Thursday, April 30, 2015

Germany deports a member of the Sudanese opposition to be killed in Sudan

Statement against the planned deportation of Hamdi Abdullah from the Refugees protest camp at Weisse Kreuzplatz in Hannover written on 04.28.2015



The Sudanese opposition member Hamdi Abdallah, born on 06.07.1985, living in Wingst, Cuxhaven, is currently in Langenhagen in a deportation prision. There he has to wait for his deportation to Sudan scheduled for May 5.

The Sudan is ruled by the islamic dictator Omar Al Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for crimes against humanity and other serious crimes. It is not a phantasm when we say that the German government is cooperating with the sudanese state of injustice and persecution. The oppositional activist Hamdi Abdullah will be exposed to death penalty in Sudan if he is deported there.

Today, April 28, 2015 the police of the immigration authorities Cuxhaven have arrested Hamdi Abdallah when he wanted to renew his passport and they brought him into the deportation prison in Langenhagen. We condemn this criminal act by the German authorities in the strongest terms. We consider the police, the responsible judge, the district and the state parliament of Lower Saxony, the Ministry of the Interior, namely Interior Minister Pistorius, the German Government and the High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations as being responsible for the live and safety of Hamdi Aballahs. In case Hamdi Abdullah suffers the death penalty in Sudan, we will use this statement in court as explanation and evidence.

We, refugees from Sudan in Niedersachsen, see ourselves as represantatives of the Sudanese community in Germany. With the protest camp on the White Kreuzplatz we have built a center of our shared commitment for a peaceful and democratic change in Sudan against the islamic dictatorship of Omar Al Bashir. The cooperation of the German government with the Sudanese government raises major difficulties for us in our fight. The cooperation for example resides ins the fact that the German government deports our active, to be put in prison and be killed in Sudan. Hamdi is not the first and will not be the last!

We call on all those responsible in to stop this deportation immediately to end any kind of cooperation with the Sudanese Government and to grant Hamdi immediately the right to stay in Germany. We call on all responsible members of German society to rescue Hamdi Abdallah from deportation to a certain death in Sudan!

STOP deportation! FREEDOM for Hamdi NOW!

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Response on racist police violence in Baltimore: Nonviolence as Compliance

Ta-Nehisi Coates Apr 27, 2015
About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

Officials calling for calm can offer no rational justification for Gray's death, and so they appeal for order.

Rioting broke out on Monday in Baltimore—an angry response to the death of Freddie Gray, a death my native city seems powerless to explain. Gray did not die mysteriously in some back alley but in the custody of the city's publicly appointed guardians of order. And yet the mayor of that city and the commissioner of that city's police still have no idea what happened. I suspect this is not because the mayor and police commissioner are bad people, but because the state of Maryland prioritizes the protection of police officers charged with abuse over the citizens who fall under its purview.
The citizens who live in West Baltimore, where the rioting began, intuitively understand this. I grew up across the street from Mondawmin Mall, where today's riots began. My mother was raised in the same housing project, Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray was killed. Everyone I knew who lived in that world regarded the police not with admiration and respect but with fear and caution. People write these feelings off as wholly irrational at their own peril, or their own leisure. The case against the Baltimore police, and the society that superintends them, is easily made:
Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson ....
And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims—if charges were filed at all. In an incident that drew headlines recently, charges against a South Baltimore man were dropped after a video showed an officer repeatedly punching him—a beating that led the police commissioner to say he was “shocked.”
The money paid out by the city to cover for the brutal acts of its police department would be enough to build "a state-of-the-art rec center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds." Instead, the money was used to cover for the brutal acts of the city's police department and ensure they remained well beyond any semblance of justice.

Now, tonight, I turn on the news and I see politicians calling for young people in Baltimore to remain peaceful and "nonviolent." These well-intended pleas strike me as the right answer to the wrong question. To understand the question, it's worth remembering what, specifically, happened to Freddie Gray. An officer made eye contact with Gray. Gray, for unknown reasons, ran. The officer and his colleagues then detained Gray. They found him in possession of a switchblade. They arrested him while he yelled in pain. And then, within an hour, his spine was mostly severed. A week later, he was dead. What specifically was the crime here? What particular threat did Freddie Gray pose? Why is mere eye contact and then running worthy of detention at the hands of the state? Why is Freddie Gray dead?


The people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer these questions. Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray's death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray's death and so they appeal for calm. But there was no official appeal for calm when Gray was being arrested. There was no appeal for calm when Jerriel Lyles was assaulted. (“The blow was so heavy. My eyes swelled up. Blood was dripping down my nose and out my eye.”) There was no claim for nonviolence on behalf of Venus Green. (“Bitch, you ain’t no better than any of the other old black bitches I have locked up.”) There was no plea for peace on behalf of Starr Brown. (“They slammed me down on my face,” Brown added, her voice cracking. “The skin was gone on my face.")
When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.

Related Story





A State of Emergency in Baltimore

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Days of Rage in Baltimore and Mexico


Protesters mark the seven-month anniversary of the Ayotzinapa students' disappearance in Chilpancingo, Mexico. (Reuters/Emiliano Torres) 
Yesterday, as Baltimore restaged the intifada, protesters in Mexico, in Chilpancingo, the capital of the state of Guerrero, rammed a flaming truck into the glass-fronted congressional building, and set fire to at least six other vehicles. They had taken to the streets to mark the seven-month anniversary of the disappearances of the 43 students, who have come to represent the hundreds of thousands of dead as a result of US-Mexico’s drug, immigration, and trade policies (a number of the relatives of the disappeared are currently in New York, where they are appealing to the United Nations to end Washington’s so-called Merida Initiative, or Plan Mexico, which sends billions of dollars to Mexico to supposedly fight drugs but which the relatives of the 43 say goes to “suppress dissent”).
Elsewhere this week, in Oaxaca, protesters did damage to the building of the governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Videos of the Chilpancingo protest are here, here, here. In Mexico City, demonstrators erected an “anti-monument,” a large red 43 in the middle of the business center.
Obviously, the right way to think about the murder of Freddie Gray and the protests that followed is to think deeply about slavery and post-Abolition racism in the United States. Immediately after the trouble began yesterday, historians and critics on social media were broadcasting information about Baltimore’s history as a slave port, its long history of police brutality, its equally long history of resisting race terror. Apparently, Spiro Agnew’s law-and-order response to a protest that turned violent in 1968 bought him his spot on Nixon’s ticket.
One can also, without diluting the power of that deep history, think about the repression and reaction laterally, as an effect of the same transnational policing and trade policies responsible for the disappearance of the 43 student-activists in Mexico. Since the August murder of Michael Brown and the September abduction of the 43 Mexican students, #BlackLivesMatter and #TodosSomosAyotzinapa are just two of the hashtags that have captured distinct heterodox protest movements that are converging.
I was at an event the other night at CUNY, a “Citizen’s Tribunal,” part of a “caravan” that is bringing the parents and advocates of the 43 disappeared to over 40 US cities (Roberto Lovato writes about it here in The Nation). At the CUNY event, a lawyer for the parents said that the two principal obstacles to “neoliberalism”—and hence the two principal targets of neoliberalism’s enforcers—were the ejidos, that is, peasant communities who still hold and work their land in common, and the rural teacher-training institutes (like the one where the 43 were enrolled), which for decades has taken the lead in protesting the dispossession generated by “free trade.” In the wake of Baltimore, that observation put me to think that Mexican peasant communities and African-American urban communities are broadly structurally analogous in their relation to “free trade” capitalism.
On both sides of the border, the absence of any sane, humane, industrial or rural policy has created concentrations of dispensable peoples. On both sides of the border, children of these dispensable people are most vulnerable. “In 2007, Baltimore City African American infants were almost nine times more likely to die before age 1 than White infants residing in Baltimore City.” In Mexico, the southern agrarian states, including Guerrero, that have suffered under NAFTA have similarly stunningly high rates of infant mortality. On both sides of the border, these people, the victims of failed government policy, are then blamed for the failure of government policy, their culture, their attitude, their “values,” and their music (rap, hip-hop, and the narcocorrido). On both sides of the border, rolling protests, days of rage and frustration like those seen in Baltimore and Chilpancingo have difficulty coalescing into a national movement, building a coalition with elites or national-level political parties due to the fragmentation of politics, itself an effect of government economic policy.
On both sides of the border, US federal money funds the overpolicing of the crisis. “The weapons that are given to Mexico [by Washington] are used to kill us, not help us,” said Blanca Luz Nava Velez, whose 19-year-old son, Jorge, is among the missing. And on both side of the border, the crisis is generated by federal policies (enacted by both Washington and Mexico City) that are designed to keep pay low and jobs precarious: What demands can a segregated labor force divided by a garrisoned border make on capital that can go anywhere it wants, anytime it wants?
Advocates of the North American Free Trade Agreement did say that economic liberalization would bring about a convergence. They were right. Just wait to see what the TPP brings.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Stop Legitimating Injustice and Legitimate Justice for Refugees 2015

Refugee's manifestation in Lutherstadt Wittenberg on 16.04.2015: With Refugees as Guest Speakers from Schwäebish Gmünd Video: Schwäebish Gmünd Refugee Activists Tour and Discussions on Civil Disobedience against Imprisonment and Movement Restriction (RESIDENZPFLICHT)
Press Conference: 14:00 Hour Date: 16.04.2015
Time: 14:00 Uhr
Venue: Lutherstadt Wittenberg (Marktplatz)
Lutherstadt Wittenberg, April 08, 2015
Refugee self-organizations and initiatives are holding a manifestation to denounce an illicit practice of depriving registered refugees in their legal existence and to demand legalization of “Tolerated Refugees (Duldung)” that have been residing in Germany for so many years without compromise.
The demand addresses to BAMF and its 530 foreigners offices in Germany. The foreign office of Lutherstadt Wittenberge implements inhuman measure that destroys our lives and perspectives and its implementations are not compatible to the Administrative Laws, Asylum Law and the German Foreigners law.
The Foreign Office's inhuman measures contribute to destroy refugees perspective for so many years.1 They interdicted refugees not to work, not to make driving license, not to have bank account, not to have health insurance card, their movements are restricted, subjected to repression and oppression, exposed refugees lives to danger, with deportation treats, deprived refugees their legal existence and right, used as an object of securing their own existence and work, isolated and humiliated and those politically active are criminalized and persecuted.
They used “Cooperation” as a pretext.2
These implementations and aggressive measures applied to refugees in this 21 century contributes in destroying refugees lives and perspectives, deteriorate refugees' health conditions etc, and contradicts the world's inter-dependency and globalization process that the Federal Republic of Germany profits.
Therefore, we demand the legalization of all refugees that have been residing in Germany for so many years without compromise. They should be compensated for their lives and perspective being destroyed.
Stop destroying their lives and perspectives. Stop Legitimating Injustice and Legitimate Justice for Refugees 2015
Flüchtlingsbewegung Sachsen-Anhalt, The Caravan for the Right of Refugees and Migrant and The Voice Refugee Forum
Contact Information
Wittenberg, 017699321843, Vockerode 015225951740, Bitterfeld 015206302191
For more information
http://thecaravan.org/node/4289, http://www.thevoiceforum.org/node/3894 http://refugeeinitiativewittenberg.blogspot.de/2015/03/refugees-protest-manifestation-in.html
1 Up to 10 to 17 years and even more
2 Refugees have presented their official document but still they insisted that he or she does not cooperate