A report from Europe of lager



TRAVEL TO BORDER for freedom of movement
Ljubljana Calling
Sentilj - Spielfeld October 31st. 

A report from Europe of lager

Ljubljana Calling. Saturday morning I arrived in Ljubljana to Rog, I thought about a meeting between various activists for updates and logistical advice and instead I find a great assembly - we're back at least a hundred activists from Slovenia and small groups of various Italian cities and from different countries who have just organized themselves to return on borders, on the same day. after the Open Borders Caravan we returned all - and it became almost a necessity, as if no one of us could do otherwise.

But the situation now is different. Now the Nazis organized a racist garrison in Spielfeld. We make a counter demonstration - against the Nazis, against borders, against militarization, against isolation and deportation, against the imprisonment of travellers in a parallel world where there are no human rights. For the freedom of movement - of all.

then we go to meet the migrants, to deliver aids - but now it is different. now between Sentilj and Spielfeld there is a large militarized area, landscape from a war zone, deep militarization. Now they do not let us to get closer - to the migrants. The migrants - heroic travellers - are isolated in pens, locked, blocked frost and then led like beasts in the corridors of nets, fences, guarded by the army and police, from machine guns, jeeps, agents on pedestals rise on the no man's land - black silhouettes legs large and holding weapon sideways towering over a crowd indistinct blurred between fumes of burning plastic - burned against the cold.

It is called the no man's land - no man's land. no one to help. no one can enter, nor distribute food or water or blankets. no relief operations. no man's land, but someone is there - and many many people in fact - to keep migrants detained, to prevent us from entering. so many machine guns around in this no man's land, and therefore that's someone’s. this is the land of Europe, emblematic land of European policies, extreme border on the edge of two borders that should no longer exist - between Austria and Slovenia. Atrocious confinement in the heart of Europe to those who dreamed of it and then finally reached it ... here it is. atrocious in the heart.

nearby there is the equipped camp, which obviously is not enough for everyone. in fact just for a few at a time. and also that is organised kind of militarily and sticking to the bureaucracy of aid. Police and Red Cross decide whether and who gets in and who to block. the truck from ljubljana loaded with aids is blocked by the police and can not reach the migrants in the cold. the assistance  it is quite needed but it is often rejected by the authorities. here warehouses full of blankets and not far people frozen after eight hours waiting outdoor at night - but those blankets can not be moved out of the camp. here clothing stores - and there people who have cold, here food and water and there people who are hungry and thirsty - but we are not allowed to do what’s necessary. Here ambulances and there people who are ill and who are not rescued.

we succeed entering the camp dressing as volunteers and we deliver material collected in Italy. 
Now you should be able to deceive or circumvent the authorities - the police and the Red Cross - a lobby that has the monopoly of the aid - of the ineffective assistance. otherwise now who wish to help have to register, change the clothes and give clear outward signs - in clothing and in mode - that he is accepting to take a role in the absurd mechanism that governments guidelines have created, to accept their insane rules and procedures.

It has been S. who made us enter and then to stay for sorting clothes. S. is an independent volunteer arrived in the morning and registered with pass, he moves in the camp as someone who knows it well - and then I understood that he was doing all that it is natural to do and that none is allowed to do. Great. He takes medicine and food from the warehouse of the camp and brings them into no man's land. He goes back and forward subtracting things from the warehouse and distributing blankets and water. around midnight he leads me in to see - to help, he says - but in fact to take pictures, to see the unimaginable, to attend his discussion with a head of the Austrian Red Cross which again gave up a woman who was sick - for yet another failure rescue (and someone even joke at her), to tell me what the soldiers say ... that you can not give help - why? because it is the no man's land.

post-nuclear landscape. opaque and unbreathable air, and heavy chemical smell, residual materials burned everywhere. I can not describe it.

and around - lights sirens, emptiness, people do not pass anymore in this deserted streets where we roam just us - activists dressed as volunteers - and the military of various types. on the railroad across the road the bulldozers are digging to install some other wire nets along the tracks, turned into another corridor with an opening for a special station right at the entrance of the camp. public works in progress, redrawing urbanism for effective deportations. the landscape is a crying, the crying of a non-place of not-love, not-equality, not-rights - nothing. cold.

and I pass my two sleeping bags offered by a friend of cesena over the net. and I give them to travellers.
                               
Nhandan Chirco
FACK / Et l’Europe alors


Nov. 3 - 2015


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