Eviction of the squat in St. Petersburg
On Friday, the 7th, November 2003, the squatted house in Petersburg was evicted. Early in the evening two policemen – a man and a woman came up to the house. As we didn’t open the door on repeatedly request, one of the policemen began smashing the windows with stones. Then we opened the door. Although we were prepared to the eviction (we carried all worthy and not immediately necessary things away already two days ago), the time of the eviction was very bad for us. Out of twelve people who were in the house to the time of the eviction, seven were foreigners. There was a finnish women’s band, which arrived one day ago and two of the squatters who lived in the house since the very beginning of the squat. Because of this, we decided not to take up a confrontation with the policemen, but to leave the house voluntarily.
The police told us to leave the house within 15 minutes and disconnected the eletric heating. It was visible, that the heating was self-made, but the illegal connected electricity was not of any interest for the policemen. Meanwhile the squatters packed their stuff, the policemen collected the passports of the finnish band and told them to come to the next police-station. There they returned the finnish people their passports, without noting the personal data. The squatters were told to come round in the next days for the keys to carry away the rest of the stuff. The behaviour of the police is irrational. One the one hand they collected not all the passports. Some of the squatters could leave without getting touched. In fact the police lost the overview. The walk of the finnish people to the police station was nonsense, considering the fact that they didn’t take the personal data. Why didn’t they show any interest in the illegal connected electricity? Why did they evict only the politicized Anarchopunks and not the homeless people from the second floor? Why didn’t they take the personal data of the squatters? The squatters confronted the police with the idea, that they take bribes from the homeless people. Both the police and the homeless rejected this in presence of each other. We will see if the policemen will, as they told us, evict the homeless in the next days, or if they won’t touch them. We come back! we squat again – we don’t give up.
Pekarnja
