Revolutionary Cells Statement

Concerning The Attack On The Refugee Administration Centre In Boblingen

Tomorrow morning you listen to the news: "Interior Minister Schaeuble says that Western and Eastern European countries should get together to draft a harmonized, all-encompassing defensive strategy to stop the influx of refugees."

You walk by the bakery. Inside, you hear as the shopkeeper tells her customer: "You have to watch out for them, they always steal." She means a man with dark skin who is standing in front of one of the shelves.

In the afternoon, you open the newspaper and read the headline: "Fire-bomb Attack on Refugee Centre." Some of those inside were admitted to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

Then you travel into the city-centre. There you meet a Kurdish woman friend. She tells you how her friend, who was deported a week ago, was taken into custody back in Turkey and tortured for several days.

In the evening you go to your favourite bar. A poster there reads: "International Awareness festival with Foreign Food and African Drum Music."

This is just an out-take of what we hear, see, and read just about every day. Examples of day-to-day racism and genocide, things which refugees and immigrants in this country face on a daily basis.

These are situations which have also angered us and caused us to hate those in power who are responsible.

Nonetheless, through our political work we know that consternation alone is not sufficient reason for continuing political action. Rather, first you have to analyze the way hierarchy is put together, to see, for example, that racism is an integral part of imperialist exploitation, and that through this racist socialization, everyone lives in their own little safe- guarded society. But all of this makes it possible for us to find a starting-point for revolutionary resistance. Being motivated by anger alone can lead you to only see the refugees as victims, instead of seeing any significance in their own forms of day-to-day resistance against repression and the established powers.

It's necessary that we lay aside our own racist outlook and broaden our perspective. Whether it's in crowded asylum-centres or villages in the ex-DDR, whether it's in the administration buildings or on the streets - everywhere the refugees are struggling against discrimination and for the chance to lead decent human lives. They are organizing demonstrations, occupations hungerstrikes, and other protests.

Safe-Guarding Power At The Lowest Level

Immigration officials play a central role for immigrants and refugees. They are forever confronted with the institutionalized racism which these officials represent.

Requests for entrance into the country are sorted into three categories: those that may stay, those that may work here for a while, and those that are to be deported.

Alongside this administrative racism, the refugees and immigrants also have to cope with the racism of the typewriter- bastards, who subject them to despotism, harassment, and humiliation. These bureaucrats often like to play with their own sense of power by denying refugees the necessary right to have family members abroad pay them a visit.

Immigrants and refugees continually feel as if they are not wanted here. The prevalent norms in the metropoles do not speak to them, because they can't fulfil certain criteria: they don't have the right skin-colour, or they're not the right gender, they don't live the right way or conform to the right political convictions, maybe it's their false culture and religion, or maybe it's the useless labour they perform, or the fact that their background is in the Three Continents.

The mechanisms that strengthen imperialist, racist, and patriarchical hierarchy reach to the lowest levels:

The bureaucrats admit refugees according to how useful they can be made to be.

The bureaucrats control the day-to-day political activities.

The bureaucrats deliver the deportation notices when the refugees and immigrants are no longer serviceable.

Even the occasional, socially-minded bureaucrat can't change the fact that he/she is enforcing an imperialist migration policy.

Thought Is Not Anonymous. It Has A Name And An Address. - Brecht

On 22.8.91, we detonated an explosive device at the Refugee Administration Centre in the Steinbeisstrasse in Boblingen.

With the implementation of the new so-called foreigner regulations on 1.1.91, the ruling powers in Germany took another step against peoples not from EC-nations.

This was the foundation for the decision on 3.5.91 at the conference of interior ministers to begin excluding de facto refugees.

More than 50,000 people, who had been admitted to Germany "on account of specific conditions in their nation of origin", are to be deported, only to be hunted down and killed.

Christian and humanitarian groups protested the planned mass- deportations, so much so, that a new interior ministers conference was held on 15.7.91.

The ruling powers changed the modality of the deportation and concentrated on another strategy. The virtual prohibition against deportations to certain countries was done away with.

The fact that this policy only applies to those de facto refugees who came here after 1.1.89 does not in any way alter Germany's cynical conduct of deporting refugees back to war zones and nations in crisis.

Those regulations are full of bureaucratic and organizational possibilities for those who handle the deportation.

We see this as an attempt to pacify the reformist and Christian spectrum and to split up and isolate any resistance to these policies.

The only hope left for those living under the threat of deportation is their individual case study. Many realize that this is virtually hopeless, and so they leave "willingly", usually to live illegally in another country.

War Against The Selection And Division Of Immigrants And Refugees

As the Schengen Agreement creeps ever closer, life for refugees and immigrants in EC-nations grows ever more difficult.

France, for example, wants to initiate raids to round up and deport more than 70,000 legal and illegal immigrants. One spokesperson for the French government termed this policy against illegals "an inevitable war."

There's a war going on in Italy at present as Albanian refugees fall victim to brutal repression. The Italian officials didn't think twice about herding thousands of Albanians into a football stadium in Bari. The deaths and injuries which resulted from poor living conditions, a lack of medical attention, and the police's use of weapons didn't upset them much.

Refugees often find themselves in a war-like situation when they are forced to flee life-threatening conditions in Mahgreb and cross the sea to Spain.

Pretty soon, the border between North and South will be a war- zone, much the way it has been in the U.S., where for years shots have been fired at immigrants trying to cross the Rio Grande.

In the meantime, it's plainly visible what this special war looks like and how it's developing in the metropole-states.

The mainstream media are propagating the frightening view of the ruling powers that we are facing a "flood of refugees", as if it wasn't known that the majority of migrants (80% of whom are women and children) are in flight within the Three Continents themselves. Only a handful of people who are on the run make it to Europe. Just the same, it's well known that the imperialist, patriarchal, and racist policies of exploitation of the metropole- states leads to massive disruptions of the subsistence economies of the countries on the Three Continents.

That is one of the major causes of world-wide migration.

The consequences of this exploitation affect both men and women. Women, however, have less hope than men of finding paid work in another country, or on another continent. They are less mobile, because usually they are required to care for families. When they do flee, it's usually to a neighbouring region or to a bordering nation, where they vegetate in a refugee camp, or they try to survive in the slums of the big cities. "At best" the youngest and healthiest of these are given work in some corporation's factory. Many women have no other option but to become prostitutes. Often they have to cater to white sex-tourists.

In the last few years, more women have reached the rich metropoles from the Three Continents and Eastern Europe. Here they find a patriarchal society which treats them as a mere appendage to a man with no individual rights, and a sexist climate which forces them to prostitute their bodies and minds to the sexist interests of white men.

Even in the metropoles, the women have the duty to "reproduce" their men.

Women-specific grounds for flight are not recognized in present asylum-regulations. As wives, they are not entitled to their own guaranteed, individual right to asylum.

Very few men and women have the good luck to make it to the rich nations of the North.

They are concrete results of imperialist plundering, ecological devastation, and the resulting wars and national liberation struggles.

Of this, immigrants write:

"Today, as more than 20 million immigrants are presently residing in European countries, no one can any longer ignore the reality that poverty leads to migration; a migration towards wealth. The causes of this migration are 500 years of colonial history, neo- colonialism, and the present-day export and war-oriented economies. This centuries-long history of colonialist and imperialist exploitation has led to hunger and poverty throughout much of the world. It has also allowed people in the metropoles to live in privileged welfare-societies. Therefore, those people that live in poverty have every right to migrate to places where there is wealth and to live there. Period. It doesn't matter why they're there. This migration can be seen as a type of war. It's a sort of manoeuvre against those things which caused the poverty, and it helps ensure that centuries of injustice become to some degree redressed." (from Radikal No. 142)

This old 'new' world order, which is allowing the veneer of the ruling power's treatment of refugees and immigrants to be stripped away, points out, to anyone willing to look, just exactly how the imperialist plan functions on a global scale.

The status quo in the rich and relatively pacified metropoles can only be maintained if 3/4 of the world is made dependent. Systematic destitution and extermination are a given. The fact that, meanwhile, several nations and halves of continents just get written off hardly bothers any citizens in the metropoles.

In Europe, Germany's politics sets the standards for the deportation-war which the other European states have to try and match.

The ruling powers are preparing for this war: judicially, politically, ideologically, and militarily.

They want to pick out those people from the Three Continents, and soon from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, whose ideas, language, and appearance make them possibly acceptable, and then exclude all the rest, so far as they can't be made use of temporarily.

Reuter of Daimler-Benz [German multi-national], and Geibler, of the CDU [Christian Democrats - ed.] agree on the German and European restrictions: "letting in immigrants in the correct proportions" is the way of the future. As to what proportions they think are correct, we can only guess.

Immigrants and refugees wouldn't be any problem if they just resign themselves to a "profit-making life-style".

Either as under-paid non-troublesome hamburger-producers at McDonalds or as Czechoslovakian or Polish seasonal workers on farms or in the construction or food industry or as forced-labourers working for $2.50 an hour in the forests near Bayer, or as erotic- exotic prostitutes and/or house-wives, or as service workers catering to the needs of tedious Germans - in these capacities they are more than welcome.

The selection criteria are nothing more than invisible parts of a politics of selection and exclusion.

All across Europe, refugees and immigrants are being sorted out, assigned to certain tasks, utilized in sex-specific ways, exchanged, and controlled.

It's important that their potential uses be discovered as quickly as possible - the European selection-experts are standing by, ready.

Those that are sorted out, like the Roma, will hardly ever be able to enter a rich European metropole-state again.

Roma are always the last to be brought here, they are the least wanted and they are always the first to be deported.

That's how, along side sexism, a multi-cultural, but nonetheless hard-hitting racism functions as an instrument of power.

The Helplessness Of The Left

The immigrants and refugees that come here have to worry about their chances for survival, their health, and their dignity.

The ruling powers, unlike the metropolitan left, have known this for some time now.

Of this, immigrants write:

"Unfortunately, most of the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist left in this country can't come to terms with this anti-imperialist approach. This process of migration, which is the result of the banishment and uprooting of millions of people, and which must also be understood as an inherited rage and declaration of war against capital, has left the German left in a state of helplessness and paralysis". (from: Radikal No. 142)

When the left "only" concerns itself with the off-shoots of this migration-politics and merely makes selective adoptions into its post-modern life-style, then it's actually helping to reinforce global exploitative relationships.

"Profit', which is always lacking, corrupts and throws a smokescreen over our view of patriarchal, racist, and imperialist interests.

It allows protests against deportations to be reduced to crocodile tears, and it hinders the development of an authentic, radical approach.

What To Do? What To Do!

The seeds of division which the ruling imperialists are sowing in the refugee-policy resistance movement are the practical result of our own anti-imperialist understanding.

Solidarity does not end with supporting national liberation struggles, but rather it also manifests itself in our practical solidarity with refugees and immigrants in this country. It finds its natural expression in attacks against those responsible for deportations, attacks on the typewriter-bastards, attacks on the white-collar bastards who seek to exclude people.

Anti-imperialism has only with difficulty come to play a fundamental role in leftist theory and praxis, but the patriarchal and racist foundations of global, exploitative relationships have, in the last few years, become part of the left-radical spectrum of concerns.

We are struggling for a non-hierarchical society.

To achieve this we must point out the different forms of oppression and social contradictions which we seek to abolish. We connect freedom to the abolition of the global exploitation of people and the ending of violent patriarchal and racist conditions.

We are struggling as a white organization for an anti-racist society, and we seek to develop this through our own discussions and praxis. So we're more concerned with asking questions than providing ready answers.

Therefore, our point of departure, our political goal, and our daily political praxis must be continually discussed and reviewed. Our credibility can't merely manifest itself in writings, but must also be shown in our praxis.

We are in solidarity with the refugees and immigrants, and we see our position accordingly. Mistakes and contradictions will always be present, of course.

We aren't struggling on behalf of the refugees and immigrants. Nonetheless, we hope that we can develop a political force along with them, as well as with other social groups.

We see our autonomous organizing and praxis as the basis for this perspective. Those that can work together and work in coalitions and mixed groups will be victorious. The question for us is, how can we add to this, and what initiatives should we take from our side?

As white leftists and white feminists, we profit from racist oppression and we realize that it's simplistic to think that by pushing back against the system we can automatically be on the other side. As white men and women we have to be conscious that we are part of a long history of colonialist and imperialist plunder and that we are part of a diverse resistance of people against this.

We see the difficult, but unavoidable task ahead of us, in our situation as a metropolitan left, of rooting out this history and approaching it critically.

This is both a theoretical and a practical process, one which is not individualized and easy, but one which will have to be developed along with people from the anti-imperialist resistance and with the refugees and immigrants themselves. In this way, international solidarity can be given real life, and if it's practical, we can direct this against those responsible for imperialist destruction, without denying our own metropolitan history.

To bring about this internationalist understanding, we see the need for, and we work toward, the abolition of racist control mechanisms aimed at splitting up and exploiting people. This is part of both our own liberation, and the liberation from all the power structures. Sure, the road will be long and full of contradictions, but we have no alternative.

That's why we have to break through our daily acceptance of racist and sexist attacks, and be sensitive to and active on all levels of political development. That means bringing those in charge of refugee politics out of anonymity, to bring to light and attack the daily forms of racism that refugees and immigrants are continually confronted with. The work of the pigs seeking to deport asylum-seekers must be practically hindered, wherever possible.

We must realize that few people in the metropoles, at present, feel themselves to be in solidarity with the refugees and immigrants. Nonetheless, our struggle has as its goal the development of such solidarity, and to therewith confront the divisive and exploitative devices of the ruling powers.

Revolutionary Cells
August 1991