Kompass-newsletter No. 114 - 05/2023

On 1 May and from 20 May with a germanwide week of action: Abolish the „Asylbewerberleistungsgesetz“+++ 9 May in Würzburg: Resist deportations: What you can do yourself +++ 12 May in Wuppertal: Break Isolation - Fight against camps and degradation +++ 31 May in Wiesbaden: Demonstration at the end of the investigation committee on the attack in Hanau +++ 1 to 6 June in Berlin-Brandenburg: Stop Deportation! Protest Camp +++ Urgent Appeal of the Alarm Phone Sahara on Assamaka +++ Voices from the Sahel on the multiple crisis there +++ Against the legalisation of Push-Backs in Lithuania +++ Tunisia is not a safe country of origin and not a safe place for people rescued from distress at sea +++ Lawsuit of SOS Humanity, Mission Lifeline and Sea-Eye against the new law of the Meloni government +++ Maldusa - new project for People on the Move in Sicily +++ Outlook: 29. June to 2 July in Brussels: Mobilisation by and with Refugees in Libya

Sea-Arrivals in Italy

 

Dear friends,

There is no question that the suffering and deaths at the EU's external and internal borders have not diminished in recent months. It sometimes seems desperate how rescue ships in the central Mediterranean and the Alarm Phone can do little more than try to reduce the death toll. Official evacuations - from Libya, Tunisia or now Sudan - are non-existent or only in tiny symbolic numbers. The handling of refugees from Ukraine demonstrates that "another world" of migration is always possible. But the racist policy of externalising and brutalising the border regime to the south blatantly continues.

 

Dublin-Abschiebungen 2023

 

However, there are also these figures:

- Almost 40,000 people have arrived on the Italian coasts since 1 January until the end of April 2023, in recent weeks mainly from Sfax/Tunisia to Lampedusa or from Tobruk/Libya to Sicily. 300% more than at the same time last year. Despite and against the post-fascist Meloni government.

- New asylum applications in Germany remain as high in the first three months of the year as they were at the end of 2022: around 25,000 people a month make it across the borders to Germany. At the same time, the Dublin system seems to be in crisis once again: out of almost 5,000 accepted take-over requests per month, barely 300 deportations can be enforced. Despite and against an SPD-led Federal Ministry of the Interior, which constantly invokes "repatriation offensives" and is even considering deportations to Afghanistan again.

 

Asyl-Antragstellungen in D

 

All "just" statistics? Certainly not. But rather an expression of contested spaces in which the autonomies of migration remain constantly alive. When individuals help individuals across borders, when those affected by deportation are hidden in citizens' asylums, when "rights to remain" are fought through in lengthy consultations, this often seems tiny and small compared to the power of institutional exclusion. As an Alarm Phone activist once put it, (we are) "those who with each shift remove a stone from a wall and add it to a bridge." Even if the "big bridge" remains a long way off or is never built, even the smallest bridgeheads make a difference and work in the bigger picture. 

In this sense: no respite in everyday resistance. And see you at the camp against deportations in Berlin-Brandenburg at the beginning of June and/or at the end of June in Brussels with and for refugees in Libya. 

The Kompass Team