Kompass-Newsletter No. 86 - 04+05/2020
Initiative 19 February in Hanau +++ Corona and the urgency of equal rights +++ Rescues and left to die in the central Mediterranean: Alan Kurdi and WatchTheMed Alarm Phone +++ Free El Hiblu 3 campaign launched +++ Leave no one behind and reports from Greece +++ "For the right to be together"- campaign for family reunification from Greece +++ Struggles of women* on the move - Alarm Phone report +++ Aegean and western Mediterranean/Morocco - Updates Alarm Phone +++ www. w2eu.info - New Style and Re-Launch of the Multilingual Webguide +++ "In which society do we want to live?! - Roundletter No.4 +++ Review: 6-8 February in Oujda +++ Outlook: Campaign for 8 May - Denazification now!
DEAR FRIENDS!
for bitter reasons, we are starting on our own:
In March we had cancelled our newsletter and now we are again later than usual. For us this has only secondarily to do with the virus and the general slowdown. The first reason is still shortly before the drastic restrictions because of Corona: the racist murders on February 19 in Hanau. Many readers may be aware that the Anti-Ra-Kompass is mainly produced from the small circle of no one is illegal activists in Hanau. We were and are affected by the shots. What remains is a huge wound of grief and trauma with which we have to struggle in our small town. Some of us had been involved in "MigrAntifa" during the last months and were on the road a lot in Saxony and other places of racist attacks. Of course we are also confronted with institutional racism in Hanau itself or with AfD. But none of us could have imagined before the 19.2. that it could affect our small and so migrant shaped city in this dimension. This is a break in our everyday social and political life that we still have to learn to deal with. We will continue to take time for this and to put other things aside when it seems necessary.
The initiative 19 February Hanau is one way of dealing with the catastrophe. To regain capacities to act against the paralysis caused by the terrible. To make the voices of the relatives and friends of the victims and the survivors audible. To promise with them: Nothing will be forgotten. To demand with all means a complete investigation and clarification. And finally to fight the racist agitation and the climate that made such a murdering possible. "MigrAntifa" will soon have a new meeting point in Hanau with the initiative 19 February.
Corona. Yes, it is terrible and threatening for everyone, but as always: on closer inspection, the virus does not affect everyone equally. Those who live on the streets or have little or no access to health care, those who have to live in camps with many people in very confined spaces, those who do not have their own garden or even a weekend house in the countryside - it soon becomes clear how differently people are affected. And that the fight for equal rights remains acute.
Deportations are suspended for the moment, but what was possible in Portugal - the legalisation of all refugees and migrants in the face of the virus crisis - seems almost unthinkable in Germany. Camps with hundreds of people are quarantined instead of evacuating and using empty hotels. The state of emergency turns the austerity policy upside down and mobilizes unprecedented billions of dollars to somehow keep the capitalist economy alive. But the urgently needed evacuation of the camps is not taking place, and the deprivation of rights of the excluded and precarious is apparently to be maintained at all costs. In many camps there are self-organized protests, just as corona information and prevention was already primarily a question of selforganisation and state-independent solidarity structures.
"Leave no one behind" - with this apt slogan, a public campaign has been launched - under the conditions of the Corona state of emergency - to raise and scandalize the exacerbated injustice at the external borders and especially in the camps on the Greek islands. While in April and May about 80,000 harvest workers from Romania are flown in by charter planes to local asparagus and strawberry fields, 50 (!) unaccompanied minors from the EU-initiated disaster hotspots in Greece are allowed to enter Germany after a tough struggle. Can the function of the border regime in this combination of exploitation and exclusion be demonstrated even more drastically?
Unbearable and shocking remains what the Alarm Phone has experienced in the last few days in the central Mediterranean and documented in detail and with great publicity: the intentional left to die at sea by coast guards in Italy and Malta, and then even attacks on refugee boats by the AFM (Maltese Coast Guard). What we have so far only known in this brutality in the Aegean Sea and what has become everyday life there again since March - violent pushbacks of boats that started in Turkey - is now to be demonstrated to the boat people from Libya. In Corona times European ports are declared "Unsafe Harbours" and refugees from torture camps are exposed to drowning.
The right to flight and migration in (post-)corona times? In the face of a state of emergency and intensified re-nationalization, our struggles for freedom of movement and equal rights seem to be even more on the defensive. At the same time, the virus reveals more openly than ever new fractures of the alleged „there is no alternative“ to neoliberal capitalism. The ambivalences of the current breaks and thus also the emancipative opportunities in and with the new global crisis are now a topic in many interesting texts and debates. The global right to health, upgrading of care work, unconditional basic income ... to name a few points.
"The solidarities that we are building today will be the basis for the struggles to the new order of the world after Corona. What will be decisive here will be how the global dimension of the crisis is also answered globally in them, and whether nationalist and anti-migrant policies are strengthened in dealing with the social question. Solidarity can become a nationalist practice or transnational solidarity". Mario Neumann and Max Pichl put this very aptly in an article worth reading at the end of March. And based on this, the initiative "In which society we want to live?!" writes in its current roundletter: "This is precisely why we give this central importance to strengthening and deepening the connecting processes. Mutual knowledge and empathy, learning from each other and respectfully arguing, exchanging experiences and fighting together. In these living processes solidarity is created and grows."
In this spirit,
the AntiRa-Kompass crew
P.S.: And now in more details on all the focal points mentioned in the introduction.