2008-11-29

November 29th 2008 Strasbourg/ Baden-Baden

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
International Dissent! meeting from the 16th to 18th January 2009 to prepare the NATO counter-summit

NATO invites itself to the center of Europe in April 2009 !

The 3rd and 4th of April, representatives of the countries members of NATO will meet again to celebrate their 60 years of domination, but also in order to develop their new plan to "defend freedom" and quoting the terms of their own generals: "A great strategy for an uncertain world."

From the 1st to the 5th April 2009 we will be present in Strasbourg and we'll oppose their "globalization by force" with the creativity of our actions of resistance: direct actions, blockades, civil disobedience, demonstrations, meetings, debates, alternative village, convergence centers, autonomous arts, concerts, ...

The success of this counter-summit also depends on an efficient international network which enables to succeed in taking decisions and preparing actions for the next NATO summit in April and for the longer term.
This network process has always been carried out but most of the time sporadically. Connections faded or even got lost after each counter-summit. Re-establishing them at a distance takes time to be truly effective, reason why we propose a meeting.

This international meeting of the radical resistance movements will be held on the 17th & 18th January 2009 in Strasbourg. It aims to strengthen international networks and achieve concrete actions during the counter-summit. This would be the only international Dissent! assembly before the NATO summit, a strong mobilization and the presence of all on this occasion is essential.

Blowin' NATO in the wind !

In order to shorten the discussions we ask participants to kindly send us a survey of the status of their mobilization against the NATO summit. This will allow us to prepare a note on each country and to ease discussions by avoiding endless presentations.
This is a proposal for an agenda. Please send us your comments and your propositions of modification of the program before the 19th January. At this date we'll send a more detailed invitation.

Friday, 16th January 2009
19.00 : Participants arrival

Saturday, 17th January 2009
10.00 - 11.00 : Participants presentation and overview of the international mobilizations
11.00 - 12.30 : Lunch - Discussions
12.30 - 14.30 : Presentation and discussions about the different action days
14.30 - 15.00 : Break - Discussions
15.00 - 17.00 : Workshops :
1.1st day
2.2nd day
3.3rd day
4.4th day ?
5.5th day ?
17.00 - 17.30 : Break - Discussions
17.30 - 18.30 : Workshops progress reports
18.30 - 20.00 : Dinner - Discussions
20.00 : Discussion on the relevance of creating a perdurable international Dissent! network

Sunday, 18th January 2009
10.00 - 12.00 : Discussion on the relations with the authorities and the non-radical organizations and media
12.00 - 13.00 : Lunch - Discussions
13.00 - 15.00 : Workshops :
1.Villages - Convergence Centers - Kitchens – Infopoints
2.Anti-repression, Legal Teams
3.Infotour

15.30 - 17.00 : Workshops progress reports, discussions on the means to communicate together and proposal for a next international meeting
17.00 : Goodbye – Never Ending Discussions...

They want to decide for us,
Our lives belong to us !

Contacts :

dissent_fr@riseup.net

Infos :

http://gipfelsoli.org
http://natogipfel2009.blogsport.de

http://dissent.fr
http://sommet-otan-2009.blogspot.com

Source: email

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Minutes

International preparation conference for activities on 60th NATO anniversary in Stuttgart, October 4th and 5th 2008

The conference has had 107 participants from 16 countries, including Georgia and Afghanistan. Find the minutes on http://www.alonysolidarity.net/sada/european/20081004-nato-minutes%5B1%5D.pdf

Source: www.alonysolidarity.net

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Flyer by french solidarity group for demonstrations

Don’t loose your head, offer resistance!

On a demonstration

Stay in groups. Found affinity groups of two or three people arriving and leaving together.
Stay mobile and keep an eye on other demonstrants as well as on your sourrounding.
Take care of ambitions of the pigs to infiltrate the group. Circle them, isolate them and show them to other demonstrants.
You have the right to cover up your face and this is highly recommended because the police likes to take pictures and films.
Teargas is used very often. Don’t panic, just save your nose and mouth with some piece of cloth soaked in lemonwater and use eye drops (saltwater dilution). In case of irritated skin neither make it wet nor use creams.

Should any demonstrant be arrested there is the possibility to resist that. If it happens anyway encourage the person to scream her/his name loudly and refer it to the legal aid.
In case of being arrested yourself shout out your name to other demonstrants and keep calm.
Apart from that it’s better to learn the number of the legal aid by heart than having it written on your arm because this can be seen as intention in case of your arrest.

Taken into police custody

Your allowed to have a translation. First they want to proof your identity (max. 4 hours). Taken into police custody can be extended up to 48 hours. You have the right to consult a doctor and a lawyer. You are only forced to give them your name and adress by law, to subscribe the protocol is not needed.
Refuse DNA-taking despite threat.
Refuse tp appear before the court immediatelly so that you have more time to prepair your defence.

Source: email

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Letter from the parents of the Tarnac nine

When all the media come together in a cacophony of lies to slander a handful of young people currently languishing in jail it is very difficult to find the right tone with which to call an end to this racket and make room for a little truth.

Many journalists bent over backwards to confirm the statements of the Minister of the Interior, even while the raids were still taking place. Those arrested were assumed to be guilty from the outset.

No one could miss the sensationalist reality cop show that our children have been forced to star in throughout the last week. The anguish, fear, and tears have submerged us and continue to do so. But probably what has hurt us the most, destroyed us the most, is the flood of lies that have been let loose. Today it was our children, tomorrow it could be yours. We are still stunned, but we are no longer paralyzed. The various facts which follow are an attempt to reestablish the truth and to silence the public condemnation.

Our children have evidently benefitted from a special treatment, locked in darkness for 108 hours, some of them without any charges, and to justify this we are told that they must be very special people, the kind that one doesn’t find on any street corner. Yet at the same time we are reminded that they are actually very normal, for everyday they become more numerous, and take up positions at every one of your street corners.

The police reproach our children being too organized, attempting to provide locally for their basic needs, reopening a village grocery store which had closed down, cultivating abandoned lands, organizing the distribution of food to old people in their area. Is it evil to self-organize for your basic needs? Here, when we have heard wind of crisis? Our children have been categorized as radicals. Radical, in the dictionary, means: taking up the problem at its root. In Tarnac our children planted carrots without bosses or leaders. Because they naively think that life, intelligence and decisions are more joyous when they are collective.

We are concerned to learn from the Minster of the Interior that simply reading the book The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee can make someone a terrorist. As a result of the free publicity the Minister has given the book through speaking of it in the media she risks soon counting 25,000 of them on her territory. For those who take the time to read it, this book is not a “terrorist catechism”, but a political essay which attempts to open new perspectives, and one of last year’s best selling social science books according to the Nouvel Observateur and Libération.

Our children are accused of going to a demonstration at Vichy on November 3rd. Some among us are the children, the grand children, of those deported by the Vichy regime. That our own children have taken the decision to go and physically oppose the functioning of a summit on immigration in this city of such symbolic significance, this fills us with pride, but also with hope and courage.

Let us return to the suspicions leveled against our children. Contrary to what has been said, and what we might think, the sabotage of railway lines did not terrorize the population or put anyone in danger. It simply caused the population to lose or kill time. What did terrorize the government was not the fact that it had to reimburse a thousand or so train tickets, but that an idea of politics, which was also an idea of action, ceaselessly reproduced itself. Sabotage, whether one employs it or rejects it, has never been an arm of terror, but always an arm of social change. There was a time when the CGT [France’s main trade union] called for it.

Bankers are responsible for the biggest economic crisis of the last 80 years. This will not fail to cause millions of people to starve. And we continue to cordially greet our bankers in the street. Our children are only suspected of causing the delay of a few trains, and for that they face 20 years in prison.

The most impressive police operation in the last week was not bursting open doors in balaclavas on a sleeping nine-month-old baby, but rather convincing people that the desire to change such a perfect world could only emanate from the heads of the mentally deranged, of powerful assassins.

When doors slam we feel fear that it is the balaclavas returning.
When they open we dream of seeing our children return.

– the parents of Bertrand, Mathieu, Elsa, Aria and Yldune

PS : we salute and offer our thanks to the inhabitants of Tarnac who prefer to believe what they live than what they see on TV.

DROP THE CHARGE OF “CRIMINAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE PURPOSES OF TERRORIST ACTIVITY” AND IMMEDIATELY RELEASE ALL THE INDICTED

Source: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/letter-from-the-parents/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Giorgio Agamben: Terrorism or tragicomedy?

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and "accused of criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions." The newspapers reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State "had congratulated local and state police for their diligence."

Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let's try to examine the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of this "diligence."

First the reasons: the young people under investigation "were tracked by the police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho autonomous milieu." As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior specifies, "their discourse is very radical and they have links with foreign groups." But there is more: certain of the suspects "participate regularly in political demonstrations," and, for example, "in protests against the Fichier Edvige (Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale) and against the intensification of laws restricting immigration." So political activism (this is the only possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as "anarcho autonomous milieu") or the active exercise of political freedoms, and employing a radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central intelligence office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a minimum of political consc ience could not help sharing the concerns of these young people when faced with the degradations of democracy entailed by the Fichier Edvige, biometrical technologies and the hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons, explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from it. SDAT officers discovered "documents containing detailed information on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains." In plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also confiscated "climbing gear." In simple French: a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.

Now let's turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the presumed head of this terrorist gang, "a 33 year old leader from a well-off Parisian background, living off an allowance from his parents." This is Julien Coupat, a young philosopher who (with some friends) formerly published Tiqqun, a journal whose political analyses – while no doubt debatable – count among the most intelligent of our time. I knew Julien Coupat during that period and, from an intellectual point of view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let's move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story. The suspects' activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts against the SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains on the Paris-Lille line. The devices in question, if we are to believe the declarations of the police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no way cause harm to people: they can, in the worst case, hinder communications between trains causing delays. In Italy, trains are often late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the national railway of terrorism. It's a case of minor offences, even if we don't condone them. On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are perhaps "perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to attribute a criminal act to any one of them."

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom "it is not possible to attribute a criminal act." Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague and that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist "intentions" or "inclinat ions," acts that until now were never in themselves considered terrorist.

Giorgio Agamben
Libération, November 19, 2008

Source: http://farkyaralari.blogspot.com/2008/11/free-tarnac-9-statement-of-support-by.html