Declaration read at the opening of a Vinci house at Liminbout

Saturday october 13 2012

Friends from here, Friends from elsewhere,

Many of you know these places. For those that live here, legally or not, it’s all familiar:

• Neighbours with whom we share moments of celebrations and exchanges, of struggle and resistance.
• The gardens we lovingly tend, farms punctuated by hourly milking, paths we find ourselves lost along while picking blackberries and mushrooms...

Others of you may have come here for the first time. Because even those who have never walked these fields and these forests, even those without a memory in every stone, in every tree, in every crossroads : they won’t watch all of this destroyed ! In taking this empty house today, despite the risk that the gendarmerie hunts us down, we want to get this message out :

The struggle continues, we won’t fall into the trap of repression that wants to disempower us, nor into the trap of negotiations with Vinci that wants to make us partners in the project, complicit in our own misfortune.

They have the means to make this area a desert. They are transforming villages into ghost villages, they dream of a farmland with plastic hedges and metal fences, of a land where mist is replaced by the aircraft exhaust, where the dew no longer forms on cobwebs but on solar panels on an airport roof.

We have always said: a terrain should be defended by those who inhabit it, but not alone. Here as elsewhere, we’ve come to show those who drive us out that together we can stand up to their logic of spreadsheets and destruction, through our words and our actions, even if that means breaking their laws.

• While Vinci and the socialist state deploys all its infernal machinery to grind down those that have decided to stay and refused to cooperate,
•  While with sadness we bump into those who welcomed us at the start and now have left.
•  While houses, fields and farms are emptied and the departure of each resident marks the arrival of new security guards and an increased police presence.

We are here to say: we’re not leaving, there’s nothing to negotiate, but everything to gain or everything to lose!

However much they harass us, evict us one by one, drag us through trial after trial, we continue to fight... even if it’s not a fair fight, even if the resistance seems in vain.

On the eve of evictions, there is still room for maneuver: inhabit the zone.

We must repopulate the area as it empties to support those who refuse to leave. To stop the advancement of the project with our presence. To scream our refusal of this absurdity and carry out acts of resistance, and as Günther Anders said:

“Courage ? I know nothing of courage. It’s hardly necessary for my action.
 Consolation. I don’t need it anymore.
 Hope. There is only reply. By conviction, I have none. My principle is : if there is the tiniest chance, however small it may be, to be able to contribute to something that intervenes in this terrible situation that we’re in, then it must be done”