By our w2wtal-breakfast at December 20 our last public meeting this year has happened. The next meeting at our w2wtal-evening at Café Stil-Bruch will take place only on January 9 in 2016. It is exceptionally postponed by a week because of New Year. The break provides an opportunity to briefly pause and look back on 2015. On this occasion, we publish a contribution of our friend Lobanowskji.
2016 – Yallah! – by Lobanowskji
For those who understand the movement of migration as a crucial social issue, the fading year 2015 was a crazy sequence of ambivalent developments in a high-speed mode. That this topic has become central to almost all fields at the end of the year, while it was an issue only for antiracist groups and refugee-supporting initiatives at its beginning, is part of these changes.
Meanwhile, the topic influences the political agenda in almost all issues – even the agreement on the Paris «climate summit» was dominated by the issue of future migration dynamics. The pendulum of events swung between a «Summer of Migration» with a beleaguered «Fortress Europe», a by masse overcome borders shredded »Dublin»-deportation system with collapsing regulatory policies and the now following «Winter of Reaction» with harsh tightenings of laws and overriding fundamental rights. Sometimes encouraging informations and disturbing messages took turns in the course of a single day. Laws that otherwise had to be coordinated for months, were partly exacerbated in weekly deadlines.
Nevertheless, the alliance of a racist mob and politicians not yet managed to intervene in the developments significantly – even if some initiatives have begun to show effect in recent weeks. Mainly single and isolated immigrant groups such as the Roma-Gypsies suffer, who got to feel the impact of the new law tightenings with full force. Almost unnoticed by the public they are deported in large numbers – often after having lived with us for years or even decades. And those who have not been deported yet are sometimes prompted to leave their homes and to resettle in special camps overnight – of which the Bavarian state government i.e. proudly announces that there was «yet not a single case» of a positive asylum-decision.
But the seemingly desperate attempts by the German government and the EU administration to get the issue of migration back into their own hands, also generate victims in completely different places. In their frantic effort to curb the movement of migration to Europe, the European Union was obviously willing to sacrifice the Kurds. Quite obviously as a part of a «deal» between the EU and AKP-government, the turkish army can fight an increasingly open war against its own people in the Kurdish parts of Turkey. Europe is silent about that in a deafening manner. For detaining Syrian refugees in Turkish detention centers and sending them back to war sometimes, Europe complicid shuts its eyes on tanks and bombs in Kurdish cities and on civilian deaths. Seldom the pitiful EU-hypocrisy was so obvious.
But these are only interim results so far. It is still not known, where the swung of European reactions on the movement of migration will finally finish. Although an angry-racist mob pushs politics further and further, the true actors of the changes are still the refugees themselves. Their self-organized way out of war and a lack of perspectives and their arrival in European wellness- and safety-zones led to many collapsing self-assurances, it turned privileges questioned and disturbed a «Doll’s House atmosphere of ignorance» as Elisatbeth Raether in the weekly «ZEIT»-newspaper formulated.
Where developments next year will go, will not at least depend on us – political refugee groups and anti-racist activists. Can we succeed to transform the dynamics of migration now to dynamic social developments – together with its stakeholders? Intense communication-processes about the future of a common living between new residents and those who lived here for years have begun at the base of neighborhoods and everyday life already. Within this processes we also have to question much of what seemed perfectly clear to us ’til today: Last year’s discussions about this were the most exciting political experiences that we could make.
Flight and migration always also mean an intensification of class conflicts – simple because many of the refugees are confronted with the fact of belonging to a common subaltern class after their arrival – regardless of their social positions before fleeing: The class of «refugees». As such members of a poor class they are forced into situations of competition and concurrence with existing impoverished classes. To intervene in these processes, which are euphemistically called «Integration», will be one of our most important tasks. Therefore refugees may not be seen as something beyond our own structures and something we have «to protect», but as a vital part of us.
On this basis w2wtal tried to be part of the «wild developments». Originally founded as an initiative that primarily wanted to support people without papers by concrete solidarity activities in Wuppertal, we also became an actor in the dynamics of the year – to our delight together with several new inhabitants of Wuppertal. We would like to thank all of those who brought this momentum also to our town. Meanwhile our goal remained the same: Irrespective of their residence status and beyond paternalistic welfare we still want to support people who are newly living in this city to refer their own positions with self-consciousness: human, cultural, and especially political.
In this sense, we are looking forward to next year – without ignoring dangers and challenges. We will tackle them confidently and offensively together.
«No border lasts forever» – Yallah!