[Gipfelsoli Newsletter] Strasbourg/ Baden-Baden

[International Newsletter]

- International Dissent! meeting from the 16th to 18th January 2009 to prepare
the NATO counter-summit
- Minutes
- Flyer by french solidarity group for demonstrations
- Letter from the parents of the Tarnac nine
- Giorgio Agamben: Terrorism or tragicomedy?

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International Dissent! meeting from the 16th to 18th January 2009 to prepare the
NATO counter-summit

NATO invites itself to the center of Europe in April 2009 !

The 3rd and 4th of April, representatives of the countries members of NATO will
meet again to celebrate their 60 years of domination, but also in order to
develop their new plan to "defend freedom" and quoting the terms of their own
generals: "A great strategy for an uncertain world."

>From the 1st to the 5th April 2009 we will be present in Strasbourg and we'll
oppose their "globalization by force" with the creativity of our actions of
resistance: direct actions, blockades, civil disobedience, demonstrations,
meetings, debates, alternative village, convergence centers, autonomous arts,
concerts, ...

The success of this counter-summit also depends on an efficient international
network which enables to succeed in taking decisions and preparing actions for
the next NATO summit in April and for the longer term.
This network process has always been carried out but most of the time
sporadically. Connections faded or even got lost after each counter-summit.
Re-establishing them at a distance takes time to be truly effective, reason why
we propose a meeting.

This international meeting of the radical resistance movements will be held on
the 17th & 18th January 2009 in Strasbourg. It aims to strengthen international
networks and achieve concrete actions during the counter-summit. This would be
the only international Dissent! assembly before the NATO summit, a strong
mobilization and the presence of all on this occasion is essential.

Blowin' NATO in the wind !

In order to shorten the discussions we ask participants to kindly send us a
survey of the status of their mobilization against the NATO summit. This will
allow us to prepare a note on each country and to ease discussions by avoiding
endless presentations.
This is a proposal for an agenda. Please send us your comments and your
propositions of modification of the program before the 19th January. At this
date we'll send a more detailed invitation.

Friday, 16th January 2009
19.00 : Participants arrival

Saturday, 17th January 2009
10.00 - 11.00 : Participants presentation and overview of the international
mobilizations
11.00 - 12.30 : Lunch - Discussions
12.30 - 14.30 : Presentation and discussions about the different action days
14.30 - 15.00 : Break - Discussions
15.00 - 17.00 : Workshops :
1.1st day
2.2nd day
3.3rd day
4.4th day ?
5.5th day ?
17.00 - 17.30 : Break - Discussions
17.30 - 18.30 : Workshops progress reports
18.30 - 20.00 : Dinner - Discussions
20.00 : Discussion on the relevance of creating a perdurable international
Dissent! network

Sunday, 18th January 2009
10.00 - 12.00 : Discussion on the relations with the authorities and the
non-radical organizations and media
12.00 - 13.00 : Lunch - Discussions
13.00 - 15.00 : Workshops :
1.Villages - Convergence Centers - Kitchens – Infopoints
2.Anti-repression, Legal Teams
3.Infotour

15.30 - 17.00 : Workshops progress reports, discussions on the means to
communicate together and proposal for a next international meeting
17.00 : Goodbye – Never Ending Discussions...

They want to decide for us,
Our lives belong to us !

Contacts :

dissent_fr at riseup.net

Infos :

http://gipfelsoli.org
http://natogipfel2009.blogsport.de

http://dissent.fr
http://sommet-otan-2009.blogspot.com

Source: email


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Minutes

International preparation conference for activities on 60th NATO anniversary in
Stuttgart, October 4th and 5th 2008

The conference has had 107 participants from 16 countries, including Georgia and
Afghanistan. Find the minutes on
http://www.alonysolidarity.net/sada/european/20081004-nato-minutes%5B1%5D.pdf

Source: www.alonysolidarity.net


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Flyer by french solidarity group for demonstrations

Don’t loose your head, offer resistance!

On a demonstration

Stay in groups. Found affinity groups of two or three people arriving and
leaving together.
Stay mobile and keep an eye on other demonstrants as well as on your
sourrounding.
Take care of ambitions of the pigs to infiltrate the group. Circle them, isolate
them and show them to other demonstrants.
You have the right to cover up your face and this is highly recommended because
the police likes to take pictures and films.
Teargas is used very often. Don’t panic, just save your nose and mouth with some
piece of cloth soaked in lemonwater and use eye drops (saltwater dilution). In
case of irritated skin neither make it wet nor use creams.

Should any demonstrant be arrested there is the possibility to resist that. If
it happens anyway encourage the person to scream her/his name loudly and refer
it to the legal aid.
In case of being arrested yourself shout out your name to other demonstrants and
keep calm.
Apart from that it’s better to learn the number of the legal aid by heart than
having it written on your arm because this can be seen as intention in case of
your arrest.

Taken into police custody

Your allowed to have a translation. First they want to proof your identity (max.
4 hours). Taken into police custody can be extended up to 48 hours. You have the
right to consult a doctor and a lawyer. You are only forced to give them your
name and adress by law, to subscribe the protocol is not needed.
Refuse DNA-taking despite threat.
Refuse tp appear before the court immediatelly so that you have more time to
prepair your defence.

Source: email


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Letter from the parents of the Tarnac nine

When all the media come together in a cacophony of lies to slander a handful of
young people currently languishing in jail it is very difficult to find the
right tone with which to call an end to this racket and make room for a little
truth.

Many journalists bent over backwards to confirm the statements of the Minister
of the Interior, even while the raids were still taking place. Those arrested
were assumed to be guilty from the outset.

No one could miss the sensationalist reality cop show that our children have
been forced to star in throughout the last week. The anguish, fear, and tears
have submerged us and continue to do so. But probably what has hurt us the
most, destroyed us the most, is the flood of lies that have been let loose.
Today it was our children, tomorrow it could be yours. We are still stunned,
but we are no longer paralyzed. The various facts which follow are an attempt
to reestablish the truth and to silence the public condemnation.

Our children have evidently benefitted from a special treatment, locked in
darkness for 108 hours, some  of them without any charges, and to justify this
we are told that they must be very special people, the kind that one doesn’t
find on any street corner. Yet at the same time we are reminded that they are
actually very normal, for everyday they become more numerous, and take up
positions at every one of your street corners.

The police reproach our children being too organized, attempting to provide
locally for their basic needs, reopening a village grocery store which had
closed down, cultivating abandoned lands, organizing the distribution of food
to old people in their area. Is it evil to self-organize for your basic needs?
Here, when we have heard wind of crisis? Our children have been categorized as
radicals. Radical, in the dictionary, means: taking up the problem at its root.
In Tarnac our children planted carrots without bosses or leaders. Because they
naively think that life, intelligence and decisions are more joyous when they
are collective.

We are concerned to learn from the Minster of the Interior that simply reading
the book The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee can make someone a
terrorist. As a result of the free publicity the Minister has given the book
through speaking of it in the media she risks soon counting 25,000 of them on
her territory. For those who take the time to read it, this book is not a
“terrorist catechism”, but a political essay which attempts to open new
perspectives, and one of last year’s best selling social science books
according to the Nouvel Observateur and Libération.

Our children are accused of going to a demonstration at Vichy on November 3rd.
Some among us are the children, the grand children, of those deported by the
Vichy regime. That our own children have taken the decision to go and
physically oppose the functioning of a summit on immigration in this city of
such symbolic significance, this fills us with pride, but also with hope and
courage.

Let us return to the suspicions leveled against our children. Contrary to what
has been said, and what we might think, the sabotage of railway lines did not
terrorize the population or put anyone in danger. It simply caused the
population to lose or kill time. What did terrorize the government was not the
fact that it had to reimburse a thousand or so train tickets, but that an idea
of politics, which was also an idea of action, ceaselessly reproduced itself.
Sabotage, whether one employs it or rejects it, has never been an arm of
terror, but always an arm of social change. There was a time when the CGT
[France’s main trade union] called for it.

Bankers are responsible for the biggest economic crisis of the last 80 years.
This will not fail to cause millions of people to starve. And we continue to
cordially greet our bankers in the street. Our children are only suspected of
causing the delay of a few trains, and for that they face 20 years in prison.

The most impressive police operation in the last week was not bursting open
doors in balaclavas on a sleeping nine-month-old baby, but rather convincing
people that the desire to change such a perfect world could only emanate from
the heads of the mentally deranged, of powerful assassins.

When doors slam we feel fear that it is the balaclavas returning.
When they open we dream of seeing our children return.

– the parents of Bertrand, Mathieu, Elsa, Aria and Yldune

PS : we salute and offer our thanks to the inhabitants of Tarnac who prefer to
believe what they live than what they see on TV.

DROP THE CHARGE OF “CRIMINAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE PURPOSES OF TERRORIST ACTIVITY”
AND IMMEDIATELY RELEASE ALL THE INDICTED

Source: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/letter-from-the-parents/


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Giorgio Agamben: Terrorism or tragicomedy?

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to
the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the
Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people
(who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the
village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist
judge and "accused of criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions." The
newspapers reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of
State "had congratulated local and state police for their diligence."

Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let's try to examine the
facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of this
"diligence."

First the reasons: the young people under investigation "were tracked by the
police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho autonomous
milieu." As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior specifies, "their
discourse is very radical and they have links with foreign groups." But there
is more: certain of the suspects "participate regularly in political
demonstrations," and, for example, "in protests against the Fichier Edvige
(Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale) and
against the intensification of laws restricting immigration." So political
activism (this is the only possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as
"anarcho autonomous milieu") or the active exercise of political freedoms, and
employing a radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the
anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central intelligence
office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a minimum of political
consc ience could not help sharing the concerns of these young people when
faced with the degradations of democracy entailed by the Fichier Edvige,
biometrical technologies and the hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons,
explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from it. SDAT
officers discovered "documents containing detailed information on railway
transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains." In
plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also confiscated "climbing
gear." In simple French: a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.

Now let's turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the presumed
head of this terrorist gang, "a 33 year old leader from a well-off Parisian
background, living off an allowance from his parents." This is Julien Coupat, a
young philosopher who (with some friends) formerly published Tiqqun, a journal
whose political analyses – while no doubt debatable – count among the most
intelligent of our time. I knew Julien Coupat during that period and, from an
intellectual point of view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let's move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story. The
suspects' activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts against the
SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains on the Paris-Lille
line. The devices in question, if we are to believe the declarations of the
police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no way cause harm to people: they
can, in the worst case, hinder communications between trains causing delays. In
Italy, trains are often late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the
national railway of terrorism. It's a case of minor offences, even if we don't
condone them. On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are
perhaps "perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to
attribute a criminal act to any one of them."

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in
activism against the (in any case debatable) way social and economic problems
are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not
even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with
clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and
Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have
judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than
those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the
detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people,
to whom "it is not possible to attribute a criminal act." Another, equally
serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations
of which are left intentionally vague and that allow the classification of
political acts as having terrorist "intentions" or "inclinat ions," acts that
until now were never in themselves considered terrorist.

Giorgio Agamben
Libération, November 19, 2008

Source:
http://farkyaralari.blogspot.com/2008/11/free-tarnac-9-statement-of-support-by.html