Emergency Call-out for Mobilization and Declaration of Solidarity

translated from Nederlands

Protest on the initiative of refugees in the deportation center at Ter Apel.

5 June, 2005, 13:30, Ter Apelervenen

The refugees being held right now in the deportation center (DC) Ter Apel want to SELF-organize a demonstration on Sunday, 5 June at 13:30 at the deportation center on Ter Apelervenen, against the injustice they have been subjected to as hostages in a years-long asylum process. There is a petition in their name filed by GreenLeft and the Socialist Party (SP) Ter Apel/Vlagtwedde to seek the protection of the refugees and permission for the protest.

The first contacts between the refugees and people in solidarity were made on Saturday, 14 May, after a spontaneous solidarity action from the Pinksterlanddagen (anarchist camp) in Appelscha. In the meantime many more people and organizations have affiliated to support the protest of the refugees in DC Ter Apel. The refugees and supporters see the action on 5 June as a warm-up for the Refugee Alarm that will take place in many more regions of Nederland on 6 June from 12:00 to 13:00. We want to ask you to sign on to and distribute the attached call-out from DC Ter Apel as soon as possible, to help mobilize people on 5 June, and to arrange busses and cars for transporting people to Ter Apel. From Groningen it takes two hours with public transportation to arrive in the neighborhood of the DC.

Call-out for the protest from the refugees in the Deportation Center Ter Apel

“Against the foreigners policy that leads to our exclusion or expulsion and the psychological torture and apartheid regime we experience.”

We, residents of the deportation center (DC) Ter Apel, experience not only the situation here in DC Ter Apel, but also in the rest of the foreigners policy as psychological torture and as an apartheid regime. We want to make this recognizable by organizing a petition action against the DC, but also by organizing a protest at DC Ter Apel on 5 June at 13:30. We do this with the support of individuals and organizations who still take human rights seriously. Upon arriving in Nederland we were viewed as untrustworthy and treated as such. From the very first moment the power of the IND (Immigration and Nationalization Service) and the Dutch authority was placed precariously over us, leaving us to feel insecure and anxious. Through fear we were forced to make statements that were not true. The location, the fences, the cameras and the (armed) patrols at the application center, and especially at the expulsion center, make us afraid. We experience Ter Apel as a prison. In the AZC’s (Asylum Seekers Centers), after years of strong repression, we have gotten used to outright physical violence against us, which out of fear we may not talk about. We cannot experience this treatment as anything other than racist.

Already these experiences make not just us, but above all our children, earnestly sick. Many of us develop — if we did not already have them — great psychological problems and don’t leave our rooms any more. Our children must share all this with us and threaten to break down. Despite the fact that we cannot return to the countries we come from, many of us, often in vain, have already cooperated with our return — insofar as it is possible. But this means that via Ter Apel we almost always land on the street in an illegal existence or in a refugee prison.

Gladly we call on all social and political organizations to come see and openly condemn our human rights-violating situation here in DC Ter Apel. Further, we call on everyone to protest with us on 5 June against the current expulsion- and exclusion- policy, in particular at DC Ter Apel, and against the foreigners policy that is unleashed upon us.

All of us have been imprisoned between 4 and 16 years, through no fault of our own, in what we experience as a racist asylum procedure. We also have the right to a humane existence. Residency rights for everyone!

Stop the psychological torture and bureaucracy against refugees

No person left on the street without resources, no one is illegal