There mobilization of students against universities projects with Leonardo and Army: Sapienza occupied, after Naples and Turin. The Government waves the fear of terrorism. But Gaza is just the last drop: the protest is longtime
Of Luciana Cimino from the manifesto
A week of protest was enough for make the us usually measured minister of the University lose your head e of the research Anna Maria Bernini who yesterday, alarmed by two disputes simultaneously, in Rome and Genoa, thought of calling the police chief Vittorio Pisani for a comparison on the "situation within the universities ".
An irrews that, in addition to seem a rude to the competent minister, planted, betrays the nervousness of the right government in front of the mobilizations of young people. Only 18 months have passed since Meloni, in his speech of settlement said "contest me, be hungry, be crazy and also free »to young people. An evident boutade that has not convinced anyone also because already a few days later the chronicles recorded the use of Manganelli against students.
Yesterday Minister Bernini had to demonstrate to adhere to the government's majority party line
who for days, in confidential communications, has asked his of his publicly support the thesis that university protests for the Palestine are infiltrated by the red brigades.
An indication that, in the intentions, it should serve to diminish the strong anti-war instances of the movement student who, after Naples and Turin, has occupied the Sapienza and manifested in Genoa to ask for the interruption of the announcement of collaboration between Italy and Israel (Maeci) and relations with Leonardo and Med-Or Foundation, chaired by Marco Minniti.
What you though The government pretends not to see is that the mobilization against the militarization of Italian universities starts from long before the contingency of the news and the massacre of the population of Gaza has it made only more urgent. Even two years ago, at the end of March 2022, the first University of the capital was occupied to protest against the escalation in Ukraine with the request to cut the agreements between Sapienza and Leonardo.
In addition to the PNRR, there is also a PNRM, National Plan of Military Research, involving Ministries of Defense and education and university. The central role of the system university for strengthening the military sector is emphasized also from the programmatic document 2020-22 of the General Staff of Defence. Also in 2022 a protocol between crui was signed (Conference of Rectors) and Leonardo Med-Or to intensify the collaboration.
According to the data published on the website of same aerospace group, at the moment Leonardo has a sixty research projects with the Italian universities plus five Framework agreements with as many universities (Polimi, Polito, La Sapienza, University of Genoa and Bologna). The army also moved: the Federico II of Naples, for example, has long started an agreement-four with the center high studies for the defense (Casd) and the Operations Command On the Network of the General Staff to develop common projects.
As the No Muos movement explains Sicilian in a recent dossier on university and war, the slip from knowledge as a place of peace to the knowledge for war is due to the intertwining of different interests: «The merely economic one e Remunction: the war companies that finance research do not do it in a disinterested way but they create profit and can draw on a large basin of interns and trainees to be used at their own structures; Another end is political and propaganda, with one universities that lends itself on the one hand to legitimize aggressions imperialist and, on the other, to spread the culture of defense and safety in the territories, which serves to normalize the war and its consequences".
The Observatory against the militarization of the schools, which for years has collected and archives the reports on the interference of the police in education, has launched a petition last January, «outside the universities from Med -or/Leonardo, producer of weapons and death », to ask rectors to give up their positions within the foundation he has Over thirty thousand signatures collected.
“When university research is financed by this type of companies, direct relapse is on the projects of research that are bound by the strategic choices of companies that they aim the growth of the war sector in a context in which the under the public funding of the universities puts the crisis in crisis universities, "says Margherita Esposito of the Union of University students, while the collective change course, the architect of the actions of the last days, call to mass mobilization for April 16.