Dear friends,
I hope you’re all well and coping with the current global situation. As usual, the poor and the marginalised are always the most affected and refugees and asylum seekers fall squarely in this category.
In Germany, it has been particularly hard for the refugees that are accommodated in camps housing hundreds of people-including pregnant women, mothers with babies who are weeks old etc.
In Bremen, there is a camp in Lindenstrasse (Lindenstreet) which is designed to accommodate 700 refugees. It’s got terrible conditions including rooms without windows and others with windows that cannot be opened. It’s a camp we’ve been campaigning to close for the last several years but this escalated since the last couple of months. At the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, we realised it was going to be particularly tough in there and we intensified the pressure. Over 600 people were there at the beginning and so far, about a third have been infected with the virus because there was just no possibility for the recommended social distancing the government is enforcing by law.
In otherwords, while people can be fined for not observing social distancing (and there have been cases like that) the refugees were crammed into these rooms where their beds were so close together, using facilities like Canteen, toilets and others together that social distancing was impossible. If there was ever a need to make discrimination and racism obvious – to justify the different and cruel treatment of the “Other”, the situation that refugees have been subjected to all across Germany in the last several months provided it.
Together we are Bremen – https://togetherwearebremen.org – has been leading this fight and together with those accommodated in the camp, we’ve been raising our voice to scandalise the inhumanity that is this camp. Below are some video clips of some of the recent actions and it has dominated the print media here and very prominent in the local tv as well. While the authorities continue to resist our call to shut down the camp, they’ve taken steps to reduce the number of people living there as many refugees have been taken out of this camp.Please take some time to watch the videos below. Feel free to circulate.
https://www.butenunbinnen.de/videos/fluechtlingsinitiative-klagen-sozialbehoerde-100.html