The morning demo on Day 6 was a huge success. After 5 nights of rioting Barcelona Council had declared the ‘demolition of Can Vies suspended’.
In reality the protestors had already stopped demolition work by burning the machinery on day 2. However when we arrived on Saturday morning the 1ooo’s of riot police were nowhere to be seen.
[Read More]
What happened in Barcelona this past week isn’t over. In the present circumstances it would not be a cliché to say that the fires that were set from the 26th to the 31st of May, and they numbered in the hundreds and several of them were as large as the wide avenues they built to prevent our revolts, live on in our hearts. Tens of thousands of people have won transformative experiences. When they see a cop, an intersection, a construction site, a dumpster, a bank, a surveillance camera, a journalist, new meanings and new possibilities appear unbidden before their eyes.
Though it isn’t over, the struggle here has entered another phase. If things kick off again in the next days, if streets are wrested away from the forces of order and columns of smoke pour skyward once more, it will be different people who have taken the initiative, and for different reasons.
[Read More]
On Friday, the migrants occupying the food distribution center brought a list of demands that they had agreed upon to the prefect and the media. At first, the prefect maintained that the 48 hour period in which they were to vacate the premises had expired and refused to enter a dialogue. However, seeing that they were determined to stay, he set up a meeting for today [Saturday] with the departmental Director of Social Cohesion, who was soon joined by the sub-prefect. They proposed a second meeting to the refugees next Tuesday, on the condition that by then they move to another place and leave the food distribution center. It seems that a meeting is planned Monday morning at the Ministry of the Interior regarding the situation of the migrants in Calais; the meeting on Tuesday will likely depend on the decisions taken Monday. The proposal to continue the dialogue in another location was accompanied by a threat: if the migrants did not leave the food distribution center on their own over the weekend, they would be evicted by force, arrested and sent back to their countries of origin. Of course, this poses the question of where should they go. The authorities let slip the idea of moving to the old municipal camp site. The state now stands before the contradiction of demanding that people leave one place only to occupy another, without permission, somewhere which inevitably belongs to someone. The site of the old camp grounds belongs to the city of Calais. [Read More]
