complete chronology see the new urban guerilla website).

On February 21st 1987 the four remaining members AD, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Nathalie Ménigon, Joëlle Aubron, and Georges Cipriani, were captured at a farm in Vitry-aux-Loges by France's anti-terrorist GIGN police. They were each sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for eighteen years.

This release is a bitter and timid "victory", for as detailed above Nathalie is not free, and in fact is less free new to express herself than she was at Bapaume. Nevertheless, it is an important step forward, especially for human reasons, as the years of isolation-torture that the AD militants were subjected to took a particularly brutal toll on Nathalie. Suffering from severe depression, she has twice attempted suicide, and has been partially paralyzed for years as a result.

Nevertheless, despite the ravages of twenty years of incarceration, she has remained defiant and held fast to her political opposition to capitalism and the State.

What follows is an except from the Short Collective Biography of Action Directe Prisoners, fuond in the pamphlet Three Essays by Action Directe Comrades published and distributed by Kersplebedeb:

NATHALIE MENIGON was born in 1957 in a working class family. In 1975 she began working at a bank, joined the CFDT trade union after a strike. She was then kicked out of the union and joined the autonomous communist group “Camarades” (trans: Comrades). Like the Italian group Autonomia Operaia (trans: Workers Autonomy), “Camarades” called for anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist social revolt and lent its support to the Italian guerilla movement. Nathalie took part in discussions and demonstrations in the Paris autonomist scene, and at the same time contemplated the necessity of armed combat.

In 1978 she and several comrades, including Jean-Marc, founded the revolutionary communist organization Action Directe. It was about concretely fighting the system and promoting the organization of the working class and its strategy: armed struggle. Both she and Jean-Marc participated in the first action claimed by the group: the machine gunning of the French chamber of commerce on May 1st 1979.

AD launched its first campaign of armed propaganda in Fall 1979. It would last until 1980. From the very beginning AD attacked those places where the State’s most important policies were thought out, decided upon and put into practice. AD chose its targets based on those questions that it described as being decisive at this stage (restructuring of the factories and neighbourhoods; military intervention in Tunisia, Chad and Zaire). More globally, AD was throwing down the red line that it intended to defend to the end: unity of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. As an example of this unity AD also attacked those involved in the exploitation of immigrant workers, responsible for the conditions they lived in and against which they were struggling.

Nathalie and Jean-Marc were arrested in September 1980 following a firefight with the police. After the election of Mitterand (1981) and the first social democratic government, a political battle erupted in the prisons. Solidarity movements were formed calling for an amnesty of political prisoners and for an end to the special courts. The massive mobilisation and the contradictions among the new powers led to the release of all communist and anarchist prisoners and the abolition of State Security Court. Jean-Marc was freed in August 1981, Nathalie in September.

Action Directe took action again in November and December of that year. It participated in the occupation of sweatshops in Sentier and buildings in Barbès. Over a hundred mainly Turkish foreign families were thus rehoused. At the same time this campaign was accompanied by several actions and demonstrations against sweatshops and for housing. It was also a matter of supporting Turkish comrades who had fled to France after the US-supported coup d’état in their country in 1980. The reconstruction of underground structures continued on at the same time.

In June 1982 AD led an important mobilization against the G-7 Summit in Versailles. It was a decisive step towards the integration of the imperialist countries along the lines elaborated by the Reagan administration.

On the last day of the Summit, June 6th, Israel attacked Lebanon. One of the lines of imperialist redeployment was thus illustrated in the most concrete way possible. There followed the invasion of Lebanon by Israeli troops, with all that followed for the Lebanese and Palestinian people. This led to AD reorienting itself towards new targets, claiming responsibility for the machinegunning of the car of the Israeli embassy’s chief of security and a number of actions against Israeli companies. After a massacre-attack against a Jewish restaurant (Goldenberg) on Rosiers street in Paris, the powers that be orchestrated a counter-revolutionary propaganda campaign throughout the media. In an interview with the newspaper Libération, Jean-Marc defended the machinegunning of the chief of security and condemned the massacre attacks. At the same time as the Council of Ministers tried to isolate the organization’s militants by ordering the dissolution of Action Directe, a series of raids were carried out against squats and known revolutionaries. Nathalie was still recovering from a serious car accident that had taken place when she was bringing posters against the G-7 Summit back from Brussels. Nevertheless, both she and Jean-Marc went underground.

It should be mentioned, in closing, that the State in its utter depravity is appealing today's decision.

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