Welcome to Europe? By the border crossing between Turkey and Bulgaria, the European Return Fund hands out a colour printed folder. The text explains what happens by the border and what happens to the person who crosses. It’s Europe who’s speaking, and it’s explaining it’s view on paper, money, life.
”In their homeland, everyone is somebody. What do you rely on here? Who are you and what are you running from? You probably think your homeland hates you. But how can we help you if you are just a shadow? We can’t reach each other. You have no documents. No money.”
Racism is spreading like a poison gas across Europe. Every third week chartered flights carrying iraqi refugees depart from Sweden in co-ordinated mass deportations. In the spring 2011 a mass grave was uncovered by the river Evros on the east coast of Greece which served as the burial site for those who didn’t survive the border crossing. Over 2000 lives were lost last year as people trying to reach Europe crammed together in lanky boats drowned in the mediterrianean.
The European Union and it’s allies bluntly classifies migration as a security threat in need of a military solution. While right-wing European political parties unbothered flirts with it’s racist and fascist counter parts to attract voters, the larger part of the left wing parties still remains on the scale of an acceptance of migration control. The defining line is just how hard the control should be.
Since 1993, European borders have killed 16 136 persons.
This is wrong. This world belongs to all of us. We have the right to move freely as we choose, through forests and cross seas, and after the principle ”From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” share the existent resources together with others in a mutual participation. We have no obligation to maintain a political idea such as the nation state, it’s borders and papers. We have no obligation to conform and become a clean slate for a capitalist society.
Fort Europa is a castle in the air. Regardless the amount of weapons, FRONTEX-soldiers or unmanned radar drones it dispatches it does not stop the daily climbs over the walls. All of the sudden is the spaces Fort Europa wants to keep seperated mixed with all kinds of people. So the wires moves themself inwards: migration become a crime, people become illegal, the starting point of the borders become the question if a person can produce an ID.
The border is everwhere, but so is the resistance. Blockades of deportations, a fire to a border station, people without papers getting organized. The state’s facing yet more trouble contracting companies running the deportation machinery as everything from mail campaigns to nightly activist adventures is a costly affair. The silence surrounding the isolated detention centers the governments are trying to hide suddenly roars. When neither state nor corporation sees no ethics or public dissent as an obstacle to carry through it’s ideological actions, the dissent increases.
This year, two No Border camps will be organized within the outer borders of Europe, yet against the same borders. A anti-rasist action built on the foundation of self-organization who’re facing the entire nation state, yet holding the only sustainable solution. Europe may call it’s war against those who are not deemed to fit in for control, the control for security, the security for safety. But the problem is never that someone migrates, it’s the border that’s the problem. It’s abolishing will never be the case of someone else’s doing.
To read the issue in english – just click on the picture to the right.
