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October 7th: Migrants on the march for their rights in London

October 7th organising group | 16.09.2006 21:38 | Transnational Day of Action Against Migration Controls | Anti-racism | Migration | Social Struggles | London

Coming out of the shadows

October 7th: International Day of Action on Migrant Rights

Assemble 12.00pm
Imperial War Museum
(Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park)
Lambeth Road
London
SE1 6HZ


"For Freedom of Movement and the Right to Stay"

This message issued by JCWI on behalf of the October 7th organising group


In an echo of recent actions in the US, the UK's migrants are coming out of the shadows and demanding that their rights are recognised. Saturday October 7th 2006 will see a march through London demanding equal rights for all. The organisers are calling on migrants, asylum seekers and their friends, families and colleagues to join the demonstration and build a movement to change conditions for migrants for the better.

For many people migration is essential to escape human rights abuses, conflict and poverty. In turn people from all over the world help fuel UK prosperity, with London's diversity an important ingredient in its successful bid to host the Olympics. However, many migrants are deprived of their full rights in employment and access to public services, while at the same time being vilified as "illegal" by politicians and media and living in daily fear of detention and deportation.

The march on October 7 2006 will start at 12 noon from the gardens of the Imperial War Museum (Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park) and proceed through south London towards the city. On Sunday October 8 2006 10am-5pm a conference will be held at Queen Mary University where migrant communities, activists and specialists in the field will discuss the possibilities and implications of a regularisation in the UK.

Anita Ceravolo, spokesperson for the October 7th organising group, said:

"There is no such a thing as an illegal person. It is the migration control system that produces illegality. It creates an underclass of people who will then go on to be cheap labour, to be exploited in various ways by unscrupulous bosses, and landlords and others.They live in fear, afraid of looking for legal protection, and effectively banned from using public services.

"The exploitation of migrants only helps to drive down wages and working conditions for the domestic workforce. It is in the interests of some bosses to deny migrants their full rights, and this is what undermines social justice for all. This is why the fight for migrant rights is in everyone's interest."

October 7th activities will take place in various cities across Europe and in Africa, forming the Third International Day of Action on Migration. This action results from the Migration Assembly which took place at the European Social Forum in Athens in June. It builds up on the appeal launched by various organisations during the World Social Forum in Bamako, Mali, in January and will lead to a major European Assembly on Migrant Rights and Regularisation in 2007.

Taking their lead from the ESF manifesto, the various groups organising the October 7th March are calling for:

* Regularisation for the migrants who are in the UK irregularly because they are refused asylum applicants, trafficked people or visa overstayers


* The right of all present in the UK to work and to be protected from destitution


* The closure of all detention centres and an end to the 'externalisation process' through which detention centres and other forms of migration control are established outside the borders of the EU


* Social justice and security of livelihood for all


* UK sign up to the UN International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers.

One of the people at the march will be Anthony Seifah, a Ghanaian cleaner 'People want to be secure," says Anthony "They need to work, they can't starve. What everyone is crying out for is a work permit; they are not criminals, all they need is a work permit to do the jobs that need to be done.


Please join our march on October 7 and help to make life better for migrants and everyone who lives in the UK."

Event summary


What: March for Migrant Rights - 3rd International Day of Action for Migrant Rights
When: October 7th, 12pm
Where: Assembly point at the Imperial War Museum (Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, Southwark). Tube: Waterloo, Elephant & Castle.

What: Conference on Migrant Rights and Regularisation
When: October 8th from 10am to 5pm
Where: Queen Mary's University, Geography Department, Main Lecture Theatre, Mile End. Tube: Mile End, Stepney Green.

Facts about migrants in the UK

Refused asylum seekers and many asylum applicants, who are normally from the global south, are frequently detained and/or electronically tagged


They are frequently deprived of the right to work meaning they, together with visa overstayers and trafficked people, are forced to work in the informal economy and/or in jobs which are dirty difficult and dangerous for the lowest wages.


Failed asylum seekers, overstayers and trafficked people are effectively denied the right to access justice, full employment rights, and non-urgent health and maternity services. They are also denied the right to marry in a civil ceremony.


Many regular migrants who have entered the UK using "legal" routes or via Accession are denied full employment and social rights. Non-EEA migrants will be subjected to the ID card before UK nationals and to surveillance at work and when they use public services.


For many developing countries such as Ghana and Bangladesh remittances from migrant workers including those in the UK are very important to their national countries' economies and local people's survival.


Many migrants who are well-qualified are forced by their immigration status and visa conditions to work in jobs that are not commensurate
with their skills and qualifications


Capturing lost taxation and other revenues could net the Treasury up to £1 billion a year more when set against the potential £4.7 billion cost of deporting the entire irregular migrant population (IPPR: 2006)


The UK is already holding more than 2500 people who have not been convicted of any criminal offences, in immigration detention centres at a cost of more than £2 million per week. It costs £812 to hold a person in detention for one week, excluding overheads. Source: Asylum/Immigration [Cost of detention] House of Commons 16/06/06  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm060616/text/60616w1000.htm#06061625000025


The number of persons who were removed or departed voluntarily (either as a result of enforcement action or under Assisted Voluntary Return Programmes) from the United Kingdom (UK) in 2005 was 58,215, a decrease of 5 per cent on 2004 (61,160).


Of those removed or departing voluntarily in 2005, 56 per cent were removed after having been initially refused entry at a port, 37 per cent were removed as a result of enforcement action, and 6 per cent left under Assisted Voluntary Return Programmes run by the International Organisation for Migration.


Asylum removals: (including assisted returns and some voluntary departures) rose by 9 per cent in 2005 to 13,730, excluding dependants. Including dependants, 15,685 failed asylum seekers were removed in 2005, 5 per cent more than in 2004 (14,915).


3,655 persons left under Assisted Voluntary Return Programmes run by the International Organisation for Migration, 35 per cent more than in 2004 (2,715). This includes 2,905 principal asylum applicants, 330 dependants of asylum seekers and 420 non-asylum cases leaving under the Assisted Voluntary Return for Irregular Migrants Programme.


Of the total number of principal asylum applicants removed or known to have departed voluntarily in 2005, 30 per cent were from Europe, 27 per cent were from Asia and 23 per cent were from Africa. The nationalities with the largest numbers were Serbian and Montenegrin (1,690), Afghan (1,155), Iraqi (1,040), Turkish (860) and Pakistani (675).



Signatories of the October 7th Call as of 5th August 2006:
End of Bulletin:


Source for this Message:
"Rhian Beynon"

October 7th organising group

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Let's celebrate the great Arabs

16.09.2006 22:57

Because they have done so much for the world, contributing towards...err...umm.. NOTHING!!!

THAT'S RIGHT THE ARABS HAVE DONE NOTHING FOR THE WORLD.

These filthy muslim arab nazi terrorist animals have contributed nothing to the world. Just because they sit on a whole load of oil (which perosnally i would like to throw them into and set alight) does not mean that is what they contributed to the world. It was the Americans who created the infrastructure to be able to refine and use the oil because the arabs are too stupid and lazy to do anything about it

rightist spreading reality


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NO BOMBS NO BOSSES NO BORDERS (NoBo)3

17.09.2006 09:38

NO BOMBS NO BOSSES NO BORDERS (NoBo)3

RESPONSE TO OCTOBER 7 DECLARATION

(NoBo)3 r my enemy (NoBo)3 cowardly non-communist (NoBo)3 uncle tom (NoBo)3 bandwagon jumper (NoBo)3 r the definition of petit bourgeoise (NoBo)3 deserve to b legally detained



(NoBo)3 hereby condemn the ESF, No Borders London and the October 7th Declaration.

NoBo3 denounce all borders - London, Europe, Earth or universe, self or other, master or slave, black or white - not just borders of space but also borders of value and time, like the borders of the calendar - these devices just serve to break us up, to control and pacify us.

It was a meeting of No War But The Class War (NWBTCW) that commissioned the (NoBo)3 banner - designed by an Iranian Anarchist, supervised by Anarchist Jihad and painted by my own hands.

Class War is dead and the defeat of Class War is the victory of the warrior caste. The very first meeting of NWBTCW we attended in September 2001, the Wasted Hitler Youth - which is proletariat and not right wing or fascist - was ejected by force and so the forceful ejection of the West Essex Zapatista from the LARC (redubbed the London Anarcho-Racist Centre) is no suprise.

In being attacked by my former comrades at the LARC, they and other members of the WOMBLES, have sided against us and with the Mayor of London and the European Social Forum (ESF). No Borders London in relocating to LARC, have also shown support for LARC's unqualified attack on Proletarian organisation.

And so in raising the banner of (NoBo)3 we do not credit their hierarchical violence with a symmetrical response; rather we will destroy the psychical construction of the "European Social Forum's call for an international day of action for migrant rights on 7th October 2006." This will proceed using a triolectical Situgraphologikal geometry to attack the European/Psychopathic geometry of the Anarcho-Racists : Starting with the construct of "Migrants", then of "Europe" and then "Rights". This critique is far from exhaustive and we welcome expansion and development as well as criticism.


1. "Migrants"

The UK Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act of 2002 formally changed the name of detention centres to removal centres. This action was part of a shift in the semantic dimensions of confinement and oppression that need to be considered along with the physical/ spatial or psychical/ temporal dimensions. Another suicide of a refugee in detention last month shows how lethal these conditions are. While the 'concentration camp' and the 'ghetto' are dimensional extensions of the semantic space of the 'nation', imprisonment is just such a feature of another dimension of 'citizenship'. The semantic elasticity of the IRCs is shown by the fact that Oakington is signposted off the A14 - not even as an Immigration "Removal" Centre, but an Immigration "Reception" Centre. Even the term 'immigration' and its semantic association with 'asylum' (again, a term that denotes mental illness as a replacement for the term refugee - a term which links a person's identity as a resister of the polarisations of imperial war) - needs to be resisted, along with nationalism; Counter strategies must be re-introduced such as opening up the semantics of diaspora and inter/antinationalism.

Basically we should also remind ourselves that while spatial dimensions are confined, temporal dimensions must be expanded in order for imprisonment to be damaging (i.e. smaller space, longer time) - But most crucially this is meaningless unless semantic dimensions are simultaneously invaded and controlled. Communication, as much as the commune, is a basic element of Communism. In the IRCs, while one of the most damaging aspects of the confinement is the openness of the temporal dimension - there is no time limit to the detention, we have also seen the damage caused by the control of semantic dimensions. The lack of any differentiation between convicted criminals, refugees and migrants, the lack of access to judicial process - or rather the spectre/image/spectacle of process removed from any real concept of justice - all of this is underpinned by the control of the means of communication. By providing phones, lawyers, communication and then withholding access at any given point, detainees are shunted around semantic/ psychic spaces at a disorientating speed.

This is the mental equivalent of 'flying' imprisonment - a tactic used on a proletarian organiser in Pakistan where he was moved around cells and prisons on a daily, twice daily basis. It is also used on terror suspects at Belmarsh. In the Pakistan case this tactic failed, as the said organiser was able to reach more people and spread his message further. This can also happen in semantic space as more and more concepts are brought into contact with a revolutionary critique. The control of spatial, temporal and semantic space with and as new technology is something that is now being developed. Curfews, tagging, surveillance are nothing new - and the subtlety as well as the scale and savagery with which they are being put into practice is only apparently new.

In fighting the spatial and temporal borders we also fight the semantic borders - We refuse all imposed description and orientation such as 'migrant' or 'immigrant' - thereby refusing to dignify colonial borders and psychopathic geometry. For us, the power of movement is also of self-definition, documentation and consciousness.

1. "Europe"

As the European Union grows in power, Pan-European internationalism will create more problems than it solves. Whereas some may see “European-wide” links as being a healthy way of superceding nationalism, for us the real key to internationalism lies in its universalism. We suggest that the abandonment of “Europe-wide” organising is necessary to allow a more egalitarian way of organising which does not privilege the “European”, whether understood in terms of culture, race or region.

It is precisely these three dimensions of the semantic space of “European” that gives it such a volatile ideological value. It can be understood by different people in different ways. Those that understand it terms of region perforce must adopt the sort of territorialism, which is characteristic of the state, in this case the emerging European Union. Another conception is racial, which originated in the consolidation of a White social elite in European colonies outside Europe. The third, ie cultural, associates the highest level of human achievement with the history of Europe from the days of ancient Greece to today.

Europe-wide organising has a reactionary effect by:

* Encouraging a European identity as something separate from humanity

in general by privileging European connectedness.

* Discouraging the participation of people from non-European diasporas

living in Europe by discriminating against their social, cultural and political connections with places outside Europe

* Obstructing a critical appraisal of Eurocentrism, institutional

racism and White Supremacy by adopting a structure which facilitates all three.

"Globalisation" has highlighted our increasing need to develop counter-strategies at a global level. For this to succeed we need to ensure that an organisational practice that embraces the whole of humanity, rather than allowing a method of organisation which asserts the autonomy of one of the richest parts of the world which has a track record of spreading destruction, exploitation and brutality across the world since the inception of capitalism in the sixteenth century C.E.


3. "Rights"

We have also recently seen the Government start to overtly attack Human Rights laws (rather than the passive attack on these 'rights' through their disregard) in order to obscure the failures of the British justice system while the press continues to fuel racist hysteria in Britain by concentrating on the fact that detainees on early release were migrants or 'foreigners' as they are phrasing it. This is despite the fact that refugees in detention centres are being illegally locked up and deported against their Human Rights as guaranteed by British, European and International law.

Having attacked the rights of Afghani refugees who hijacked a plane to escape the Taliban (Just like some newspapers in the 30s attacked the 'right' of Jews to escape Auschwitz), they have simultaneously covered up the fact that there is an ongoing Hunger strike at British Detention Centres and Immigration Removal Centres, where conditions have become so bad that people have committed suicide. There has also been a cover up of the beatings by Home Office sanctioned Immigration Officers at SERCO and Premier of migrant detainees who talk to the press in order to expose their treatment.

This amounts to a joint effort by Home Office and the Press to collaborate in the genocide of refugees by beating, torturing and ultimately deporting them to war-zones, which they have fled and will certainly be killed. The power of the state to confer and withhold human rights is the power to grant life and death. Given that in Europe we do not have the right to bear arms or have a death penalty, the right to kill remains in the hands of the army.

In reality, many very different concepts are united under banner of the human rights, often in an inconsistent manner. For example in Germany, human rights for immigrants mean something completely different than human rights for natives. Why free speech is a human right, but a right to land is not? Concepts such as human rights and terrorism are ever present in political discussion, but their content is blurred to say the least.

The concept of human rights is for sure, a core idea of "enlightment" of the 18th century - a racist concept based on a Newtonian physical conception of light as the presence of God on Earth - a scientific justification for white supremacy. Marxist materialism on the other hand, in its rejection of humanism was a departure from enlightement which was recuperated as Leninist totalitarism.

However, we see no problem in using Human Rights as an argument in practice, either for refugees or when defending rights of workers against illegal sacking. We have both good and bad experiences for example with liberal human rightists and consistency of their practice in regards to rights of anarchists - for example ACLU of USA has always stood by anarchists when their civil rights have been violated, whereas in contrast, Amnesty International does not support anybody who has for example been defending himself (such as anti-fascist Tomek Wilkoszevski doing 15 years in Poland), and very seldom those who have been framed for committing criminal offences (such as anarchist Aleksei Cherepanov in Russia).

Self defence should not be less of a right than free speech, everybody should have a right to kill a violent Nazi. Self-defence should not be a privilege of statists. On the other hand, mob justice is far too often glorified by anarchists, image of a lynch mob may hardly suit promoting direct action among such groups as black people.

We have much first-hand experience of terrorist hysteria, for example recently an anti-terrorist case was opened against Bulgarian anarchist for distribution of leaflets only. Bosnian anarchists told which kind of advertisement NATO and SFOR are paying in the local press - corpses in bodybags under header "terrorist, this is your destiny"... although during 9 years of defacto colonial occupation there has not been a single terrorist attack against NATO or SFOR troops in Bosnia! Which of course does not mean that suspected people are not sent to Guantamo... 200 years ago concept of terror was reserved for states only, nowadays it is even used in the context of property destruction.

We therefore stick to Marx's critique of jurisprudence, its class-based nature, its abstract subjects. This critique cannot help looking at the ideology of "civil liberties" and "human rights". We are very much aware of the (objective) inconsistency of anarchists and libertarians. Their aims may be revolutionary, and we are likely to fight the same battles, and yet any demand for "rights" – even "natural", "human", "universal" ones – maintains the same limits and contradictions exposed by Marx. The capitalist state acknowledges "rights" only as its foundations, its "natural base", and never separates them from horrible "duties" (e.g. to give up part of one's income to maintain the police and the army). As to "human rights", they depend on the same trans-national legislation, which declared embargos [economic blocks] to "hostile" (non-human?) countries, and allowed imperialists to raze down cities and bury soldiers alive in their desert trenches.

If we mistake freedom for the "totalitarianism of the rights of man", we will surrender to the abuses of the world cops. Nevertheless, we must fight on the enemy's ground, use the enemy's concepts and show how they really work, turn them against the enemy in a stylish way (style is the real martial art, the base of every fight; fighting techniques are the consequence). From this point of view, we want to show what jurisprudence is and what effects it has in today's authoritarian state and the empire which states are a part of. We will do it by wearing the spectacles of "civil liberties" defenders, drawing the least obvious conclusions, laying the stress on the most obscure and contradictory aspects, such as ius resistentatie [the right to resistance] and the necessity to test out the law, all aspects that can turn the law inside out. The lawyer must use the law to attack the law, just as any worker must work against work - and the victim make a victim of its victimisation. This cannot be done in isolation but through constant proletarian intervention - lawyers, human rights, anarchist or support groups are all very well, but the struggle is lost without active groups of the exploited classes (for example refugees), self-organised against their exploitation.


(NoBo)3

NO BOMBS NO BOSSES NO BORDERS (NoBo)3


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THE PROPHET MOHAMMED IS A CUNT

17.09.2006 19:24

ENOUGH SAID

juni


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