MOVE's Killers Sue Paris for Honoring Mumia

In the midst of a revival of an international campaign to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, Philadelphia city officials are suing the city of Paris and its Saint-Denis suburb for naming a street after Mumia and for designating him an honorary citizen. As reported in the French press, an October 17 letter to the Council of Paris states that Philadelphia officials plan to visit France at the end of November to protest these honors. The French group United National Collective to Support Mumia Abu-Jamal has called a protest against this delegation for November 29.

After news of the lawsuit was leaked, Philadelphia officials disingenuously claimed that the letter was a hoax. But according to the Philadelphia Tribune (17 November), Peter J. Wirs, president of the 59th Republican Ward Executive Committee, admitted, “I sent privileged communication between myself and my counsel that if and when a delegation were to be organized these were the members that would be composed thereof.” In response to the Philly officials’ lawsuit scheme, Mumia himself wrote a letter to the mayor and Council of Paris, as did his attorney, Robert Bryan.

Mumia, a leader of the Philadelphia Black Panthers in his youth, has long been a supporter of the MOVE organization, which has for decades been vilified by the government and terrorized by police. Just two months ago, the Philadelphia police department awarded its “Valor Award” to nine cops who participated in the assault on the MOVE commune in Powelton Village on 8 August 1978 following a 55-day siege by as many as 600 cops. One cop was killed in the police cross fire. But nine MOVE members were framed up and sentenced to 30-100 years in prison for the killing. In May 1985, city police assisted by the Feds firebombed MOVE’s Osage Avenue home, incinerating eleven people, five of them children, and burning down an entire black neighborhood in the process.

The latest development in the campaign against Mumia illustrates yet again that given the capitalist rulers’ determination to execute Mumia, the mobilization needed to fight for his freedom is one that recognizes the depth of the state’s hatred for him and brings the power of the international labor movement to bear.

We print below a translation of a leaflet issued on November 16 by the Comité de Défense Sociale, a non-sectarian legal and social defense organization in political solidarity with the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League.

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The City of Philadelphia has sued Paris and the suburb of Saint-Denis for “apology for crime.” “Apology for crime” is a concept introduced into French law in 1893-1894 as part of the infamous “evil laws” that were used to persecute anarchists. In the eyes of the Democratic and Republican Philadelphia city councillors who have launched this action, the “apology for crime” here is that courageous death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal was named an honorary citizen of Paris and Saint-Denis, and that in April, the first Mumia Abu-Jamal Street was inaugurated in Saint-Denis.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man. A former Black Panther Party spokesman, supporter of the MOVE organization and award-winning journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” he was framed up in 1982 on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Sentenced to death based on his political activity and beliefs, Mumia has spent 24 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. Free Mumia now!

At the end of this month, Philadelphia is sending a bipartisan delegation, including the city’s police commissioner, to protest this support for Mumia, underscoring the extent to which the American bourgeoisie remains mobilized to see him executed. This attack takes place when the international defense campaign for Mumia is once again gaining steam, a campaign that Philadelphia and its police are seeking to crush in the egg. It also comes at a crucial juncture of the legal proceedings. Last month, Mumia submitted the final papers in his appeal of a federal court decision that affirmed his frame-up conviction. The court could decide within months whether to reinstate the death penalty, to condemn him to the living death of life in prison or to grant a new trial.

For years, every court has continued to refuse to take into account the mountain of evidence proving his innocence, including centrally the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner. Beverly’s confession corroborates a whole set of other evidence and explains that Faulkner was killed by hit men paid by the mob because he was interfering in payoffs to the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia police. Foremost, it demonstrates the collusion of the cops, the prosecution and the courts in Mumia’s frame-up. It is an object lesson in the class nature of the capitalist state, an instrument of organized violence for the capitalist class to defend its profit system against the working people and minorities.

This latest offensive by the city of Philadelphia against Mumia underlines that it is a suicidal illusion to believe that he can get a new, fair trial in the very courts that have been trampling on his rights for 25 years. But this is the line peddled by the likes of PCF [Communist Party] head Marie-George Buffet as well as Olivier Besancenot of the LCR [Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire] and Arlette Laguiller of LO [Lutte Ouvrière], who signed a call for “a new, fair trial” (l’Humanité, 4 February) and so place their faith in the bourgeois injustice system. The courts will not free Mumia without the weight of an international mobilization of the masses, centrally based on the labor movement. It was the power of an international mobilization based on the working class, from South Africa to Europe to the U.S., that helped stay the hand of the executioner when Mumia was days away from execution in 1995. Preaching faith in the capitalist courts has already demobilized workers and the oppressed, undercutting the need to fight now for Mumia’s freedom.

Philadelphia is being represented in Paris by one Gilbert Collard, a lawyer who grotesquely compared Mumia with Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie! “Apology for crime” is something Collard knows very well. In 2001 he defended General Aussaresses when he was prosecuted for “apology for war crime” after boasting of his role as a chief torturer during the Algerian War! During the trial, Collard sought to discredit Henri Alleg, a Communist leader, who gave evidence of his own torture at the hands of French paratroopers during that war.

Henri Alleg has signed the Comité de Défense Sociale and Partisan Defense Committee statement demanding Mumia’s freedom, as has Gilles Perrault, author of Le Pull-over Rouge on the Ranucci affair. [The statement, along with a list of signatories, appears on the PDC’s Web site at www.partisandefense.org/campaigns/
signers.html.] In 1976, Ranucci was the last man in France to face the guillotine for a crime he always swore he did not commit. And Collard at that time was already a lawyer…participating on the side of the prosecution against Ranucci. The PDC call to free Mumia has been signed by hundreds of trade-union activists, organizations and personalities around the world, including the poet Sonia Sanchez; Nobel Prize-winning authors Dario Fo and Nadine Gordimer; Antonio Negri; Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos; the late Markus Wolf; Bob Crow, leader of the British Rail, Maritime and Transport Union; as well as numerous trade-union sections and branches such as the COBAS PT CUB (postal workers union) in Milan, the SNTE-CNTE Section 10 (teachers union) in Mexico City, International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422-A in the U.S. city of Charleston, etc.

So much for the statements by the city of Philadelphia and Collard that they oppose the death penalty and “only” want to keep Mumia behind bars for the rest of his life. Pennsylvania is a death penalty state, with the fourth-largest death row population in the U.S., and the Philadelphia delegation to Paris is taking place in the context of the prosecutors’ fight to restore the death sentence against Mumia. Mumia is an innocent man who should never have spent a single day in prison!

Why has Philadelphia City Hall targeted Paris and Saint-Denis in their offensive when Venice and a score of other cities internationally have also made Mumia an honorary citizen? The answer lies in its perceived opportunity to profit from the racist campaign underway here against youth in the banlieues [suburban ghettos], carried out by parties of the left and right in the run-up to presidential elections. The first anniversary of last year’s banlieue revolt following the deaths of Ziad Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were killed while trying to escape a police dragnet, saw a major government offensive to present the police rather than banlieue youth as the real victims. The PCF’s daily l’Humanité [16 October], for example, devoted a full page to “Police Officers Trapped in a Housing Project in Epinay-sur-Seine.” Ten days later, l’Humanité ran another article headlined, “Police Officers in an Infernal Cycle,” promoting their line for a return to the neighborhood cops touted by [former Socialist Party prime minister Lionel] Jospin and Buffet.

This, together with the fact that the Socialist and Communist parties both called to restore the order of the Republic at the height of the youth revolt of a year ago, has only served to embolden all proponents of racist terror and those who want to see Mumia dead. Indeed, the letter sent on behalf of Philadelphia asserts that the decision to honor Mumia is disturbing “at an hour when French policemen themselves are exposed daily to an increasing number of attacks and acts of urban violence.” (We note with irony that this letter was sent on October 17, marking the 45th anniversary of the killing of 200 Algerian workers by the Parisian police.) And on October 22, the far-right police “union” Action Police issued a statement demanding that [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy increase his repression of youth by attacking

“the true cause of these evils: radical Islamism, unemployment and apology for cop-killing which is being made by some councillors, as is the case with the sort of ‘canonization’ of Mr. Mumia Abu-Jamal, who assassinated a police officer in Philadelphia the night of 9 December 1981.”

This same “trade union,” counseled by none other than Gilbert Collard, has gone to court to protest the freeing of 70 youth caught in a cop dragnet on October 27 in Seine-et-Marne. The cops are not workers; they are the guard dogs of the racist capitalist system. Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions!

The cops, emboldened by the campaign against banlieue youth, have been increasing their protests and mobilizations to grant themselves even greater liberty to terrorize whomever they choose. One cannot fight seriously today for Mumia if one does not defend banlieue youth against police terror and fight for their rights against the capitalist system, which has nothing to offer them except unemployment, racist discrimination and prison.

Sarkozy is now threatening criminal charges against anybody who opposes the forces of capitalist order “as an organized band.” Such a measure directly threatens the whole working class: any picket line or trade-union demonstration attacked by the police could lead to such charges. Meanwhile, at Charles de Gaulle airport, the racist witchhunt underway to strip dozens of workers and trade-union militants of security clearance, and with it their jobs, targets first off the thousands of youth from the Paris banlieues employed there. More broadly, it targets this entire integrated workforce, and the bosses know full well that these workers can wield enormous social power when they defend their rights by strike actions. Down with Vigipirate! [Vigipirate is a program that includes racist police/army patrols of public transportation.]

The working class has a vital interest in mobilizing for Mumia’s freedom and in defense of the banlieue youth. And the current ominous campaign by Collard, Philadelphia and Action Police shows how much the two issues are linked. The CDDS continues to demand amnesty for all youth jailed and charged in the wake of last year’s banlieue revolt and the mobilization against the CPE [First Employment Contract]. Racism is inherent in capitalism. To eradicate it once and for all, it will be necessary to overthrow this whole system through a workers revolution.

Just as we need to defeat the racist, pro-cop campaign against the banlieue youth, it is necessary to defeat Philadelphia City Hall’s campaign against Mumia. A victorious mobilization for Mumia must open a breach in the racist consensus against the youth of North African and African origin. We call on the workers and the oppressed to mobilize massively to protest the Philadelphia delegation. Join the contingent of the Comité de Défense Sociale at the November 29 demonstration called by the Collectif National Unitaire de Soutien à Mumia Abu-Jamal in front of Paris City Hall. There is no justice in the capitalist courts—Freedom now for Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty! The workers movement must defend the banlieue youth!

Note: Since the publication of the above leaflet, WV has been informed that Ranucci, who was guillotined in 1976, was not the last person executed in France. Hamida Djandoubi was guillotined in September 1977.