2005-12-07

Global Freedom of Movement and Equal Rights for All

"We are here, because you are destroying our countries." This central slogan of the ‘Caravan for the rights of refugees and migrants’ explicitly links capitalist destruction on the one hand to flight and migration on the other. The G8-governments - as well as the WTO, IMF and World Bank - are not only responsible for neocolonial relations of exploitation; they also increasingly rely on and further the intensification of processes of selection and exclusion in the Northern parts of the globe, the intensification of legal, social and political hierarchies. It is these and other developments - whether in the North or the South - that lead us to speak of a system of global Apartheid.

When in October 2005, thousands of refugees and migrants collectively stormed the border fences around [the Spanish enclaves of] Ceuta and Melilla [in Northern Africa], they forced, momentarily, the central demands that their actions expressed - for global freedom of movement and participation (‘equal rights’) - into the minds of the general public. At the same time, the inhumane and repressive measures of the European migration regime became more than obvious: shoot-to-kill, internments, mass deportations, etc...

For many years now, we have been fighting against the brutal EU-border regime, against deportations, against racist controls and regulations like, for example, the ‘duty of residence’ [trans. "Residenzpflicht", i.e. where asylum seekers are prohibited by law from leaving the county in which they are placed], against the camps, etc... In particular, resistance to camps and deportation prisons has become increasingly important, since the system of camps is being expanded not only within the EU, but is also being ‘externalised’, that is, outsourced into countries like Ukraine, Libya or Tunisia. As antiracist networks, we will continue our struggles against these policies, in 2006 for example with more NoLager-actions [i.e. anti-camp actions], but also at the everyday level by supporting the permanent process by which the racist migration regime is being undermined year-by-year by the hundreds of thousands of actions of ordinary people.
Global freedom of movement was already the central slogan of a mass demonstration about migration during the anti-G8-mobilisation in Genoa 2001. ‘For Freedom of Movement and the Right to Remain’ was the motto of the Europe-wide day of action, in April 2005, that had been decided on, and thus included in the final declaration, at the third European Social Forum in London. We want to follow these and similar examples, and therefore propose to call, in the context of the anti-G8 activities in 2007, for another major action, probably taking the form of a mass demonstration one day before the start of the summit, definitely with the central demands for global freedom of movement and equal rights (possibly also with other slogans).

We therefore invite the diverse networks and organisations that will participate in the upcoming protests against the G8, to take up this suggestion and thus support our plan to make ‘Global Freedom of Movement’ and ‘Equal Rights’ against the global Apartheid-regime a central plank of the common anti-G8 mobilisation. In return, this of course means that we will support central slogans and demands of other networks. After all, our interest in a strong and collective anti-G8 mobilisation comes precisely from such horizontal connections and cooperation.

NoLager network, December 2005

http://nolager.de/
Other signatures:
Karawanegruppe Bremen, Karawanegruppe München, Antirassismusplenum Göttingen, kein mensch ist illegal Hamburg, Kanak Attak Hamburg, Aktionsbündnis gegen Abschiebung Rhein-Main, Bürengruppe Paderborn, Initiative gegen das Chipkartensystem Berlin, kein mensch ist illegal Hanau