Kompass-newsletter No. 112 - 03/2023
On the current situation in Tunisia +++ From 17 March in Wuppertal: Series of events on 25 years of the Caravan +++ From 21 March in Würzburg: Series of events Blackbox Deportation +++ 25-27 March in Malta: Solidarity with El Hiblu 3 +++ On the situation in the HotSpot in Lampedusa +++ Open letter to new Frontex director +++ Reviews: CommemorActions on 6. February +++ 19 February: Three years after the racist terrorist attack in Hanau +++ 27/28 February in Niamey: Alarm Phone Sahara Conference +++ Outlook: 1-6 May in Berlin: Camp against deportations and detention +++ End of June in Brussels: Solidarity with Refugees in Libya
Dear friends,
Transnational Social Strike in Frankfurt, We`ll Come United in Osnabrück, Alarm Phone Sahara in Niamey: three conferences that took place shortly after each other in February, representing three very different networking processes and yet connected in many ways.
The Transnational Social Strike Platform links struggles against war and climate crisis, against precarisation and border regimes. In the Frankfurt meeting with activists from over 15 countries, the migration workshop posed the question of how local and specific struggles against exclusion and exploitation can work together in a common perspective.
From 2017 to 2019, We`ll Come United formed a strong, germanwide alliance against racism, deportations and camps; in mixed organisation, up to 30,000 participants were mobilised for joint demonstration parades. At the meeting in Osnabrück, activists from more than 10 cities discussed in a productive atmosphere which contents and structures could be used to reorganise the network.
Alarm Phone Sahara has stood for solidarity with refugees and migrants on the desert routes in Niger for many years. The conference took place in transnational composition with activists from North and West Africa as well as Europe. The externalisation of EU border policy plays a central role in the struggle against the criminalisation of migration there.
Out of current cause we weave another reality into this preface: the escalating situation in Tunisia. An increasingly dictatorial president is copying racist conspiracy theories of European fascists on the alleged "population exchange" in the North African context and blows the whistle on the hunt and criminalisation of sub-Saharan (transit) migration. The fact that the foreign minister and the post-fascist prime minister of Italy were guests shortly before is probably no coincidence. Especially since they have offered their colleagues in Tunis to issue more visas for Tunisian seasonal workers in return for Tunisia pushing back boat people and other "irregular migrants".
It remains the case that we can only fight against the escalation of violence at the external and internal borders of the EU, against the hierarchisation of rights in the North-South differences, against the "divide and rule" policy of a global apartheid regime, if we organise ourselves with local roots in transnational networks. We should value the three conferences mentioned above as modules, as spaces for thinking and collective moments: on the way to common perspectives that we have to create anew again and again.
With best wishes for solidarity,
the Kompass team