The ABC is a German-wide Afrocentric and Pan-African network of Organisations and individual activists. It is run under the auspices of exclusively African and/or Blacks people with African genealogical roots (hence, the name African/Black Community) whose objectives are stipulated in its Code of Conduct (CoC) and Policy Paper (PP).
Aims/Objectives
Although the main idea of an ABC sprang up at the Black Community Congress held from the 18th to 20th October 2002 in Löhne-Gohfeld and subsequent meetings in 2004 in Berlin, the first practical consultation meeting called for by African activists within „The VOICE Refugee Forum” however took place in 2005 in Göttingen. The objective was to bring together again diverse African/Black activists from different Organisations, with the aims of networking and of a collective development of activities, galvanized and inspired by our Struggle for JUSTICE for Oury Jalloh and all other Sisters and Brothers killed by the German State terror, through structural and institutional racism, in short Systemic Racism.
The main objective of these meetings and other consultative engagements that later continued until 2011 was to breach the conflictual understanding of “Identity representation, class and privileges” within the Community. From 2013, the impulse was reignited by new activists and networks from within the Community, with help from those who followed up the previous processes since 2005. And here we are today.
How did the name ABC come about and is it the same as BC (Black Community)?
The name came about after a long deliberation about our objectives, which were to bring together again diverse African/Black activists from different Organisations, with the aims of networking and of a collective development of activities that would strengthen our independence (or reduce our dependence on) from the White majority society in which we find ourselves. It is the same as the Black Community (BC) in many levels and ways, but some of the differences are expressed in our conviction that uplifting Africa (through different liberation struggles, engagements and achievements) is at the centre of all our engagements. We follow the principle of self-organisation and intra-supportive community mechanisms and processes.
That said, it would not be a genuine process to talk about the history of the ABC just by recounting our experiences and Community engagements since the first Black Community Congress in 2001. While acknowledging the roles played by individual activists and Networks in the process of establishing and recording this rich history, a rather legitimate appraisal would be to formulate questions that can be used to express the background and documentation of the process of founding the ABC, the African / Black Community in Germany. This would enable the participation of many, in documenting our history of the foundation of the network.
Contact us and be part of our struggles and empowerment processes.
For several weeks, activists from Aufstand der letzten Generation (Uprising of the Last Generation) have blocked roads in Berlin and other cities around Germany. The activists hold banners with the message Essen Retten Leben Retten (save food, save lives) and are trying to disrupt business as usual to send a message to the German government.
They have two demands: firstly, immediate action from the federal government against food waste, with a law following the example of France from 2016. Secondly, they demand concrete measures from the new government to achieve a fundamental change in agriculture by 2030 within their first 100 days in power.
The fact that the government is not implementing these laws already highlights its woeful inaction on the climate crisis. Worldwide, 30-40% of food is thrown away before it reaches the consumer. This is devastating in a world where over two billion people are currently malnourished. Reducing food waste is a glaringly obvious chance to reduce emissions, save land, water and labour. An immense amount of CO2 would be saved from not fertilising, growing and shipping food that is never even eaten.
Germany creates over10 million metric tons of food waste per year – all of which could be avoided. Annually, 190 kg of food is wasted per person, and this is before consumers buy a single thing. It’s hard to find anyone who would agree to this amount of food being wasted on their behalf.But stopping this industrial scale disaster requires those in power to be willing to change. So far the response by politicians to the road blocks has been mixed. Environment Minister Steffi Lemke from the Greens supported the activists saying, “It is absolutely legitimate to demonstrate for your concerns and also to use forms of civil disobedience. “ But her perspective seems to be a minority in the government.
Much of the public’s response to these protests has been anger, on the roads and online. Videos show members of the public ripping away the activists signs, shouting at them and pulling them off the street. It is difficult to gauge the amount of public support as the voices normally heard the most are the ones shouting. Support was shown last week in 13 cities around Germany where solidarity campaigns collected edible food from supermarket bins and redistributed the produce to the public. These ended with the police turning up and swiftly redistributing the perfectly edible food back into the bins as shown in the Twitter post below:
This is so horribly representative of the broken system that you may assume it prompted SPD politician Nancy Faeser to tweet “Anyone who resorts to such means harms climate protection.“ But instead she was referring to activists blocking the roads and calling to save food and save lives.
A lot of the criticism from politicians and the public is focused on the method and not the message of the campaign. But shooting the messenger does not help anyone. The reality is that if these very same activists were holding the same signs on the pavement, there would be no discussion – I wouldn’t be writing this article and you wouldn’t be reading it.
The solutions to massive food waste exist, as France showed in 2016 by passing laws forcing supermarkets to donate excess food to food banks and other charities. People have also been campaigning for this issue for a long time – Aufstand der letzten Generation has just been the loudest. Their campaign has been undeniably successful in pushing the issue to the forefront of public and political discussion, despite their methods being unpopular. But methods of campaigning that are popular and legal haven’t made change, and we no longer have time to delay climate action. We are living in a climate crisis, in which the next “three to four years will determine the future of humanity”.
On Thursday evening, the topic of “road blockades and unannounced demonstrations” was on the agenda in the Bundestag, proving that the government cares more about road blocks than food security and the climate crisis. Every day of inaction on the climate crisis will have catastrophic and lasting effects on future generations. For the drivers stuck in traffic during the road blocks this may be their first physical encounter with the climate crisis. They may be unable to see past the car in front of them, unable to see the reason for the traffic. But the reason they are stuck goes further than the activists sitting in the road, it goes all the way into the Bundestag where empty promises are made and broken. The reason goes into the landfills that are piled high with edible food, to the hectares of monoculture farms which degrade the soil and poison the land. The reason goes to the broken capitalist system destroying the earth and everything on it.
Last Wednesday Aufstand der letzten Generation read out an open letter with their demands in front of the Reichstag building. Their ultimatum called for the federal government to make a statement by Sunday about food saving laws or the protests would increase in disruption. No statement was made by the government and on Monday they blocked several main roads in the port of Hamburg. Perhaps the government could learn from the protesters that drastic times call for drastic measures. If there’s one thing these protests have shown it is that our politicians will not bring about the change that is necessary themselves. Ordinary people have to step up because we are part of the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last who can do anything about it.
Radio Berlin International #5 – Junge Welt / Hanau / Enteignung [Audio & Transcript]
In this episode we hear about Germany’s Marxist daily newspaper, and the latest on the campaign to bring housing in Berlin into public ownership.
Originally broadcast on reboot.fm on 20 February 2022, in this episode, we meet the editor of Germany’s daily Marxist newspaper, which has just celebrated its 75th birthday. We hear from the commemoration and protest on the second anniversary of the Hanau attack, in which ten people were murdered by a far-right racist. And we find out why a group of radical cheerleaders is performing outside Berlin’s town hall.
DWE plenum is every other Tuesday from 7pm, R2C plenum is every other Wednesday from 7 pm (18:30 for first-timers).
This episode’s playlist is:
Warren Zevon – Lawyers, Guns and Money
The White Stripes – The Big Three Killed My Baby
Ebow – K4L
Ana Tijoux – Antifa Dance
The Hans – Deutsche Wohnen enteignen
Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen – Ready to Enteignen
This episode is presented and produced by Tom Wills. The studio engineer for reboot.fm is Franziska Duchemin.
Please tell us what you think of the show by emailing radio@theleftberlin.com. Don’t forget to include your name and where you’re listening from, and we’ll read out as many messages as possible on the air.
Don’t miss our next show live on reboot.fm 88.4 MHz in Berlin, 90.7 MHz in Potsdam and online at http://reboot.fm at 7pm on Sunday 6 March.
Transcript
The transcript of this show will be posted here in a few days’ time.
“There is no difference between ‘good’ deportation and deportation that is legally OK”
Interview with Coco from No Borders Alliance about planned deportations from the BER airport.
Berlin’s new airport, named after the city’s former mayor Willy Brandt, opened after many years of delays at the end of 2020. It sits next to the old Schönefeld airport, and has also replaced Tegel airport in the north of the city. But it has now emerged that construction work on the airport is not entirely finished, and a new campaign has been launched to stop one particular building that was quietly announced at the end of last year, just before the new German government took office. With me to tell me more is Coco from the activist group No Border Assembly. Thank you very much for joining us, Coco.
Coco: Hi, thank you so much for having me. It’s a great opportunity to be here.
Your group learned about this planned building at the end of last year in an announcement on the website of Germany’s federal interior ministry. Can you tell me what they say is going to be built, and what the actual purpose of this building will be?
Coco: Yes, sure. They proposed that they are going to start building this year. They frame it as an entry and exit building. There are going to be different kinds of buildings under one roof. There’s an arrival building, a transit building, a function and justice building, a detention building and a repatriation building. What they want to emphasise is that it is mainly an efficient way to organise migration.
We clearly see that there is a strong focus on exit. They are quietly building a new deportation centre there. What is also critical is, that they said that this is a pilot project, and they want to build it in a way that everything is under one roof. It has a character that could be copied all over Europe. We see this clearly at the anchor centres at the European outer borders, that these kinds of facilities are kind of black boxes.
You can’t really understand the processes because it is all under one roof, it is not really transparent. And for people who are locked up there it is particularly difficult, because it is not so easy to get legal support or psychological support. Comrades of mine who have experience with this, were telling us that there is a huge psychological dimension, that you are captured in one place and everything is under one roof. And there is a lot of potential for state violence.
Some deportations are already happening through Berlin – for example, there was a mass deportation flight to Afghanistan which managed to take off despite protests back in April last year. Has the new airport already had an impact on the number of deportations – the old Schönefeld airport terminal building, which is now called Terminal 5, is still being used isn’t it?
Coco: Yes. It is used, but only for deportations at the moment. What we can clearly see is from the moment they opened the new airport, Terminal 5 is only used for deportations and the number has increased since then.
The German government suspended deportations to Afghanistan in August, after the Taliban came back into power. There has been a long-running debate in the mainstream media about whether to stop deportations to countries that are officially considered dangerous. But many people are being deported from Germany to other countries that are supposedly ‘safe’ destinations. What do you think about that?
Coco: We personally, as the No Borders Assembly – but also the alliance – think there is no difference between “good” deportation and deportation that is legally ok. We are against all deportations. I think Afghanistan is a very good example to understand how arbitrary this ‘secure country of origin’ is. We saw last year in August, they just stopped it and before it was happening. I think that is a very good example to understand that there are no deportations that are ok. It is always state violence in a very, very brutal way.
At the moment many deportations take place from airports in other parts of Germany. Do you expect that may change if the new deportation centre is built here in Berlin?
Coco: It will maybe change a bit, but for sure there are going to be more deportations from Berlin, from now on. It is maybe a good question whether there are more deportations from Germany as a whole because the system is getting more efficient or if they will move it more to Berlin. At the moment there is also a deportation centre at the airport. The capacity now for the ‘Ausreisegewahrsam’ is twenty people and the new building for detention capacity handles 120 people. So this is going to increase massively. And for now in the agreement, it is written that there is no prison built, a deportation prison.
There is a small difference between a detention centre and a deportation prison. In a detention centre people can normally be locked up to ten days before their deportation, but in the deportation prison, they can be held for a longer period. What we particularly don’t trust is that they say they won’t build a deportation prison, because we think that once this building is there it is very easy to change this promise. Nevertheless, we are against all these buildings, but this is something we want to point out that this is very, not really a trustable plan.
We’re going to come on to how the No Border Assembly is responding to these plans in a moment, but first you’ve chosen a song by Refpolk. Can you tell us why you’ve chosen this track?
Coco: This artist is also a political activist in Berlin and we also collaborated with him at our demonstrations. This song is also about deportation and the struggle of deportations. So that is why we chose this song.
Can you tell us a bit about the Alliance – when did it start, and roughly how many groups are involved?
Coco: Yes sure. It started last year in December. So we found out about these plans and thought, we know a lot of people who are not ok with this building. So we started to ask around who would be interested in doing something together. When we met for the first time in December with the alliance, it consisted of around 15-20 organisations. It is a wide range of organisations. Some self-organised refugee organisations, some more with a legal focus and some with an environmental focus.
When is construction planned to start, and are there any steps that the builders will have to take through where there is an opportunity to mount opposition?
Coco: It is a very good question. One thing to mention is that this process is highly intransparent. We know that in the agreement that the interior minister of Brandenburg signed with Seehofer last year. It was one of the last things Seehofer [former government minister Horst Seehofer] did in his former position. This plan they signed was that they want to start the construction at the beginning of this year. We think that the next step is that the municipality of Schönefeld must agree to this plan, that is why I think it is important to show our presence in Schönefeld itself.
You are planning a first demonstration against the planned deportation centre this Wednesday. Can you tell us the details?
So our first protest is going to take place next Wednesday in Schönefeld and we start at Terminal 5, S Bahn station Schönefeld. We are walking to the townhall of Schonefeld and we want to arrive there by six o’clock because that is when the municipality meets. We don’t know what is on their agenda, but we think, or it could be that they are going to discuss this plan or if they discuss it in the future, we already want to show them that there are a lot of people who don’t agree with these plans. So we hope that all listeners will join this Wednesday. [the protest took place on February 9th].
What should people do if they want to keep up to date with the campaign or get involved?
Coco: We are launching some social media channels and we are going to publish a press release on Monday. And people can get in touch via our social media channels. There is also where we will publish more information about it. One big aim is to break the silence and this intransparency.
An important thing that we are trying to do is to make the plans public and also we want to point out who is profiting from the plans. Because this is also something we find very brutal, that it is a private investor, as far as we know. And this private investor is going to build this entire building and they are going to receive money from the municipality and then when the municipality is renting it to the federal government they are going to receive money from it. So basically, one investor is going to profit massively from this building.
We also want to point out that we might know who it is and that this person should know the brutal consequences these buildings have and what it means for the people who are locked up in these buildings.
You can also find the link to the No Borders Assembly here. Thank you again for joining us, Coco. Would you like to introduce the next song, by Feine Sahne Fischfilet?
Coco: Yes sure. It is also a song about a deportation and I think it points out really well how it feels for a person to be deported and that is why we chose this song.
The ‘Truckers Movement’ has mobilised right wing tendencies in Canada; Ken Hiebert from British Columbia Canada describes its leaders, some left-wing critical views, and considers its roots.
Ostensibly, the anti-vax movement is anti-tyranny and anti-fascist, and they sometimes portray the promoters of vaccine mandates as fascists. In reality there are far right and even fascist elements in the movement. But many of those participating are confused and do not have well formed political views. Knowing that – we progressives and socialists – must be careful in using the label “fascist” when dealing with people who views are in flux.
There are regional tensions expressed in the so-called ‘Truckers movement’. Many people, especially from the Western provinces, view Ottawa (the national capital) with hostility. This hostility seems to include anyone living in Ottawa, among them food bank volunteers and poorly paid fast food workers. And it even extends to inanimate objects in Ottawa such as war memorials. One of the biggest reactions against the convoy followed the disrespect shown by some of their supporters at ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’. This incident must have cost them some support in the general population. And the anti-social behaviour of the demonstrators provoked hostility from many people in Ottawa who have had to live through it.
The New York Times has reported that there is a presence of individuals who have been trained in the military and in the police. This is a similarity with the Trump movement in the US.
Those seeking to be leaders of the anti-vax Movement in Canada
There has been something of a land rush among various far right groups scrambling to put themselves at the head of this movement. The publication ‘Druthers’ showed up in my small town on the British Columbia West coast. An early issue of their paper carried an article by Caitlin Johnstone (at p.4), whose name will be known to some readers of ‘The Left Berlin’. They declared their intention of publishing an issue this month, but their November issue is the last one appearing on their website.
A competing publication Common Ground, is based in Vancouver, and has a reputation as a voice for peace and the environment, mixed in with New Age ideas and advertisements. Their latest issue had the headline ‘End the Circus of Coercion’. This is a remarkable statement for a periodical that in 2016 published an article praising the bombing of Aleppo.
Yet another strand in the far right is ‘The Epoch Times’, a well financed newspaper linked to Falun Gong. They have enough money to hire professional journalists and give themselves a veneer of dispassionate and objective journalism.
Left Wing responses in Canada on this movement
Left organizations and publications have responded to the convoy. The first article I saw was by Judy Rebick and Cort Russell. In my opinion Rebick and Russell put too much weight on the stumbles and errors of leading health officials. I suppose that could account for some of the confusion, but I believe there are much deeper reasons for the wave of irrationalism that has been part of this movement.
John Clarke was a long time leader of the ‘Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’. He wrote Why Has The Fascist Canadian Truck Convoy Had Such An Easy Ride? In my view this article is long on denunciation and short on ideas as to what the left and the labour movement should do.
Perhaps the most useful articles I have read were on the website of ‘Fightback’, a Trotskyist group – that I am not close to (here and here). One of the strengths of their approach is that they have a perspective that does not write off all those drawn to this movement.
What explains this movement?
In the US some people see the Trump phenomenon as being fuelled by fear among some white people over the gains made by blacks and Latin American people. This leads me to ask if there is something similar happening in Canada. Are some people reacting against the growing power of First Nations struggles? If they are it would be hard to prove it, as even far right organizations are very careful what they say about First Nations people.
One exception to this is The Epoch Times, which took a sideways swipe at the First Nations struggle when they reported that the abuses suffered by First Nations children were not sanctioned by Canadian law. The simple answer to that is ‘so what?’ Are they suggesting the blame lies with First Nations people who failed to assert their legal rights?
A progressive Canadian doctor, Gabor Mate has suggested that some of the fervent attachment to bizarre beliefs we find among anti-vaxxers is fuelled by unresolved trauma. Certainly, I will agree that we cannot win among anti-vaxxers simply by appealing to reason. This does not mean that we must give up or resort to threats of violence.
A mass movement of support for hospital workers and for medical science can influence people by force of numbers. A mass movement does not rely exclusively on media outlets to get its message across, but can reach people in other ways.
Ken Hiebert took part in his first Vietnam demonstration in 1966. He remains active today in the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as in support of Syrian refugees.
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