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Notis Mitarakis, the Greek Minister of Migration and Beate Gminder, Head of the European Taskforce for Lesbos and acting head of the EU task force on Lesbos visited Moria 21 on the island of Lesbos end of November.
by dunya collective from Lesbos (Greece)
It had the looks of a well-rehearsed show. Business as usual: In his speech Mitarakis emphasized that the camp was clean, save and orderly. He spoke of a “structure that has no traces of the chaos of Moria” and declared that flood protection measures had been completed and the camp was adequately prepared for winter. The camp could now function independently from the health care system of the city of Mytilini.
The minister continued by explaining that together with IGME1 the soil had been analyzed – a detail that could be of importance, since the camp is located on a former shooting range which makes contamination with lead and other heavy metals likely. With this step he reacted to the concerns of NGOs and media reports.2 EU commissioner of home affairs, Ylva Johansson, had stated after the fires in Moria in early September that conditions were indeed inacceptable. “Conditions in Moria, both before and after the fire, were unacceptable. Men, women and children living in overcrowded camps with poor sanitation and little access to health care.”3 Trusting Mitarakis’ comments, it looks like we are not about to recreate the same conditions. But the perspective of the people who must live in the camp is very different. It was not without reason that they quickly named the new camp Moria 2. A short overview:
I There are very few showers that only run with cold water, so-called bucket showers. Camp inhabitants have to improvise and build their own showers to wash themselves. There is neither running nor hot water. People have no other option than doing their laundry and washing themselves in the ocean.
II The quality of food is as bad as it was in the old camp Moria, the same catering company “Elaitis” brings the food. Food equaling three meals is distributed once a day. The food is of very low quality and in the evening it is often times spoiled already.
III Health care is insufficient. Many of the inhabitants do not trust the doctors anymore. There are long waiting hours and inhabitants often only receive paracetamol as a treatment. There is hardly any psychological care. There is an epidemic of scabies that was already a big problem in Moria 1.
IV The location of the camp is exposed to the north. The tents are thin. Wind and weather pull at them and cause enormous noise. Many inhabitants complain about sleep deprivation because of this. It is also cold at night and the tents are not heated. The use of radiators is officially forbidden, as is open fire.
V Electrical installations are insufficient and in many cases seem improvised. There has already been a fire in Moria 2, apparently caused by an electrical short. Inhabitants extinguished the fire, not the fire brigade.
VI There is very restricted access for the press. Journalists can only enter the camp with special permission and accompanied by police or camp personnel. These permissions are hard to come by. Of course, protection against COVID-19 is important, but these measures were already in place before lockdown. They aim at avoiding images of the ugly truth of the camp reaching the public.
VII Inhabitants often describe the camp as a prison. At the entrance there are metal detectors. Drones surveil the camp and there are 300 police officers on duty, working in shifts. On top of that, the possibilities of leaving the camps are heavily restricted. Lockdown has impacted the camp tremendously and now inhabitants can only leave the camp once per week for four hours maximum. This results in enormous psychological pressure.
Many do not now what is next to come. The repeating questions we encounter are: Will they decline my asylum application? Will there be a transfer to the mainland? Will I receive asylum? Will I be homeless? Will Germany take me in? What have we done to deserve this treatment? What will happen to me if I stay here? Will there be a new camp? Will I be allowed into the new camp? Will the camp be closed? How long do I have to stay here?
What do we know about the construction of a new camp that the EU task force is involved in? After his tour of the camp, Mitarakis underlined that Moria 2 was only temporary and together with the EU commission, a new, closed camp was in the works. “In the following month we will quickly work towards the creation of a more permanent, closed, controlled structure, in cooperation with the European Commission”, Mitarakis stated.4
Mitarakis has made similar statements before to online portal “Infomigrants”: “These camps will have double fencing, they will have a secure gate. Asylum seekers will be allowed to exit and enter using a card and a fingerprint at a dedicated time through the day. Camps will be closed at night – it’s a policy we are already implementing in the temporary camp in Lesbos. And also the camp will have a fully closed ‘pre-removal section’ for the people that have had final decisions and need to be returned to their countries of origin.”5
Doesn’t this contradict the statements of EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson? She always stressed that a new building would be an open multi-purpose camp.6 But she also spoke of controlled entries and exits. Maybe Mitarakis is just not shy about speaking openly about his ministry’s plans. He simply does not see the necessity of being reserved when it comes to this issue. After all, the construction of such a prison camp is fully in line with the political agenda of the ruling Nea Dimokratia party. The ultra-conservative Greek government wants to show strength and score points with the extreme-right voters. It already did so with the eviction of the PIKPA on Lesbos.7
It looks as if the question of the construction date and exact location of the new camp is about to be resolved. All of the sites proposed until now are far away from the city or villages. Apart from the fact that housing people in camps for any length of time is inhumane, a camp in the middle of nowhere and without proper connections to public life has close resemblance to a prison. Social exclusion via spatial segregation is a popular tactic in European-Greek asylum policy. The question now is whether there are two different versions of one and the same camp in play, or whether Johansson deliberately used nicer words when speaking to the media to distort reality and calm public opinion.
Mitarakis talked big in September, announcing that the new camp will be completed before Easter of 2021. These plans can already be considered failed. There have been differences to be settled in regard to the location, which stalled the process and required new negotiations. “It is not easy to speak with the local population”, Gminder said to the press.8
This is why the visit to Moria 2 was only a small item on the agenda of the two politicians. The actual reason for the visit to the island of Lesbos must have been the agreement on the building site for a new camp. The two politicians met with officials of the European Commission as well as the Greek Ministry of Migration and technical advisors in Mytilini to discuss the project. The proposed location, directly next to a waste dump in Vastria, has already been rejected by the EU.9It would only damage the tarnished reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize winner further. The site proposed by the mayor of Mytilinis, Stratis Kytelis, and Charalambo Athanasiou, the representative of Nea Dimokratia of the respective prefecture, was the last one still on the table. After the meeting it was announced that this is the location they had now agreed upon. It is a private property called “Eleftherakou estate”, located about two kilometers to the east, near the landfill. The owner will cash € 70,000 of rent per month. The property belongs to the administrative district of the island capital of Mytilini.10Gminder and Mitarakis were confident that construction will start before Easter 2021 and the camp will be completed in autumn of the same year.11
We now know that a new camp will be built close to a landfill in the middle of nowhere. We do not know how open or closed the camp will be. But its location alone makes it a prison. It has also become clear that the current camp is a rather long-term “temporary structure”. Refugees will have to live there for another full year. This is an enormous psychological and physical burden for them. Europe has the responsibility of fairly allocating the people needing asylum. Particularly rich countries such as Germany are in a position to do so, but they obstruct this process politically. The new camp and the new EU migration package show what the phrase “No more Morias” actually means: The show must go on.
1 Hellenic Survey of Geology and Mineral Exploration. (https://www.igme.gr/)
5 https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/28372/mitarakis-we-are-protecting-our-borders-in-line-with-international-law
6 Ylva Johansson in a conversation with German ARD, at 13:12min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHVi99NdLME
7 PIKPA was a unique project offering shelter to particularly vulnerable refugees, without violence, police or fences. It was operation under the principle of “community organizing”. In the early hours of October 30th the project was evicted against the will of its inhabitants who were transported to Karatepe 1 camp. This camp is to be closed at the end of December. The refugees do not know what will happen afterwards.
The is a translation with some modifications of a text by Cerveaux Non Disponibles.
The ban on broadcasting police actions centralizes all fears, but legalizing drones and surveillance technology is just as damaging to freedoms and democracy.
It is a subject that is little discussed and yet concerns us all. The text provides in these gaps to legalize facial recognition in the public space and the real-time exploitation of information about people. The video stream would be processed live by the police command, as mentioned in Article 22. The text does not mention the term “facial recognition”, but it should be noted that all amendments aimed at clarifying the practice were rejected. An example is amendment n°CL340 which explicitly provided for the prohibition of facial recognition. Rejected! The spirit of this law is to put the entire public space (especially cities) under permanent control. Without blind spots, with all the technology of algorithms and their freedom killing uses in data collection on a daily basis.
The State has lost the battle on police violence since the yellow vests, especially through the profusion of images made available to all on social networks, which have become a true self-media for any individual or collective that finally finds a voice.
The purpose of this law, which provides for 1 year of imprisonment and a 45,000€ fine for broadcasting that “undermines the police” is to limit freedom of expression in order to regain control of a republican narrative that has been completely eroded. In order to regain a hegemonic discourse, the hundreds of arbitrary acts of violence, daily racism, almost permanent impunity, as well as the dirty work that the police carry out on behalf of the State have become realities that must be hidden at all costs.
@TaoualitAmar Twitter photograph Hannah Nelson, arrested by police on 17th nov
Today, the forces of law and order already regularly intimidate professional journalists or simple witnesses who film. The police are already exercising a judgmental practice in the field through the physical and psychological violence they exercise. Imagine their zeal if this law were to be passed… If the National Assembly gave even more power to those who already abuse it with impunity…
Without an image, how many crimes and violence would have been hushed up or would not even have reached the gates of a court? Judges themselves say it: images are useful and without them, the police version always wins.
Let’s remember the importance that images have had for several cases:
This law also poses a major technical problem. Implicitly, it would sign the end of live videos showing police officers. If in their great leniency of falsely naïve playmobils the LREM (Macron’s party) deputies have suggested blurring the faces of police officers, let us recall that it is currently impossible to blur faces in real time. And that, in general, blurring a face on video is a complicated technique that is not within everyone’s reach and that would in fact restrict many images. If, however, this abject law were to be respected…
Last but not least, it should be noted that the police are not worried by the diffusion of their faces, which they have already been in the habit of masking for a long time (as well as not wearing their numbers), and although we have seen barbaric acts committed by them, this has not been the subject of popular reprisals to date. The argument of police protection is not based on anything and is mainly a bluster that makes the oppressors look like the oppressed.
Other aspects of the law should be addressed, such as the extension of the carrying of weapons in public places, even when not in use, or the increased role of private companies in policing.
The journalist Nnoman (his video) is being beaten by police.
What is striking in this text, which was passed on November 17 in the National Assembly, 2 years to the day after the yellow vests began, is its martial aspect. Do we realize that in the same law there is a state response to social protest and one against terrorism? This law intends to globally manage these problems in the same way. The repressive outcome of the November 17 demonstration is particularly strong, especially for the press.
The terrible image of a system that only responds with violence and intimidation… including on totally harmless demonstrators.
But the thousands of people present around the National Assembly could feel the anger rising and that no water cannon will be able to extinguish.
“The last warning for journalists: leave the premises with your press card or you will be arrested.” Quietly, the police muzzle the press covering a press freedom rally… All this knowing that they are being filmed. The law has not even passed and France is already in a totalitarian country. And it’s hard to see how the trend could be reversed. Neither petitions, nor demonstrations, nor the UN will be able to stop the fascinating drift.
At least 7 journalists have been arrested, threatened and/or beaten. Journalists who were covering a rally for freedom of the press and demonstration. It is extremely serious what this government allows itself! In particular, photographer Hannah Nelson was arrested last night and spent the night in police custody.
With the second anniversary of the gilets jaunes (GJ) uprising approaching, I virtually sat down with some participants to look back at a revolution that could have happened, the violent response of the police and the increasing restriction of civil liberties in France.
I virtually sat down to talk to a group of young activists from Montreuil (Paris suburb) who joined in the early hours of the movement, witnessing the moment when the regime almost fell in late 2018. They talked about the people in the gilets jaunes (GJ) movement, the uprising, the left’s hesitations, the struggle against the far right, and the political and police response. Here is an edited version of our conversation, divided by topics.
This conversation was part of research for an article by André Kapsas on police and judiciary repression during the GJ movement, which was published by Jacobin.
Youri* remembers that he was in the Drôme region in South-East France and that tags everywhere were calling for mobilisation on the 17th. “I didn’t know at all what it would look like, but there was a lot of agitation, so I decided to go to the local roundabout that was being occupied.” He remembers the GJ as a moment when „people started coming together, talking their daily problems and unwinding the thread, finding the source of their anger, of their living conditions. More and more, they were approaching the roots: the state, the system, capitalism. I’ll always remember my first twenty minutes on a roundabout with the GJ: they start talking about gas prices and twenty minutes later they’re already talking about the revolution, asking themselves whether that’s the solution. That really left a mark on me.”
Antoine was in Commercy, in the Meuse region, in the East, when it all started: “We organised some popular assemblies, and also organised the assembly of all GJ assemblies in January 2019. When it comes to forms of protest, they were much more radical, much more spontaneous. They were so strong as to launch a real insurrection, stronger than all the activist networks could ever dream of. When it comes to demands, there was no substitution, no either / or, no dropping of demands on the tax cancellation and purchasing power in favour of greater demands like the system’s abolition. There was rather an accumulation of demands. The core of the GJ movement were people concerned by purchasing power, having troubles making ends meet. Then people went further, with demands on democracy, on referendums. In Commercy, there were also municipal demands, demands to end tax evasion.
Where people revolutionary, anti-capitalist? There were definitely such discourses among the GJ, from people within the core. Ideas to end the capitalist system were welcome by many, but that wasn’t the main idea from Day One. You can’t really divide demands. Myself, I consider myself like a GJ, and I can say that in the movement, the idea that “end of the month, end of the world – same fight” was well understood.
“end of the month, end of the world – same fight”
GJ were often depicted like far-right rednecks listening to techno on parking lots while barbecuing, some kind of image of a stupid France, but this struggle against a tax went way further, it was about the organisation of power, the structure of society, about who should pay for the ecological transition. This tax was really about a punitive ecology, against poor people, a ‘class ecology’, and people saw through it. It’s not reactionary to fight against an injust tax.
So there was this consciousness, at least in Commercy, that purchasing power was the starting point, about the hard living conditions and the problem of making ends meet at the end of the month. That was never replaced by anything. There was also the RIP (Référendum d’initiative populaire – referendums that could be triggered by petition), that was more global, but otherwise it was mostly about those ‘bread and butter issues’.
At first, economic elites (the ‘patronat’, the bosses) were not really targeted. The GJ had another relationship to small bosses, entrepreneurs, craftsmen and craftswomen, who were often involved in the GJ, so they didn’t see the big bosses as a target at first; it was more the political elites, denounced as corrupted. Demands against the big bosses and corporations gradually came; not from outside, but rather from leftists who were inside the movement. It was a result of those meetings on roundabouts, not a manipulation, but rather a spontaneous development.
Louise: yes, it came after several months, when there was more targeting of the big bosses, and also a greater involvement with the strike movements, also with the ecological movement.
Antoine: there was a development going on, through intense exchanges, as people not only shared their experiences as activists, as trade unionists, when there was concrete solidarity, those were organic developments, not higher-level meetings. In Commercy, there was a huge defiance towards trade unions, towards any organisation, other flags, a great fear of manipulation and recuperation. Trade unionists were well received as participants, though.
This whole situation illustrated the growing distance between the left and popular classes during the last 30-40 years. There was a huge gap between people who didn’t speak the same language anymore. I remember the deep sadness of seeing a friend, a 50 year-old worker and trade unionist, who had taken part in all strikes in the last decades, feeling violated on the roundabout, because he was so starkly criticised. He felt that he had fought for this his whole life, yet he was being rejected because of his hat from the trade union. That changed after November-December, as there were many more meetings, during the whole year, and up to this date.
Louise: “I went to the second protest, on November 24th, because we had seen quite incredible images from the previous Saturday, and I wanted to see for myself and talk to people in order to form my own opinion. And not just listen to what the media were saying back then, talking about the Yellow Vests as middle-class, white, rather far-right. There were very few of us from the left-wing circles here in Montreuil to be mobilised.”
Next to Invalides we bumped into a group of about a hundred GJ who had just come in and didn’t know Paris. My friend and I had taken plans for this purpose and we passed them around. Some of them had megaphones and tried to lead, but they didn’t know where the Élysée (presidential palace) was, nor how to get there with all the cop blockages. We had yellow vests in our bags but we didn’t put them on at first, as we were still rather suspicious, but then we did put them on because it was easier to talk to protesters that way, otherwise they were suspicious.
What was the most surprising was the relationship to the police, in the first weeks, when people were calling on the police to join them. And also they were negotiating with the police. And the reaction of the police was also interesting. They were completely confused, they weren’t reacting the same way as during the Loi Travail protests (in 2016) or radical left protests. It was a whole other reaction, with police officers asking us ‘Please, mademoiselle, please, monsieur, stay on the curbwalk’, delicately picking us up, it was really surprising. The cops didn’t know what to do, they didn’t dare to repress. And the demonstrators were also astonishing, with some of them just standing in front of police trucks and stopping them with their hands.”
Loi Travail protests (in 2016)
There were already barricades. People were just building barricades. I talked to many of them, they were at their first demonstration ever. They weren’t even hiding their faces. They just started to throw cobblestones, completely unmasked! Mostly those were 16 to 18 year-old teenagers and people over 60, together. I talked to many of them, some had voted for the Rassemblement National (far-right) and we met many people who supported the Union populaire républicaine (anti-EU, populist, conspirationist).
Youri: “I went back up to Paris soon before December 1st, as we knew that it would be very intense there. Some other activists and I, we were stunned by the lack of support in the capital and its suburbs, so we met up in Montreuil beforehand in order to start something in our neighbourhood. That’s where I met Julien and Louise, and we’ve been in the Montreuil gilets jaunes up to this date.”
“On December 1st, I don’t know if the police is so repressive yet, because they were completely overwhelmed. According to me, that was our window of opportunity, something even bigger could have happened. Because that’s the moment they also understood that it was an insurrection, and then they put everything in action to crush it. On December 8th, they were overwhelmed as well, but everything was in place, not just the police repression, but also their media machine. This is the week from the 1st to the 8th that needs to be studied to understand what happened.”
Julien: “The Triumphal Arch issue was the perfect pretext for politicians (on December 1st, protesters stormed this monument and took it, causing some material damages). The barricades looked problematic, but it wasn’t that bad, whereas there was a huge media campaign during the next week on the vandalism of the Triumphal Arch. They did a crazy agitation they whole week on the Arch, on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, on the tags, the damages. There was a great media operation by the government to delegitimate the GJ, present them as breakers. And it all served to legitimate the repression for the next week, with the deployment of the BAC (brigade anti-criminalité) and, later, the BRAV (brigade de répression de la violence).”
Louise: “What was really interesting among demonstrators was that they felt completely legitimate to demonstrate. The barricades, and the violence, it was all a fully natural violence, people didn’t ‘learn’ how to do that, they were just outraged that the police wouldn’t let them go to the presidential palace. They said, ‘We have the right to go so we’ll do everything to pass’. I was stunned to see people just throwing cobblestones, without being …, like, trained,” she says laughing. “For them, it was just so logical!”
Julien: “It was crazy, we could just go through the whole Paris as a wild demonstration, I had never seen that before, and never saw it again. It looked like the State had vanished, the street was ours, we thought we were hallucinating, that the cops would just come in at some point. But they didn’t. We went from the Champs-Élysées to Place de la République (5 km), like an hour and a half, without seeing a cop, or just a car coming and then escaping. It was a feverish atmosphere, but things didn’t really materialise…”
Louise: “It was an insurrection, but the issue was that people didn’t know the city, the buildings, where to go. We were next to the Stock Market, or the public TV, that could’ve been interesting to seize, but people were really focused on the presidential palace. So it was an insurrection, but there was no strategy, even if we had the streets to ourselves.”
Youri: “I thought it was the revolution. It was the best opportunity in my life. I thought the fire would grow even more. But it turned out more to be a revolt, a failed insurrection, something in between. I think it didn’t turn out to be a revolution because some key social groups didn’t come out at that moment, like the middle classes and the youth, especially in the cities. And also the poorer classes with a migration background. Not especially during the demonstrations, they were there, but they didn’t get involved in between the Saturday demonstrations, that were more like demonstrations of force. But the in-between, that’s when something revolutionary was happening, according to me, but in the cities, there was almost nothing happening, that really damaged the movement, there was a desertion of the urban classes.”
Julien: Some things really changed, the spread of certain tactics, like the issue of violence. There has been an evolution in the relationship towards police forces. At first, people were rather in favour of the police, calling on the police to join them, but within two months they had all understood the violence used against them. There was an instinctive reaction to regroup and to rethink violence as a legitimate mean to respond. I think this is something that the GJ movement has changed.
Youri: This is a turning point. Maybe I’m looking at things from an international perspective. It’s the peak of an intense political moment. Even if the GJ were not always part of previous movements, it’s the result of developments starting in 2016 and before. Suddenly, the movement became wider, more popular, and also more dangerous. We also saw a bunch of weak points of what would be a contemporary revolutionary movement, our weaknesses were laid bare open.
Julien: There was an opening, an opportunity, that the radical left failed to seize.
Youri: It showed weaknesses in the organisation of radical organisations, and also traditional ones. The GJ movement is an important moment of political recomposition, as well as a period of incredibly intense politicisation. Just like in all insurrectionary moments, there was a crazy wave of politicisation that will be felt in the next years. There is an enormous amount of political work to do, that needs to include an abandonment of some dogmatic positions by some groups.
Antoine: As Julien said, perspectives on violence changed, and even on direct action in general. It’s something that’s more associated with the autonomous left, libertarian left, with civil disobedience movements in the last years. Not just about forms, but also about the content, as a practice, a real pratice without intermediaries.
This leads to a further delegitimisation of intermediate bodies, like trade unions, who have the role of buffers between institutions and society. This was not just about the inability of these bodies to seize the real identity of the movement, even if I must say that some trade unions helped a lot on the local level. It was also about the State going from neo-liberalism towards the police State, a shift that has continued with the pandemic.
The last point was the question of the local. There was a re-politicisation of the local, of neighbourhood issues, and this has continued during the pandemic through solidarity networks. We’re in a process of a constant reshaping of forms. For a while, assemblies were used, now we’ve moved on. There’s a constant effervescence, and that has been created by the GJ in many places where there was nothing happening. It’s hard to have a full assessment, because there are so many places about which we don’t have much information, we don’t know about the results of all those roundabout GJ groups. For the moment, there is no strong interlinking between groups. It’s all under the radar. We need to know more about this reality to go further.
Julien: “We shouldn’t negate that there were fascists among the GJ. There were organised fascist groups that came to the demonstrations in Paris, those were enemies that had to be kicked out, but then there were reactionary elements, stereotypes, that had to be dealt it through discussion, not through violence.”
“We could see that national symbols, the Marseillaise, could have a revolutionary effect, a really galvanising one, but it also has an exclusionary effect for many people. It scares some. I think that was a mistake of the movement.”
Louise: “I remember, on December 1st, the first big barricade that was set up, there were organised far-right groups that were there. There were images of that, they did a lot of propaganda with that, they put their flags everywhere. And that also played a role on the involvement of the radical left, which then came in later, rather together with the Antifa to kick out those fascist elements.”
Julien: “And those fascists, they were wearing the yellow vest, whereas a lot of leftists, like the antifa, had a lot of trouble to adopt the yellow vest, even when they were kicking out the fascists. That created a weird image.” Louise: “Yeah, especially the Black Bloc, some people were a bit worried, not knowing about who were those people in black.” Youri: “Yeah, that kinda looked like the Black Bloc attacked the GJ”, whereas it was more like the antifa attacking fascists, and they did it well.”
Louise: “Yes, I agree with Youri, the left, or at least the radical left, intervened really late. And mostly during the demonstrations, the clashes, but they participated really little during the weeks. Leftists were suspicious, and also there was something about those activists not wanting to do the ‘dirty work’, you know, during the winter, standing on the roundabout and talking with ordinary citizens. Who wants to do that? Not many…”
Julien: “We could really see that among people with a migration background, the people from the quartiers populaires (densely populated neighbourhoods, mostly suburbs where working-class people live, mostly coming from former French colonies), the youth being like ‘Hey, wait, aren’t they racist?’ That was a factor that really maintained a distance between the GJ on the one hand and the left, and radical left, and the working classes with a migration background on the other. That also has to do with the regime’s strategies, targeting some elements of a movement. Just like the discourse about ‘breakers’, there was a discourse about ‘fascists’.
Youri recalls the incident with French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who “received anti-Semitic insults from one person at a GJ protest, but then they talked about it on the media for four days, saying that all GJ are anti-Semitic. That really did some damage.”
“The GJ was well cleaned up of fascists. There was a period of 2-3 weeks of clashes in Lyon and Paris, after the Paris fascist group ‘Les zouaves’ had attacked a GJ anti-capitalist group (from the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste) . There was a strong reaction by the antifascists, together with people from the cites, who went on a mission to kick those people out at demonstrations.”
“But it was also a debate about the movement in general, we had a lot of discussions in Montreuil about Islam, conspirationism, but that’s not the same thing as straight-up organised fascists. Organised fascists were progressively kicked out from the movement.”
Youri: “There was still a non-negligible part of the movement that was rather inclining towards the Rassemblement National (RN, far-right), on some roundabout there were fights, some split in two groups on the same spot, with a more left-leaning and a more right-leaning one.”
Julien: “On December 1st, and then especially on December 8th, there’s a real toughening of repression, and that has an impact on both the attitude of the GJ who continue to protest and on the composition of the crowd. Crazy things happened, such as the Black Bloc getting an ovation on the Champs-Élysées, scenes impossible to imagine. More leftist people, more determinate, joined the protests.”
Louise: “We could see a change in the chants and in the relationship to the police. When it started to repress more harshly, people stopped chanting ‘La police, avec nous!’, it was more anti-cop chants.”
“What mostly changed in early December, especially on December 8th, when repression was more brutal. Those were things that we already knew, I wasn’t surprised, but there was a big contrast with the previous weeks. I was rather surprised they hadn’t used all their usual techniques in the previous demonstrations.
What changed things was when the Détachements d’action rapide (DAR) were put in action. They were much lighter and made rapid interventions. And then in March they created the BRAV (brigade de répression de la violence) who was on motorcycles.
What was specific about police repression at that point was that it was against everyone. It didn’t matter if you wore a mask or not, they were just breaking skulls, shooting flashballs everywhere. Then ‘Black Bloc’ tactics spread, people wore more masks, to protect themselves from shots, gas, and also camera monitoring. But nowhere in the demonstration would you feel safe.
At first, when it was more like riots, we were stronger, we could disperse, but when we came back towards more organised forms, like marches. And then they were just shooting on everyone.
I had a personal experience with the DAR and it’s really impressive. It was happening before, but those could real trap people on a street corner and beat them up badly, and even just release them afterwards. It was more about fear, about punishment.
But there were also many arrests, an incredible number of speed trials each Monday with those arrested on the previous Saturday. And unfortunately, there were many tricks on how to defend yourself against the police, against the judiciary, that were not known to many people in the GJ. I went to some trials and it was quite crazy.
On March 16th, there was a big meeting of GJ in Paris for a demonstration, there were barricades everywhere, with the police trapping us on the Champs-Élysées. With a group of about 30, we tried to break the blockage in a side street, thinking it was heavily equipped, and thus slow, CRS (the usual anti-riot forces), but then they started running towards us, catching the first line. And we were unlucky, because we were alone, with no camera to film. The presence of journalists can sometimes be helpful, but there were none.
They hit me for 5 minutes, insulting me as a ‘bitch’, a ‘little whore’, they cracked open my friend’s skull. Luckily, they messed up their arrest papers for me, so I was released after the arrest. They’re groups that are made for interventions, jumping in and beating up people, so they transferred us to another unit, but they didn’t do the arrest papers. By March 16, just having a mask, or protection goggles, would be enough to get sentenced, under this article about “gathering with the intention of committing violence”, which was used against pretty much anyone. But luckily they didn’t do the arrest papers with the list of the things I had on me, so I could get rid of them on my way to the cell. I only had to stay for 48h and then they had to release me.”
Julien: When you look at the profile of those people who were maimed (lost an eye, a hand), about ¾ of them were first-time demonstrators. Some of the people who lost an eye had never been to a demonstration before. This whole idea that radicals were targeted is not true at all. Many were from the countryside, just came to the demonstration and lost an eye or were beaten up.
Louise: I think the goal was to dissuade, that’s how I saw it. From what I could see, and also from all the people I was detained with. There were also different intimidation techniques. They also tried to gain access to mobile phones, to get information about the organised groups, they put a lot of pressure on this goal.
Julien: A big change also was when they started to do a lot of controls ahead of the demonstrations. Starting from December 8th, the police was controlling all the toll booths leading into Paris, and already at 8AM on Saturdays they would have arrested thousands of people. And also at train stations, or before the demonstration in the streets. That was completely new. And that’s why they were accusing everyone with this article about “gathering with the intention of committing violence.” It was enough to have a jack in your car to spend 48h in arrest. They were just arresting everyone. And then there were prosecutors who were insisting on keeping people for the full 48h to prevent them from going to the demonstration, even if they had no evidence against them, which is completely illegal.
Louise: There were also prohibitions to go into some areas of Paris, even for some people who were actually working in Paris, they would be banned from those areas.
Élise: I think that starting from December 8, it wasn’t only about dissuading, but also about containing. They were under pressure after all these images of Paris burning, all this mess. March 16th was the last demonstration in Paris when we thought that we could overwhelm the police, bypass their whole set-up around the Champs-Élysées. And that’s when they put in the BRAV, and it made it hard to escape the format of a march with a predetermined itinerary. It wasn’t possible to go out and target some institutions. It was about dictating the proceedings of the demonstration.
Louise: What also played a role in that is when they started to play out the good GJ versus the bad GJ, when some GJ accepted to register demonstrations. That was especially in Paris. Then they were the good demonstrators that would not be repressed so hard and keep to their pre-agreed march, while others could be smashed, they were the Black Bloc, the breakers.
Antoine: Another important point was the penal repression, there were 400-450 people sent straight to jail, and another 600 deferred jail sentences; 1000 in total. Without counting all the suspended sentences. It’s thousands. It’s astronomical! For months and years, we have hundreds of people in prisons all over France. The only possible comparison in the last 50 years in France are the 2005 riots, the uprising in the banlieues. Back then, there were also thousands of arrests and about 800 jail sentences.
It’s crazy, especially in a context where there is no strong structure to help those help, there are enormous psychological traumas. This huge incarceration is not medialised so much. Police violence has become a big topic, judiciary repression has also been covered, but there’s almost nothing about penal repression.
We’re seeing an authoritarian shift, or rather an extension of authoritarian methods that were previously used against working-class neighbourhoods. There is now a generalisation of methods developed in a post-colonial context.
Antoine: what is important to underline is that the first activist group to call for joining the GJ mobilisation was the Vérité et Justice pour Adama committee (a committee set up to seek justice for Adama Traoré, a young Black man killed by the French police in 2016), together with antifascists and a queer liberation group. This is highly symbolic: those were the first ones who dared to jump in and join the movement.
They were the first to produce powerful analyses of the link between the GJ movement and the quartiers populaires, far from radical leftist ideological purity. They saw the link between police repression in the colonies, against migrant populations in the quartiers populaires and the repression of the GJ, seeing that there was no coincidence, but rather an extension of authoritarian practices.
Justice pour Adama committee
Julien: This logic of hitting, going in for the contact, to shoot, and to aim for physical punishment of individuals: those are all colonial practices. This is more similar to what happened during the war in Algeria, during repression in Guadeloupe, when the prefect would simply give the order to shoot into the crowd with live ammunition. This is a different logic from classic crowd control which aims at containing a crowd and limiting damage. Now, this is the new norm. We can see it with current protests by high school students (lycéens), as soon as the police is blocked, they just charge in and beat everyone up. This is rather new.
Antoine: The German weekly Der Spiegel, which can hardly be called radical, not long ago talked about France as an „authoritarian Absurdistan“. Myself, I’m afraid to go to demonstrations nowadays, in Paris, Marseille, Lyon or elsewhere. On Tuesday, there’s a demonstration in Paris against the new legislative proposal ‘Loi sécurité globale’ to increase police control. They even want to forbid the filming of police interventions, even though that played a huge role in raising consciousness about repression during the GJ movement. The GJ movement empowered a lot of citizens, with many people becoming ‘their own media’, and closely documenting police violence, with media closer to the action. That has discredited even more intermediary bodies like mainstream media, replacing them with citizen media closer to what is happening on the ground. That has been one of the big victories of the movement.
It’s important to go to the demonstration on Tuesday, but I’m freaking out. I’m afraid it will be a massacre.
Julien: „What is freaky is the noise. Now, we know the noise made by different weapons, and when we hear those specific smacks made by flashballs, we don’t know who they’re targeting and the crowd freaks out. I remember lying down on the ground at some demonstrations as bullets were flying. You don’t know where it’s coming from, you can’t do anything.“
„I wouldn’t say that the police repression now is fully generalised. I think there’s a distinction between good and bad demonstrations. During the recent demonstrations against a reform of the pension system, you could see police showing a lot more restrain than usually. So there’s a duality where there are demonstrations organised by the intermediary bodies like trade unions during which the police shows more restrain, even when being provoked, and then there are other demonstrations when the police can freely maim and beat up demonstrators. It’s as if they wanted to show a nicer face during the trade union demonstrations, pretending that the police is not violent and that the GJ only got what they deserved.“
Louise: It’s true, but then, I also noticed that there was a huge concentration of police at the trade union demonstrations, marching in front of the crowd, preventing it from starting anything. We couldn’t move at all, there were thousands of cops. It seemed like there was more cops than demonstrators.
Julien: It was beautiful!
Louise: Yes, so many encounters, and it continues! Sure, the groups have become smaller, but it’s still happening, in Montreuil and elsewhere. It is transforming, it is taking new forms on the local level. And you could see the changes: when the pension reform protests started, we could see the trade union coming to see the GJ straight up, the teachers came, they were coming to assemblies to ask to join. Now it’s more local, like municipalism.
Julien: Yeah, there is a giletsjaunisation of activism in France.
Παρέμβαση που έκανε ο σ. Ντίνος Αγιομαμίτης εκ μέρους της Εργατικής Δημοκρατίας στη συζήτηση «Ο ιμπεριαλισμός σήμερα και η Ελληνοτουρκική κρίση» στα πλαίσια της ημερίδας, «Παλεύουμε για το Σοσιαλισμο» που οργάνωσε το Σοσιαλιστικό Εργατικό Κόμμα στην Αθήνα την Κυριακή 8 Νοεμβρίου.
Το σημερινό πρωτοσέλιδο του Πολίτη, της δεύτερης σε κυκλοφορία εφημερίδας στη Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία και το μεγάλο μέρος των άλλων σελίδων του ασχολούνται με τις εξελίξεις στην ευρύτερη περιοχή και το Κυπριακό. Αποκαλύπτει μάλιστα ότι στο περιθώριο της διάσκεψης στο Κράν Μοντανά που έγινε τον Ιούλιο του 2017 ο Αναστασιάδης προσέγγισε τον Τσαβούσογλου και του είπε ότι χάνουμε τον χρόνο μας συζητώντας για διζωνική δικοινοτική ομοσπονδία και ότι έπρεπε να αναζητηθούν άλλες λύσεις. Ο Αναστασιάδης ζήτησε πίστωση χρόνου να περάσουν οι προεδρικές εκλογές που ήταν τον Φλεβάρη του 2018. Η Τουρκία σύμφωνα με το δημοσίευμα του την έδωσε, απέχοντας από τις συνήθεις προκλήσεις, ενώ ο Αναστασιάδης προσπαθούσε στο παρασκήνιο να εξασφαλίσει λύση δύο κρατών.
Εκείνη την περίοδο ήταν που είπε απευθυνόμενος στους τουρκοκύπριους το περίφημο πάρτε τη δική σας ΑΟΖ στο βορρά και αφήστε τη δική μας ήσυχη, αναγνωρίζοντας για πρώτη φορά κρατική υπόσταση στο τουρκοκυπριακό κράτος που να δικαιούται και δική του ΑΟΖ. Βέβαια μετά τα μάσησε και το επίσημο αφήγημα ήταν ότι οι συνομιλίες κατέρρευσαν εξαιτίας της τουρκικής αδιαλλαξίας. Βέβαια πολλοί ξέρουν ότι δεν ήταν έτσι τα πράγματα. Για αυτό εξάλλου και επιστράτευσε τον πρώην υπουργό εξωτερικών τον Κοτζιά ο οποίος σε συνέντευξη του σε κυπριακό κανάλι προσπάθησε να ξεπλύνει τον Αναστασιάδη και να στηρίξει το αφήγημα του. Το μόνο που κατάφερε ήταν να γελοιοποιηθεί και στην ουσία να επιβεβαιώσει ότι ήταν ο Αναστασιάδης που έφυγε από τις συνομιλίες.
Παρά τις προσπάθειες του εκείνη την περίοδο δεν κατάφερε να πείσει για την ανάγκη λύσης δύο κρατών γιατί ακόμη και αυτοί που το θέλουν δεν τολμούν να το στηρίξουν ανοικτά. Αυτό έφερε ξανά τα πράγματα σε πορεία αντιπαράθεσης με την Τουρκία την οποία προσπαθεί να αποκλείσει από τις εξελίξεις στην περιοχή. Μαζί με τον Μητσοτάκη συμμετέχει και οξύνει τους ανταγωνισμούς για τον έλεγχο του πετρελαίου, του φυσικού αέριου και των αγωγών κτίζοντας συμμαχίες με τα πιο αυταρχικά και δολοφονικά καθεστώτα της περιοχής όπως τον Σίσυ, τον Νετανιάχου, τον Εμίρη του Κουβέτι, το Βασιλιά της Ιορδανίας και βάλε.
Έχει διαγράψει την επαναπροσέγγιση και τη συνεργασία με τους τουρκοκύπριους και έγινε ο νεκροθάφτης της επανένωσης για να εξυπηρετήσει τα δικά του συμφέροντα και μια κλίκας γύρω από τον ίδιο και το περιβάλλον του.
Μας έκανε «συμπατριώτες» με την αφρόκρεμα των διεθνών απατεώνων, και φοροφυγάδων παραχωρώντας τους την κυπριακή - ευρωπαϊκή υπηκοότητα και μας υπόσχεται ότι θα πατάξει τη διαφθορά. Την ώρα που τον κράζουν όλοι αυτός εμφανίζεται με το φωτοστέφανο του άμωμου. Θα σας δώσω μόνο ένα παράδειγμα από την εμπλοκή του στη διαφθορά: Tο δικηγορικό του γραφείο είναι οικογενειακή επιχείρηση. Το γραφείο Αναστασιάδη διεκπεραίωσε μεγάλο αριθμό διαβατηρίων. Δηλαδή η οικογενειακή επιχείρηση υποβάλλει αίτημα για έκδοση διαβατηρίου, με το αζημίωτο φυσικά αφού θα συνοδεύεται με την αγορά διαμερίσματος στους πύργους που κτίζει ο γαμπρός του Αναστασιάδη και την απόφαση για έκδοση του διαβατηρίου θα την πάρει το υπουργικό συμβούλιο στο οποίο προεδρεύει ο Αναστασιάδης. Ο ορισμός του σκανδάλου και της διαφθοράς.
Δέν υπάρχουν μέσες λύσεις. Τα σκάνδαλα και η διαφθορά, είναι συνυφασμένα με ένα σύστημα που στην καρδιά του έχει το κέρδος και την εκμετάλλευση. Δεν έχει να κάνει με πρόσωπα και λάθος επιλογές. Έχει να κάνει με το σύστημα της απληστίας και του ανταγωνισμού που βάζει τα κέρδη πάνω από τις ανθρώπινες ζωές. Με το σύστημα που θεοποιεί την εκμετάλλευση και τον πλουτισμό. Που χρησιμοποιεί τη διαφορετικότητα για να χωρίζει το κόσμο και να τον κρατά υπόδουλο. Όλα αυτά δεν διορθώνονται, δεν μπορούμε να έχουμε δικαιοσύνη, δημοκρατία και σεβασμό στη διαφορετικότητα μέσα στο καπιταλισμό. Χρειάζεται να τον ανατρέψουμε.
Ο καπιταλισμός δεν είναι απρόσωπος. Έχει και τους εκπροσώπους του και τους εκφραστές του. Ο Αναστασιάδης είναι αυτή ακριβώς η προσωποποίηση του. Οι πολιτικές του τα τελευταία 7 χρόνια που κυβερνά το επιβεβαιώνουν με το πιο δραματικό τρόπο. Είναι η χειρότερη διακυβέρνηση από καταβολής Κυπριακής Δημοκρατίας για τους απλούς ανθρώπους. Είναι η πιο διεφθαρμένη και επικίνδυνη διακυβέρνηση από την εποχή του πραξικοπήματος. Παίζει παιχνίδια με τη φωτιά και συμμετέχει στους ιμπεριαλιστικούς ανταγωνισμούς σε μια περιοχή που κυριολεχτικά είναι η πιο καυτή περιοχή του πλανήτη αυτή τη στιγμή.
Χρειάζεται να φύγει τώρα.
Είναι αυτό μια ρεαλιστική προοπτική σήμερα. Είναι.
Έχουμε πολλά χρόνια να ζήσουμε ένα τέτοιο έντονο αντικυβερνητικό κλίμα και ένα τέτοιο κύμα αντικυβερνητικών διαδηλώσεων:
Ηταν δυστυχώς Ασυντόνιστες με πολιτικά συγχυσμένα αιτήματα και χωρίς ξεκάθαρους στόχους. Το ΑΚΕΛ δεν θέλει να μπεί μπροστά παρά το ότι χτές οργάνωσε μια μεγάλη διαδήλωση έξω από το προεδρικό, για δύο λόγους:
Το κίνημα παρ όλα αυτά είναι εκεί. Το ίδιο θα είμαστε και εμείς εκεί, να προβάλουμε τις ιδέες μας και να συνδέσουμε τη πάλη μας με την προοπτική της ανατροπής, ξεκινώντας από την ανατροπή της κυβέρνησης Αναστασιάδη.
Τα ίδια φαινόμενα και μάλιστα πολύ πιο έντονα βλέπουμε και στην άλλη πλευρά με τους Τουρκοκύπριους. Μπορεί να κέρδισε ο Τατάρ τις έκλογές αλλά όλοι ξέρουμε πως τις κέρδισε, τι νοθεία έγινε και τι παρεμβάσεις από το κόμμα του Ερτογάν. Παρ όλα αυτά τα πράγματα δεν είναι μαύρα.
Η μάχη θα δοθεί και στις δυο πλευρές. Έχουμε τις εμπειρίες και τα κανάλια επικοινωνίας όσο και αν έκλεισαν το οδοφράγματα και θα τις δώσουμε μαζί ενάντια στη διαφθορά, ενάντια στον εθνικισμό και την απειλή του πολέμου για μια καλύτερη κοινωνία, το σοσιαλισμό.
Τον περασμένο Ιούλη, κατατέθηκε πρόταση νόμου για ποινικοποίηση της αγοράς σεξουαλικών υπηρεσιών που την κοινοβουλευτική ομάδα του ΑΚΕΛ. Τούτη η πρόταση βασίζεται στο σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο (nordic model) τζιαι εν μέρος τούτου που ονομάζεται carceral feminism, της προσέγγισης, δηλαδή, που βλέπει την αυξημένη αστυνόμευση, επιτήρηση, διώξεις, φυλακίσεις τζιαι άλλες διαδικασίες του ποινικού συστήματος ως πρώτη γραμμή αντιμετώπισης της βίας εναντίον των γυναικών. Σε τούτο το πλαίσιο, επικρατεί η αντίληψη ότι η πορνεία ισοδυναμεί με βία κατά των γυναικών τζιαι, συνήθως, η οποιαδήποτε συμμετοχή στην βιομηχανία του σεξ ορίζεται με όρους σωματεμπορίας (trafficking) αντί εργασίας, αποτρέποντας οποιαδήποτε συζήτηση για εργασιακά δικαιώματα τζιαι προστασίες των σεξεργατριών. Ειρωνικά, ενώ υπερτονίζεται η κακοποίηση τζιαι εκμετάλλευση εκ μέρους μαστροπών τζιαι πελατών, στις δηλώσεις των υποστηρικτών της πρότασης εν ακούμε λέξη για άλλες μορφές έμφυλης βίας, που εννά νομιμοποιηθούν ακόμα περισσόττερο, αν περάσει το νομοσχέδιο,–που μπάτσους, ιδιοκτήτες, λειτουργούς της υπηρεσίας αλλοδαπών τζιαι μετανάστευσης τζιαι άλλους.
Αφού περιγράψουμε εν συντομία το σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο, πάνω στο οποίο βασίζεται η πρόταση, τζιαι δούμε πώς πτυχές του βρίσκονται ήδη σε εφαρμογή, βάσει των υφιστάμενων νόμων, με αρνητικές συνέπειες για τες σεξεργάτριες, εν να προσπαθήσουμε να αναδείξουμε τζιαι να δούμε με μια κριτική ματιά τες υποβόσκουσες υποθέσεις γυρώ που το σεξ, την εργασία τζιαι την μετανάστευση. Μέσα που τούτη την ανάλυση, φτάννουμε σε κάποια συμπεράσματα τζιαι προβλέψεις για περισσότερη βία, επισφάλεια τζιαι καταστολή των ατόμων που πουλούν υπηρεσίες σεξ, σε περίπτωση εφαρμογής του προτεινόμενου νομοσχεδίου. Τούντα συμπεράσματα, όμως, έννεν ούτε τζιαινούρκα ούτε μόνο δικά μας. Εν βασισμένα στες φωνές σεξεργατριών/ων που άλλες χώρες, όπου εφαρμόστηκαν ίδια τζιαι παρόμοια νομοσχέδια ποινικοποίησης των πελατών, τζιαι άλλοι νόμοι, που κάθε άλλο παρά προστασία, δικαιώματα τζιαι ενδυνάμωση έχουν να προσφέρουν.
ΕΙΣΑΓΩΓΗ
Το σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο, στο οποίο βασίζεται η πρόταση για ποινικοποίηση αγοράς σεξουαλικών υπηρεσιών συγκεντρώνεται σε τέσσερις τομείς: τους αγοραστές, τα άτομα που πουλούν υπηρεσίες σεξ, υπηρεσίες «εξόδου» τζιαι τρίτα άτομα (π.χ. μαστροπούς ή διακινητές). Εστιάζει στην ποινικοποίηση των πελατών, πιστεύκοντας πως με τούτο τον τρόπο στέλνεται ένα ηχηρό μήνυμα στην κοινωνία –τζιαι κυρίως στους άνδρες–, ότι η αγορά υπηρεσιών σεξ εν κάτι κακό. Κατά συνέπεια, πιστεύκει ότι με τούντο τρόπο εννά μειωθεί η ζήτηση για τέθκοιες υπηρεσίες. Το άλλο, θεωρητικά δυνατό χαρτί του μοντέλου, που συνεισφέρει στην προβολή του ως πανάκεια για τα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίζουν οι σεξεργάτριες, εν τα διάφορα σχέδια τζιαι υπηρεσίες «εξόδου», που σκοπεύκουν να βοηθήσουν όσες θέλουν να βρουν στήριξη τζιαι να αλλάξουν επάγγελμα.
Αντιλαμβανόμαστε γιατί πολλά που τούτα ακούουνται καλά, τουλάχιστον στα χαρτιά. Όπως εν να δούμε πάρακατω,όμως, στην εφαρμογή του, τίποτε έννεν τόσο καλόν όσον ακούεται. Εν υπάρχει τρόπος να μειωθεί η ζήτηση, χωρίς να αφήκει τα άτομα που πουλούν σεξ εκτεθειμένα σε συνθήκες επισφάλειας, επιτήρησης, καταστολής, με αρνητικό οικονομικό αντίκτυπο τζιαι μειωμένη διαπραγματευτική δύναμη με τους πελάτες τους. Επίσης, αν τζιαι οι υποστηρικτές του μοντέλου τείνουν να τονίζουν την ποινικοποίηση της ζήτησης (πελάτες) σε αντιδιαστολή με την αποποινικοποιημένη προσφορά (σεξεργάτριες), επί του πρακτέου, σε κάθε χώρα που εφαρμόζονται τέθκοια μοντέλα διατηρείται άμεσα ή έμμεσα ποινικοποίηση της σεξεργασίας, μέσα που την ποινικοποίηση της προώθησης των υπηρεσιών αλλά τζιαι πρακτικών που χρησιμοποιούν οι σεξεργάτριες για δική τους ασφάλεια, όπως το να νοικιάζουν μαζί κάποιο χώρο για να εργάζονται. Σε μια σύντομη αναζήτηση για την Κύπρο, εμφανίζονται διάφορα περιστατικά συλλήψεων δύο ή τριών γυναικών, με κατηγορίες για μαστροπεία τζιαι «αποζείν από κέρδη πορνείας». Σε άλλες περιπτώσεις στο εξωτερικό, συνοδοί που διαφημίζονται ως «duo», διαφημίζοντας δηλαδή την δυνατότητα για τρίο μαζί με τον πελάτη τζιαι μια άλλη σεξεργάτρια, κατηγορούνται για διατήρηση οίκου ανοχής. Ο φόβος των ιδιοκτητών σπιτιών τζιαι διαμερισμάτων να μεν διωχθούν νομικά ως τρίτα πρόσωπα που κερδοφορούν που κέρδη πορνείας, μαστροποί ή διατηρητές οίκου ανοχής, δυσκολέφκει την πρόσβαση σε ασφαλές εργασιακό περιβάλλον για πολλές σεξεργάτριες τζιαι διατηρεί ψηλά τον αριθμό των εξώσεων. Στην Αμερική, τα νομοσχέδια Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) τζιαι Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), που περάσαν πριν θκυο χρόνια με στόχο να εμποδιστεί η σωματεμπορία μέσω διαδικτύου, κατέστησαν διάφορες διαδικτυακές πλατφόρμες υπεύθυνες για το τι κάμνουν οι χρήστες στις πλατφόρμες τους. Μέσα που τούντες πλατφόρμες, όμως, πέραν που κάποια περιστατικά, που έχουν όντως να κάμουν με καταναγκαστική πορνεία ή σωματεμπορία, οι σεξεργάτριες επροωθούσαν τις υπηρεσίες τους, αλλά τζιαι εμπορούσαν να φιλτράρουν τους πελάτες τους πριν προχωρήσουν σε φυσική συνάντηση. Αν τζιαι η Αμερική εν υιοθετά το σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο, αφού εν πιο κοντά σε ένα μοντέλο πλήρους ποινικοποίησης της σεξεργασίας, αναφέρουμε τούτο το παράδειγμα, για να τοποθετήσουμε την πρόταση για αλλαγή νόμου στην Κύπρο εντός μιας παγκόσμιας κλίμακας επίθεσης στα δικαιώματα των εργαζομένων στο σεξ, στο όνομα της προστασίας τους τζιαι της καταπολέμησης της σωματεμπορίας.
Στην Κύπρο, είδαμε τούντο μοντέλο να παρουσιάζεται ως σωτήρια λύση στην αδυναμία της αστυνομίας να συλλάβει, να διώξει τζιαι να καταδικάσει μαστροπούς τζιαι διακινητές. Ήδη που δαμέ εν φανερή η σύνδεση μεταξύ πορνείας τζιαι σωματεμπορίας, που πηγάζει που συγκεκριμένες ιδεολογικές αντιλήψεις για το σεξ. Βλέπουμε σε διάφορες συζητήσεις μια προσπάθεια να αντλήσουν κοινωνική τζιαι ηθική νομιμοποίηση, μέσα που αναφορά στα θύματα σωματεμπορίας που η ΚΔ απέτυχε να προστατεύσει, τζιαι την ανυπαρξία καταδίκης οποιουδήποτε σωματέμπορα1. Για να εντάξουμε την πρόταση ποινικοποίησης αγοράς σεξουαλικών υπηρεσιών σε ένα σύντομο χρονικό των τελευταίων δέκα χρόνων, σημειώνουμε τα ακόλουθα:
2009 – κατάργηση βίζας καλλιτέχνιδος
2010 – καταδίκη ΚΔ που ΕΔΑΔ για υπόθεση Οξάνας
2014 – ποινικοποίηση χρήσης υπηρεσιών θυμάτων σωματεμπορίας
2020 – πρόταση για ποινικοποίηση αγοράς σεξουαλικών υπηρεσιών
Όσον αφορά το προτεινόμενο «σχέδιο εξόδου», έννεν κακό που μόνο του να υπάρχει κάποιο πρόγραμμα για σεξ-εργάτριες που αυτόβουλα θέλουν να αλλάξουν τομέα εργασίας ή να υπάρχει πρόσβαση σε υπηρεσίες στήριξης με μια λογική μείωσης της βλάβης (harm reduction), που θα μπορούσε να συμπεριλαμβάνει μεταξύ άλλων διανομή προφυλακτικών, δωρεάν εξετάσεις για ΣΜΝ, σεμινάρια για ασφαλέστερη εργασία κ.ά. Το όνομα, όμως, εν που μόνο του προβληματικό τζιαι ιδεολογικά φορτισμένο, ενδεικτικό του πώς κάποιοι φαντάζονται την εργασία στην βιομηχανία του σεξ, ως ένα εφιάλτη,δηλαδή, που τον οποίο κάποια πρέπει να διαφύγει. Αν τζιαι δεν εδημοσιευτήκαν οι λεπτομέρειες της πρότασης, κάποια πράματα εν προβλέψιμα. Για να λειτουργήσει αποτελεσματικά ένα τέτοιο σχέδιο κοστίζει. Πολλά. Τούτο, γιατί ένα σημαντικό κομμάτι του εν μπορεί, παρά να εν η οικονομική υποστήριξη όσων σταματούν να δουλέφκουν ως σεξεργάτριες, ώσπου να βρουν μια δουλειά, μέσα που την οποία να μπορούν να διασφαλίζουν αρκετούς πόρους για να ζουν. Στην Σουηδία, όμως, που συχνά παρουσιάζεται ως το success story του μοντέλου, τα λεφτά που εχορηγηθήκαν στην αστυνομία, σε πολλαπλές περιπτώσεις, με στόχο την επιβολή του μοντέλου εν δυσανάλογα περισσότερα σε σχέση με όσα εχορηγήθηκαν σε διάφορα κέντρα που προσφέρουν κοινωνικές υπηρεσίες τζιαι στήριξη σε σεξεργάτριες2. Στην Κύπρο, ενώ θεσμοί, όπως η Πολυθεματική Συντονιστική Ομάδα κατά της εμπορίας προσώπων υπολειτουργούν, κοινωνικές υπηρεσίες τζιαι αστυνομία καθυστερούν ή αδυνατούν να προστατεύσουν τζιαι να περιθάλψουν αποτελεσματικά, αναγνωρισμένα θύματα σωματεμπορίας, τζιαι ενώ διανύουμε ακόμα μια περίοδο οικονομικής κρίσης, ακόμα τζιαι που την οπτική κάποιου που πιστέφκει στην δύναμη τζιαι τη θέληση του κράτους να προστατεύσει ευάλωτες ομάδες, εν παντελώς αφελές να περιμένουμε ότι ένα τέτοιο «σχέδιο εξόδου» εννα στηριχτεί αποτελεσματικά με τους οικονομικούς πόρους που χρειάζεται για να λειτουργήσει. Εκτός τζι αν στον νου τους έχουν πως τούτος θα εν, απλώς, ένας μηχανισμός, μέσα που τον οποίον εργάτριες στην βιομηχανία του σεξ ή στην καταναγκαστική πορνεία θα μπορούν να ενταχθούν σε κάποιον άλλο τομέα της οικονομίας, όπου υπάρχει ανάγκη για φτηνή εργασία.
ΣΕΞ
Ο ηθικός πανικός που δημιουργείται γύρω που το σεξ βοηθά να τεθεί ως επείγουσα προτεραιότητα η πάταξη του φαινομένου της σεξ-εργασίας, αφήνοντας στην άκρη οποιαδήποτε συζήτηση για εργασιακά δικαιώματα ή βελτίωση των συνθηκών τζιαι του βιοτικού επιπέδου όσων εργάζονται στην βιομηχανία του σεξ. Στον λόγο τους, οι SWERFS (Sex Exclusionary Radical Feminists)3 επικεντρώνονται γύρω που την βία που δέχονται οι εργαζόμενες στην βιομηχανία του σεξ, τζιαι επιλεκτικά αναπαράγουν τον λόγο επιζούσων γυναικών, που ήταν δέκτριες βίας εντός της βιομηχανίας, «επιβεβαιώνοντας» την γενικευμένη θέση τους ενάντια στην πορνεία, τζιαι υποστηρίζοντας ότι η τιμωρία των πελατών εν αναγκαία. Έτσι, οι “εξερχόμενες” που την βιομηχανία του σεξ γυναίκες γίνονται σύμβολο της πληγωμένης, τραυματισμένης θηλυκότητας, τζιαι η ποινικοποίηση των πελατών φαντάζει φεμινιστική δικαιοσύνη. Το σεξ τοποθετείται σε τούντες συζητήσεις ως κάτι εξιδανικευμένο που εν πουλιέται τζιαι πρέπει να περιορίζεται εντός ρομαντικών σχέσεων, με την συναισθηματική σύνδεση με το άλλο άτομο να δρα ρυθμιστικά. Εν η ίδια μισογυνική αντίληψη που υποτιμά τες γυναίκες που εν βρίσκουν κάποια ουσιοκρατική ιερότητα στο σεξ, τζιαι εναλλάσσουν συχνά ή έχουν διάφορους σεξουαλικούς συντρόφους. Για τους άντρες, εν φαίνεται να υπάρχει η ίδια ανησυχία, αφού το συχνό περιστασιακό σεξ εν γίνεται αντιληπτό ως κάτι που απειλεί την ακεραιότητά τους ως άτομα. Ίσως τούτος να εν τζιαι ένας που τους λόγους, που ενώ οι άντρες σεξεργάτες γίνονται τζιαι τζείνοι δέκτες –ομοφοβικής κυρίως– βίας που πελάτες τζιαι μπάτσους, τα μάθκια του παγκόσμιου κινήματος ενάντια στην πορνεία εν σχετικά κλειστά προς τες εμπειρίες τους.
Που την άλλη, απέναντι στον λόγο των SWERFS, υπάρχουν τζιαι κάποιες υπεραπλουστευμένες αναλύσεις, που διαπλεκόμενες με ταξικά τζιαι φυλετικά προνόμια, σε μια προσπάθεια απενοχοποίησης της σεξεργασίας εν αφήνουν χώρο για να συζητηθεί η βία τζιαι οι εργασιακές συνθήκες, αφού επισκιάζονται που συζητήσεις για ευχαρίστηση μέσα που την ίδια την εργασία. Εντός τούτης της ρητορικής που εστιάζει στην ηδονή/ευχαρίστηση, δημιουργείται, επίσης, κάποιες φορές μια ψευδαίσθηση ότι τα συμφέροντα των σεξεργατριών τζιαι του πελάτη είναι ένα, αφήνοντας στο περιθώριο συζητήσεις για ασφάλεια, λεφτά ή διαπραγματευτική δύναμη. Για μια θεώρηση της σεξεργασίας, ικανή να αντιληφθεί τις υλικές ανάγκες των εργατριών στη βιομηχανία του σεξ, είναι σημαντικό να κρατούμε ότι οι εργάτ@ είναι εκεί ως εργαζόμεν@ που θέλουν να πληρωθούν για τις υπηρεσίες τους, τζιαι ότι τούτη η επιτακτική οικονομική ανάγκη διαφέρει που το ψυχαγωγικό ενδιαφέρον των πελατών σε αυτές τις υπηρεσίες. Τούτη η αναγνώριση επιτρέπει να συζητηθεί τζιαι η βία, μεταξύ άλλων προκλήσεων και συνθηκών, που αντιμετωπίζουν οι σεξ-εργάτριες, χωρίς να καταλήγουμε στες στερεοτυπικές φιγούρες της «καημένης πόρνης» τζιαι του «κακού/ανήθικου πελάτη», που συχνά προωθούν οι υποστηρικτές της ποινικοποίησης των πελατών.
ΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ
Ακούεται συχνά το επιχείρημα, ότι τα άτομα που εργάζονται στην βιομηχανία του σεξ είτε εξαναγκάζονται είτε οι κοινωνικοοικονομικές συνθήκες εξωθούν τα στην πορνεία. Που μιαν ελευθεριακή σκοπιάν, όμως, ούλλη η εργασία εν εξαναγκαστική, που την στιγμή που εν ο μόνος τρόπος να διασφαλίσει κάποια την διαβίωσή της. Τούτον εν σημαίνει ότι εν αναγνωρίζουμε ότι υπάρχει εκμετάλλευση γυναικών σε κυκλώματα μαφιόζων. Σωματεμπορία τζιαι μαύρη εργασία υπάρχει τζιαι πέραν που την βιομηχανία του σεξ, αλλά κανένας εν αμφισβητεί με την ίδια ευκολία τζιαι ζήλο ότι η απλέρωτη τζιαι υποτιμημένη εργασία μεταναστών στες αγροτικές περιοχές εν εργασία, τζιαι ότι τούτα τα άτομα πρέπει να έχουν πρόσβαση σε εργασιακά δικαιώματα τζιαι προστασία. Όσο για το ότι «καμιά εν θα εθκιάλεε τούτη τη δουλειά, αν είσσιεν επιλογή», το επιχείρημα ακυρώννεται μόνο του, αν απλώς κάποια ανοίξει τα αφτιά της στες φωνές των σεξεργατριών ανά το παγκόσμιο, που οργανώνονται τζιαι δημιουργούν φορείς ενδυνάμωσης τζιαι προάσπισης των δικαιωμάτων τους, τοπικά τζιαι διεθνή δίκτυα, σχέσεις αλληλεγγύης μεταξύ τους τζιαι διεκδικούν εργασιακά δικαιώματα. Αν δεν υπάρχει ακόμα στην Κύπρο μια οργάνωση όπως το Red Umbrella, εν σημαίνει πως εν υπάρχουν ούτε ντόπιες σεξεργάτριες που επιλέξαν τούντο επάγγελμα οικειοθελώς. Όποια τζιαι αν ένι η έκταση της καταναγκαστικής πορνείας στην Κύπρο, τέθκοια επιχειρήματα αποκλείουν εκ των προτέρων που εργασιακή προστασία τζιαι κοινωνικές υπηρεσίες, άτομα ούλλων των φύλων, ντόπιες τζιαι μετανάστες, που υπάρχουν αδιαμφισβήτητα, τζιαι δουλεύκουν ή θέλουν να εργαστούν στην βιομηχανία του σεξ. Ένα χώρο που μάλλον αντιλαμβανόμαστε ως κάτι πολλά πιο ευρύ τζιαι συμπεριληπτικό: συνοδοί, strippers, σεξουαλικοί βοηθοί ατόμων με αναπηρίες, διαδικτυακά cam models, fetish τζιαι BDSM υπηρεσίες, με ή χωρίς διεισδυτικό σεξ. Αντίστοιχα, οι πελάτες τούντων υπηρεσιών έννεν μόνο (ετεροφυλόφιλοι) άντρες, ούτε ούλλοι κακοποιητές. Το σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο τζιαι το υπό συζήτηση νομοσχέδιο εν βοηθά για την δημιουργία συνθηκών τζιαι συνειδήσεων που να διευκολύνουν τα άτομα στην βιομηχανία του σεξ να φκουν προς τα έξω, να αναγνωριστεί η φωνή τους τζιαι ναν μέρος της διαδικασίας για νομοθετικές αλλαγές που θα μπορούσαν, ίσως, να τους εγγυηθούν περισσόττερην ασφάλεια τζιαι δικαιώματα.
ΣΥΝΟΡΑ & ΣΩΜΑΤΕΜΠΟΡΙΑ
Όπως ήδη αναφέραμε, οι υποστηρικτές της ποινικοποίησης των πελατών θεωρούν την σεξεργασία άμεσα συνυφασμένη με την βία τζιαι πιστέφκουν ότι, χτυπώντας την ζήτηση, χτυπούν τζιαι τα κυκλώματα σωματεμπορίας. Η ρητορική τους αδυνατεί να διαχωρίσει αποτελεσματικά την καταναγκαστική πορνεία τζαι την σεξεργασία, δημιουργώντας έναν ηθικό πανικό γύρω που το σεξ τζιαι τζείνους/ες που το γοράζουν. Λαλούν ότι εν κατακρίνουν τα «θύματα» για τες υπηρεσίες που παρέχουν, παρ’ όλα αυτά, η ταύτιση της σεξεργασίας με την σωματεμπορία ενισχύει τες προϋπάρχουσες κοινωνικές αντιλήψεις για την σεξεργασία ως κάτι ανήθικό τζιαι εξευτελιστικό.
Πολιτικές που κάμνουν πιο δύσκολη την ζωή τζιαι εργασία των σεξεργατριών, εν μπορούν, παρά να δυσκολέφκουν τζιαι τες ζωές των ατόμων που θεωρούνται θύματα σωματεμπορίας. Στην πραγματικότητα, άτομα που εμπίπτουν τζιαι στες θκυο ομάδες χρησιμοποιούν παρόμοιες τακτικές για πιο ασφαλή εργασία. Επιπρόσθετα, αν φανταστούμε ένα φάσμα μεταξύ συναινετικής, αυτόβουλης σεξεργασίας στα αριστερά, τζιαι εκμεταλλευτικής ή/τζιαι καταναγκαστικής πορνείας ατόμων που την άλλη, η αυξημένη ανάγκη για μεσάζοντες τζιαι τρίτα άτομα, όπως προκύπτει μέσα που το σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο, μπορεί να σπρώξει προς τα δεξιά, άτομα που δούλεφκαν ανεξάρτητα τζιαι με σχετική αυτονομία, δυνατότητα επιλογής των πελατών τζιαι όρων εργασίας. Ένα παράδειγμα εν ότι όσο πιο δύσκολη γίνεται η εξεύρεση τζιαι ενοικίαση χώρου εργασίας, τόσο περισσότερο χρειάζεται κάποιος διαμεσολαβητής, τον οποίο η σεξεργάτρια θα πρέπει να πληρώννει επιπρόσθετα που το ενοίκιο για να της εξασφαλίζει χώρους. Τούτος ο μεσάζοντας μπορεί ανά πάσα στιγμή να ζητήσει υπέρογκα ποσά ή να απειλήσει για καταγγελία στην αστυνομία, που θα είσσιεν ως αποτέλεσμα τον εντοπισμό, τη σύλληψη των πελατών της τζιαι έξωση που το διαμέρισμα. Μέσα που τούτο το παράδειγμα, φαίνεται ότι το σκανδιναβικό μοντέλο, στην ουσία, αναγκάζει τις σεξεργάτριες να δουλέφκουν ακόμα περισσότερο ή πιο εντατικά αντί να μειώννεται η σεξεργασία, αφού προκύπτει επιπρόσθετο κόστος. Τζιαι τούτο το επιπρόσθετο κόστος, σε συνδυασμό με την ανάγκη να γίνεται η δουλειά μακριά που τα μμάθκια της αστυνομίας, αυξάνουν την ευαλωτότητα των εργαζομένων που έχουν περιορισμένη πλέον δυνατότητα επιλογής πελατών τζιαι λλιόττερη αυτονομία στην εργασία τους.
Για τες μετανάστριες που παρέχουν σεξουαλικές υπηρεσίες, ένας συνδυασμός των περιορισμών τζιαι παρανομοποίησής τους, όπως προκύπτει μέσα που την μεταναστευτική πολιτική του κράτους, αφήνει τες συχνά καταχρεωμένες τζιαι ευάλωτες σε εκμετάλλευση μαφιόζικων δικτύων. Η καταναγκαστική πορνεία τζιαι οι ακραίες σχέσεις εκμετάλλευσης όσων εργάζονται στην βιομηχανία του σεξ, έννεν μια εξαίρεση στην κατά τ’ άλλα μέλι-γάλα εργασιακή πραγματικότητα των μεταναστριών. Είτε έρτουν «νόμιμα» είτε «παράνομα», το καθεστώς συνόρων τζιαι μετανάστευσης προς την Ευρώπη-Φρούριο δημιουργεί ευνοϊκές συνθήκες για την εργασιακή τζιαι σεξουαλική εκμετάλλευσή τους.4 Η απειλή της απέλασης αποθαρρύνει τες καταγγελίες για βία τζιαι εκμετάλλευση, που τζείνες που έχουν εξαρχής την πιο λλίη πρόσβαση σε υπηρεσίες στήριξης, τζιαι μπορεί να ενισχύσει την σχέση εξάρτησης με μαφιόζικα δίκτυα τζιαι αφεντικά.
ΕΠΙΛΟΓΟΣ
Μέσα που την πρόταση για ποινικοποίηση τζιαι τες ανακοινώσεις που την εσυνοδεύσαν5 δημιουργείται η εντύπωση ότι μια νομοθετική αλλαγή μπορεί να στείλει ένα μήνυμα στην κοινωνία. Όπως φαίνεται, όμως, που όσα επροαναφέραμε, οι νόμοι έννεν απλώς συμβολικά τζιαμέ, για να περνούν μηνύματα, αλλά καθορίζουν τις δυνάμεις τζιαι τις εξουσίες του αστυνομικού σώματος τζιαι άλλων θεσμών.Αν τζιαι εν εππέσαμε που τα σύννεφα, εν ειρωνικό ότι η πρόταση ήρτε που την κοινοβουλευτική ομάδα του κόμματος της θεσμικής αριστεράς, φανερώνοντας τον συντηρητισμό της τζιαι την ολοκληρωτική εγκατάλειψη οποιασδήποτε μορφής αναγνώρισης της ταξικότητας του ζητήματος. Ενώ οι καλοπροαίρετες ευαισθησίες των «αγγελιαφόρων» επιτρέπουν τους να διεκδικούν χώρο στη δημόσια σφαίρα ως πολιτικά υποκείμενα, προωθούνται καταναγκαστικές μορφές «φροντίδας», με κόστος την αύξηση της αστυνόμευσης τζιαι επιτήρησης των ζωών των σεξεργατριών/ών, πολλές που τες οποίες εν μετανάστριες που βρίσκονται στον πάτο της ταξικής πυραμίδας. Η καταναγκαστική πορνεία τζιαι σωματεμπορία αποσυνδέονται εντελώς που τες κρατικές πολιτικές ως ανεξάρτητα φαινόμενα, αντί να γίνουνται αντιληπτά ως συμπτώματα των μεταναστευτικών πολιτικών της ΚΔ τζιαι του καθεστώτος συνόρων της ΕΕ. Εν ανησυχητική, επίσης, η επιλεκτική αναφορά ερευνών, που αναδεικνύουν την σύνδεση μεταξύ κυκλωμάτων πορνείας τζιαι σωματεμπορίας. Μέσα που τούτη την πραγματική σύνδεση, εν εντελώς αυθαίρετο το συμπέρασμα ότι κτυπώντας την πορνεία εννα κτυπηθεί τζιαι η σωματεμπορία. Ακόμα τζιαι σε έρευνα της Βουλής για την ποινικοποίηση τζιαι τα αποτελέσματά της σε χώρες μέλη της ΕΕ, που έγινε κατόπιν αιτήματος της βουλεύτριας του ΑΚΕΛ, Σκεύης Κουκουμά, τον Μάρτη του 2019, αναφέρονται αρνητικά αποτελέσματα της ποινικοποίησης στες χώρες που εφαρμόζεται. Στην Γαλλία «είχε καταστροφικό αποτέλεσμα για τις εκπορνευόμενες, αφού κατέστησε τη θέση τους πιο επισφαλή»6. Για άλλες χώρες, αναφέρεται ότι βοήθησε μόνο στο να μειωθεί η αγοραπωλησία σεξουαλικών υπηρεσιών στους δρόμους –ωθήθηκαν, δηλαδή, οι σεξεργάτριες σε πιο αόρατες συνθήκες εργασίας–ή ότι εν υπάρχουν αξιόπιστα στοιχεία για σύνδεση της ποινικοποίησης αγοράς υπηρεσιών με τη μείωση της σωματεμπορίας. Όσο για την αναφορά των σουηδικών αρχών ότι τουλάχιστον εν αυξήθηκε η σεξεργασία μετά την εφαρμογή της ποινικοποίησης, κάτι που συχνά χρησιμοποιείται για την υπεράσπιση του μοντέλου, προκύπτει που μεθοδολογικές αδυναμίες λόγω της έλλειψης στοιχείων για την σεξεργασία που γίνεται σε κλειστούς χώρους.7 Η ανυπομονησία των υποστηρικτών της πρότασης για ποινικοποίηση τζιαι εξάλειψη του φαινομένου της πορνείας βάλλει σε δεύτερη μοίρα την φυσική τζιαι οικονομική ασφάλεια των σεξεργατριών, στο όνομα της πάλης ενάντια στην πατριαρχική βία. Εν έχουμε, όμως, ούτε ψευδαισθήσεις ότι η αποποινικοποίηση ή οποιοδήποτε σύνολο νομοθετικών αλλαγών, μπορούν να εξαλείψουν την βία της πατριαρχίας. Όπως για παράδειγμα, η αποποινικοποίηση των εκτρώσεων εν φέρνει που μόνη της αναπαραγωγική δικαιοσύνη. Αγώνες για σύνορα ανοικτά, εργασιακά δικαιώματα, πρόσβαση σε υπηρεσίες τζιαι εργασία χωρίς απειλή απέλασης, πιο φτηνά ενοίκια, εν μόνο μερικά που τα νήματα που συνδέουν τες διεκδικήσεις μας με τους αγώνες των σεξεργατριών. Όμως, μόνο μέσα που την συμπερίληψη των ατόμων, των οποίων οι ζωές επηρεάζονται άμεσα που τέθκοιες αποφάσεις, τζιαι την ανάλυση των μηχανισμών της καταπίεσης που βιώνουν, μπορούν να γίνουν ουσιαστικές αλλαγές. Εν επιτακτική η αναγνώριση της εργασίας στη βιομηχανία του σεξ ως εργασίας (γενικότερα, όι μόνο της «συνουσίας επι πληρωμή»8) τζιαι η αλλαγή προς μια δικαιωματική τζιαι εργασιακή προσέγγιση της σεξεργασίας.
ΣΗΜΕΙΩΣΕΙΣ & ΑΝΑΦΟΡΕΣ
Για περαιτέρω διάβασμα στα αγγλικά προτείνουμε το βιβλίο Revolting Prostitutes, The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights.
Καταγγέλλουμε την πορεία που έχουν εξαγγείλει οι φασίστες στο οδόφραγμα της Δερύνειας το Σάββατο το βράδυ. Είναι μια προβοκατόρικη και επικίνδυνη ενέργεια που στόχο έχει να δημιουργήσει επεισόδια όπως προσπάθησαν να κάνουν και την περασμένη Κυριακή.
Με τέτοιες ενέργειες δυναμιτίζουν το κλίμα συνεργασίας και συμφιλίωσης και στηρίζουν τους οπαδούς των δύο χωριστών κρατών και της στρατιωτικής περιχαράκωσης. Είναι μια ενέργεια που βρίσκεται σε πλήρη συντονισμό με τους εθνικιστές και τους φασίστες της άλλης πλευράς και ταυτόχρονα δίνει ένα σημαντικό δώρο στον Τατάρ σε βάρος του Ακιντζί εν όψη των αυριανών εκλογών στο βορρά.
Είναι μια ενέργεια πλήρως συντονισμένη και με το καθεστώς διαφθοράς που κυριαρχεί στα ψηλά δώματα της εξουσίας με πρωταγωνιστές τους «άριστους των αρίστων» που επέλεξε ο Αναστασιάδης. Διαφθορά και φασισμός πάνε μαζί. Ο Αναστασιάδης και το κόμμα του είναι που ξέπλυναν τους εοκαβητατζήδες και τους έβαλαν στη Βουλή. Αυτοί είναι που άνοιξαν το δρόμο και στο ΕΛΑΜ με την εθνικιστική και ρατσιστική πολιτική τους για να μπορέσει να μπει στη Βουλη. Και αυτοί είναι που αναρριχήθηκαν στην εξουσία με τις ψήφους του ΕΛΑΜ. Αυτοί οι ίδιοι είναι και οι βασικοί υπεύθυνοι για αυτές τις αθλιότητες που έχουν δει το φως της δημοσιότητας. Αδίστακτοι πολιτικοί, δικηγορικά γραφεία, κατασκευαστικές εταιρίες και άλλοι μεγαλοκαρχαρίες που πατούν πάνω στην ανοχή και τη στήριξη της κυβέρνησης για να θησαυρίζουν ασύστολα σε βάρος του λαού.
Γι αυτό και η πάλη ενάντια στη διαφθορά είναι άρρηκτα δεμένη με τη πάλη ενάντια στο φασισμό και τον εθνικισμό. Δεν είναι τυχαίο που ο Αναστασιάδης έγινε ο νεκροθάφτης της επανένωσης. Για να μπορεί η ελίτ και οι άνθρωποι γύρο του να λυμαίνονται ελεύθερα και χωρίς κανένα έλεγχο το κράτος και τους πόρους του νησιού μας.
Γι αυτό και κανείς δεν πρέπει να συμμετέχει στη φασιστική πορεία στη Δερύνεια. Αντίθετα πρέπει όλοι να συμμετέχουμε στην πορεία ενάντια στη διαφθορά και το φασισμό που θα γίνει στο προεδρικό.
Η Εργατική Δημοκρατία στηρίζει και συμμετέχει σε αυτή τη πορεία και καλεί τον κάθε ένα που έχει σιχαθεί, τους Συλλούρηδες και τους όμοιους του, που δεν θέλει να αφήσει τους φασίστες να τινάξουν στον αέρα τις γέφυρες συνεργασίας και την προοπτική επανένωσης του νησιού μας, που δεν θέλει να συγκαλύψουν τα σκάνδαλα και τη διαφθορά της κυβέρνησης, να έλθει την Κυριακή να πορευτούμε μαζί στο προεδρικό και να απαιτήσουμε να φύγει τώρα η κυβέρνηση της διαφθοράς, του ρατσισμού και ο νεκροθάφτης της επανένωσης.
Συγκέντρωση Κυριακή η ώρα 17:00 στο Υπουργείο Εσωτερικών
Εργατική Δημοκρατία
17 Οκτώβρη 2020
Καταγγέλλουμε την προσπάθεια των φασιστών να δημιουργήσουν επεισόδια στο οδόφραγμα της Δερύνειας την Κυριακή το βράδυ. Η προσπάθεια τους να μπουν στη νεκρή ζώνη και να βάλουν φωτιά ρίχνοντας πυρσούς και πυροτεχνήματα είναι μια προκλητική και επικίνδυνη πράξη. Στην περιοχή υπάρχουν ναρκοπέδια και αν αυτά έπαιρναν φωτιά, κανείς δεν ξέρει ποιες θα ήταν οι συνέπειες. Αυτός πρέπει να ήταν και ο στόχος των φασιστών. ώστε να αλλάξουν την πολιτική ατζέντα στο κυπριακό και να δημιουργήσουν συνθήκες πολεμικής σύγκρουσης.
Είναι φανερό πως τέτοιες ενέργειες δυναμιτίζουν το κλίμα συνεργασίας και συμφιλίωσης και στηρίζουν τους οπαδούς των δύο χωριστών κρατών και της στρατιωτικής περιχαράκωσης. Είναι μια ενέργεια που βρίσκεται σε πλήρη συντονισμό με τους εθνικιστές και τους φασίστες της άλλης πλευράς και ταυτόχρονα δίνει ένα σημαντικό δώρο στον Ερσίν Τατάρ εν όψη του δεύτερου γύρου των εκλογών στο βορρά.
Οι υπεύθυνοι αυτής της ενέργειας πρέπει να συλληφθούν και να οδηγηθούν ενώπιον της δικαιοσύνης. Αυτό όμως δεν είναι αρκετό. Χρειάζεται να κινητοποιηθούμε και να χτίσουμε ένα αντιφασιστικό κίνημα σαν αυτό στην Ελλάδα που πλημμύριζε τους δρόμους και πολιορκούσε το δικαστήριο μέσα και έξω με αίτημα να κηρυχτεί εγκληματική οργάνωση η Χρυσή Αυγή και να οδηγηθούν στη φυλακή οι Ναζί ηγέτες της. Ετσι μπορούμε να εξασφαλίσουμε ότι το ΕΛΑΜ, η Χρυσή Αυγή της Κύπρου θα έχει την ίδια τύχη με την μητρική της οργάνωση στην Ελλάδα.
Η αντιφασιστική πορεία της περασμένης Κυριακής ήταν ένα σημαντικό βήμα προς αυτή τη κατεύθυνση, που θα πρέπει όμως να έχει και ανάλογή συνέχεια και κλιμάκωση. Έτσι στέλνουμε και ένα σημαντικό μήνυμα αλληλεγγύης και συναδέλφωσης στην άλλη πλευρά και δημιουργούμε τις προϋποθέσεις για ένα κοινό κίνημα που θα κινείται παράλληλα και στις δυο πλευρές για να τσακίσουμε τους φασίστες σε ολόκληρο το νησί.
Εργατική Δημοκρατία
12 Οκτωβρίου 2020
A political commentary.
2020 has hit us hard. At the beginning of the year the world was not in order, but hardly anybody expected a worldwide pandemic and in the consequence an economic-political crisis. There can be no “back to normality”. How could there be? Fast-moving capitalism is constantly reinventing itself, even or especially during the pandemic. At a very high price: the profound splits at the national and global level have come to an extreme. Where before there was a gap, now there seems to be an unbridgeable hole.
These phenomena become particularly clear in two examples, which are briefly summarized below. On September 9, the overcrowded camp for refugees in Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos was set on fire. For years, the refugees on the small island lived crowded together in the smallest of spaces under the most humiliating conditions. Again and again they succeeded in attracting attention and sympathy in the EU and in appealing to the remains of bourgeois morality, but the EU did not allow real humanism to prevail. What is this sick world in which people are driven to set fire to their own camp to draw attention to their fate? Barely 3 weeks later, on September 26, Amy Coney Barrett is nominated for the Supreme Cort in the White House. She is a legal hardliner against Obama’s health program and an anti-abortion campaigner. While crowds are banned all around the White House in Washington because of the pandemic, Trump and his allies celebrated a humid and cheerful Corona party in the White House. There were hugs, handshakes and nobody really wore masks here, which is why a large part of his administration including the president himself was infected with the corona virus.
While some partied in spite of pandemic circumstances and now enjoy the best medical care, thousands are stuck on the Greek islands and the mainland, cut off from medical care. Liberals and leftists around the world have understood that this has nothing to do with fairness. In Germany, thousands took to the streets in many cities and demanded the immediate evacuation of people and the welcoming of refugees into the communities. With #WirHabenPlatz (#WeHaveSpace), #LeaveNoOneBehind and #Seebrücke, an anti-racist movement has established itself in Germany and internationally over the past months and years. Well-connected at the local level, this movement has always ensured at the right time that the EU’s cruelties at its external borders are not forgotten, and has created structures that are organized in a non-parliamentary and grassroots democratic way and thus are able to catch up with large parts of the liberal political camps.
“The moral compass is off.” (Some German on some TV Show)
Practical action was then taken: Horst Seehofer, German Home Secretary, himself a Corona crisis manager and recently a sudden critic of racism, demanded the admission of a few hundred particularly vulnerable people and was able to present himself as a humanitarian on a European scale. While in 2018 the #Seebrücke had used his “anchor centers” (camps in which refugees would be held in isolation while their case was evaluated) as an opportunity to rebel against the federal government’s asylum policy, two years later he can stage himself as a liberal and humanist. The Corona Party in the White House can not only be described in terms of moral errors either: The President of the United States, who since the outbreak of the pandemic has had the death of thousands of Americans on his conscience because his policy denied them access to medical care and recommended the loyal state inmates to drink aquarium cleaners against the treacherous virus, manages to inspire compassion and to receive global wishes for recovery. That instead people wish him a severe course and a painful death is understandable, but the wrong answer. It’s the other way round: Neither Trump nor Seehofer will put an end to the dying of the nationally excluded and pauperized class. Rather, their openly fascist or supposedly philanthropic policies are an expression of growing nationalisms. As sovereigns of their nations, both defend the national borders and need the national identity on the inside to keep them separate from the outside.
All a question of morality?
These times are terrible. The fear of an infection with the deadly virus is growing, while questions of health care, freedom of movement and migration continue to intensify. What is hidden behind the morally loaded memes, talk shows and net politics are the questions that really matter: What can a society look like in which national borders do not decide on life and death and the socio-economic status of everyone decides on their health care? The prosperity of the global North cannot be redistributed so easily and different neo-fascist governments have unfortunately been able to establish themselves in recent years and enjoy great support from their loyalties. The moral compass of any society depends on the conditions under which it exists. If the Left wants more than share pics and 280 (Twitter-)signs to articulate anger, we must be the motor that changes the conditions for morality. For this, we need to determine at what time and in which fields the living conditions of the next years will be decided under the consequences of the Corona crisis. Or, to try it with Brecht: Food is the first thing, morals follow on.
By Jonas Wagner and Mia Wyborg
The authors are based in Germany and active in social struggles and the antifascist NIKA campaign. The campaign was founded in Germany in 2016 to fight the European right-wing movement in an organized way.
A Beyond Europe call to keep up the pressure and fight for solidarity.
After the fire that destroyed the misery camp of Moria, those who have nothing are not only left in the ashes of the monster of European foreign policy, but are now also being trampled on.
The refugees who did not manage to flee from the camp and escape to the city were not provided with blankets, tents and water, but with tear gas and the sticks of the Greek police. The cops tried with all their might not to let the refugees leave the camp, while what little they left behind remains was burned the next night. Trapped on the island’s streets around the camp, they were surrounded by riot police, left alone, without sufficient food, water and medical care. Helpers, NGOs and journalists were largely kept away, leaving the people defenceless against the heat of the day, the cold of the night, the arbitrariness and violence of the police and the attacks of local fascists.
For the verdict of the ultra-conservative Greek government under Nea Demokratia had already been passed. The guilty ones were those who had been locked up for years in the hell of Moria in disregard of human rights, and those who tried to alleviate the greatest suffering or to make the conditions public. Their guilt was investigated where there was nothing left to investigate, in the remains of Moria, already pushed together by bulldozers. But the Greek propaganda must be confirmed, on the one hand to distract from their own guilt and on the other hand to curb the biggest fear of the European Union. The fear that the fire that destroyed Moria will spread to the countless other places in the EU, based on the same inhuman policy. Whether in Lampedusa, Cyprus, Spain or along the entire Balkan route, the border regime has created places that are not far behind Moria. Where people are imprisoned without dignity, without opportunities and without any perspective. Moria is not the only powder keg that the EU has created in recent years.
While the people of Lesvos are suffering, the European politicians responsible for this catastrophe are extremely concerned. However, lip service is still paid without insight and concrete measures to help. Under the leadership of Germany there is a diligent haggling about responsibility and ridiculous contingents, legitimized with excuses and the search for common European solutions.
Despite their situation and the repression, many people are still demonstrating. They demand freedom and do not want to be resettled in a new closed camp under any circumstances. They are disappointed and tired of the promises of European politicians. Many understand all too well by now that they have become a plaything and are being used as a warning to break the idea of the Summer of Migration 2015, the idea of a Europe of human rights, whose ashes are carried away by the wind, sinking into the Mediterranean.
The Greek state is trying to blackmail the refugees into the new closed camps through lack of supplies, the continuing great danger of Covid-19, the threat that their asylum procedure will be suspended and permanent police arbitrariness and violence. How long their resistance can hold under this pressure is uncertain and therefore it is up to us to support their struggle and make it ours.
The refugees clearly show that they do not want to be numbers anymore and that dehumanization has come to an end. They want to fight for their rights, their future, their security and their lives. A fight for the foundation of our society that shows whether human rights are universal or remain a privilege. Because in this world of exploitation and competition, on the last islands of wealth, there is not enough space for those who seem superfluous.
Moria is a magnifying glass for the mistakes of the capitalist society we live in, and an example of how the smoking remnants will only be preserved by increasingly authoritarian measures of the state. A foul and dirty deal with despot Erdogan was made and inhumane camps were created with no concept at all. No wonder, since a bunch of European states are led by far right or right-populist governments, who hijack international decision making to impose their idea of society: authoritarian on the inside, locked up for the outside.
From 2015 till now, the EU did not even come close to find a common strategy to deal with refugees arriving at European borders. Those refugees, the people, who have to flee their own countries from war, ecological, social and economic catastrophes. The effects of global capitalist businesses, which make many parts of Europe rich.
Throughout Europe, there have been various solidarity actions in favour of evacuating the camps, not only in Moria, but on the whole external borders of the EU. But neither the pressure in the streets nor the public discourse was enough to make the rulers act effectively, which they simply do not want.
This Sunday on 20.09. people will again take to the streets in countless cities. We must not try to keep up the appearance of the European values, which were burnt in Moria, but to stand up for something completely different. A society that is based on solidarity and equality and that creates livable spaces everywhere without destroying the basis of life of the people.
After all, Solidarity is the key. Today, it is vital to stand up for solidarity and freedom of movement for everyone. These buzzwords used to be our own labels for assuring ourselves of our own radical views. In these times, solidarity and freedom of movement are still radical. They are ideas from which we can advance a radical critique of capitalism. The difference is that many more people are open to these demands, because after years and years of tens of thousands killed at borders such as in the Meditarranean, the critique of the status quo goes far beyond the usual suspects. When we take solidarity and freedom of movement to the streets today, after the disaster of Moria, it is not to be a small and hopefully radical voice in the discourse, but it is to change something politically: Evacuate now. End the camps. Fight the Fortress.
See you on the streets!
“Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps things are very different. It may be that revolutions are the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.” (Walter Benjamin)
The world is in flames and they continue to play with fire. Every day they dig up coal and burn it in their power plants, even though they know that this is the biggest source of CO2. Even though they know that in the next few years we are heading for tipping points that will make the climate catastrophe irreversible.
They, that is RWE AG, the energy-dependent industry, that is investors who are relying on everything going on as before. They are the federal and state government and the German-dominated European Commission. All those involved know what’s happening, and coal is still being produced.
Angela Merkel and other politicians looked at the appeals and mass demonstrations with a slight nod, but they weren’t really impressed. The coal phase-out should continue to come only when the last piece of coal has actually been burned. Because as someone once said: The modern state power is only a committee that manages the common business of the whole capitalist class. But we cannot expect anything else, because fossil capital provides the energy for the entire class. And the unity of property and the existing order is vehemently defended. As much as some may wish for a green capitalism: it will never be, because there is no decoupling of growth and resource consumption – these are just fantasies. The ruling class is the idealist, dreamer, unworldly.
It has broken its own announcements, self-commitments, etc., all by itself. All it has managed, since it has known about climate change, is to export environmental destruction itself. Even if coal is no longer burned in the Federal Republic and the industry is otherwise conserving resources here, environmental destruction will continue to be outsourced under capitalism if necessary. As always those people worldwide, who cannot afford to protect themselves, are most affected by capitalism and its environmental destruction.
Those responsible are the saboteurs of any effective climate policy and any humane coexistence, because the latter stand in the way of their business model and growth compulsion. They threaten to sue the states if their operating license is revoked. They threaten to leave workers in poverty and to worsen working conditions. They take away people’s time, our health and the resources we need to live. They will not stop their sabotage by themselves, they must be stopped. And if no one else can stop them, we must. If we stop their machines, we drive up the costs. Until it no longer pays off. We will stop the madness where it takes place. That is why we are joining the actions of Ende Gelände in the Rhineland from September 23 – 27, 2020.
Let us sabotage the saboteurs.
See you in the pit!
…ums Ganze! – September 2020
Last night the desperation at Camp Moria on lesbos was discharged into a huge fire!
The unbearable situation in the refugee camp on the Greek island Lesbos completely escalated last night. In protest against the continuing poor care, the danger of Covid 19 and the prospect of Moria being turned into a closed camp by the erection of a fence, some camp residents decided to burn down large parts of the camp.
The police used batons and tear gas against the refugees, but could not control the situation. The fire department was attacked with stones to hinder their work.
Many of the camp inhabitants fled to the surrounding area or to the city of Mytilini. It is not clear how many people were injured and whether people fell victim to the flames. The further provisioning situation is not yet clear.
After a Kurdish feminist rally in Vienna-Favoriten was attacked by Turkish fascists on Wednesday, hundreds of anti-fascists took to the streets against this attack on the following day. After yesterday’s demonstration the fascists escalated the situation again and attacked the EKH, an occupied house in Vienna, with a mob of about 200 to 300 people. Stones, bottles and incendiary devices flew on the squatted house, which is shared by left-wing migrant organisations and anarchist aligned squatters.
We have translated an article by Zeynep Arslan (@zeynemarslan) from the Austrian Mosaik Blog to give you a first overview and analysis of the situation. The antifascist demonstrations are organized under the motto Faşizme karşı omuz omuza! – Side by side against fascism! Try to find an answer on the streets!
The noise of the police helicopters could be heard late into the night yesterday. For a long time no peace and quiet returned to the streets of Vienna-Favoriten. It all began with a rally by a Kurdish women’s organisation based in the Ernst Kirchweger Haus (EKH). The participants wanted to point out the increasing number of feminicides in Turkey and Austria. They wanted to show what the effects of anti-women policies are, which can be seen, in the privatisation and destruction of women’s shelters in Salzburg for example.
Then the women were attacked by a group of fascist men. Within a very short period of time, around a hundred right-wing extremists appeared, and a large-scale police operation was launched. The women fled to the EKH and had to stay there for hours for security reasons.
It wasn’t the first attack in the district. Similar incidents occurred on Mayday on the fringes of a rally on Keplerplatz. And a pattern is emerging: the extreme right-wing group of young men seems to have no fear of the security forces, who were even supported by two police helicopters last night.
Two to three young people can turn into fifty to a hundred within minutes. They act as owners and guards of Favoriten and want to supervise their district. They forbid residents and visitors to events to consume alcohol during the Muslim month of fasting Ramadan. They try to keep Kurdish music and language out of the public. They also like to sic the police on Turkish-Kurdish participants of events – with the insinuation that they are followers of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party). Self-confidently they accuse the police and the Austrian state of allowing a terrorist organisation to take over public space. They mobilise each other via their mobile phones and are organized in hierarchical roles.
The group’s world view is shaped by the political ideas of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. They position themselves as his defenders and do not shy away from making the wolf salute (comparable to the Hitler salute as a distinctive sign of Turkish fascists), which is forbidden in Austria, in the presence of the police.
How is it possible that young people who were born in Vienna and Austria internalized such an unreflected racist Turkish way of thinking and generalized hatred? Unfortunately the omnipresent discrimination in Austria favours the propaganda of the Turkish right-wing extremists. Young people who regularly experience exclusions according to the motto “You are and can be with us, but you will never be one of us” can never feel equal rights and equal treatment. This structural and institutional racism prevents a common, pluralistic understanding of democracy across cultural and national affiliations.
The male “us” narrative à la Erdoğan offers these young people an identity, even if it is constructed and artificial. The corresponding messages and war propaganda from Turkey reach them daily – and are received by them uncritically and without reflection. When they are confronted by others because of their attacks, they declare that despite their citizenship and perfect German they will remain foreigners forever and ever. Their disorientation provides fertile ground for right-wing extremist propaganda.
The young people born in Austria take on the megalomania of “Turkishness” across borders. Basic democratic rights obviously have no place in this. That’s why they attack marginalized groups from their supposed “own” cultural circle: Kurds, Alevis and women. For them, their rights are part of the “corrupt Christian strangeness” in which, in their opinion, they live. They seem to have found a feeling of belonging only in the group. In the group they feel strong – but even a rally against violence against women becomes unbearable for them and threatens their male power.
So we are dealing with an aggressive inferiority complex. It is rooted in a constructed legitimation of identity, that refers to Turkish history. It begins in the steppes of Central Asia, continues through the invasion of Anatolia, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and migration into the European diaspora. Various massacres, genocides and defamations in the course of the formation of the Turkish nation state a good hundred years ago are also part of this legitimation.
The Turkish state doctrine grants them the international privileged status of “Turk-Turkish-Sunni-Muslim Man”. To defend the leader and the fatherland, even far from Turkey, any use of force is justified. This can also be seen in violent anger against women.
Last night the self-proclaimed “guardians of Favouriten” were able to carry out their second action this year in front of the Austrian public. Prior to this, their attack was directed against the May Day rally on Keplerplatz. These developments can no longer be ignored. Behind them lies a political power structure that operates transnationally. The young men are only a pretense. The structures and ideologies behind them reach as far as Turkey. A trivialisation of the current incidents would be irresponsible towards the future.
What is needed is courageous action against all forms of racism, which goes hand in hand with sexism – no matter what corner it may come from. Each and every one of us must democratically engage and take responsibility for our common future. The world views that further stabilize a male-dominated ideology must be broken up. The patterns and motivation for racist and sexist violence and incitement to hatred are always the same: the perpetrators want to compensate for their own feelings of inferiority and the existential fear associated with it. After all, the young right-wing extremists are not as strong and courageous as they themselves believe.
[English Follows]
Το 1988 συστάθηκε η Επιτροπή Συμπαράστασης στον Αντιρρησία Συνείδησης Γ. Πάρπα, μετά από την φυλάκιση του πρώτου Αντιρρησία Συνείδησης στην Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία. Το αρχείο έχει πλέον εντοπίσει, καθώς και δακτυλογραφήσει διάφορο σχετικό υλικό (που χρειάζεται μετάφραση).
1) Για μια γενική καταγραφή της σύστασης της επιτροπής βλέπε το 'Ένας Αρνητής Στράτευσης - Το Τέλος του Μακροχρόνιου Αγώνα'.
2) Για υλικό της Επιτροπής βλέπε την σελίδα της στο αρχείο.
3) Για το κείμενο της Πρωτοβουλίας Ενάντια στον Κοινωνικό Ρατσισμό βλέπε 'Συμπαράσταση στον Αντιρρησία Συνείδησης Γιάννη Πάρπα'.
4) Για την ιδεολογική κόντρα που εξελικτικέ βλέπε το πρώτο κείμενο μαζί με το κείμενο 'Για τις Θεωρητικές Κλανιές του Δ. Μιχαήλ στη Σοσ. Έκφραση'.
In 1988 the Committee for the Support of Conscientious Objector Yiannis Parpas was formed, after the imprisonment of the first Conscientious Objector in the Republic of Cyprus. The archive has by now located, as well as typed various material (that is now in need of translation as it is only available in Greek).
1) For a general documentation of the formation of the committee look at 'A Conscientious Objector - The end of the Long Struggle (Ένας Αρνητής Στράτευσης - Το Τέλος του Μακροχρόνιου Αγώνα)'.
2) For the material of the Committee check its page on the archive.
3) For the text of the Initiative Against Social Racism look at 'Support towards Conscientious Objector Yiannis Parpas (Συμπαράσταση στον Αντιρρησία Συνείδησης Γιάννη Πάρπα)'.
4) For the ideological tensions which developed check the first text alongside the text 'On the Theoretical Farts of D. Mihail in Socialist Expression (Για τις Θεωρητικές Κλανιές του Δ. Μιχαήλ στη Σοσ. Έκφραση)'.
Translation of an article by Antifa AK Cologne
“When you talk about a revolution, most people think violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principles, in the goal that you’re striving for, not in the way you reach them.”
–Angela Davis
3 weeks ago, the African-American George Floyd was brutally murdered by police officers. Since then, an anti-racist wave of protest against police violence and White Supremacy has been spreading, which is being taken up internationally. In France, England, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Canada, but also in Germany, masses of racialized people and those standing in solidarity are taking to the streets in the middle of the pandemic. In the various countries where protests are taking place, different social situations exist from which the uprisings arise. White Left activism must show solidarity with the struggling organisations and movements of black people and people of color and recognise their spearhead role in the anti-racist struggle. We are communists from Germany who participated in the protests in Cologne and would like to present some analyses and theses on the current #BlackLivesMatter movement.
In the USA, black people make up 13% of the total population, but at the same time 33% of corona patients who need hospital treatment. They suffer from poverty-related pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes, much more frequently and receive much worse health care, as they are much more likely to be affected by poverty. Black people are more than twice as often victims of murder by police officers than white people. The murder of George Floyd was certainly not an isolated case, but the straw that broke the camel’s back. The massive rage that is currently erupting everywhere merely makes these brutal facts visible. The images of the riots and the looting in the USA are by no means frightening, as postulated by bourgeois media, but are an expression of the need to upset the murderous status quo. One could plunder for a lifetime; this would not replace what capitalism stole.
The movement has already had some success. 54% support in the US-population for the burning Minneapolis police department speaks for itself. Now the police department there is to be disbanded. Worldwide, the #BlackLivesMatter protests have caused colonial monuments glorifying slavery to be hit, as in Bristol and Brussels. These successes would not have been possible without the far-reaching mass militancy. No petition had achieved this before. In Germany no monument has been tackled so far. Some influential political figures externalize the problem: it is an American phenomenon. Former faction leader of the Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, claims that there is no latent racism in the police. The facts tell us something else: since 1990, at least 159 People of Colour and black people have died in police custody in Germany. The racist terror does not only come from the state, but also from racists and fascists who have killed at least 209 people since 1990. In Germany racism is present everywhere. The rulers do everything to make it ignoreable for the majority of society – to the murderous disadvantage of those targeted by racism.
The internationalization of the protests makes three things clear: racism and capitalism are inseparable. Racist plundering only works with social pacification and class contract. The bourgeois state plays a central role here: it secures the capitalist normalcy, and thus inevitably also the racism that supports it and shapes it. That is why it and its personnel are now faltering in the face of the internationalization of the uprisings that are continuing in many places. The uprisings, when they attack systemic racism, necessarily attack the whole system. Civil liberties will only be accepted by those in power if the social movements can be integrated into the status quo. And: Where understanding is expressed in another country about the protest, it is usually unpopular as soon as it is directed at one’s own ruling class and it does not remain peaceful. But the renewed protests in Atlanta also make it clear that the state can try to pacify its inmates with reforms and at the same time fight the uprising with the help of the military, but also gets massive headwind from the internationalization of the protests. Whether Trump, Bolsonaro, Macron or Johnson: They are currently getting a lot of fire under their asses.
The last social movements had a subjective factor and lived on spontaneity, which caused their rapid growth: whether it was the students of Fridays for Future, who will still feel the effects of the climate catastrophe during their lifetime, or the women’s movement, which attacks the systematic double exploitation of gendering under capitalism worldwide, or the BLM movement, which makes the daily murderous threat to black people visible. Social movements take up and attack the contradictions concretely: Whether racist police violence, patriarchal and sexual exploitation or the climate catastrophe. The fight for the whole can only be won by expanding the struggles. Where systematic oppression by domination is made a problem of individuals or certain groups, the so-called “progressive neoliberalism” beckons with quotas and ridiculous reforms like body cams to satisfy the state inmates. Revolutionary answers to the crisis do not speak of individual perpetrators and redistribution. With #DefundThePolice the police as an institution is questioned. Meanwhile, in Hamburg and Berlin it quickly became clear how the smallest spark of resistance against police officers is dealt with. We have to attack racist structures and institutions, as well as colonial continuities, where we live and struggle. In other words: disempowering capital and the perpetrators of violence and expropriating the rich.
#BlackLivesMatter feeds off the anti-colonial struggles of the Black Power movement. Black culture plays a central role here, which in turn comes from a resistant tradition and poses questions of social representation and participation radically from below, but at the same time has gained quite a high popularity. Without this popularity, the wave of protest would not have been able to internationalize so quickly. In the German public and the German left, black culture is marginalized, as is knowledge of the struggles of movements and organizations. Often black voices are overheard, or their critical sting is removed. Afro-German communists, like the resistance fighter Hilarius Gilges, who was brutally murdered by the Nazis in 1933 in Düsseldorf, or the partisan fighter Carlos Grevkey, who was also murdered by Nazis, are not well known in the anti-fascist German left. This statement is directed as a criticism of ourselves, as part of this movement.
Racism is treated as a problem and, across different political camps, as structural violence. Even Horst Seehofer (German minister of the interior) and others say: We have a racism problem. This could be seen as a discursive victory for interventions critical of racism. The problem is: the legitimate questions about representation of black people and PoC, as soon as they are taken up by the Congress, the EU Parliament and the Bundestag, lack the class standpoint. Intersectional research and theoretical approaches are very vulnerable to being turned against themselves, as they have already been appropriated by the bourgeois academic sphere. The realization that many social conflicts and injustices of our time can be interpreted on the basis of the categories race, class, gender, does not necessarily put them in conflict with the capital relation. In contrast to this is the notion of striving to overcome capitalist rule, which is expressed through class relations, racism and gender relations. The difference lies in the fact that in comparison to diversity-oriented and racism-critical approaches, capitalism as a whole is denounced. Racism and gender relations are by no means a side contradiction to class relations. They are historically closely connected and can only appear to be interwoven with each other. Thus this theory differs from bourgeois theories by two central features: It has a Marxist basis on which to argue. That is, it goes beyond the categorization of inequalities. Secondly, in contrast to academic intersectionality theory approaches, the theory of triple oppression in particular aims at the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism. Or, to use Bobby Seales (Black Panther Party) words:
“We are an organisation that represents black people and many white radicals relate to this and unterstand that the Black Panther Party is a righteous revolutionary front against this racist decadent, capitalistic system. Our organisation doesn’t have any white people as members. If a white man in a radical group wants to give me some guns, I’ll take them. I’m not going to refuse them because he’s white.”
If we as leftists want to make our contribution to the BLM movement, we must intervene practically and locally. For Cologne, a minimal catalogue of measures would be the abolition of the construct of “dangerous places” (a rationalization for stop and frisk), such as the Domplatte and Ebertplatz, an end to racist police controls, #JusticeforKrys (a young man shot and by a conservative politician), Herkesin Meydani – a memorial in Keupstraße (where nazi terrorists detonated a mailbomb), the private accommodation of fugitives and to dump the Kaiser Wilhelm statues in the Rhine. Nationwide: the disarmament of the police, the return of colonial looted goods, immediate debt relief and reparations payments for former German colonies, a reappraisal of the involvement of German shipbuilders and financial houses in the slave trade and the evacuation of all camps. Those who do not want to talk about colonialism should also keep quiet about capitalism.
Λόγω του όγκου του καινούργιου υλικού, οι πιο κάτω λίστες είναι περιληπτικές. Επίσης, ενημερώνουμε εδώ πως η Λεπτομερής Αναζήτηση είναι ξανά σε λειτουργία στο Ελληνικό τμήμα του Αρχείου.
Σελίδες για τις ακόλουθες ομάδες, ιστοσελίδες και χώρους έχουν πλέον δημιουργηθεί στο Ελληνικό τμήμα του αρχείου:
Μεγάλη αύξηση του δακτυλογραφημένου υλικού, κύριος από στα πιο κάτω περιοδικά και ομάδες, καθώς και στις θεματικές 'Οικολογία', 'δημόσιοι χώροι' και 'δικαίωμα στην πόλη':
Due to the large number of the new material, the following lists are only a brief summary. In addition, we would like to announce here that the Detailed Search Option (Λεπτομερής Αναζήτηση) is again functional on the Greek version of the Archive.
Pages for the following groups, websites and spaces have been created in the Greek version of the archive:
An extensive increase in typed material, mainly from the following magazines and groups as well as under the sujects of 'Ecology (Οικολογία)', 'public spaces (δημόσιοι χώροι)' and "right to the city (δικαίωμα στην πόλη)':
[English follows]
Στην έκδοση της Κυριακής (07/06/2020) του πολιτιστικού ενθέτου “Παράθυρο” της εφημερίδας Πολίτης φιλοξενείται συνέντευξη δύο εκ των συντακτών του Κυπριακού Κινηματικού Αρχείου. Στην συνέντευξη με τίτλο “Ενα αρχείο για το κυπριακό ριζοσπαστικό κίνημα” συζητούμε το ξεκίνημα και τα πρώτα βήματα του Αρχείου πριν τέσσερα χρόνια, παρουσιάζουμε το υλικό που έχουμε ήδη ανεβάσει, και εξερευνούμε τους τρόπους με τους οποίους το Αρχείο μπορεί να εμπλουτιστεί καθώς συνεχίζουμε.
Ευχαριστούμε την συντάκτρια του πολιτιστικού ρεπορτάζ του Πολίτη, Μερόπη Μωυσέως, για την πρόσκληση και ευκαιρία να παρουσιάσουμε το αρχείο σε ένα πιο ευρύ κοινό.
Υπάρχουν πολλοί τρόποι με τους οποίους μπορείτε να βοηθήσετε το Αρχείο, όπως για παράδειγμα η προσφορά σκαναρισμένου υλικού, η δακτυλογράφηση και μετάφραση υλικού που είναι ήδη ανεβασμένο, και η βοήθεια στην πλαισίωση του υλικού στον ιστορικό του τόπο μέσα από την συγγραφή σύντομων σημειωμάτων. Θα χαρούμε να ακούσουμε από εσάς μέσω e-mail στο arxeio@riseup.net.
In the Sunday (07/06/2020) edition of Politis' cultural section “Parathyro” (Window), you can find an interview (here, in Greek) with two of the editors of the Cyprus Movements Archive. In the interview titled “An archive for the Cypriot radical movement”, we discuss the beginnings and first steps of the Archive four years ago, we present currently uploaded material, and explore the ways in which the Archive can be improved as we move forward.
We thank Meropi Moiseos, Culture reporter for Politis, for the invitation and the opportunity to make the Archive known to a wider audience.
There are many ways in which you can contribute to the Archive, such as providing scanned material, typing and translating existing material, and help frame the material in its historical context by writing short historical notes. We welcome your communication at arxeio@riseup.net.
A note on the necessity of archiving.
(Greek follows)
On the 21st of May, 2020, the server of espiv.net, which hosts a plethora of websites and blogs of political groups, went offline, due to reasons outlined in the trilingual text (Greek, English, Spanish) shared by the espiv.net collective which we reproduce in solidarity below. Websites and blogs with a rich accumulated material of historical significance disappeared overnight, with unclear prospects for their full or partial recovery. From the perspective of our archive, we have now lost access to the websites of antifa λευkoşa, Skapoula and faq, with our only access remaining the material archived in the Wayback Machine (links to the Wayback Machine captures exist on the Movements' Archive page for each group).
Taking these sad news as a pretext, we would like to remind the significance of the continuous and decentralized archiving of our political activity and history, including websites, as the preservation and collecting of material online, without the creation of website security backups, entails the weakness of having a “single flaw” (as is, for example, the cases of Geocities, Wordpress and the websites with rented URLs), constituting in many occasions websites as more vulnerable than printed material.
Μια σημείωση για την ανάγκη της αρχειοθέτησης.
Στις 21 του Μάη του 2020 ο server της σελίδας espiv.net, η οποία φιλοξενά μια πληθώρα σελίδων και blog πολιτικών ομάδων, έπεσε, για λόγους που καταγράφονται στο τρίγλωσσο κείμενο (Ελληνικά, Αγγλικά, Ισπανικά) που ανέβασε η κολεκτίβα του espiv.net και το οποίο αναπαράγουμε πιο κάτω ως ένδειξη αλληλεγγύης. Σελίδες και blogs που συσσώρευαν πλούσιο υλικό ιστορικής σημασίας εξαφανίστηκαν σε ένα βράδυ, με ασαφείς προοπτικές σχετικά με την πλήρη ή μερική αποκατάστασή τους. Από τη σκοπιά του αρχείου μας, έχουμε πλέον χάσει την πρόσβαση μας στους ιστότοπους των ομάδων antifa λευkoşa, Σκαπούλα και faq, με μόνη μας πρόσβαση που παραμένει να είναι το υλικό που αρχειοθέτησε το Wayback Machine (links στα captures του Wayback Machine υπάρχουν στη σελίδα της κάθε ομάδας πάνω στο Κινηματικό Αρχείο).
Με πρόφαση τα θλιβερά αυτά νέα, θα θέλαμε να υπενθυμίσουμε την σημασία της συνεχούς και αποκεντρωμένης αρχειοθέτησης της πολιτικής μας δραστηριότητας και πολιτικής μας ιστορίας, συμπεριλαμβανομένων και των διαδικτυακών σελίδων, καθώς η διατήρηση και συλλογή υλικού διαδικτυακά χωρίς τη δημιουργία αντιγράφων ασφαλείας ιστότοπου εμπεριέχει την αδυναμία του “ένός μοναδικού σημείου βλάβης” (όπως για παράδειγμα οι περιπτώσεις του Geocities, του Wordpress καθώς και των σελίδων με ενοικιασμένα URLs), καθιστώντας το πολλές φορές πιο ευάλωτο από το έντυπο υλικό.
Ακολουθεί το τρίγλωσσο κείμενο της κολεκτίβας του espiv.net όπως αυτό ανέβηκε στη σελίδα τους, στα Ελληνικά, Αγγλικά και Ισπανικά.
The text of the espiv.net collective follows, as it was presented on their website, in Greek, English and Spanish.
Την Πέμπτη 21/5 και μετά απο προφορική εντολή και πρωτοβουλία της πρυτάνεως του Παντείου στην Δ/νση Μηχανοργάνωσης, ο server του espiv.net βγήκε εκτός λειτουργίας. Αφορμή αποτέλεσε μια καταγγελία για παραβίαση πνευματικών δικαιωμάτων. Συγκεκριμένα, η καταγγελία αυτή αφορούσε δύο τίτλους βιβλίων τα οποία ήταν ανεβασμένα σε μορφή pdf σε ένα από τα εκατοντάδες blogs που φιλοξενεί ο server.
Απο την πρώτη στιγμή, ως συλλογικότητα διαχείρισης του espiv, προσπαθήσαμε να επικοινωνήσουμε με την πρυτανεία και να βρεθεί λύση, κρίνοντας ότι η υπάρξη και η πρόσβαση στο περιεχόμενο των blogs το συντομότερο δυνατό είναι άμεση προτεραιότητα μας.
Ο server, στον οποίο φιλοξενούνται 850 blogs -η πλειοψηφία των οποίων αποτελεί βασικό ηλεκτρονικό μέσο έκφρασης πολιτικών συλλογικοτήτων, συνελεύσεων γειτονιάς και εργατικών σωματείων- βρίσκεται στην Πάντειο απο την αρχή λειτουργίας του εγχειρήματος το 2008 έως σήμερα, σε ένα δημόσιο πανεπιστήμιο στην Αθήνα.
Οι επανειλλημένες προσπάθειές μας να επικοινωνήσουμε και να έχουμε μια σαφή απάντηση από την πρυτανεία έπεσαν στο κενό. Θα έπρεπε κανείς και καμία να είναι πολύ καλόπιστος ή αφελής για να υποθέσει ότι όλο αυτό οφείλεται σε αυξημένα ακαδημαϊκά καθήκοντα. Άλλωστε η εντολή για το κλείσιμο του server δόθηκε εντυπωσιακά γρήγορα. Την Πέμπτη 28/5, μία εβδομάδα μετά, λάβαμε τηλεγραφική ενημέρωση ότι η Πρύτανης θα παραπέμψει το θέμα μας σε επόμενο συμβούλιο της συγκλήτου του Παντείου, με άγνωστη ημερομηνία. Προφανής στόχος η νομιμοποίηση της καταστολής του εγχειρήματος πίσω από κλειστές ηλεκτρονικές πόρτες τηλεδιασκέψεων. Φαίνεται πως με τις σχολές κλειστές και μετά απο ένα δίμηνο lockdown οι συνθήκες θεωρήθηκαν ευνοϊκές για να προστεθεί άλλη μια κινηματική υποδομή στον μακρύ κατάλογο των καταλήψεων και εγχειρημάτων που έχουν κατασταλεί τελευταία. Επιλογή που επεκτείνει την καταστολή στο πεδίο του internet, επιβάλλοντας την κανονικότητα των social media, της ψηφιακής ρουφιανιάς και της καταγραφής και επιτήρησης της κάθε πληροφορίας που διακινείται στο διαδίκτυο, δείχνοντας ξανά ότι το ρόλο του μπάτσου μπορούν να παίξουν κάλλιστα οι κάθε λογής πρυτάνεις και κρατικοί υπάλληλοι. Η επιλογή να κατασταλλεί μία υποδομή που στηρίζεται και αποτελεί τον διαδικτυακό τόπο έκφρασης δεκάδων συλλογικοτήτων του ανταγωνιστικού κινήματος, δεν μπορεί παρά να μας βρει απέναντί τους. Απευθύνουμε κάλεσμα σε πρωτοβουλιακές δράσεις αντιπληροφόρησης και αλληλεγγύης από τις ομάδες και συλλογικότητες που φιλοξενούνται στον espiv, ενάντια στην καταστολή άλλης μίας κινηματικής υποδομής.
ΚΑΜΙΑ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗ ΦΙΜΩΣΗ ΝΑ ΜΗΝ ΜΕΙΝΕΙ ΑΝΑΠΑΝΤΗΤΗ!
ΟΥΤΕ ΒΗΜΑ ΠΙΣΩ
ΚΑΤΩ ΤΑ ΧΕΡΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΙΣ ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΙΚΕΣ ΥΠΟΔΟΜΕΣ!
ΣΥΓΚΕΝΤΡΩΣΗ ΑΛΛΗΛΕΓΓΥΗΣ ΕΞΩ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΠΡΥΤΑΝΕΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΠΑΝΤΕΙΟΥ(ΣΤΟΝ ΠΕΖΟΔΡΟΜΟ)
ΠΕΜΠΤΗ 4/6/2020 12:00
Hello, comrades:
We would like to inform you about the latest developments on the shutdown of the server.
The information we received is that the server went out of order after an oral command of the rector of Panteion University to their computerisation section on the occasion of a complaint about digital piracy.
More specifically, this complaint concerned two book titles that were uploaded in pdf format to one of the hundreds of blogs hosted by the server. We immediately tried to contact the rectorial authorities and work out a solution, wanting to regain access to the content of the blogs as soon as possible.
The server, which hosts 850 blogs, has been located in Panteion University since the beginning of Espiv project in 2008. From time to time issues have arisen, and so far we have managed to overcome them and keep the server in place, at a public university in Athens (Greece).
We understand that many things have changed over the last 12 years, and from time to time we have discussed the real conditions under which Espiv project continues to operate. However, it is our intention and desire to keep the server in place, with all political and labour collectives, neighbourhood assemblies and self-organised projects hosted on it.
Our repeated attempts to receive a clear answer from the rectorial authorities fell on deaf ears. On Thursday, 28 May 2020 (a week after the shutdown), we received information that the rector will refer our issue to the next council of the senate of Panteion University, which is unknown when it will take place. One should not be too superstitious or naive to assume that all this is due to increased academic duties. After all, the command to shut down the server was given impressively quickly. With universities still closed and after a two-month lockdown, conditions were considered favourable to add another movement’s infrastructure to the long list of squats and projects recently suppressed. A choice that expands repression in the field of internet, imposing the normality of social media, digital snitching, and recording and surveillance of any information circulated on the internet, again showing that the role of the cop can be played well by all sorts of rectors and state employees. The choice to suppress an infrastructure that supports the expression of dozens of collectives within the antagonist movement can only find us against them.
We will let you know of any further developments and mobilisations.
No political gagging left unanswered.
Not a step back.
The administration crew of espiv.net
LLAMADO A MOVILIZACIÓN APOYO Y SOLIDARIDAD CONTRA LA POLÍTICA DE AMORDAZAMIENTO DE ESPIV
El jueves 21/5, luego de orden verbal e iniciativa de la Rectora de la Universidad Panteio hacia la Dirección de Informática, el servidor de espiv.net quedó fuera de funcionamiento. El motivo fue una denuncia por violación de derechos intelectuales. Concretamente, esta denuncia se refería a los títulos de dos libros los cuales estaban subidos en formato .pdf en uno de los cientos de blogs que hospeda el servidor.
Desde el primer momento, como colectivo de administración de espiv, intentamos comunicarnos con la rectora para encontrar una solución considerando la existencia y el acceso al contenido de los blogs lo antes posible, es nuestra prioridad.
El servidor, en el cual se aloja 850 blogs -la mayoría de los cuales constituyen medio electrónico básico de expresión de colectivos políticos, asambleas barriales, y asociaciones de trabajadores- se encuentra en la Universidad Panteio desde el comienzo de la iniciativa en el 2008 hasta hoy, una universidad pública en Atenas, Grecia.
Nuestros repetidos intentos de comunicarnos y tener una respuesta clara del rectorado cayeron en saco roto. Tendría que ser cualquier/a muy crédulo o muy ingenuo para suponer que todo esto se debe a un aumento de de los deberes u obligaciones académicas. Por otro lado, la orden para el cierre del servidor se expidió asombrosamente rápido. El jueves 28/5, una semana después, recibimos una comunicación telegráfica que la Rectora derivará el tema al próxima reunión del Consejo Académico del Panteio, con fecha aún desconocida. Objetivo evidente, la legalización de la represión sobre la iniciativa tras las cerradas puertas electrónicas de una teleconferencia.
Se nota que con las universidades cerradas, y luego de dos meses de “lockdown” las condiciones se estimaron favorables para agregar otra infraestructura ligada a movimientos sociales al largo catálogo de okupaciones y proyectos que han sido objeto de desalojos y mano dura últimamente. Elección que extiende la represión al ámbito del internet, imponiendo la normalización de las redes sociales (social media), de la intriga y la delación digital, del registro y la vigilancia de cada información que circule por la red, mostrando una vez mas que el rol de policía, puede jugarlo perfectamente cualquier rector y empleado estatal.
La opción de suprimir una infraestructura que se apoya en y constituye lugar de expresión en la red para decenas de colectivos del movimiento antagonista, no puede sino encontrarnos enfrentándolos. Dirigimos el llamado a iniciativas, acciones de contrainformación y solidaridad por parte de los grupos y colectivos que se hospedan en espiv, en contra de la represión de otra estructura mas de los movimientos sociales.
NINGÚN AMORDAZAMIENTO POLÍTICO SIN RESPUESTA!
NI UN PASO ATRÁS!
CONCENTRACIÓN EN SOLIDARIDAD FRENTE AL RECTORADO DE LA UNIV. PANTEIO - ATENAS
JUEVES 4/6/2020 - 12:00
Solidarity statement from antiauthoritarians in Germany and Austria
After a white cop in Minneapolis, Minnesota suffocated the Afro-American George Floyd under the eyes of three of his colleagues, half the country is on fire. It was not the first racist murder by the US police, it was not even the first one this year and not the last since. It was just one too many.
The night after George’s murder, protests broke out in all kinds of cities across the United States and quickly increased. The protests were organized from within black communities in big US cities and quickly met with a huge wave of solidarity. After Trump had feigned sympathy and demanded an investigation into the murder, the mask has now fallen: Swinging his Bible, the autocrat declares the protests to be terror, against which he now wants to bring in the military, after the National Guard has already been mobilized in most states. Following the motto “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, Trump wants to put a stop to the social uprisings. In the same breath, he wants to blame antifa directly for the protests, whom he has long since known to be communist and anarchist agitators. Fair enough! But while the truncheon orgies continue on the streets of America, Trump leads a campaign against those who stand in the way of the unchained state power.
The authoritarian Republican bloc in the US has long since mobilized all its media power to shift the discourse: Instead of racist cops and structural violence, FOX News discusses looting and terrorism. In trying to divide the protest into peaceful and violent, the Liberals, as so often, willingly let themselves be pulled in front of the Republicans’ trolley and toot the same horn: While armed sections of the Ku Klux Klan have opened the hunt under the eyes of the police, the Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic emphasize how important it is to remain non-violent. As if this is an option against police state and gangs of nazi thugs!
Trump had already made it clear in his presidential election campaign that he would not only stand for complete neo-liberal unleashing, but would also be prepared to use the strong state to beat this order into existence with all necessary force. The social distortions in a country where half the population considers health insurance to be Stalinist cannot be ignored. The COVID crisis has only exacerbated these differences: More than 20 million people lost their jobs and the foodbank queues stretch for miles. While it is the role of the state to ensure the normal accumulation of capital in times of peace and crisis, particularly exceptional situations such as this one show the other side of the coin: where integration fails, terror must be unleashed!
Meanwhile in Germany a whole sea of crocodile tears is being shed. From the conservative paper FAZ to the left-liberal Taz, from Christian Democrats to the Left party everyone agrees that one cannot handle justified anger in this way. Forgotten are the beatings of the G20 summit, the state’s involvement in Nazi networks, forgotten the evictions, deportations, deaths in police custody, etc… We write this declaration in solidarity one day after the 53rd anniversary of the murder of the student Benno Ohnesorg by the bullet of a German policeman.
It is not new that for the state no means are too drastic in the fight against insurrections to secure its monopoly on the use of violence. We send greetings of solidarity to our comrades and friends on the streets of American cities, who are showing practical solidarity against the state’s power!
From Germany & Austria to Minneapolis: Fight the Police! Solidarity beyond borders! Black lives matter! Abolish the system from below!
…ums Ganze! – 3rd June 2020
Pages for the following groups have been created in the English section of the archive:
Pages for the following groups and spaces have been created in the Greek section of the archive:
- Kontrasusta
- Cypriot Anarchist Kernel
- XORKO Collaborative Arts Movement
- Workers' Democracy
- Workers' Democracy
- Chrysallida
- Trotskyist Party of Cyprus
-ΚΚΕ Κ.Ο. Κύπρου
- Πλατύπους Λευκωσίας
- antifa λευkoşa
- Island Anarchy
Σελίδες για τις ακόλουθες ομάδες και χώρους έχουν πλέον δημιουργηθεί στο Ελληνικό τμήμα του αρχείου:
Σελίδες για τις ακόλουθες ομάδες έχουν πλέον δημιουργηθεί στο Αγγλικό τμήμα του αρχείου:
-ΚΚΕ Κ.Ο. Κύπρου
- Πλατύπους Λευκωσίας
- antifa λευkoşa
- Island Anarchy
- Kontrasusta
- Cypriot Anarchist Kernel
- XORKO Collaborative Arts Movement
- Workers' Democracy
- Workers' Democracy
- Chrysallida
- Trotskyist Party of Cyprus
Re-post from Its’s Going Down.
The streets of Minneapolis exploded on Tuesday evening, following the horrific murder of a 46 year-old African-American man, George Floyd, at the hands of white police officers on Monday. In a now viral video, Floyd’s grizzly murder was captured on film, as a white police officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck while he lie on the ground for several minutes, as an angry crowd gathered and recorded the killing. In the video, Floyd can be heard saying that he was not able to breathe, echoing the words last spoken by Eric Garner, who was also killed by police in 2014 in a similar incident in New York.
"The more the social order loses credit, the more it arms its police." – The Invisible Committee pic.twitter.com/RcfBXnVycJ
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) May 27, 2020
As CBS Minnesota wrote:
Overnight, video of the attempted arrest circulated on social media. Posted by Darnella Frazier on Facebook,the nine-minute video shows a white officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck behind a squad car. While lying facedown on the road, Floyd repeatedly groans and says he can’t breathe.
“He’s not even resisting arrest right now, bro,” one bystander tells the white officer and his partner, in the video. “You’re f—ing stopping his breathing right now, you think that’s cool?”
After about five minutes, Floyd stops moving and appears unconscious. People in the gathering crowd plead for the officers to check Floyd’s pulse. The officer on Floyd’s neck does not lift his knee until medical personnel arrive and carry him to an ambulance.
Directly following the video of Floyd’s murder going viral, all four of the officers that were involved in the killing were fired, a rarity in cases involving police deadly use of force. Multiple media outlets also reported that the FBI is now investigating the killing “for possible civil-rights violations.” According to Mapping Police Violence, police are charged with a crime following deadly encounters only 1.7% of the time. Data from Killed By Police, a website which tracks police killings, shows that at least 400 people have been killed by law enforcement in 2020, making for an average of around 3 people per day.
They Going Crazy In Minneapolis Rn
#ICantBreathe #GeorgeFloyd #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/6efmPeDMa1
— SOLLY THE BANKBOY
.® (@SollyBandz_) May 26, 2020
Despite expected heavy rains and the firing of the four officers, the demonstration on Tuesday evening brought out thousands of people onto the streets; the vast majority of them wearing masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Arial shots of the demonstration show it stretching across several city blocks. According to folks on the ground, actions happened throughout the city. At the intersection where George Floyd was murdered, there was a continuous gathering and street blockade. Marches on Tuesday took off from various points; collectively converging on the 3rd precinct. During one of these marches, anti-police graffiti slogans were extensively painted. Upon converging at the precinct, the massive crowd surrounded the building and the front window of the precinct was busted out and people began to write slogans on police cars and building walls, while others pelted other windows with eggs and projectiles. People then began attempting to break out more windows before being repelled by police tear gas from officers inside the building.
It should also be noted that during this time, other demonstrations were also taking place – outside of the home of Derek Chauvin, the now fired police officer at the center of the video showing the murder of George Floyd. Posts to social media show large crowds outside of the home of the former officer with one person commenting that several attempts at food delivery had been turned away, “So he’s in there hungry. Hope he’s fucking scared.” Chauvin lives in Oakdale, a suburb of St. Paul, “joining the estimated 94 percent (in 2014) of Minneapolis police officers who live outside the city,” according to one local news report.
Police cruiser smashed up outside MPD 3rd Precinct pic.twitter.com/6Slb4dqcT7
— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) May 27, 2020
Meanwhile, back at the 3rd precinct, during this chaos, various “peace police” attempted to contain the crowd, trying to get them to stop attacking police property, yet these cries fell almost completely on deaf ears. A group of police wearing gas masks were then successful in pushing the crowd away from the building and towards the police parking lot, where people began to tear open fences to vandalize and attack a variety of police vehicles; breaking out windows, mirrors, popping tires and spray painting slogans.
Battles raged for hours outside MPD's 3rd precinct. After the building was tagged, its windows smashed, and the parking lot gate broken open to allow people to sabotage their vehicles, police fired massive amounts of tear gas in a futile attempt to disperse the crowd. pic.twitter.com/9smcXenNE2
— The Minnesota Wild (@lets_go_wild) May 27, 2020
Enraged, police then began shooting massive amounts of projectile weapons and tear-gas into the parking lot, pushing people onto the adjacent street, and away from their vehicles. Unicorn Riot reported on the ground that these tear-gas canisters led to a series of small fires, which were quickly put out by demonstrators, who also threw the tear gas back towards the police. Officers also shot off large amounts of “marker rounds,” which left large blotches of paint behind when fired; marking an individual for possible later arrest.
Tons of tear gas #GeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/UifkKSz1Ez
— Brandon Long (King of Westeros) (@BLongStPaul) May 27, 2020
Over the next several hours, running street battles took place between protesters and law enforcement, much of it within the parking lot of the nearby Target store. Rioters built barricades with shopping cars while police attacked the crowd indiscriminately. Those on the streets, many very young, acted bravely in the face of intense police violence, protecting each other, treating tear-gas, and throwing back smoke canisters. As the evening wore on, people also looted the nearby liquor store and smaller clashes continued to break out with police until the early morning of Wednesday.
A Minneapolis City Council member described the police violence on Twitter, writing:
This is a disgusting display. I’m here on the southside, helping people as I can with milk, water, and towels. So far, I have been unable to prevent the police from firing indiscriminately into the crowd. Moments ago, I held a towel to a teenage girls head as blood poured from it.
Teargas and "marker" rounds are products of Defense Technology, owned by Safariland, a riot control corporation in the US that supplies governments around the world in counter-insurgency projectiles, from Ferguson to Gaza. pic.twitter.com/TD6nH9wK9Y
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) May 27, 2020
The uprising comes after several months of rising unemployment and massive State failure in the face of the coronavirus, which so-far has led to the deaths of over 100,000 people. People in the so-called US have also watched over the past month as both elite interests and neo-fascist groups have pushed jointly for the economy to “ReOpen,” which has only solidified poor and working-people, often of color, being placed onto the front lines of the pandemic. The fact that police have shown heavily armed far-Right protesters nothing but kid gloves for the past month at various “ReOpen” rallies was also not lost on anyone, and many on social media pointed out the vast difference in police response. Ironically, several far-Right “Boogaloo” protesters did try and intervene in support of the demonstrations in Minneapolis, only to be quickly shown the door.
Ongoing back and forth exchange of police munitions w fireworks and other projectiles from protesters. Crowds angry about George Floyd’s killing have had this area saturated and mostly shut down for quite a few hours now pic.twitter.com/o9JgODeWR0
— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) May 27, 2020
As the gates to the 3rd precinct's parking lot were being opened, many of the building's windows & doors were showing obvious signs of damage.
Graffiti in the second photo: "George Floyd! Remember it!"
(#GeorgeFloydWasMurdered is trending right now on Twitter) pic.twitter.com/rbaXZTerzK
— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) May 27, 2020
On Wednesday, May 27th, the City of Minneapolis began construction of a metal fence around the 3rd precinct, as new protests began in the streets.
The city of Minneapolis is literally BUILDING AN ENTIRE WALL around the 3rd Police Precinct on Minnehaha Avenue. They are more concerned about protecting a building than they are with the sanctity or Black life. #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/xTcscHgH17
— untilfreedom (@untilfreedom) May 27, 2020
by Alice Claire, Christian Frings and John Malamatinas. Originally published in German on Analyse & Kritik. English translation by Angry Workers for Fever Struggle.
The wildcat strike of Romanian agricultural workers in Bornheim shows that struggles are possible even under conditions of racist super-exploitation. Originally published on akweb.de.
On Friday, 15th of May, some of the 250 seasonal workers of the Spargel Ritter company in Bornheim (North Rhine-Westphalia) stopped working in the asparagus and strawberry fields and informed the local press. Management called the police, but the intimidation attempt failed. The strike was covered widely by the media.
The workers are angry because they received ridiculously low wages of 100 to 250 euros instead of the promised 1,500 to 2,000 euros, and because they are housed under inhuman conditions in a container warehouse, idyllically located between a cemetery and a sewage plant on a vacant building site. As a result of the strike, they were immediately threatened with early dismissal and expulsion from their accommodation. Spargel Ritter has been bankrupt since March 1st, according to other sources even since January, and is now managed by the law firm Andreas Schulte-Beckhausen in nearby Bonn. In April, the firm hired both foreign seasonal workers and labourers from Germany without informing them that the company is in a state of insolvency. Obviously the insolvency administrator is using all means necessary to make the company attractive to new investors.
The protest continued on Monday, 18th of May with a rally organised by the anarcho-syndicalist trade union FAU at the accommodation containers, which was attended by about a hundred external supporters. Women workers in particular protested against their exploitation, making impressive and angry speeches. Afterwards, all of them demonstrated together in front of the company’s nearby yard, where some of the outstanding wages were alleged to be paid. Instead, the workers were expected by a chain of police officers and aggressive security guards. It quickly became clear that the strategy of the insolvency administrator was to divide the workers and set them against each other: Some were paid 600 euros, others only 50 or 70 euros. The security guards opposed the presence of a FAU lawyer during the payments, until the police enforced the lawyer’s presence. While the isolation of migrant workers usually means that this type of super-exploitation is largely ignored, the Bornheim case caused a nationwide sensation. Monday was a difficult day, as FAU Bonn tweeted: “A hard day is coming to an end. Even though we cannot be satisfied with the result: The fact that the wages of a few hundred euros were paid at all is a panic reaction of the class enemy. Tomorrow we will enter round 2.”
On Tuesday, the seasonal workers and solidarity activists met for another rally, this time in downtown Bonn, outside the insolvency administrator’s office. From there they went to the Romanian Consulate General, where a delegation of ten workers was received. The consul admonished the workers to be calm and considerate. They should return to their accommodation and wait – because the Consul is in contact with the Romanian Minister of Labour Violeta Alexandru, who is in Berlin at the invitation of the German Minister of Agriculture Julia Klöckner. According to the Consul her second stop after Berlin happened to be Bonn anyway, where she would meet with the Farmers’ Union.
On Wednesday, the minister actually showed up at the lodgings. After a long conversation with the Romanian workers – in which no trade union representatives were allowed – she announced that “everything was settled”: the insolvency administrator had assured her that she would push ahead with the payments, and her ministry would organize a free return to Romania or, in agreement with the German Farmers’ Union, the transfer to another company. After their departure, buses picked up groups of ten workers each for payment at an unknown location. The supporters together with the workers were able to make sure that a lawyer and interpreters were present for all payments, but they had to hand in their mobile phones first.
Since this dubious payment procedure could not be trusted, supporters followed the buses to “unknown places”, which a visibly disoriented police officer tried to prevent them from doing. It came to absurd wild-west-style chases across the strawberry fields, until the busses stopped at a field, where the payments were made in the burning sun. The lawyer made sure that the workers didn’t sign any termination agreements, and many gave him the power of attorney to check their wage claims in court. The FAU announced on Wednesday evening that the minimum target had been reached.
The fact that not all the workers from Romania and a few from Poland took part in the strike is due to the division caused by different contracts. Those workers with contracts running until September instead of only until June who were also promised higher wages saw their contracts of employment endangered by the strike and criticised the unrest that had arisen. In addition to the foreign seasonal workers, about 200 labourers from Germany have been hired since the end of April. As one worker from this group told us, they are called the “German team”, even though they come from all kinds of countries, but are resident in Germany. It is a motley crew – young people who have responded to the call to help “our” farmers to protect the harvest, and people who simply need the money urgently because of short-time work or unemployment. Unlike the workers from Eastern Europe, they are not employed on a piecework basis, but on an hourly wage, and receive a few cents more than the minimum wage of 9.35 euros, to mark the racist differentiation. Another reason for this is that the untrained workers from Germany would not have been able to work at the same pace as the Eastern European workers, who have been doing this kind of work for longer.
At work, the “German” and “Romanian” columns – these are the divisive terms used by the bosses and their foremen – are kept strictly separate when working in the strawberry tunnels, but they run into each other when the full crates are handed over. However, communication usually fails because of the language barrier. On Friday it was noticed that the “Romanian column” was missing, but it seems that word of the strike didn’t get around to the “German column” until Saturday. After the “German column” had continued working on Saturday and Monday, they were sent home for a day on Tuesday because according to the bosses the situation was too heated.
In the past weeks there have been increasing reports on the miserable working and living conditions of agricultural and slaughterhouse workers in Germany. The main reasons for this are the inhumane living conditions to which the workers are exposed and which are even more threatening in the current corona situation due to the lack of protection against infections. While Germany celebrates its low number of cases, it is not surprising that infections break out in places where people live and work under particularly precarious conditions. The refugee accommodation in Sankt Augustin, the slaughterhouse in Dissen and a deceased Romanian field worker in Baden-Württemberg are examples of these scandalous conditions.
The Romanian field workers were initially left on their own. Their outcry was heard by left-wing supporters – above all the FAU. And what about the IG BAU, the mainstream construction union? And the DGB federation? Members of parliament? No chance! With little money and few resources, FAU Bonn managed to support the workers in every step, despite the language barrier – a prime example of concrete solidarity.
This struggle shows above all that even the precarious and unorganised can defend themselves. This experience gives courage for the future. And it remains to be seen whether those who have now been placed on other farms through the Farmers’ Union will carry the strike virus to other fields. In Romania, all major daily newspapers have reported on the strike in Bornheim. This, too, could strengthen the self-confidence and entitlement of the seasonal workers.
In the Corona crisis, in view of the danger of infection, numerous social grievances have become the subject of discussion, which were already disastrous before Corona, but remained hidden for years. In a situation of crisis, people might initially deal with the burdens and troubles on an individual level. But in various sectors, micro-processes of resistance are currently taking place that can easily develop into collective struggles. In some cases these struggles come together, in others the divisions and hierarchies need to be broken through.
Alice Claire is an activist from Cologne and member of Beyond Europe.
Christian Frings is an activist, author and translator (of David Harvey and others).
John Malamatinas is a freelance journalist from Berlin, Brussels and Thessaloniki.
Ανοιχτό Κάλεσμα για Υλικό, Δακτυλογράφηση και Μεταφράσεις
[English Follows]
Ο στόχος μας είναι να αρχειοθετήσουμε το υλικό του ευρύτερου Κυπριακού ριζοσπαστικού χώρου- φυσικά, λόγο της ελαστικότητας της κατηγορίας αυτής, έχουμε πάρει την απόφαση να συμπεριλαμβάνουμε υλικό από διαφορετικές παρατάξεις, ιδεολογικούς χώρους και θεματικές, με βάση πάντα τα τοπικά δρώμενα, άσχετα αν πολλές φορές το υλικό και οι συλλογικότητες που το δημιούργησαν είναι αντιφατικές μεταξύ τους. Ο στόχος μας είναι να αρχειοθετούμε και να κάνουμε προσβάσιμο παλιό και καινούργιο υλικό, όχι να παράγουμε κάποια ξεκάθαρη πολιτική ή ιδεολογική θέση.
Το αρχείο λειτουργεί επί εθελοντικής βάσεως - κατ επέκταση στο αρχείο μπαίνει υλικό το οποίο εντοπίσαμε ή μας στάλθηκε και το οποίο είναι διατεθειμένος κόσμος είτε να βοηθήσει για να βρεθεί είτε να μας το στείλει. Καθώς η διαδικασία αρχειοθέτησης (καθώς και δακτυλογράφησης/μετάφρασης) είναι ατελείωτη, ενώ ο χρόνος και οι δυνατότητες μας περιορισμένες, δουλεύουνε πάνω στο υλικό το οποίο είναι για εμάς προσβάσιμο και το οποίο έχουμε εντοπίσει μέσα από τα διάφορα ανεπίσημα αρχεία στα οποία έχουμε πρόσβαση.
Αν έχετε υλικό το οποίο δεν βρίσκεται στο αρχείο (φυλλάδια, μπροσούρες, περιοδικά κλπ), που ότι εμπίπτει στους στόχους μας θα το αρχειοθετήσουμε με χαρά αν μας το στείλετε σε ηλεκτρονική μορφή (scans, pdf files κτλ) - αν μπορείτε, συμπεριλάβετε τον μήνα και την χρόνια έκδοσης του κάθε υλικού ξεχωριστά. Επίσης, αν το υλικό εμπίπτει σε συλλογικότητες που δεν βρίσκονται στο αρχείο, θα θέλαμε να ζητήσουμε τα ακόλουθα στοιχεία σε σχέση με την κάθε συλλογικότητα: Περιοχή [πόλη] Περίοδος Δράσης [χρονιές] Ιδεολογία [σοσιαλισμός, αναρχισμός, κτλ] και ιστοσελίδα, αν υπήρξε. Επίσης, αν ενδιαφέρεστε στο να μεταφράσετε/δακτυλογραφήσετε κείμενα που ήδη βρίσκονται στο αρχείο, μεταφράστε/δακτυλογραφήστε το κείμενο της επιλογής σας και στείλτε μας το. Θα αναλάβουμε όπως ανεβεί η μετάφραση/δακτυλογραφημένο κείμενο σας στο αρχείο.
Κυπριακό Κινηματικό Αρχείο.
Επικοινωνία κατά προτίμηση με e-mail: arxeio@riseup.net
Open Call for Material, Typing and Translations
Our aim is to archive material from the broader Cypriot radical scene - of course, due to the elasticity of this category, we have taken the decision to include material from multiple political groups, ideological currents and topics, based always on local developments, regardless of the fact that many times the material collected as well as the groups that produced it, are in contradiction with each other. Out aim is to archive and make accessible old and new material, not to produce a clear political or ideological position.
The archive functions on a voluntary basis - by extension, in the archive we include material that we have located or that was sent to us and which people are willing to help locating, or send. As the process of archiving (as well as typing/translating) is never-ending, while out free time and our capacities are limited, we work mainly on material that is accessible to us and which we have located through the various unofficial archives that we have access to. If you have material that is not currently on the archive (leaflets, brochures, magazines etc) and which fit within out aims, we will gladly archive it if you send it to us in a digital form (scans, pdf files etc) - if you can, include the month and year of publication for each individual material. In addition, if the material falls under a group or collective that is not currently on the archive, we would like to ask that you include the following basic information in relation to each group: Area [City], Active Period [which Years], Ideological Position [socialism, anarchism etc.] and website, if it existed.
Furthermore, if you are interested in translating or typing up texts that are already available on the archive, translate/type the text of your choice and send it to us. We will make sure that the translation/typed text will be uploaded on the archive.
Cyprus Movements Archive.
Preferred mode of contact is via e-mail: arxeio@riseup.net
For more than two weeks, young people from Fridays For Future in Germany have been on hunger strike. From the very beginning the protesters in Germany tried to establish a contact to youngsters at the Moria refugee camp. At a joint press conference on 19th of May, young people from the Moria slum camp prepared and read out very moving statements. Two youngsters from the small German town of Landau. Under the name “Colored Rain” they called on people to join their protest. Sooner said than done: Another hunger strike by a person from Dresden followed. Also in Trier two other activists joined the action. On May 19, the hunger strike in Landau was ended by a protest march to the state capital Mainz. There their demands were symbolically handed over to the state government. Earlier, the activist from Dresden had already ended his action, while the hunger strike in Trier continues.
The youths criticized above all the inactivity of the politicians in meeting the demand to evacuate the camps. Even if the hungerstrike is now partly done, the exchange between the young comrades from Germany and Moria is still active. This is an important thing to strengthen each other and create a common understanding of a joined fight against the border regime.
The situation has not improved. The European migration regime is too deeply inhumane, Moria is an example of this. So let us fight together to counter the policy of exclusion and dehumanisation. The words of the young people of Moria urge us not to give up this fight!
The statements in text form:
Alireza (17)
Moria Refugee Camp, Greece, 19th of May
Usually people describe happiness as improvement, or they say if you want to have a happy life you should live in the moment, but when I look at my situation in the camp, I realize I am going backward instead of improving and I am experiencing a bad period of life, I don’t know, maybe this is my punishment because of I was born as an immigrant.
Hussain ali (16)
Moria refugee camp, Greece, 19th of May
I’m Hussain Ali. I’m 16 years old and I live in section where they keep minors. Coming from illegal ways is like you accepted a challenge of life or death. When we decided to come from illegal ways I didn’t know this but slowly slowly I knew that coming from this ways is like a suicide but there was no way for us. For being alive we used to accept this challenge and we started as I was a teenager it was hard to come but I thought that I can pass this bad way and I will reach to Europe and the problems will be finish.After a lots of hard days and many problems I reached to Greece and I thought I finished my problems but that was just a dream. Moria is a small Afghanistan.insecure, not safe and a place where we get mental problems and many other problems.
We are the most bitter story of the world.
Nazanin (26)
Moria refugee camp, Greece, 19th of May
When it comes the name of Moria, immediately all the thoughts go through the terrible available situations inside the camp such as overcrowding problems, horrible sanitation, lack of basic needs like water, electricity fuel and…
Definitely these can be the most important and problematic issues that are visible at a glance but if we pay attention deeply there are more hidden and unsaid things, let’s think about the mother who crossed the dangerous borders to make her child’s future but lost her in the fire, nothing left but burnt bones.
The father who lost his innocent boy during the crazy fights and no one asked why? How?
Or Someone who came here to find peace and safety but is living in a more dangerous, unsafe and stressful place even more than the land he has come from.
The child whose toy was changed to a fake knife and trying to do, talk and shout just what he saw in the adults.
The girl who tried to learn, be independent and stand on her own feet but is even more vulnerable than ever that should rely on someone else to take one step out of his living area.
The people who are losing their mind, patient, tolerance due to living in this awful situation and dealing with so many challenges.
Milad (21)
Moria refugee camp, Greece, 19th of May
My name is Milad, 21 years old from Afghanistan. Before entering the European soil, I had some imaginations from Europe, for example, European countries respect a lot to human rights, so that Europe will be the best place to have a safe and comfortable life, but unfortunately, Moria refugee camp proved that it’s nothing but an imagination, I realized that in the first days in Moria. And I’ve been in this hell for five months.
In Moria, at days I’m facing to the danger which is treating people’s lives all around the world, COVID-19, which is treating my life as well because in this camp, unlike the rest of the world which people have the ability to protect themselves from this virus by washing their hands frequently, keeping their distance from each other or even having sufficient and suitable medical equipments and supplies to be far from getting infected by this virus, we don’t have enough medical supplies, we don’t have enough water to wash our hands, even we can’t keep our distance between each other because of long lines like food lines, shower lines, toilet lines, market lines, Doctor lines or even ATM line, and the reason is that because it is an overcrowded camp. And at nights I’m facing to the danger of being injured or killed in huge fights between refugees, which keeps me awake for hours at nights. I have to be awake in nights when fights are happening because of my safety.
Europe was a strong big hope for me like a narrow bright light in the deepest terrifying darkness days of my life, but Moria proved that it was nothing but an imagination and took that light from me and took me to another deepest terrifying darkness days of my life again in another place.
Yaser (16)
Moria refugee camp, Greece, 19th of May
Moria, hell of migrants, it’s a good place for criminals, murderers, rapists, thieves and fighters, a place where people have to stay in lines for hours, a place where there is only few clinics for 19000 of migrants, a place where there is no school for thousands of youngsters who came for a brighter future, a place where there is no water to wash our hands, a place full of trash, a place where police has no control over fights in there own homeland.
Three days ago a fight happened between volunteers of Movement and Team humanity, it was a huge fight more than five people were stabbed and police did nothing, later that day at night there was another fight between two Hazara and Panjshiri nations and I am pretty sure more than fifteen people were stabbed that night, in that morning I witnessed cut fingers on the ground.
Is that the how safe Europe is? Is this the humanity they are always talking about?
Please leave no one behind
Solidarity with the strike of the harvest workers in Bornheim (near Bonn)! Ultra low wages, mouldy food and no protection from Covid-19. German asparagus and strawberries taste like workers exploitation!
On the ground report by Severin Marten, Alice Claire and John Malamatinas
Hundreds of syndicalists and activists expressed on Monday solidarity with the wild strike of the Asparagus harvest workers in #Bornheim between Bonn and Cologne in Germany.
Last Friday hundreds of seasonal workers stopped work on the asparagus and strawberry fields, whereupon the management of the company called the police to intimidate them. Like thousands of other seasonal workers, the harvest workers in Bornheim live and work under catastrophic conditions: The wages of the now insolvent Spargelhof Ritter were kept, the accommodation is under inhumane conditions – an imminent homelessness could be averted. The workers complain not only about mouldy food, unheated mass accommodation next to a sewage plant and a complete lack of protection against corona – but also about not being paid. They had only been paid 100 to 250 Euros for a month of hard work.
The company belongs (or belonged until a few months ago) to the Ritter family, but has been in insolvency administration since the beginning of March. Andreas Schulte-Beckhausen’s lawyer’s office is responsible, and according to media reports it already has a new investor for the large company on hand. In the main season, the farm is said to have employed up to 500 harvest workers in the years before.
The protest began on Monday at the accommodation containers and continued at the company farm. Tough negotiations were held all day. Around 3 pm the situation comes to a critical point. Suddenly it is said that the payment of outstanding wages should take place on the farm. A police chain awaits them there, and two security men are also there, who were very aggressive towards union organisers. They say that money should only be given to people who are on an ominous list. The assumption was obvious that the strategy of the insolvency administrator was to set the employees against each other, in which some paid 600 Euros and others only 50 or 70. The lawyer from the insolvency administration came out and sat in the car. He drove away. People were yelling that they want their money. The police protected the car and partly took action against the field workers. Outrage reigns.
Where the isolation of the migrant workers from the rest of the world usually leads to that this over-exploitation being largely ignored, the joint organisation with FAU Bonn was able to cause a nationwide sensation. It was a difficult day as FAU Bonn tweets: “A bone-crushing day draws to a close. Even if we cannot be satisfied with the result: that wages of a few hundred euros were paid at all is a panic reaction of the class enemy. Tomorrow is round 2.”
German agriculture is largely based on low-wage work performed by migrant workers. About 300,000 seasonal migrant workers come every year to Germany to work in the fields. Shifts of 14 hours, seven days a week for unhealthy heavy work are not uncommon. They work and live under catastrophic conditions and are mostly isolated from the outside world from the time they are picked up and taken to their accommodation in order to maintain the over-exploitation of migrant labour.
Now it is important to continue to maintain solidarity with the workers and not to be satisfied with the payment of small amounts of money.
Therefore, come to Bonn (Oxfordstraße 2) tomorrow at 10 a.m. in front of the seat of the insolvency administration, which is in charge of paying out the wages.
Germany you lousy piece of asparagus!
One Radical Planet 
