Sozialforum Dortmund
Veranstaltung der Geschichtswerkstatt - Das Zerbrochene Gewehr
Shut down the Dortmund Central Foreigners Authority!
The function of the central foreigners authorities (Zentrale Ausländerbehörden / ZAB) in North Rhine-Westphalia is that of "central deportation authorities". Their tasks are, among other things, to procure passport substitute documents, to provide "support services" to refugees and migrants in pre-deportation detention, to carry out deportations, and to maintain corresponding databases. Consequently the Dortmund Central Foreigners Authority is a building block in the development of an ever more murderous migration policy of the European Union.
Rally and Demonstration
04 December 08 - 04:30 pm - Olpe 1 - Dortmund
In order to obtain passport substitute documents for deportations, the Dortmund Central Foreigners Authority has organised a series of dubious "collective hearings" over the last years. At such deportations hearings, refugees and migrants are brought before embassy officials or delegations from their (alleged) countries of origin. These officials then confirm, for considerable sums of money, that the interviewees are "their" citizens, and issue documents for their deportation. Thus even refugees who keep silent during their interviews or come from other countries may be declared fellow citizens of the embassy officials or delegation's members.
It is quite clear what one has to expect from such "identifications". Following such hearings conducted by a Guinean delegation in 2006 refugees revealed that the head of the delegation was also acting as a "smuggler" in his country and that he had brought them to Europe. Despite this double game of the delegation's head and the dubiousness of his "services", the documents issued were used for deportations to Guinea. In response to the scandals of the past, Guinea has now put astop to such mass deportations. Therefore, in order to have everything going like clockwork again, Dortmund ZAB personnel went to Guinea on a business trip in summer.
In the context of hearings conducted by Nigerian enbassy officials a significant number of those summoned said that they were from from other African countries; actually, the Nigerian embassy's "willingness to cooperate" has become a well-known fact throughout Germany. The hearings, held almost monthly in varying places, have become a profitable income source for officials from the Nigerian embassy.
Twice this year interviews of supposed citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took place in Dortmund. According to the International Rescue Committee the Congo conflict has claimed the lives of 5.4 million people since 1998. At the end of last year several newspapers (once again) published reports on mass rape in the DR Congo.
In its role as a "central deportation authority" the Dortmund Central Foreigners Authority is also in charge of:
- "providing support services to foreigners obligated to leave Germany" held in Büren, Europe's biggest deportation prison - that is to say, accelerating their deportation;
- "arranging and, if necessary, accompanying collective charter flights to Turkey" - torture is still a daily occurrence in Turkey;
- collecting data on the supposed country of origin of refugees and coordinating the corresponding "investigations" in the whole of Germany.
For a world without borders!
Nobody leaves the place where he or she lives without any reason!
For global freedom of movement - those who want to stay must be able to stay!
Migration that are those who come, but do not come, were sent back, died in the desert, a boat that capsized, a high-performance radar system like a wall in the sea, a continent behind high-tech fences, and then those who nevertheless have come, as no seas, no patrol boats, no fences, no electronic surveillance systems could have stopped them.
The gap between the living conditions in the centres of global capitalism and its peripheral poverty regions is widening. More people decide to leave their countries of origin, and higher and higher border fences are built between these worlds. A complex array of "defence" and control measures has been implemented at EU (European Union) level:
- employment of quasi-military means against refugees on migration routes e.g. across the Mediterranean or to the Canary Islands (by the FRONTEX "border management agency"),
- collection of all data on migrants and their personal environments as well as EU-wide access to these data (Schengen Information System, among others) during their stay in the EU area,
- coordination of deportations at EU level and overcoming the unwillingness of the countries of origin to cooperate with deportations (readmission agreements, collective hearings).
Thus, the use of force is what has been behind the decrease in the number of refugees coming here. Within the context of this European institutionalised racism the central foreigners authorities coordinate the smooth functioning of the deportation machinery. As "official" routes are closed, a large proportion of an increasingly female migration, now illegalised, makes its way into private households and other labour markets of the richer countries.
In order to preserve the capitalist valorisation and poverty divide in its globally diverse forms, global capitalism is existentially dependent on control und defence measures. And it stops at nothing. Since 1988, more than 12,500 bodies have been found at the EU's borders, most of them in the sea. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that per every one found there are about 45 others that are not recovered: a death toll of 500,000. The objective is to prevent people from regions where the conceded standard of living is low from managing to make it to the centres of accumulated wealth, without control. Revolts against rising prices and enforced privatisation, against plundering of resources and destruction of local economies are suppressed in those regions, not least by direct or indirect support of dictatorial regimes or wars.
The control over people's freedom of movement, which from the 19th century onwards has been organised through nation states, restricts possibilities to flee these conditions: Management and control of populations belong to the preconditions of an as efficient and as effective valorisation as possible.
Migration as a transgression of the spatial order of domination is connected with the hope for a better life for all. The idea of a world without borders reaches far beyond that of open borders. Without borders, nationalities, and passports, nation states will be history, and the uneven conditions can no longer be maintained. The world belongs to all.
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