Today the bench chamber of the court in Haarlem ruled in the case of incitement by speech and word against Joke Kaviaar. The court rejected all of the defense pleas of her lawyer and sentenced Joke to four months in prison. This is less than the six months imprisonment the Public Prosecutor had asked for. Joke Kaviaar will appeal the conviction and announces that she will not let herself be silenced. She will continue to speak out against the Dutch migration policy.
court hearing January 8th 2013
Joke Kaviaar sentenced to four months in prison for incitement
- Migration activist does not let herself be silenced
Today the bench chamber of the court in Haarlem ruled in the case of incitement by speech and word against Joke Kaviaar. The court rejected all of the defense pleas of her lawyer and sentenced Joke to four months in prison. This is less than the six months imprisonment the Public Prosecutor had asked for. Joke Kaviaar will appeal the conviction and announces that she will not let herself be silenced. She will continue to speak out against the Dutch migration policy.
The Support Group 13 September, founded after the arrest of Joke Kaviaar, feels that the ruling was to be expected, as seen in the light of the current political climate in the Netherlands and in the standing jurisprudence around the Supreme Court regarding incitement (Article 131 of the Criminal Code).
The current verdict restricts the freedom of expression: from now on Joke Kaviaar and other publicists offering sharp criticism against government policy will get into danger to be restricted as well. This verdict creates dangerous jurisprudence for further restriction of criticism against the government.
Joke Kaviaar will appeal to a higher court, because she will keep defending her right to express herself by her texts, both as part of the struggle for free speech against state repression and as part of the refugee struggle. The sentence is a scandal, but will not break the ongoing struggle against borders and for freedom of movement.
Joke Kaviaar was arrested at home on September 13, 2011 and detained for three days under full restrictions. Meanwhile a house search took place. She was charged with “incitement and spreading incitement with a terrorist intent”. This charge involved a number of texts in which Joke fiercely speaks out against the Dutch migration policy. A few months later, in December, the Public Prosecutor’s National Office had her website taken offline. It was a day later put back online by unknowns and is still accessible.
After a long-term investigation two weeks ago, on January 8, a hearing before the bench chamber place finally took place. Four of her texts were submitted by the Public Prosecution to the court as being 'inciting'. The previous accusation that Joke Kaviaar had a “terrorist intent” with the alleged incitement was dropped. This raises the suspicion that the aggravated charge at the time of arrest, permitting the house search, and used throughout the entire investigation has only been added as intimidation, and to make use of the extensive investigative powers of the terrorism legislation.
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For more information: Support Group 13 September (
info@13-september.nl)
The quotes for which Joke Kaviaar is convicted, the relevant articles and more background information, are available at www.13-september.nl and
http://13-september.nl/tag/english (english info)
Website of Joke Kaviaar: www.jokekaviaar.nl
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Joke her last words as spoken at the court hearing of January 8th, 2013 in Haarlem, the Netherlands:
Each word a spark!
The Public Prosecution thinks it has the right to prosecute me on charges of what it calls 'incitement'. In fact they are persecuting me because of my opinion, because of my written attacks on the destruction machine that is called immigration policy.
In an article published in the newspaper, Noord Hollands Dagblad, dated December 29, 2012 a spokesman of the National Prosecutors Office said about their case against me: “We find it most of all important that she stands trial and has to answer herself for her words.” So, for words... Words that I will not take back. The same spokesman also said: “The defendant seems to have done nothing to make sure that her website would disappear.”
Today again it becomes more than obvious: the National Prosecutors Office wants me to censor myself, since they can not: “It is going to be difficult to prevent such mirror websites.” as was said in Noord Hollands Dagblad. Power feels powerless, so it is intent on revenge.
The Public Prosecution will do everything to dispose this trial of its political character. Let it not be the content of the articles, that have been quoted in the summons, that is the matter at hand. It must seem as if here and today it is all just about an individual that writes punishable articles. It is plain criminalization. On one hand the Public Prosecution wants to conduct a political trial. On the other hand it wants to get rid of its political content. This is why in this last word, I will spend a lot of words on the outrage of this trial that is being conducted in defense of a racist 'asylum' policy, that is no asylum policy, to serve the purpose of splitting up its opponents. Here, I will also continue my accusations against the state for its crimes against refugees. Because, if the Public Prosecution wants to prosecute me for my opinion, my words, it can have my opinion and my words! The only justice that can be served during this trial, is to bring forward these accusations.
This is a political trial. This is shown by the objectives of the Gulkana investigation as they have been formulated in the dossier of the case. These objectives are, apart from 'to stop the offense': 'to discourage the suspect and the faction' and 'to send out a signal to the suspect, the faction and the population'.
The Public Prosecution engages in politics. This is not just a test-case to see how far they can go in limiting freedom of speech for all those who attack the state for its policy, but also a show trial, a someone-to-blame trial, a trail that has to 'discourage' others that dare to speak out. A trial that has to 'discourage' others that dare to actually come into action: the 'faction'. It has all been in vain, all this discouraging. The Public Prosecution rests nothing more than to demand punishment, and it does so on political grounds.
I am telling the Public Prosecution and the court here before me: None of you will be able to make the accusations against the state and the capitalist system disappear. And again: Not a word I will take back. Even more: I will repeat and extend these accusations. It does not seem to me that I have any obligation to answer to the Public Prosecution, nor to any court, nor to any representative of the state whatsoever, whether it is for words that call for necessary resistance or for actual deeds of necessary resistance.
With necessary resistance I mean: the resistance that is imperative to defend suppressed individuals that fear for their safety, their freedom, and their lives. Resistance that is labeled by the state as violent, so it can be judged and dispatched with as being criminal. Resistance that does not wait until it is too late, but takes on the offensive. Resistance that does not want to measure up to power and the violence of those in power, but is anti-authoritarian, that wants to break down, all that is justified to be broken down: the many times larger destruction that the preservation of that power and the violence of that power will bring about. We have but to look at the hidden genocide, committed by the united European democratic constitutional states in their zeal to dispose of immigrants. I will now mention six of the victims that are on the incomplete list of deaths by The Netherlands, that we hear about:
April 9, 2012: Alain Hatungimana (36 jr., from Burundi) had to leave the country and committed suicide to make sure that his children could stay, a son age 14 and a daughter age 12. Their mother had already been killed in Burundi.
December 29, 2011: unknown man (41 jr., from Sri Lanka).
Found dead in the registration center at Schiphol on the day that he was told he was not going to get asylum. He had tried to kill himself before.
December 22, 2011: Predrag Molnar (40 jr., from Serbia).
Cell complex North-West Amsterdam (Meer & Vaart). Found dead in his cell.
Augustus 22, 2011: James ... (from Liberia)
Asylum center Echt: Set fire to himself after a conversation with the Dienst Terugkeer & Vertrek (DT&V=service for 'returns and departures') and died of his injuries twenty days later.
April 6, 2011: Kambiz Roustayi (36 jr., from Iran)
Set himself on fire on Dam square in Amsterdam and died of his injuries the day after. His situation was hopeless, asylum rejected. After 11 years of procedures he had to return to Iran where torture and death awaited him.
September 2010: Nezam Azimi (60 jr., from Afghanistan)
After a rejected asylum request and following forced return in August 2006, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan.
They are not the only ones! Repeatedly people have fallen to their deaths from apartment buildings while fleeing from a raid by the immigration police: Michael Osey, October 4, 2004. An unknown man from Pakistan, July 29, 2010. These kinds of raids are common, just as surrounding trams to catch people, identity control at railway stations, and raids at cafés such as the one at the Grand Café in South East Amsterdam in the fall of 2011, thanks to the collaboration of Connexxion bus drivers that found it suspicious that women 'with a negroid appearance' were on the bus to Heemstede and Bloemendaal (towns where wealthy people live)...
It has been hunting season permanently for many years! The sabotage of the machinery that the states and their politicians operate to keep up their hunt and mass murder, is legitimate in every aspect. That resistance, that is necessary resistance. The enforced fact that there is a law that makes this criminal, does not mean that this law is just and that we should keep to it. If resistance stopped at the boundaries of the law, the struggle would have been given up a long time ago!
Laws are by definition being imposed from above. No person has asked for the Identification Act, that is often being used to catch people without residence permit. “Ausweis bitte!” That law serves no other purpose than manhunt. Many people now protest the introduction of the penalization of 'illegality', just as once upon a time people protested against the introduction of the Linking Act ('koppelingswet' in Dutch) that makes it impossible for people to work legally and drives them into the hands of dishonest employers. The Dublin agreement, that makes it impossible for people to request asylum in a second European country, the new European Returns Directive that provides for a five year entry ban and for long term detention in the Fortress of Europe; all these laws, all these agreements, they have all been designed by governments that want to put up obstacles against people that are looking for a better life in Europe. These are laws, designed by high officials and politicians with a nationalistic agenda, that have no grounds for justification, other than having the power and the means to execute them.
In the case against me, the Public Prosecution comes out with a law that states that calling for resistance is a crime, a law that in the past has been used against many political activists to make an example of them for others. My answer to that law is, that I will, like many laws, not consider it the standard for my actions. The standard is humanity, solidarity, freedom, consensus, equality, the fair sharing of prosperity, without bosses and hierarchy, a society without exploitation of soil, water, animals and humans. A law is nothing but letters in a book. A book that in this trial is the rule along which the indictments of the Public Prosecution are being measured, that is being used to calculate punishment, but that says nothing about the crimes it allows.
Lady Justice is not wearing a blindfold, Lady Justice is wearing blinders.
I accuse, all those enforcing and executing the law!
To begin with:
Let the Public Prosecution answer for the intimidation and censorship of political opponents under the guise of state security, the filling of cells with written off people under the guise of public order, the preservation of the illusion that we need punishment and imprisonment of people, to serve only one goal which is to justify the building of more prisons and to exploit it.
I accuse, the designers of the laws, the nation states and their borders!
To begin with:
Let the representatives of the state answer for their systematic destruction of people, cast in the institutionalized racism that has been laid down in their laws, let them answer for instigating xenophobia.
What do they want to undertake against these accusations? Let each word be a spark! Sparks in the barren soil of silence. Each word a spark. Each sentence a match. Each tongue a flame. Bombs. Grenades. Molotov cocktails. Fire to the foundations of the law. Let resistance be ignited! Are these words not allowed? Does the established order, represented by paternalistic prosecutors and judges to whom the laws are sacred, by desk murderers and trigger happy cops, by ministers and state secretaries that hunt down refugees, does it fear these words? Then let each word blow the fire of resistance!
How many words are needed for that? In fact none, because resistance is even more being stirred up by the repression of the state itself. This is getting more and more visible, even though the executioners, that on behalf of the state deal with demonstrations of refugees that have dared to make themselves visible, try to conceal their molestations. They use brutal force and make sure that this will happen out of the sight of bystanders and media, just like it happens in cells and airplanes, in cuffs and gags, in beating, kicking and suffocation. The violence that the state uses every day in order to deny people their right to exist is being organized, mechanized, perfected and legalized. Without this violence the system cannot function.
In the year 2004 in the article 'Stop Deportations – A statement against the silence' I wrote:
Are we going to let voices be heard that are now being ignored? Are we going to demonstrate and occupy, are we going to disturb parliamentary justifications from high above their government seats with our outcries? It is the least we will do! Are we going to break down the centers that serve as camps for the unwanted, are we going to keep the airplanes stuffed with cuffed people on the ground?
And:
So what, if only a little we feel what those people, that have had their freedom taken away their whole life already, feel? So what? For what is it worth, our freedom, without the freedom of another? What is it worth then, my freedom? It is the freedom of an executioner, that does not make his own hands dirty.
The word 'deportation' was not allowed to be heard by former minister Verdonk at the time. [note for non-Dutch people: the Dutch government uses only the term 'expulsion']. Jan Pronk, at the time chairman for the Union of Refugee Organizations Netherlands, used the word deportations late January 2004 and had, as demanded by Verdonk, to 'take back' the word. Let Verdonk take back the deportations! But gone is gone, out of eye out of sight, chased to their deaths. Deportation, that means to arrest people, throw them out of the country and never look back.
Each time again the word 'deportation' is being used, it is pushed aside as being inappropriate because it is considered to make a comparison with deportations during World War II. Again and again, those that are to blame try to wipe criticism off the table and to silence opponents, because they are afraid of the mirror that is being held up to them!
In 'Stop Deportations – A statement against the silence' I also wrote:
Destroy the instruments that are being operated for deportation, as you would do in war, and stand in front of the doors of the houses from which people are being dragged away.
And:
I'll prefer anything over becoming an accomplice to the crime of deportations! Not in my name, to remain silent. Not in my name.
In the nine years that have passed since then, I have not changed my mind, and faithfully AIVD, police and the law read everything that I wrote. As if the words were a threat that could explode any moment. The policy got worse, as far as still possible and regardless of which parties were in the government, regardless of who was responsible for immigration and asylum.
October 2006: Verdonk signs a performance contract with all the police corpses, agreeing that in 2007 the police has to catch 12.000 illegals, in exchange for a considerable financial reward. To achieve this goal 40.000 'aliens' must be stopped and checked for papers. The quota must be met!
After Verdonk, Albayrak came, who for show announced a general pardon that left many people missing the boat. There was in fact no pardon and Albayrak turned out to be even more cunning and tougher than Verdonk. After Albayrak, Leers came, who equipped the police with special smart-phones to be able to take fingerprints on the street. It is July 2011 as he says: “The devices shall be used to intensify the control of illegal aliens.”
After Leers, it is now the turn of Fred the refugee hunter Teeven, who brags that there will be a pardon for children, and again a fake pardon is being put forward to mask the manhunt that is high on the political agenda.
They all have one thing in common, and not just with each-other, but also with the rest of all political parties in the Dutch and European parliament: the Fortress of Europe for the Europeans, equivalent to The Netherlands for the Dutch and Our People First.
Those who are being rejected, have to leave, willingly or unwillingly but always under pressure. Pressure that involves intense control, the denial of rights such as housing, food and care, and imprisonment for an indefinite period of time. To say that there is such a thing as voluntary return is to say that there is such a thing as running away voluntarily. It does not exist. People do not run away because they want to, but because they are forced to.
An exclusive minority of migrants that is pulled out of their own country, the so called Highly Skilled Migrants, is being selected as a welcome addition for the economic prosperity of that heavily guarded Fortress. If you had the opportunity to study, if you have money, you are more than welcome, a showpiece for the façade of tolerance. Those that have every reason to rush off, leaving behind family, personal documents, a piece of land or business of their own, can get a one way deportation ticket back home.
I accuse, the executors of the laws of apartheid, that carry out their orders blindly!
To begin with:
Let officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), the Dienst Terugkeer en Vertrek (DT&V=service for 'returns and departures'), the uniformed weapon bearers of police and military police, the key bearers of the prisons, answer for their contribution to the systematic destruction of people, cast in the institutionalized racism that has been laid down in laws.
The officials that work for the IND all think that they are just doing their job, just like cops that hunt down undocumented people, or guards in prisons, or the military police that hauls gagged people into an airplane. To say that it is only your job, is to let yourself off easy, without criticism, without a sense of shame!
How can you sleep at night? How can you face a person and be the bureaucrat that only follows the rules? To put the stamp 'refused' or 'unwanted' on a file is not the same as writing off a book in the library. The rejection of people and their needs is not the same as throwing away consumption products because they have passed the perishable date. It is not the same as the destruction of an amount of drugs that has been confiscated in a raid. These are people that are being numbered and classified, that are being divided into categories such as 'economic asylum seeker' and 'political asylum seeker' just to portray the one as a parasite, and to send the other one back as soon as it is safe according to the minister. But even worse: a refugee may only call himself a refugee if the IND says so! These are people that are repeatedly being thrown out as waste products, worthless and superfluous. Why they came here, does not matter. Go away! For the lucky ones that are allowed to stay, there are immigration rules that point out that they need to assimilate to Dutch society completely, that they are not allowed to make even the slightest mistake, otherwise they will go straight back return to sender, like a package in the mail.
All you officials that take orders to execute all of this, you have blood on your hands, just like the politicians, whether you are the director of the IND or the guard that works for security company G4S and had a crash-course in locking up people and has been put to work in a deportation center: the decision to do it or not is all yours.
If nobody cooperates, nothing can be executed. If there are no cog-wheels available to replace the broken ones, the deportation machine gets stuck.
I accuse, the architects, the engineers, the building companies, that are eager to obtain assignments of the state to build prisons!
To begin with:
Let the directors and megalomaniac developers with their bulky bank accounts and their country houses in Wassenaar, het Gooi, or some other Gold Coast far from all poverty, that pay poor wages to a maid without papers to be used as a gesture of charity to wash their dirty hands, let them answer for their Quote 500 riches gained over the backs of discarded fellow human beings.
Over the past few years two new border prisons have been built through a construction of Public Private Cooperation, at Rotterdam Airport and Schiphol West. The last one has been taken into use recently and is already filled with of desperate people that came to the Netherlands in search for freedom.
Every day they can see the airplanes fly over the yard and the cells. In every plane their may be a fellow sufferer chained and gagged between guards that will put an end to the least bit of resistance immediately.
Companies such as Ballast Nedam, Strukton, BAM, EGM Architects, ISS Facility Services and many others competed for the tenders for new prisons. The gates to hell that they have built, marketed to the outside world as golden cages, are bunkers to serve only one rigid objective: the deportation of people. They thought they could be proud of that and were proven emphatically wrong. Long black-lists of large and small companies show the shame they have brought upon themselves.
These prisons have not only been designed, financed and built by the companies but they will also operate them for 25 years. Sit back and count your profits! Sit back and count your victims! Does even only one designer of cells lay awake because of his design? Hell no! Only when activists leave the symbol of blood on their doorstep. That they call terror. But they do not know what terror is!
I say to them: You are partners in the war that the European nation states have declared migrants. An invisible war. A war not made public. But we shall bring that war to light! And people who have been declared war, have the perfect right to defend themselves against it, and search and find supporters. In war, resistance comes with acts of sabotage. Companies that take it upon themselves to facilitate the imprisonment and deportations of victims of war, shall be targeted until they stop their investments in the neo-liberal penal state. You are all part of the system that is being run by your financial injections and relentless lobby. You are the multinationals that pull the strings of politics, and politics pretend that the voters are the ones who have a say. That, in short, is your role. A leading role, that is played behind the scenes. In fact the multinational companies with their craving for economic domination are the ones that are responsible for every political decision, for every law that must guarantee the profits.
For example: the foreigners law, a law, aimed only at 'The Foreigner', as people in the suffocating procedures are constantly called. To aim a law at a group of people that is being set apart and is being referred to as 'The Foreigner' is institutionalized racism, apartheid. It sets 'The Foreigner' separate rules and dictates restrictions. This law reverses the burden of proof. Those who cannot prove something, are turned down. Entering the country with a false passport? Away with you! Why someone has a false passport, is not a question in the IND's vocabulary. Why someone in the haste of fleeing does not bring along pieces of evidence is of no importance either. Papers, papers, papers. You do not have them, so you will not get them. In this all grinding mill of vague procedures a person is nothing but the documents the IND officials and judges produce. Impossible to follow and incomprehensible on purpose as the are, people do not stand a chance. This is why so often from behind the bars of the border prisons the call “Why?” sounds. The system just is not fair in answering this question. It does not tell the truth, which is:
Because we, the leaders of the governments and the directors of the multinationals and the banks have decided that we want to keep our wealth to ourselves. For 'our' people. For 'our' economy. Because we, the neo-colonialistic rulers of the modern times, only want the good stuff from abroad, which is worth money, for which we do not have, or only have little, to pay. The VOC has not ceased to exist, it has only be renamed and modernized.
Because we, the great squanderers and waste dumpers of the globally organized digging expedition in the developing countries, build our prosperity on the mess we leave behind as soon as a country or region is no longer profitable. And we, that is our Fortress of Europe right here, the United States on the other side, and Australia down-under. It belongs to us, is for us, note the word 'us'.
I accuse, the neo-colonial, neo-liberal, nationalistic representatives of the apartheid regime, the democrats with their demeaning attitude towards refugees and their fear for protest and resistance, for the truth that their democracy is a dictatorship and will be assaulted as such.
To begin with:
Let the representatives of the current government of the state that calls itself The Netherlands, and all their predecessors, let them answer for decades of smear-campaigns, that find their match in Goebbels' repeating the lie until the people want to believe it, let them answer for the blackmail and the threats, for crushing people and driving people mad, let them answer for each law that they hide behind to deny all accountability for killings and suicide.
Today I point out Fred Teeven, Ivo Opstelten, Mark Rutte, Diederik Samson and Lodewijk Asscher as the political leaders that are answerable. Many went before them, but to say that all they did was to execute the policy of a predecessor is not a valid excuse. It is a choice to execute and to not reverse. It is a choice to continue on a course that has been laid out. It is a choice to be a puppet of capitalism. No way are they doing what 'the voter' wants, what 'all of us' have voted for. The sustained slander coming from politicians is what makes people agree on behalf of 'all of us'. But it is NOT IN MY NAME that all of this is happening!
Xenophobia is being sown and subsequently harvested just like grain. Refined, gradually, unnoticed. In the eighties we could still say of Janmaat and his Centre Party and his Centre Democrats that they were fascists. His ideas have now become generally accepted and policy. It is not a valid excuse to only blame Wilders for this. Many politicians cuddle up against this Great Blond Death to regain the votes of the electorate. They fed the thought and then took possession of it. No politician has a valid excuse to not be responsible.
The Netherlands walks in front of these delusions of grandeur of the heavily guarded continent of Europe. At the moment it pushes through the penalization of the by states themselves made up 'illegality'. In October 2009, Albayrak was knighted in the Legion of Honor by the French state-secretary of justice, for helping to realize the European Pact for immigration and asylum. That same Albayrak closed all emergency shelters for rejected refugees in 2007.
Since November 2011 the refugees do no longer put up with the fact that they are treated as third rate civilians, as untermensch. The first tent camps at the freedom restricting location Ter Apel were the beginning of something that can not be stopped: the fierce resistance of the refugees with their tent camps, in storm, rain, frost and snow. The courage of the refugees, that had until then been in hiding out of fear for arrest and deportation, let us talk about that!
I quote Fred Teeven about the bill for penalization of what is still being called 'illegality':
“What matters is, that illegal stay is becoming unattractive. This will drive them away.”
“First of all, these people have to leave. If you just leave, you will not be exploited.”
“It is about laying down a standard. We will draw peoples attention to the fact that they really have to leave The Netherlands.”
Mark Rutte says: “The Netherlands show the rest of the world that illegal stay is not being permitted here. We take the approach to this problem seriously.”
The brave defenders of The Netherlands against the scary foreigners want to make a statement to the rest of the world. 'Drive them away'. 'Laying down a standard'. 'Approach to this problem'. Is it about some tough guys that are going around liquidating each-other, is it about gang wars? No, it is about people that ARE here. To smoke them out, that is the plan. But nobody will be smoked out. It is similar to setting fire to a prison and then tell people to go out if they do not want to suffocate, if they do not want to burn alive. Very adequate, as Verdonk put it after the Schiphol prison fire. The council of ministers that agreed with Fred Teevens bill, is asking for people to die. In legal terms this would at least be conditional intent to cause the deaths of people. I call it: MURDER. We can all see it coming. You can just wait for the first person that will poor gasoline over his body on the square in front of The Binnenhof (seat of parliament) because there is no other way out of the misery. A lot of people will watch him strike a match. A lot of people will be horrified because of what they saw. But then it is too late.
“You can demonstrate until eternity, but you will not get a residence permit if you go sit in a tent.” Fred Teeven said about refugees that take action in tent camps. All those refugees that have persisted despite this remark of Teeven, that risked their lives to get to this country to begin with, they deserve the greatest respect from all of us.
Portrayed as campers, or pathetic asylum seekers, they are the ones that lead the way and give resistance a face and a new impulse. Thousands of words I can write, but these are also and even better to be read in the eyes of each one of them that I meet, and who tells me his or her story and refuses to be suppressed and pacified any longer. They are stories like many stories, that all have one thing in common: these are all people that are being chased back and forth on this planet like outcasts, because to the capitalist system they are not worth a dime. Not a dime for their own lives, not even for their slavery. It is worth a lot of money though, to abuse and fight them. Money for tyrants and million dollar contracts, money for oil and resources. Money for Frontex frigates to make people drown at sea, for training border-guards, for walls and fences, barbed wire and NATO wire, for camera's and lots of technological novelties to catch stowaways in the cargo holds of trucks and airplanes, hidden in containers with plastic bags over their head, and in ships. Money for 'State of the Art' computer systems, elaborate registration furnished with serial numbers and fingerprints. In short: money for murder and molestations, for persecution and incarceration, money for blackmail and threats.
But the refugees are done giving in, so a large diversity of population groups combines forces and bridges their differences. A lot of people are ready to support their struggle. With anything,from tents and sleeping bags, food and canvases, demonstrations and actions, to resistance. I am but one of those people. And I am telling you here and now, once and again: ENOUGH! It has got to stop, the divide and conquer between migrants, the divide and conquer between 'our own people' and migrants. It has got to stop, the repression that has been developed in such great detail, the ever so perfect deportation machine that is working overtime daily. It has got to stop, the lies and hypocrisy of the politicians, from the mayors Van der Laan and Van Aartsen of Amsterdam and The Hague to the ministers and state-secretaries in The Binnenhof, van Opstelten, Teeven, Rutte, Asscher, Samson. They are joining hands to make peoples lives impossible. The mayors claim that there is nothing they can do, but evict the tent camps saying the camps are a danger to the health of their inhabitants. They should have thought of that when they closed down the cities' shelters! In fact, what they mean to say, is that they do not want the activists of the camps to lie in the cold so openly, get wet and sick, and get help from people. In fact, what they mean to say, is that they would rather have these people disappear back into anonymity and then die there from starvation or cold, in a cardboard box of our latest dryer under a bridge, beneath the bushes between dog shit in the park. They mean to say, that an unknown corpse in an alley is easier to get rid of without being noticed, than the protest in plain sight on the Koekamp opposite The Hague Central Station. They mean to say, that they want to look humane so badly, that they do not want to be held liable, that they do not want responsibility on their plate. They mean to say that they are only doing their job. But they also have blood on their hands.
Blood on their hands is what all politicians have. Also the ones that plea for a milder regime in the detention centers, that say they are adopting the demands of refugees, but lower their standards beforehand because actually they as well think that those who have been rejected, have to leave. It is such an easy thing to say: “They cannot all come to the Netherlands”. That is right. They cannot. Because in fact most of them do not even have the money to pay the human traffickers to get here! Nevertheless populist propagandists claim in terms of 'tidal waves' and 'flood' that mass immigration would get under way if the borders were to be abolished. No lie is gross enough in order to frighten people!
But it is not the refugees that are the problem, the problem is the bankrupt capitalist system that stubbornly clings on to the exploitation of development countries and world wide migration control in order to protect itself. It is the morbid 'solution' to the redundant part of world population that is immersed into poverty, so that our riches continue to be financed. It is the endlösung that comes easily, if you abandon people. A fascist-like fact of life. It all has to remain that way, in favor of us with our latest mania and gadgets, our latest fashion, empty office buildings, our luxurious shopping streets, our parties and modern games, our thoughtless passing by the tent camp, thinking about our next holiday. Camping, that is fun! Where shall we go next year?
Hitching in with refugees in front of a tent in the mud. It is such a small act of resistance and at the same time of so much value. I did it because I do not want to be one of that 'us'. Twice I have been dragged away. A little inconvenience compared to the years of being hunted down that people have to endure. Years of fear and insecurity, of a life on the street, of waiting, waiting, waiting...
A few hours spent in a narrow cell in The Hague. I saw Araz, the Iraqi from Baghdad who cannot prove he was born in Baghdad and therefore has to leave The Netherlands, holding his hand with a look of pain on his face, when I was taken for interrogation. He has a broken hand due to police violence during the eviction of the camp. I was glad to see him again at a demonstration. He did not give up. And this is why I will not give up. By what right should I give up? By what right should I shut up? The executioners of the Dutch state will not defeat the struggling refugees. We support their struggle. I support their struggle. So the people in the cells of the border prisons will not feel as if they have been let down. So people will no longer out of despair set fire to themselves. So we will not again have to hear a minister say that “a well-considered decision has been made” and that he is does not feel responsible. Not responsible for all the violence that is being used to send people to their deaths.
And simply because I categorically refuse to comply with all of this, I am now being charged with calling for violence?! The violence is coming from the state. Resistance and sabotage are not violence, they are necessary, sincere, and fight for freedom. They do not assault a persons existence, they attack at best equipment, weapons and structure that is being employed in order to carry out this states' violence. They attack the foundation of power, and still they are only pinpricks. No word is needless or superfluous in the call for freedom. To demand that one has to 'answer' for words, is tyranny. It is a tyranny that was to be expected as an extension of the hunt for refugees.
Away with tyranny! Each word a spark! Our statements, our testimonies, our accusations! And so words are being prohibited. If they can not prohibit the words, cannot let writers keep their big mouth shut, then unavoidably intimidation and allegations will be next. Then they will speak of terrorism, while true terror comes from the weapons of army and police. Then they will speak of calls for violence, while calls for violence are rooted in the constitutional state.
What exactly is that, violence?
Is setting fire to an office of the IND, where refugees are being registered and where decisions over their lives are being made, violence?
Is it violence if I cut the fence around a border prison, write slogans on a wall?
Is it all violence because the law says so?
Is violence allowed and therefore no violence if it has been arranged by law?
Is chasing and imprisoning people violence?
Is deporting people violence?
Is it violence to kick people out on the street, in the freezing cold, without food?
The violence is obvious at the borders of the Fortress of Europe. At the gates with barbed wire and camera's. You can tell by the bodies that wash ashore. The violence is liquid like the oil that is being pumped out of the ground of development countries, liquid like the sea that is being fished empty after which the hungry population is being charged with piracy! The violence is the monopoly of the capitalist robbery, slavery, violence is making money! That is where the sources of violence lie. Each word a spark! Each text a bomb under the silence!
If what I say may be called violence, then what does one call the violence of state and capital?
I accuse, the mass media that feed hysteria, that meekly publish all press releases coming from the government, that only call attention to the consequences of repression if there are casualties, if radical actions have been taken, if a minister has gotten a bit of red paint on his house!
To begin with,
Let them answer for it, these collaborators that let themselves be paid for lying and remaining silent, that are eager for sensation, that feast on a minister who says he or she is feeling 'dreadfully cut up' by a spatter of ketchup, aim their camera's at the broken windows of an IND-office and can think of no other question than the one meant to make people turn against each-other.
The game of divide and conquer is being played through the mass media. Let us not fall in that trap! It is big business and it depends on commerce, advertisement. Those who have money and power, can speak up and be heard, have an influence on headlines, are invited to talk shows that will only ask the kind of questions that are careful and do not mean to discuss the core of implemented policy. TV programs pour out ego flattering images over their viewers. The mass media have made a pact with their subjects: “I'll scratch your back, you'll scratch mine”. And now for another cozy game show: bread and games for the public!
But the powers-that-be forget all about the increasing influence of the use of Internet. And they fear this influence! They fear the fast distribution of the truth, the critical words, and the calls for resistance. That is why they try to survey and control the World Wide Web.
In spite of all manipulation: the struggle can take many forms. It can be overt and in large numbers, grand. It can keep its back straight as it takes a beating and endure the pain of passive resistance. It can attack the state and the companies when they least expect it, adopt the night and the guerrilla tactics of sabotage. But in whatever form: it will not accept, I will not accept that the apparatus of power and violence will make more casualties then it has already done. And this struggle may, can and will be instigated.
You can lock me up, but shall not silence me, not restrict the thought of freedom that connects us all. You can lock me up, to warn others. But we shall not be intimidated. You can take my website offline, but many will take its place. You think that you have the right to judge me and you can let the sentence be carried out...
Let it be clear that I, that we, who deliver and distribute these accusations that I have just made you listen to, are also capable of drawing conclusions. If you want to call that incitement, than I can only be proud of that. It means that my words have been heard and have hit the mark, and that is the least I want to accomplish.
No word without deeds! More important than this trial is the struggle that needs to be kept up, a tough and daily reality that the Public Prosecution wants to keep me away from. This trial has strengthened me in my conviction that resistance is necessary. To the Public Prosecution, the National Crime Squad (in dutch: 'Dienst Nationale Recherche'), Unit Counter Terrorism and Activism, the AIVD, your court, to the state, I have only one more thing to say: mission failed. Each word a spark!
Joke Kaviaar, January 8, 2013 (translation January 17, 2013)
- Migration activist does not let herself be silenced
Today the bench chamber of the court in Haarlem ruled in the case of incitement by speech and word against Joke Kaviaar. The court rejected all of the defense pleas of her lawyer and sentenced Joke to four months in prison. This is less than the six months imprisonment the Public Prosecutor had asked for. Joke Kaviaar will appeal the conviction and announces that she will not let herself be silenced. She will continue to speak out against the Dutch migration policy.
The Support Group 13 September, founded after the arrest of Joke Kaviaar, feels that the ruling was to be expected, as seen in the light of the current political climate in the Netherlands and in the standing jurisprudence around the Supreme Court regarding incitement (Article 131 of the Criminal Code).
The current verdict restricts the freedom of expression: from now on Joke Kaviaar and other publicists offering sharp criticism against government policy will get into danger to be restricted as well. This verdict creates dangerous jurisprudence for further restriction of criticism against the government.
Joke Kaviaar will appeal to a higher court, because she will keep defending her right to express herself by her texts, both as part of the struggle for free speech against state repression and as part of the refugee struggle. The sentence is a scandal, but will not break the ongoing struggle against borders and for freedom of movement.
Joke Kaviaar was arrested at home on September 13, 2011 and detained for three days under full restrictions. Meanwhile a house search took place. She was charged with “incitement and spreading incitement with a terrorist intent”. This charge involved a number of texts in which Joke fiercely speaks out against the Dutch migration policy. A few months later, in December, the Public Prosecutor’s National Office had her website taken offline. It was a day later put back online by unknowns and is still accessible.
After a long-term investigation two weeks ago, on January 8, a hearing before the bench chamber place finally took place. Four of her texts were submitted by the Public Prosecution to the court as being 'inciting'. The previous accusation that Joke Kaviaar had a “terrorist intent” with the alleged incitement was dropped. This raises the suspicion that the aggravated charge at the time of arrest, permitting the house search, and used throughout the entire investigation has only been added as intimidation, and to make use of the extensive investigative powers of the terrorism legislation.
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For more information: Support Group 13 September (
info@13-september.nl) The quotes for which Joke Kaviaar is convicted, the relevant articles and more background information, are available at www.13-september.nl and
http://13-september.nl/tag/english (english info) Website of Joke Kaviaar: www.jokekaviaar.nl
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Joke her last words as spoken at the court hearing of January 8th, 2013 in Haarlem, the Netherlands:
Each word a spark!
The Public Prosecution thinks it has the right to prosecute me on charges of what it calls 'incitement'. In fact they are persecuting me because of my opinion, because of my written attacks on the destruction machine that is called immigration policy.
In an article published in the newspaper, Noord Hollands Dagblad, dated December 29, 2012 a spokesman of the National Prosecutors Office said about their case against me: “We find it most of all important that she stands trial and has to answer herself for her words.” So, for words... Words that I will not take back. The same spokesman also said: “The defendant seems to have done nothing to make sure that her website would disappear.”
Today again it becomes more than obvious: the National Prosecutors Office wants me to censor myself, since they can not: “It is going to be difficult to prevent such mirror websites.” as was said in Noord Hollands Dagblad. Power feels powerless, so it is intent on revenge.
The Public Prosecution will do everything to dispose this trial of its political character. Let it not be the content of the articles, that have been quoted in the summons, that is the matter at hand. It must seem as if here and today it is all just about an individual that writes punishable articles. It is plain criminalization. On one hand the Public Prosecution wants to conduct a political trial. On the other hand it wants to get rid of its political content. This is why in this last word, I will spend a lot of words on the outrage of this trial that is being conducted in defense of a racist 'asylum' policy, that is no asylum policy, to serve the purpose of splitting up its opponents. Here, I will also continue my accusations against the state for its crimes against refugees. Because, if the Public Prosecution wants to prosecute me for my opinion, my words, it can have my opinion and my words! The only justice that can be served during this trial, is to bring forward these accusations.
This is a political trial. This is shown by the objectives of the Gulkana investigation as they have been formulated in the dossier of the case. These objectives are, apart from 'to stop the offense': 'to discourage the suspect and the faction' and 'to send out a signal to the suspect, the faction and the population'.
The Public Prosecution engages in politics. This is not just a test-case to see how far they can go in limiting freedom of speech for all those who attack the state for its policy, but also a show trial, a someone-to-blame trial, a trail that has to 'discourage' others that dare to speak out. A trial that has to 'discourage' others that dare to actually come into action: the 'faction'. It has all been in vain, all this discouraging. The Public Prosecution rests nothing more than to demand punishment, and it does so on political grounds.
I am telling the Public Prosecution and the court here before me: None of you will be able to make the accusations against the state and the capitalist system disappear. And again: Not a word I will take back. Even more: I will repeat and extend these accusations. It does not seem to me that I have any obligation to answer to the Public Prosecution, nor to any court, nor to any representative of the state whatsoever, whether it is for words that call for necessary resistance or for actual deeds of necessary resistance.
With necessary resistance I mean: the resistance that is imperative to defend suppressed individuals that fear for their safety, their freedom, and their lives. Resistance that is labeled by the state as violent, so it can be judged and dispatched with as being criminal. Resistance that does not wait until it is too late, but takes on the offensive. Resistance that does not want to measure up to power and the violence of those in power, but is anti-authoritarian, that wants to break down, all that is justified to be broken down: the many times larger destruction that the preservation of that power and the violence of that power will bring about. We have but to look at the hidden genocide, committed by the united European democratic constitutional states in their zeal to dispose of immigrants. I will now mention six of the victims that are on the incomplete list of deaths by The Netherlands, that we hear about:
April 9, 2012: Alain Hatungimana (36 jr., from Burundi) had to leave the country and committed suicide to make sure that his children could stay, a son age 14 and a daughter age 12. Their mother had already been killed in Burundi.
December 29, 2011: unknown man (41 jr., from Sri Lanka).
Found dead in the registration center at Schiphol on the day that he was told he was not going to get asylum. He had tried to kill himself before.
December 22, 2011: Predrag Molnar (40 jr., from Serbia).
Cell complex North-West Amsterdam (Meer & Vaart). Found dead in his cell.
Augustus 22, 2011: James ... (from Liberia)
Asylum center Echt: Set fire to himself after a conversation with the Dienst Terugkeer & Vertrek (DT&V=service for 'returns and departures') and died of his injuries twenty days later.
April 6, 2011: Kambiz Roustayi (36 jr., from Iran)
Set himself on fire on Dam square in Amsterdam and died of his injuries the day after. His situation was hopeless, asylum rejected. After 11 years of procedures he had to return to Iran where torture and death awaited him.
September 2010: Nezam Azimi (60 jr., from Afghanistan)
After a rejected asylum request and following forced return in August 2006, he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan.
They are not the only ones! Repeatedly people have fallen to their deaths from apartment buildings while fleeing from a raid by the immigration police: Michael Osey, October 4, 2004. An unknown man from Pakistan, July 29, 2010. These kinds of raids are common, just as surrounding trams to catch people, identity control at railway stations, and raids at cafés such as the one at the Grand Café in South East Amsterdam in the fall of 2011, thanks to the collaboration of Connexxion bus drivers that found it suspicious that women 'with a negroid appearance' were on the bus to Heemstede and Bloemendaal (towns where wealthy people live)...
It has been hunting season permanently for many years! The sabotage of the machinery that the states and their politicians operate to keep up their hunt and mass murder, is legitimate in every aspect. That resistance, that is necessary resistance. The enforced fact that there is a law that makes this criminal, does not mean that this law is just and that we should keep to it. If resistance stopped at the boundaries of the law, the struggle would have been given up a long time ago!
Laws are by definition being imposed from above. No person has asked for the Identification Act, that is often being used to catch people without residence permit. “Ausweis bitte!” That law serves no other purpose than manhunt. Many people now protest the introduction of the penalization of 'illegality', just as once upon a time people protested against the introduction of the Linking Act ('koppelingswet' in Dutch) that makes it impossible for people to work legally and drives them into the hands of dishonest employers. The Dublin agreement, that makes it impossible for people to request asylum in a second European country, the new European Returns Directive that provides for a five year entry ban and for long term detention in the Fortress of Europe; all these laws, all these agreements, they have all been designed by governments that want to put up obstacles against people that are looking for a better life in Europe. These are laws, designed by high officials and politicians with a nationalistic agenda, that have no grounds for justification, other than having the power and the means to execute them.
In the case against me, the Public Prosecution comes out with a law that states that calling for resistance is a crime, a law that in the past has been used against many political activists to make an example of them for others. My answer to that law is, that I will, like many laws, not consider it the standard for my actions. The standard is humanity, solidarity, freedom, consensus, equality, the fair sharing of prosperity, without bosses and hierarchy, a society without exploitation of soil, water, animals and humans. A law is nothing but letters in a book. A book that in this trial is the rule along which the indictments of the Public Prosecution are being measured, that is being used to calculate punishment, but that says nothing about the crimes it allows.
Lady Justice is not wearing a blindfold, Lady Justice is wearing blinders.
I accuse, all those enforcing and executing the law!
To begin with:
Let the Public Prosecution answer for the intimidation and censorship of political opponents under the guise of state security, the filling of cells with written off people under the guise of public order, the preservation of the illusion that we need punishment and imprisonment of people, to serve only one goal which is to justify the building of more prisons and to exploit it.
I accuse, the designers of the laws, the nation states and their borders!
To begin with:
Let the representatives of the state answer for their systematic destruction of people, cast in the institutionalized racism that has been laid down in their laws, let them answer for instigating xenophobia.
What do they want to undertake against these accusations? Let each word be a spark! Sparks in the barren soil of silence. Each word a spark. Each sentence a match. Each tongue a flame. Bombs. Grenades. Molotov cocktails. Fire to the foundations of the law. Let resistance be ignited! Are these words not allowed? Does the established order, represented by paternalistic prosecutors and judges to whom the laws are sacred, by desk murderers and trigger happy cops, by ministers and state secretaries that hunt down refugees, does it fear these words? Then let each word blow the fire of resistance!
How many words are needed for that? In fact none, because resistance is even more being stirred up by the repression of the state itself. This is getting more and more visible, even though the executioners, that on behalf of the state deal with demonstrations of refugees that have dared to make themselves visible, try to conceal their molestations. They use brutal force and make sure that this will happen out of the sight of bystanders and media, just like it happens in cells and airplanes, in cuffs and gags, in beating, kicking and suffocation. The violence that the state uses every day in order to deny people their right to exist is being organized, mechanized, perfected and legalized. Without this violence the system cannot function.
In the year 2004 in the article 'Stop Deportations – A statement against the silence' I wrote:
Are we going to let voices be heard that are now being ignored? Are we going to demonstrate and occupy, are we going to disturb parliamentary justifications from high above their government seats with our outcries? It is the least we will do! Are we going to break down the centers that serve as camps for the unwanted, are we going to keep the airplanes stuffed with cuffed people on the ground?
And:
So what, if only a little we feel what those people, that have had their freedom taken away their whole life already, feel? So what? For what is it worth, our freedom, without the freedom of another? What is it worth then, my freedom? It is the freedom of an executioner, that does not make his own hands dirty.
The word 'deportation' was not allowed to be heard by former minister Verdonk at the time. [note for non-Dutch people: the Dutch government uses only the term 'expulsion']. Jan Pronk, at the time chairman for the Union of Refugee Organizations Netherlands, used the word deportations late January 2004 and had, as demanded by Verdonk, to 'take back' the word. Let Verdonk take back the deportations! But gone is gone, out of eye out of sight, chased to their deaths. Deportation, that means to arrest people, throw them out of the country and never look back.
Each time again the word 'deportation' is being used, it is pushed aside as being inappropriate because it is considered to make a comparison with deportations during World War II. Again and again, those that are to blame try to wipe criticism off the table and to silence opponents, because they are afraid of the mirror that is being held up to them!
In 'Stop Deportations – A statement against the silence' I also wrote:
Destroy the instruments that are being operated for deportation, as you would do in war, and stand in front of the doors of the houses from which people are being dragged away.
And:
I'll prefer anything over becoming an accomplice to the crime of deportations! Not in my name, to remain silent. Not in my name.
In the nine years that have passed since then, I have not changed my mind, and faithfully AIVD, police and the law read everything that I wrote. As if the words were a threat that could explode any moment. The policy got worse, as far as still possible and regardless of which parties were in the government, regardless of who was responsible for immigration and asylum.
October 2006: Verdonk signs a performance contract with all the police corpses, agreeing that in 2007 the police has to catch 12.000 illegals, in exchange for a considerable financial reward. To achieve this goal 40.000 'aliens' must be stopped and checked for papers. The quota must be met!
After Verdonk, Albayrak came, who for show announced a general pardon that left many people missing the boat. There was in fact no pardon and Albayrak turned out to be even more cunning and tougher than Verdonk. After Albayrak, Leers came, who equipped the police with special smart-phones to be able to take fingerprints on the street. It is July 2011 as he says: “The devices shall be used to intensify the control of illegal aliens.”
After Leers, it is now the turn of Fred the refugee hunter Teeven, who brags that there will be a pardon for children, and again a fake pardon is being put forward to mask the manhunt that is high on the political agenda.
They all have one thing in common, and not just with each-other, but also with the rest of all political parties in the Dutch and European parliament: the Fortress of Europe for the Europeans, equivalent to The Netherlands for the Dutch and Our People First.
Those who are being rejected, have to leave, willingly or unwillingly but always under pressure. Pressure that involves intense control, the denial of rights such as housing, food and care, and imprisonment for an indefinite period of time. To say that there is such a thing as voluntary return is to say that there is such a thing as running away voluntarily. It does not exist. People do not run away because they want to, but because they are forced to.
An exclusive minority of migrants that is pulled out of their own country, the so called Highly Skilled Migrants, is being selected as a welcome addition for the economic prosperity of that heavily guarded Fortress. If you had the opportunity to study, if you have money, you are more than welcome, a showpiece for the façade of tolerance. Those that have every reason to rush off, leaving behind family, personal documents, a piece of land or business of their own, can get a one way deportation ticket back home.
I accuse, the executors of the laws of apartheid, that carry out their orders blindly!
To begin with:
Let officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), the Dienst Terugkeer en Vertrek (DT&V=service for 'returns and departures'), the uniformed weapon bearers of police and military police, the key bearers of the prisons, answer for their contribution to the systematic destruction of people, cast in the institutionalized racism that has been laid down in laws.
The officials that work for the IND all think that they are just doing their job, just like cops that hunt down undocumented people, or guards in prisons, or the military police that hauls gagged people into an airplane. To say that it is only your job, is to let yourself off easy, without criticism, without a sense of shame!
How can you sleep at night? How can you face a person and be the bureaucrat that only follows the rules? To put the stamp 'refused' or 'unwanted' on a file is not the same as writing off a book in the library. The rejection of people and their needs is not the same as throwing away consumption products because they have passed the perishable date. It is not the same as the destruction of an amount of drugs that has been confiscated in a raid. These are people that are being numbered and classified, that are being divided into categories such as 'economic asylum seeker' and 'political asylum seeker' just to portray the one as a parasite, and to send the other one back as soon as it is safe according to the minister. But even worse: a refugee may only call himself a refugee if the IND says so! These are people that are repeatedly being thrown out as waste products, worthless and superfluous. Why they came here, does not matter. Go away! For the lucky ones that are allowed to stay, there are immigration rules that point out that they need to assimilate to Dutch society completely, that they are not allowed to make even the slightest mistake, otherwise they will go straight back return to sender, like a package in the mail.
All you officials that take orders to execute all of this, you have blood on your hands, just like the politicians, whether you are the director of the IND or the guard that works for security company G4S and had a crash-course in locking up people and has been put to work in a deportation center: the decision to do it or not is all yours.
If nobody cooperates, nothing can be executed. If there are no cog-wheels available to replace the broken ones, the deportation machine gets stuck.
I accuse, the architects, the engineers, the building companies, that are eager to obtain assignments of the state to build prisons!
To begin with:
Let the directors and megalomaniac developers with their bulky bank accounts and their country houses in Wassenaar, het Gooi, or some other Gold Coast far from all poverty, that pay poor wages to a maid without papers to be used as a gesture of charity to wash their dirty hands, let them answer for their Quote 500 riches gained over the backs of discarded fellow human beings.
Over the past few years two new border prisons have been built through a construction of Public Private Cooperation, at Rotterdam Airport and Schiphol West. The last one has been taken into use recently and is already filled with of desperate people that came to the Netherlands in search for freedom.
Every day they can see the airplanes fly over the yard and the cells. In every plane their may be a fellow sufferer chained and gagged between guards that will put an end to the least bit of resistance immediately.
Companies such as Ballast Nedam, Strukton, BAM, EGM Architects, ISS Facility Services and many others competed for the tenders for new prisons. The gates to hell that they have built, marketed to the outside world as golden cages, are bunkers to serve only one rigid objective: the deportation of people. They thought they could be proud of that and were proven emphatically wrong. Long black-lists of large and small companies show the shame they have brought upon themselves.
These prisons have not only been designed, financed and built by the companies but they will also operate them for 25 years. Sit back and count your profits! Sit back and count your victims! Does even only one designer of cells lay awake because of his design? Hell no! Only when activists leave the symbol of blood on their doorstep. That they call terror. But they do not know what terror is!
I say to them: You are partners in the war that the European nation states have declared migrants. An invisible war. A war not made public. But we shall bring that war to light! And people who have been declared war, have the perfect right to defend themselves against it, and search and find supporters. In war, resistance comes with acts of sabotage. Companies that take it upon themselves to facilitate the imprisonment and deportations of victims of war, shall be targeted until they stop their investments in the neo-liberal penal state. You are all part of the system that is being run by your financial injections and relentless lobby. You are the multinationals that pull the strings of politics, and politics pretend that the voters are the ones who have a say. That, in short, is your role. A leading role, that is played behind the scenes. In fact the multinational companies with their craving for economic domination are the ones that are responsible for every political decision, for every law that must guarantee the profits.
For example: the foreigners law, a law, aimed only at 'The Foreigner', as people in the suffocating procedures are constantly called. To aim a law at a group of people that is being set apart and is being referred to as 'The Foreigner' is institutionalized racism, apartheid. It sets 'The Foreigner' separate rules and dictates restrictions. This law reverses the burden of proof. Those who cannot prove something, are turned down. Entering the country with a false passport? Away with you! Why someone has a false passport, is not a question in the IND's vocabulary. Why someone in the haste of fleeing does not bring along pieces of evidence is of no importance either. Papers, papers, papers. You do not have them, so you will not get them. In this all grinding mill of vague procedures a person is nothing but the documents the IND officials and judges produce. Impossible to follow and incomprehensible on purpose as the are, people do not stand a chance. This is why so often from behind the bars of the border prisons the call “Why?” sounds. The system just is not fair in answering this question. It does not tell the truth, which is:
Because we, the leaders of the governments and the directors of the multinationals and the banks have decided that we want to keep our wealth to ourselves. For 'our' people. For 'our' economy. Because we, the neo-colonialistic rulers of the modern times, only want the good stuff from abroad, which is worth money, for which we do not have, or only have little, to pay. The VOC has not ceased to exist, it has only be renamed and modernized.
Because we, the great squanderers and waste dumpers of the globally organized digging expedition in the developing countries, build our prosperity on the mess we leave behind as soon as a country or region is no longer profitable. And we, that is our Fortress of Europe right here, the United States on the other side, and Australia down-under. It belongs to us, is for us, note the word 'us'.
I accuse, the neo-colonial, neo-liberal, nationalistic representatives of the apartheid regime, the democrats with their demeaning attitude towards refugees and their fear for protest and resistance, for the truth that their democracy is a dictatorship and will be assaulted as such.
To begin with:
Let the representatives of the current government of the state that calls itself The Netherlands, and all their predecessors, let them answer for decades of smear-campaigns, that find their match in Goebbels' repeating the lie until the people want to believe it, let them answer for the blackmail and the threats, for crushing people and driving people mad, let them answer for each law that they hide behind to deny all accountability for killings and suicide.
Today I point out Fred Teeven, Ivo Opstelten, Mark Rutte, Diederik Samson and Lodewijk Asscher as the political leaders that are answerable. Many went before them, but to say that all they did was to execute the policy of a predecessor is not a valid excuse. It is a choice to execute and to not reverse. It is a choice to continue on a course that has been laid out. It is a choice to be a puppet of capitalism. No way are they doing what 'the voter' wants, what 'all of us' have voted for. The sustained slander coming from politicians is what makes people agree on behalf of 'all of us'. But it is NOT IN MY NAME that all of this is happening!
Xenophobia is being sown and subsequently harvested just like grain. Refined, gradually, unnoticed. In the eighties we could still say of Janmaat and his Centre Party and his Centre Democrats that they were fascists. His ideas have now become generally accepted and policy. It is not a valid excuse to only blame Wilders for this. Many politicians cuddle up against this Great Blond Death to regain the votes of the electorate. They fed the thought and then took possession of it. No politician has a valid excuse to not be responsible.
The Netherlands walks in front of these delusions of grandeur of the heavily guarded continent of Europe. At the moment it pushes through the penalization of the by states themselves made up 'illegality'. In October 2009, Albayrak was knighted in the Legion of Honor by the French state-secretary of justice, for helping to realize the European Pact for immigration and asylum. That same Albayrak closed all emergency shelters for rejected refugees in 2007.
Since November 2011 the refugees do no longer put up with the fact that they are treated as third rate civilians, as untermensch. The first tent camps at the freedom restricting location Ter Apel were the beginning of something that can not be stopped: the fierce resistance of the refugees with their tent camps, in storm, rain, frost and snow. The courage of the refugees, that had until then been in hiding out of fear for arrest and deportation, let us talk about that!
I quote Fred Teeven about the bill for penalization of what is still being called 'illegality':
“What matters is, that illegal stay is becoming unattractive. This will drive them away.”
“First of all, these people have to leave. If you just leave, you will not be exploited.”
“It is about laying down a standard. We will draw peoples attention to the fact that they really have to leave The Netherlands.”
Mark Rutte says: “The Netherlands show the rest of the world that illegal stay is not being permitted here. We take the approach to this problem seriously.”
The brave defenders of The Netherlands against the scary foreigners want to make a statement to the rest of the world. 'Drive them away'. 'Laying down a standard'. 'Approach to this problem'. Is it about some tough guys that are going around liquidating each-other, is it about gang wars? No, it is about people that ARE here. To smoke them out, that is the plan. But nobody will be smoked out. It is similar to setting fire to a prison and then tell people to go out if they do not want to suffocate, if they do not want to burn alive. Very adequate, as Verdonk put it after the Schiphol prison fire. The council of ministers that agreed with Fred Teevens bill, is asking for people to die. In legal terms this would at least be conditional intent to cause the deaths of people. I call it: MURDER. We can all see it coming. You can just wait for the first person that will poor gasoline over his body on the square in front of The Binnenhof (seat of parliament) because there is no other way out of the misery. A lot of people will watch him strike a match. A lot of people will be horrified because of what they saw. But then it is too late.
“You can demonstrate until eternity, but you will not get a residence permit if you go sit in a tent.” Fred Teeven said about refugees that take action in tent camps. All those refugees that have persisted despite this remark of Teeven, that risked their lives to get to this country to begin with, they deserve the greatest respect from all of us.
Portrayed as campers, or pathetic asylum seekers, they are the ones that lead the way and give resistance a face and a new impulse. Thousands of words I can write, but these are also and even better to be read in the eyes of each one of them that I meet, and who tells me his or her story and refuses to be suppressed and pacified any longer. They are stories like many stories, that all have one thing in common: these are all people that are being chased back and forth on this planet like outcasts, because to the capitalist system they are not worth a dime. Not a dime for their own lives, not even for their slavery. It is worth a lot of money though, to abuse and fight them. Money for tyrants and million dollar contracts, money for oil and resources. Money for Frontex frigates to make people drown at sea, for training border-guards, for walls and fences, barbed wire and NATO wire, for camera's and lots of technological novelties to catch stowaways in the cargo holds of trucks and airplanes, hidden in containers with plastic bags over their head, and in ships. Money for 'State of the Art' computer systems, elaborate registration furnished with serial numbers and fingerprints. In short: money for murder and molestations, for persecution and incarceration, money for blackmail and threats.
But the refugees are done giving in, so a large diversity of population groups combines forces and bridges their differences. A lot of people are ready to support their struggle. With anything,from tents and sleeping bags, food and canvases, demonstrations and actions, to resistance. I am but one of those people. And I am telling you here and now, once and again: ENOUGH! It has got to stop, the divide and conquer between migrants, the divide and conquer between 'our own people' and migrants. It has got to stop, the repression that has been developed in such great detail, the ever so perfect deportation machine that is working overtime daily. It has got to stop, the lies and hypocrisy of the politicians, from the mayors Van der Laan and Van Aartsen of Amsterdam and The Hague to the ministers and state-secretaries in The Binnenhof, van Opstelten, Teeven, Rutte, Asscher, Samson. They are joining hands to make peoples lives impossible. The mayors claim that there is nothing they can do, but evict the tent camps saying the camps are a danger to the health of their inhabitants. They should have thought of that when they closed down the cities' shelters! In fact, what they mean to say, is that they do not want the activists of the camps to lie in the cold so openly, get wet and sick, and get help from people. In fact, what they mean to say, is that they would rather have these people disappear back into anonymity and then die there from starvation or cold, in a cardboard box of our latest dryer under a bridge, beneath the bushes between dog shit in the park. They mean to say, that an unknown corpse in an alley is easier to get rid of without being noticed, than the protest in plain sight on the Koekamp opposite The Hague Central Station. They mean to say, that they want to look humane so badly, that they do not want to be held liable, that they do not want responsibility on their plate. They mean to say that they are only doing their job. But they also have blood on their hands.
Blood on their hands is what all politicians have. Also the ones that plea for a milder regime in the detention centers, that say they are adopting the demands of refugees, but lower their standards beforehand because actually they as well think that those who have been rejected, have to leave. It is such an easy thing to say: “They cannot all come to the Netherlands”. That is right. They cannot. Because in fact most of them do not even have the money to pay the human traffickers to get here! Nevertheless populist propagandists claim in terms of 'tidal waves' and 'flood' that mass immigration would get under way if the borders were to be abolished. No lie is gross enough in order to frighten people!
But it is not the refugees that are the problem, the problem is the bankrupt capitalist system that stubbornly clings on to the exploitation of development countries and world wide migration control in order to protect itself. It is the morbid 'solution' to the redundant part of world population that is immersed into poverty, so that our riches continue to be financed. It is the endlösung that comes easily, if you abandon people. A fascist-like fact of life. It all has to remain that way, in favor of us with our latest mania and gadgets, our latest fashion, empty office buildings, our luxurious shopping streets, our parties and modern games, our thoughtless passing by the tent camp, thinking about our next holiday. Camping, that is fun! Where shall we go next year?
Hitching in with refugees in front of a tent in the mud. It is such a small act of resistance and at the same time of so much value. I did it because I do not want to be one of that 'us'. Twice I have been dragged away. A little inconvenience compared to the years of being hunted down that people have to endure. Years of fear and insecurity, of a life on the street, of waiting, waiting, waiting...
A few hours spent in a narrow cell in The Hague. I saw Araz, the Iraqi from Baghdad who cannot prove he was born in Baghdad and therefore has to leave The Netherlands, holding his hand with a look of pain on his face, when I was taken for interrogation. He has a broken hand due to police violence during the eviction of the camp. I was glad to see him again at a demonstration. He did not give up. And this is why I will not give up. By what right should I give up? By what right should I shut up? The executioners of the Dutch state will not defeat the struggling refugees. We support their struggle. I support their struggle. So the people in the cells of the border prisons will not feel as if they have been let down. So people will no longer out of despair set fire to themselves. So we will not again have to hear a minister say that “a well-considered decision has been made” and that he is does not feel responsible. Not responsible for all the violence that is being used to send people to their deaths.
And simply because I categorically refuse to comply with all of this, I am now being charged with calling for violence?! The violence is coming from the state. Resistance and sabotage are not violence, they are necessary, sincere, and fight for freedom. They do not assault a persons existence, they attack at best equipment, weapons and structure that is being employed in order to carry out this states' violence. They attack the foundation of power, and still they are only pinpricks. No word is needless or superfluous in the call for freedom. To demand that one has to 'answer' for words, is tyranny. It is a tyranny that was to be expected as an extension of the hunt for refugees.
Away with tyranny! Each word a spark! Our statements, our testimonies, our accusations! And so words are being prohibited. If they can not prohibit the words, cannot let writers keep their big mouth shut, then unavoidably intimidation and allegations will be next. Then they will speak of terrorism, while true terror comes from the weapons of army and police. Then they will speak of calls for violence, while calls for violence are rooted in the constitutional state.
What exactly is that, violence?
Is setting fire to an office of the IND, where refugees are being registered and where decisions over their lives are being made, violence?
Is it violence if I cut the fence around a border prison, write slogans on a wall?
Is it all violence because the law says so?
Is violence allowed and therefore no violence if it has been arranged by law?
Is chasing and imprisoning people violence?
Is deporting people violence?
Is it violence to kick people out on the street, in the freezing cold, without food?
The violence is obvious at the borders of the Fortress of Europe. At the gates with barbed wire and camera's. You can tell by the bodies that wash ashore. The violence is liquid like the oil that is being pumped out of the ground of development countries, liquid like the sea that is being fished empty after which the hungry population is being charged with piracy! The violence is the monopoly of the capitalist robbery, slavery, violence is making money! That is where the sources of violence lie. Each word a spark! Each text a bomb under the silence!
If what I say may be called violence, then what does one call the violence of state and capital?
I accuse, the mass media that feed hysteria, that meekly publish all press releases coming from the government, that only call attention to the consequences of repression if there are casualties, if radical actions have been taken, if a minister has gotten a bit of red paint on his house!
To begin with,
Let them answer for it, these collaborators that let themselves be paid for lying and remaining silent, that are eager for sensation, that feast on a minister who says he or she is feeling 'dreadfully cut up' by a spatter of ketchup, aim their camera's at the broken windows of an IND-office and can think of no other question than the one meant to make people turn against each-other.
The game of divide and conquer is being played through the mass media. Let us not fall in that trap! It is big business and it depends on commerce, advertisement. Those who have money and power, can speak up and be heard, have an influence on headlines, are invited to talk shows that will only ask the kind of questions that are careful and do not mean to discuss the core of implemented policy. TV programs pour out ego flattering images over their viewers. The mass media have made a pact with their subjects: “I'll scratch your back, you'll scratch mine”. And now for another cozy game show: bread and games for the public!
But the powers-that-be forget all about the increasing influence of the use of Internet. And they fear this influence! They fear the fast distribution of the truth, the critical words, and the calls for resistance. That is why they try to survey and control the World Wide Web.
In spite of all manipulation: the struggle can take many forms. It can be overt and in large numbers, grand. It can keep its back straight as it takes a beating and endure the pain of passive resistance. It can attack the state and the companies when they least expect it, adopt the night and the guerrilla tactics of sabotage. But in whatever form: it will not accept, I will not accept that the apparatus of power and violence will make more casualties then it has already done. And this struggle may, can and will be instigated.
You can lock me up, but shall not silence me, not restrict the thought of freedom that connects us all. You can lock me up, to warn others. But we shall not be intimidated. You can take my website offline, but many will take its place. You think that you have the right to judge me and you can let the sentence be carried out...
Let it be clear that I, that we, who deliver and distribute these accusations that I have just made you listen to, are also capable of drawing conclusions. If you want to call that incitement, than I can only be proud of that. It means that my words have been heard and have hit the mark, and that is the least I want to accomplish.
No word without deeds! More important than this trial is the struggle that needs to be kept up, a tough and daily reality that the Public Prosecution wants to keep me away from. This trial has strengthened me in my conviction that resistance is necessary. To the Public Prosecution, the National Crime Squad (in dutch: 'Dienst Nationale Recherche'), Unit Counter Terrorism and Activism, the AIVD, your court, to the state, I have only one more thing to say: mission failed. Each word a spark!
Joke Kaviaar, January 8, 2013 (translation January 17, 2013)
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