Closure of the ZAB instead of deportation! Freedom of movement instead of deportation lagers! Every reason to flee is legitimate!

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NRW-wide demonstration in Bielefeld on the 2nd of April 2016.Starting time: 2 p.m. / Place: In front of the main train station (HBF)

Meeting in Cologne - Bahnhofsvorplatz 11.00 Uhr

Why Bielefeld?One of North Rhine-Westphalia’s three central foreigners authorities (German: Zentrale Ausländerbehörden – ZAB) is situated in Bielefeld. The ZAB Bielefeld is not only responsible for organizing deportation flights for the whole of NRW. It also “advises” “unwanted” refugees in special deportation lagers (so called “Balkan centres”) on the “benefits of voluntary return”. Not far from Bielefeld there is the Hövelhof-Staumühle deportation lager, where Albanian refugees have so far been kept and deported again as soon as possible – now this also includes people who fled from Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Macedonia and will include probably even more in the future. The Bielefeld branch of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (German: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge – BAMF) also takes care of the accelerated procedure, in which generalized denials take away any chance of asylum from the refugees.

The Summer of HopeOver the course of the last year the walls of Fortress Europe have finally started to crack! They crumbled because lots of people from everywhere with a lot of different reasons set out to Europe.These people are no longer prepared to bear the miserable life which has been granted to them by the globally graduated system of exploitation and authority, they are looking for a better life!The European regimes lost control over the migration routes and for a short moment people could move as freely as they hadn’t been able to for a long time. A huge success, which the refugee movement fought for. Since then the ruling class is fighting to regain control. They want to control people so they can divide them into “useful” and “useless”.

There are no safe countries of originIn North Rhine-Westphalia there are already special deportation lagers for people from “safe countries of origin”, just as in Bavaria. There refugees are pressed to “return voluntarily” or are deported in large numbers through accelerated asylum procedures. The construct of “safe states of origin” which has been applied to all Balkan countries, is now to be expanded to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, implying that refugees from those countries aren’t to get a chance to stay here either.Many people who fled the Balkan countries are Romani who have been robbed of their existence, excluded and persecuted in those countries and whose ancestors were murdered by the Nazi regime. This has been confirmed many times and is well known to the people in power here. And because no state is safe for everyone, reports of persecutions because of gender or sexual orientation have also been confirmed – as they have for a lot of other countries.

Nationalism is no alternativeAt the same time as the laws are tightened and the walls within and around Europe are growing – where the authoritarian state of Turkey, that is waging war on the Kurds, is used as a buffer – a racist and nationalist movement is growing in Germany, that ranges from the “middle of society”, via the CSU and AfD to the Nazis. Hundreds of attacks on refugee accommodation show the aggression of this movement, which can feel encouraged by the behavior of the police and the political class. We can currently see a contest from the politicians trying to outdo each other in tougher policies against refugees.

Actors of deportationsBesides the central foreigners authorities (ZAB), local foreigners authorities, airlines which provide the planes for deportations, and the Düsseldorf airport which has its own gate for deportations, we want to focus on those companies and organizations that run the deportation lagers. Surprisingly, these special lagers aren’t run by commercial providers, but by supposedly humanitarian organizations such as the Malteser Hilfsdienst and the German Red Cross. It is revealing that these organizations are willing to run facilities the entire purpose of which is to create an atmosphere of deterrence and fear which allows the deportation of refugees to run smoothly without publicity.

But neither the open racists nor the people in power will stop those who have started to come – that much is clear!

We want to come together with all those who don’t want to accept deportations and the sorting of people into “real” and “fake” refugees! We want to fight for a good life for all and everyone!