Redebeitrag zur No Lager!-Tour
Dear residents of the camp, dear friends and supporters.
Today our NoLager-Tour is here because we demand equal rights and living conditions for all people - no matter what's their nationality or their legal residential status.
We are opposed to the housing of people in refugee camps, and we will articulate our critic in the following speech.
Exclusion
We all saw the physical exclusion here today. Apart from the city, in an ugly industrial area. This is not a place for people to live.
The psychological exclusion is even worse though, living isolated, whithout personal contacts, in an foreign environment, where some powerful institution decided to put you.
Control
To keep 70 million people wordwide who lost their homes under control, you.need walls, fences, security forces and burocracy.
Control is the most effective, when you can keep people locked at one specific place. You experience more than enough of this control right here, every day: Identification requirement, gate keepers, control of visiters. The residents of Langenort have to sign in, and sign out, every time the want to leave this dreadful place. And they keep track of your movements.
No privacy
A camp means there is no privacy for anyone, no safe space where you can retreat to, no place for individuality and creativity.
The people in this camp become objects. They are denied the very human desire to be an individual, to be a subject of their own live.
Damage to health
A camp also means that you put the health of the people living there at risk. Physically, as we see it right now during the Corona pandemic, and psychologically, because they deny human contact.
And also socially, because the majority population comes to see the residents of refugee camps as foreigners, as a baggage, and also as dependent, in constant need of help.
We're getting to the main point:
People who get locked up in camps are put aside from regular society as useless literal outlaws.
And that makes it easier to remove them. You don't feel responsible for “them“.
It makes it easier to deport them.
Politicians and burocrats learned, that quiet,unproblematic deportations are much easier, if you deport people from an isolated camp.
Otherwise they face resistance from the population. We have seen it a thousand times: Those who live among the general population and become a part of society can't just be easily removed and deported.
The many acts of resistance against deportations from church communities and schools show it: Only when you label people at foreign, as a baggage, you can put them in an airplane like an object and send them into an uncertain future.
That does it mean for us?
When we deny people their human dignity, and that's what a camp does, we lose our own dignity.
We as Germans, through our history, learned that lesson painfully. The values of our society are shattered and will in the end be destroyed by the existence of such camps.
There is no democratic legitimation for the camps. It is in our own interest to abolish them immediatly, otherwise we abolish our own society and its values.
Therefor we demand:
- NO Lager! Nowhere, no way, never.
- Integration of the residents of the camps in normal homes, which are suitable for human beings.
- A respectful treatment of all who come to us. Because it is a human right to come and go. There is right to open borders. We as Germans, with the “right“ passport, consider it natural and obvious, but for the people behind these walls it is only a dream. A dream that needs to become reality.
This is only possible with our solidarity, our help, and our support, for the radical fight against the global Lager system.