Dijon: attempt to evict the Engrenage Gardens

By: fawda - July 24th, 2020  Filed under: News

Early this Friday morning, the occupants of the Engrenage Gardens were woken up by municipal police officers and three backhoe loaders that had been sent to ravage the vegetable gardens. The rapid arrival of supporters allowed them to stop the advance of the machines. The protagonists’ account of the events.

Waking up this morning, to the sound of the “beep-beep” of the bulldozers. Astonishment to discover the Jardins de l’Engrenage, surrounded by the barriers and the police. The beans, the tomatoes (already red!): crushed, the branches of the trees: torn off, the hedges: crushed. The brutality of the machines, facing the thorns of the brambles.

Sponsored by whom? Why was it ordered? The city? The property developer? Nobody on the spot wants to answer our questions. No one to dialogue except the police force and the steel of the machines.

So we’re holding. Together. We hang on, we climb, we watch. We call friends and neighbors. Yesterday they were there for the market, and since June 17, 2020, to share around these gardens a moment of music or petanque… Today we saw tears in their eyes. Since the taking of this land how many gardening tips, crafts and small services have been exchanged; how many stories around this neighborhood and the lives of its inhabitants! So we resist, again. [Read More]

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Paris: Dramatic growth of informal migrant camp at Aubervilliers

By: fawda - July 23rd, 2020  Filed under: News

In just one month, the number of migrants living in the Aubervilliers camp in the Paris region has more than doubled, from 400 in mid-June to around 1,000 in mid-July. While arrivals are expected to continue over the next few weeks, NGOs denounce the failure of the French reception system.

In the Aubervilliers camp, the number of migrants has more than doubled in just one month. In mid-June, aid groups estimated that there were around 400 people living under the Stains bridge along the Saint-Denis canal in the north of Paris. In mid-July, France Land of Asylum (FTDA) said it counted some 1,000 migrants in the camp.

“And by August, there will be at least 1,500 of them,” predicted FTDA Director General Pierre Henry. “It’s always the same thing, we’ve been going in circles for years,” he said. [Read More]

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Berlin: Renewed alarm at Rigaer94

By: fawda - July 13th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

Today july 13th, there are strong police forces, construction workers and securities in the area. Alarm, now it’s getting exciting! Mouth-to-mouth info:

It is now being decided whether the police will take responsibility for the Rigaer94 conflict, and carry out the eviction which began Thursday 7 july and will continue today. At 8 o’clock the so-called Lusche, the new dubious alleged property manager, arrived first. He and his lawyer Bernau wanted to gain access to the house by force, which failed because of the human chain in front of it. His physical attack was answered accordingly. Then immediately masses of cops arrived, who had already been in stand by in the neighborhood but avoided the street in front of Rigaer94. There are at least a hundred of them, if not two riot squads again in action. At the same time, construction workers and the security company arrived. The construction workers called on residents “one to one”. It was reported that some of them wear Combat18 tattoos. They and the cops had to register that there was a new, massive entrance door. So for the moment, the intrusion into the house was stopped. According to information obtained, the police command at the highest level, i.e. the police chief, is currently advising. Nothing will happen until they take responsibility. What happens then will bring clarity about the operation since Thursday. Was it a coup attempt by the middle level police or a well planned action by the political leadership in an attempt to make everything look like a coincidence. The lies will stop.

On the other hand, the anger against the attackers on our living together in solidarity is endless!
Prepare yourself for everything, friends, it is serious! [Read More]

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Amsterdam: Keizersgracht 318 resquatted

By: fawda - July 12th, 2020  Filed under: News

Since thursday (july 9th) a building was squatted in Amsterdam, on the Keizersgracht number 318. This sunday afternoon the squatters made their presence known. A statement from the squatters:

Since some time we are living in the building at the Keizersgracht number 318. Today we make our presence known. The building has been vacant for years. In 2015 it was also squatted. Back then it got evicted pretty quickly, because the owner claimed to still use it. Looking at the state of the building, that wasn’t very apparent. Later, in 2017, the owner got caught illegally demolishing the monumental interior of this building. The municipality decided to put a building stop on the building. It was prohibited for the owner to do anything else with the building, before the monumental interior was rebuild to its original state.
Now, 3 years later, nothing has changed. The building is still empty, nothing has been restored, and the decay continues.
All this while the homelessness numbers in Amsterdam are rising, the rents are skyrocketing, the waiting lists for social rent are getting close to 20 years and hotel after hotel is being build.
For us, reason enough to start using this building, we want to have a house! [Read More]

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Berlin: Rigaer94, they tried to bury us but forgot that we are the seeds

By: fawda - July 11th, 2020  Filed under: News

From friday till saturday evening securities were in front of our house, that does not have any of its front doors anymore. Yesterday morning, around 6:30 am the cops attempted to enter again our front-house block. The so-called “Hausverwalter” Torsten Luschnat arrived at 7 am in order to enter the 4th floor flat in front house of 94. Of course, there is still no owner of the house known but the cops and their commanders in the senate decided to trust the new company, that pretends they are legally allowed to enter. Luschnat Immobilien did not even follow any legal frame and attacked the flat in order to evict it. The attack started from the construction team secured by the cops, by trying to smash through a bricked up door attempting to injure people who were behind it. The people behind the barricades showed an active defense and managed to ruin these plans. Therefore, it was impossible for the workers to enter. They and the cops went to the attic and smashed a hole into the ground ending up in the next door appartment. Unfortunately for them, also the tenant who lives there, managed to keep them out of the flat. Because of the escalation, the cops, afraid of leaving the legal frame, were not willed to continue and stopped the procedure. After those failed attempts of entering our flats, the cops stood in front of our door with the security team. At the same time, the construction team started throwing all the stuff from the ground floor flat, that had been evicted on friday, to the trash. The security team and the workers started to use the toilet and kitchen of the flat. Actually, as soon as they realized that there is a contract still existing, with a person present being able to show it, the doors of the apartment were closed. To demonstrate their power, the cops, from time to time, decided to prevent people who are not registered to come inside. In the afternoon the cops left their position in front of our house. Before the demo arrived, the securities also left being secure by cops. Hundreds of solidary people joined the demonstration and gathered in front of our house until late in the night. [Read More]

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Berlin: Rigaer94 raided. Another eviction attempt

By: fawda - July 9th, 2020  Filed under: News

Today at 07:00 in the morning, a hundred riot cops walked over the bicycle rack in the yard of Riga 93 to climb over the fence into our yard one by one. At the same time they occupied the roofs of our block. The cops, along with LKA 5 and 6, then gained access to apartments on the 3rd floor of the front building under the pretext of a search for forgery of documents and others. According to the press, they also searched an apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee.

Contrary to their usual procedure, they refrained from using a helicopter and made no attempt to penetrate the rear building so far. In the meantime, they led the worst traffic lawyer in town, Markus Bernau, around the front building, presumably with the intention of supporting him in legal actions against the apartments occupied there. Torsten Luschnat, who thinks he is our new property manager, also gained access to these apartments. The so-called owner company has already proved several times in court that they can’t really prove anything, not even their legality to take legal action against us. The previous court rulings have dismissed all claims. [Read More]

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The Hague: Housing Action Days, call for participation!

By: fawda - July 8th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

On Friday and Saturday 31st of July and 1st of August, Housing Action Days will take place in The Hague. The theme for Friday is social housing and precarious modes of housing, and the theme for Saturday is the selling out of the city and gentrification. During these two days we will make a collective fist against precarity and the housing shortage.

In the past couple of years the city has become the stage of a social struggle. Capital is increasingly controlling housing and public spaces. The city is transformed into a revenue model, a new apparatus for a select group to accumulate wealth. This has drastic consequences for many of us. De waiting lists for social housing are ever lengthening, rents are already way too expensive and the political unwillingness to take up these issues is stifling. In the inner city, one loft gets restored after another and only expensive private sector housing is built. Hip coffeehouses and their terraces are spreading like an oil spill. We don’t want a city merely for consumption but a city in which we can live!

Paired with the gentrification, the state’s net to control public spaces tightens. Concurrently to being forced to pay increasingly high rent for increasingly small spaces, we are being dispossessed of the streets: hanging out in the street is perceived as suspicious and will get you castigated for gathering. The only places where you can still gather in public are parks or sports field – but never without the supervision of cameras. Our living spaces are shrinking, we will no longer put up with this shit anymore! [Read More]

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Amsterdam: Always Anti-Anti-kraak

By: fawda - July 6th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

Sunday afternoon there was a small action at a former squat in Amsterdam Noord. The squatters are angry, because in the evicted building is now an anti squat workspace. The building, that had been squatted already for 3 times, got evicted last summer. It turns out it got evicted for anti-squat. Below a statement of the squatters:

Today we are here to put the situation surrounding the building in the middle of your neighborhood under attention. The old pizzeria on Statenjachtstraat 598. Probably the recent history of this building is still known to you, but to summarize:
After years of vacancy, last year the building got bought by to rich real estate dealers, Axel Veldboom and Frans Blom. Last summer, the place got resquatted (it was already squatted 2 times before). It was clear for the squatters that there were no short term plans for the building. But the owners did have a plan. A pretty ambitious and unrealistic plan, to build an enormous building in the middle of the neigbourhood.
The state decided to start a procedure to evict the squatters, squatting is forbidden, and the owner claims to have a plan. The squatters decided to fight the state in court, to prevent the eviction. In a court case like this the importance of interests is being weighed against each other by a judge, or at least it should be. On one side the needs of the state for having the place evicted, and on the other side the needs of the squatters, to be able to have a place to live. [Read More]

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Athens: Solidarity action for Dervenion 56. An international call for solidarity

By: fawda - July 4th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

On friday 26 june, in Exarchia, the Greek state evicted and sealed Dervenion 56 and the building at Dervenion 52. An immediate gathering of solidarity was held on Exarcheia square for several hours. In the evening of the same day, a solidarity march was held with the participation of 300 people. The march ended at the Dervenion squat, barricades were set up around the perimeter and then comrades broke the concrete blocks of shame. Police never came and after some hours the protesters left. Riot cops made again an operation the next morning, building again a concrete wall in front of the squat’s door. According to information, in the following days, various solidarity actions followed, a demonstration took place on the main shopping street of Athens, Ermou, where slogans were shouted, and apparently some people attacked multinational clothing companies in Ermou in the occupied -by the police-, center of Athens. Even the rich yuppie nephew of the Prime Minister, the mayor of Athens, Costas Bakogiannis, could not escape the anger caused by the evictions. The pioneer of violent gentrification and his bodyguards were attacked with coffees and other items by dozens of people at a local religious festival. In the following days a march was held again at Exarcheia where comrades demolished the walls of the sealed migrants’ squats at Themistokleous 58 and Spirou Trikoupi 15. All these days, texts of solidarity were written and banners were put in various locations in Greece. [Read More]

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Berlin: 30 years Liebig 34 – We never stop!

By: fawda - July 4th, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

The Liebig 34 will celebrate its 30th birthday at the beginning of July. Eviction titles, media hype and annoying cops don’t spoil these days. Viva la Liebig!
Thirty years ago, after the fall of the Wall, people from a wide variety of backgrounds flocked to East Berlin to take advantage of the chance offered by the unresolved chains of command and the unspeakable vacancy. Entire streets and blocks of houses were occupied, redesigned and filled with ideas and creativity. The streets of Friedrichshain were full of life and very practical solidarity. At one corner there was a discussion meeting, in the next open-air cinema and there food was cooked for the whole street.
In these hours also lies the origin of our collective, which entered the rooms of Liebigstraße 34 in July 1990 and thus made the beginning of this project. In the following years a lot changed: the squat became a feminist house project without cis men. Through hard work and years of struggle it was tried to create a shelter and to offer an alternative to the cis-sexist everyday life.
Now, 30 years later, is the project to end? [Read More]

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Wassenaar: Ivicke’s Zoning Plan, a Monumental Fuck Up

By: fawda - July 1st, 2020  Filed under: Communique, News

Enforcement of a zoning plan would suggest there is a plan. There isn’t.

The municipality of Wassenaar has decided to pursue our eviction from Huize Ivicke on the basis of the building’s zoning plan which designates its function as an office, not a residence.

Their reasoning for the decision appears to be that ‘Kantoor Ivicke’ must become ‘uninhabited’ once again in order to be ‘presentable.’ Strange, since we all seem to recall that Ivicke being uninhabited is what led to it becoming unpresentable in the first place.

The fact that it is a house, that it has largely been used as a house, that anti-squat guardians lived at Ivicke for several years under the current owner’s watch, and that many thousands of people are living “illegally” in non-residential (and often state-owned) buildings as anti-squat guardians across the country is apparently irrelevant.

The normalization of actual offices and other business premises as anti-squat housing – operating in a ‘legal grey zone’ – demonstrates that Ivicke’s designation as an office is incidental; a handy bureaucratic tool the municipality can choose to use or disregard, depending on their interests at any given time. [Read More]

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Philadelphia: Report On Attempted Occupation Of Hahnemann Hospital

By: sisulscz - June 30th, 2020  Filed under: Announcement

On Saturday, June 27th, Health-Care Workers And Community Members In Philadelphia Put Up Barricades And Attempted To Occupy The Entrance To The Shuttered Hahnemann Hospital.

For a brief moment on Saturday, nurses, patients and community members seized a shuttered hospital in Philadelphia and turned it over to the people to use as a clinic. Following a rally at the City Hall, a crowd of around 100 people marched north to the empty hospital tower, erected canopies, tables, and chairs, and began to attend to patients who had joined the march and were eager to receive care. They were the first people to be treated at the hospital since the pandemic began, during which the absentee owner kept its doors shut to the city in the hopes of forcing the city to pay a ransom.
[Read More]

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