Amsterdam: Prins Hendrikkade 138-139 squatted

By: fawda - February 10th, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

The building has been empty for several years. The owner wants to turn the building into yet another hotel. However, according to the city council, there is a hotel stop in this neighborhood since 2004. The neighbors are also actively resisting the hotel plans.

While in Amsterdam thousands of people are in need of housing, speculants and investors with the support of the city council keep on turning the city into a place only suitable for tourists and commercial activities, while sweeping off everything that does not suit their profit. [Read More]

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London: Aylesbury Estate Occupation – Statement of support for our occupation from local tenants and leaseholder groups

By: fawda - February 6th, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

Southwark Council, a bunch of Labour party career crooks who disregard their tenants’ clear wishes and smash up empty homes on a cold winter’s night, claims that our occupation has no support from residents. The reality is there is real strong solidarity between occupiers and long-time residents, as we saw last night when dozens of people turned out to help defend the buildings under attack.

Today a number of local residents’ groups have emphasised the point with the statement below.

Message for Southwark Council: your cowardly attack last night helped bring us together and make us even stronger!
Tenants, leaseholders, squatters, homeless people … wherever we stand on the sick “housing ladder”, we are coming together and fighting. Stop social cleansing of our city. Homes for all. Solidarity.

Statement on the occupation and housing action on Aylesbury Estate ( Friday 6th February):

Numerous Southwark housing campaigns and other local activists warmly welcome the ongoing occupation of a number of empty homes on the Aylesbury Estate. The current occupation of Chartridge block on the Aylesbury Estate has brought a much-needed spark of inspiration to local residents and housing campaigners. [Read More]

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Koper (Slovenia): Creative Platform INDE U.P.I. manifesto

By: fawda - February 4th, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

Inde_platforma_squat_Koper_SloveniaNOT THE POWER TO RULE, BUT EMPOWERMENT.
THE FUTURE IS HERE AND NOW: COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE CREATIVE PLATFORM INDE – UPI

From the ruins, we have built new foundations.
From the abandoned spaces, we exorcise old ghosts and return them to life.
From garbage, we will create instruments with which we will drown the sound of monotonous dark and hopeless situation of our time and space.

On the 5h of October 2014, we, a diverse group of people decided that we no longer want to just be part of the problem, but want to become part of a solution. So we spontaneously self-organized and occupied a couple of rooms at the long-abandoned and dilapidated factory INDE Koper. Decades ago this factory walls gave room to different companies employing handicapped people under the guise of social inclusion and integration, but in reality mostly only for the profit of the owners. [Read More]

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London: Statement from Aylesbury Estate Occupation

By: fawda - February 2nd, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

Since the “March for Homes” demo on 31st January, we have re-opened and occupied a part of the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, South London.

We are tenants, squatters, and other people who care about how our city is being grabbed by the rich, by developers and corrupt politicians, socially cleansed and sold off for profit.

The Aylesbury Estate is where Tony Blair made his first speech as Prime Minister in 1997, making empty promises about social housing. Since then, for the past 18 years, Southwark Council and their developer friends have come up with one scheme after another. All with the same aim: to dispossess the residents, demolish their homes, and sell the land.

In 2002 Aylesbury tenants fought and won a campaign against demolition and voted down the original scheme in a ballot. But now big areas of the estate are emptied and sealed up awaiting the bulldozers, while residents are “decanted” away from the area.

The same bullshit that we have seen on the nearby Heygate estate, and all across London. [Read More]

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London: Aylesbury Estate Occupied

By: fawda - February 1st, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

Message from the occupiers: “We are occupying part of the aylesbury estate se1 resisting social cleansing. Join us. Neighbourhood Assembly 3 pm tomorrow sunday. Charteridge house off albany rd.”

Yesterday (Saturday 31 Jan) after the March for Homes demo, a 100-200 strong “squatters bloc” broke off from the main rally and headed South to occupy the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, South London. Houses on the Charteridge House bloc have been opened and were occupied overnight.

The occupiers are holding an assembly this afternoon and ask for neighbours, squatters, and everyone who wants to, to join them. There are homes here for hundreds, lying empty because of the greed of developers and bribed politicians.

The Aylesbury Estate is one of the largest “social housing”complexes in Europe. It was built in the 1960s-70s with 2700 homes. Because it sits on prime inner London real estate, it is being socially cleansed of its working class inhabitants, in a saga that has gone on for over 15 years now. In 1997, genocidal scumbag Tony Blair came here to make his first speech as prime shitster, promising to invest millions to gentrify the area. But in 2001 tenants campaigned and voted against the first plan to sell the estate to a “charitable” private housing association. [Read More]

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London: Squatters bloc @ March for Homes, January 31st

By: fawda - January 30th, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

20150131_london_SQUATTERS_BLOC_March_for_HomesFrom Squatters in North and South London.
SPREAD WIDELY. JOIN US.
Whose City? Our City.

Are we going to let all of London become a playground for rich fuckers? Where every inch of space is taken for profit? A sterile zone drained of history, culture and life? Are we going to hand it to them without a fight?

Squatters and Tenants unite.
Fight ALL evictions.
Homes for all.
Take the empties.
Take back our city.

Join the SQUATTERS BLOC on the March for Homes.

UPDATE: the main squat bloc meet up will be at Elephant & Castle at 12 noon: St Mary’s Churchyard, Newington Butts, SE1 6SQ. Though there will certainly also be squatters on the East London march, which starts from St Leonards Church, Shoreditch High Street, also at noon. [Read More]

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Marseille: Occupation of the Park Michel Levy

By: dolph-l - January 24th, 2015  Filed under: Communique

DENUNCIATION OF THE PRIVATISATION OF THE PARK,
STOP THE DESTRUCTION OF ANCIENT TREES!
RECLAIM OUR COMMON SPACE!

Since May 2013, the collective “Michel Lévy” took over legal challenges brought to the court by residents near the park. They are fighting to avoid the square Michel Levy and it’s trees, centuries old, from disappearing. Notably a “remarkable” tree is listed in the national register of the association ARBES [Remarkable Trees: Appraisal, Research, Study and Protection]. [Read More]

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Amsterdam: Eviction letter Kerkstraat 104

By: fawda - January 22nd, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

Today, just after the eviction of the Pieter Vlamingstraat 98, the squatted building on Kerkstraat 104 got the 8 weeks eviction letter.
The house was squatted on the 7th of December, and according to the letter it will be evicted before the 18th of March.
Will there be an eviction wave, as Van der Laan wishes to re-establish it?
If other houses got eviction letters for the same period, please let us know.
Rebel, resist, revolt! [Read More]

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Amsterdam: Pieter Vlamingstraat 98 resists eviction

By: fawda - January 16th, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News, Press release

Today, Friday the 16th, the building is not yet evicted.

The buildings on the Pieter Vlamingstraat 94-96-98 had been empty since 2008, when the tenants were kicked out. The demolition of these and other surrounding buildings started in 2009 with the exception of Pieter Vlamingstraat 98, where the owner of the coffeshop on the ground floor refused to leave. The original plan of De Key was to demolish the existing social houses for building luxury apartments for the free market. The neighbors protested against the plan, started a court-case and the project was eventually rejected. De Key then proposed to build both social and private sector apartments, but this was rejected as well. Eventually De Key proposed to build 145 apartments for students, and the projects got finally approved despite the opposition of the neighbors, who started yet another court case against De Key but lost it at the end of 2014.

In July 2012 a group of people squatted the Pieter Vlamingstraat 98 and the empty field that was left after the demolition of the buildings aside. These fields are quite common in Amsterdam Oost, where housing corporations like De Key, after demolishing entire social housing blocks, run out of money to complete the project and left only waste lands behind. At the time of the occupation, the state of the house was very poor. All the basic infrastructures were missing, and the structure of the building was rotting away. The squatters massively renovated the building to make it livable. Through these years more then 30 people have called this building ‘home’. A lively communally grew around it, and started a number of activities for the neighborhood such as a neighborhood garden (Roomtuintje Oostbos), a give away shop and a free library. [Read More]

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Eviction Delayed Again: The Expropriated Bank, Barcelona

By: freedom - January 8th, 2015  Filed under: Communique, News

The ‘Expropriated Bank’ is one of 7 occupied social centers in  ex banks in and around Barcelona.  Though long overdue for eviction the State has hesitated, perhaps a bit nervous after failing to evict Can Vies last year due to huge solidarity.

Maybe they don’t want to coincide with widespread public anger at the jailing of 7 activists for being anarchists.  (Mass Demos vs. Gag law and Arrest of Anarchists)

Perhaps they wish to avoid more opposition to their corrupt banks which have presided over the eviction of up to half a million people to balance their crooked books.

Whatever the reason the ‘Expropriated Bank’ in Gracia barrio is still going strong. Here’s a translation of their latest communiqué…..

[Read More]

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Berlin: Solidarity sabotage with those incarcerated as part of Operation Pandora in Spain

By: dolph-l - January 7th, 2015  Filed under: Communique

As a sign of our solidarity with projects raided on December 16th, 2014, in Barcelona and in other cities as well as the comrades detained in the course of Operation Pandora, we burnt a vehicle of DHL in the early hours of January 5th, 2015, in the neighbourhood of Neukölln in Berlin.

DHL was attacked not only for their collaboration with the army, but also for the reason of international distribution of vehicles of this company, which constitutes an appropriate target for sabotage actions. [Read More]

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Spain: Words written a few months ago by some of the Operation Pandora prisoners

By: dolph-l - January 7th, 2015  Filed under: Communique

SOLIDARITY AND STRUGGLE

For those who struggle, solidarity is not an empty concept, distant from our offensive capacity and the conflicts that develop in the struggle itself.

For those who struggle, solidarity is not an “issue” that emerges only at particular repressive “moments”, because repression is not a “moment”, it’s an otherwise inevitable and permanent part of the state’s mechanisms against those who rebel. [Read More]

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