Half of Amsterdam’s 200 + rejected asylum seekers, will likely be evicted from two buildings this week. In their 2 year long political struggle they exposed Dutch deportation polices as the worst of northern Europe, and stopped even worse policies, generating support from many unexpected corners. But with crucial parliamentarians silenced by social democratic leaders, soon they will sleep rough again, in fear for deportation.
Untill now, unified under the banner We Are Here, they occupy three buildings:
First a former prison, end 2013 turned into a temporary mayer’s-shelter for undeportables, evicted from a squat. During spring the mayor started to arm twist the undeportables into ‘voluntary deportation’. But then the facts about their undeportability started to shine in his face: Deportation destinations were indeed much more dangerous then thought, foreighn embassies obstructed deportation routes, new wars broke out, and many refugees could prove that crucial parts of their rejected stories were indeed true.
Unfortunately, the mayor chose to shift blame for being undeportable, to the refugees, inventing an activists conspiracy against him.
Second we squatted a large sub urban parking garage / office block. It has large, by now overcrowded and partly sewege flooded rooms, with new comers already squatting out on the car decks.
And third, some of the undeportables / activists themselves squatted an unused old housing building, where the refugees enthousiastically renoveted eight delapitated flats.
Unfortunately, all buildings except the garage will likely be evicted tuesday july 8 2014, putting half of the movement on the street, and the garage both socially and technically in no shape to take them in.
On the postive side: Rejected refugees got supporting declarations and verdicts from Dutch and German courts, and from European and international organizations, such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Even increasing numbers of mayors (not the Amsterdam one) turned against the government, and undeportables are helped with shelter, food, health and legal stuff by activists, churches and mosqs, and neighbors. Also a fantastic lawyer is spamming the city council with pro-rejected court cases, slowly by slowly turning the legal tide for individual cases.
But the goverment ignores it all. Still fearing the now self-sidelined right wing populists, the top of the Dutch social democrats had as their strategy to not confront their right wing libs coalition partner on refugees issues, until the European institutions would force them. Now those corrections come from all corners of Europe, with Dutch highest administrative court adopting it into their latest single case verdict. Even our best European ally Germany has made angry phone calls to our government, because they are forced to give rapidly growing numbers of mainly Somali refugees protections against the DUTCH asylum system.
The Right -Lib coalition parliamentarians openly speak of ignoring and even out-lawing Europe from Dutch policies. But Dutch social democrat leaders continue to silence their own parliamentarians.
