This is the English translation of the last word in the court of appeal, May 15 2014. Today, May 28, the court of appeal will render its verdict at 1:30 PM
Do not take part in tyranny, but take part in liberation!
In my last word at the Haarlem Court on 8 January 2013 I concluded to say that the struggle we need to wage is more important than this political trial. This trial is important to the prosecution that even more than is already the case wants to limit freedom of speech for people that put in their words and their actions against the government and not, as it would rather have, against each other. A political trial it is indeed because it has a political goal: to weed out the sprouts of resistance.
This whole case against me was also meant to keep me away from the things that I do, and to scare me and other off. This has not happened and will not happen because if we need to cross borders in order to achieve something, we will.
Time and again we will break through them, the borders of law and the borders of state!
Your legal order is not mine and your laws are not mine. They serve the protection of possession and power more than the protection of man, animals and nature. They leave cops that shoot people dead undisturbed because the victim will always remain suspect and will always be a perpetrator and shall never be able to prove innocence, because people that start running will have to be caught at all time. Take no prisoners, shoot to kill is the motto and it does not have to be in self defense.
Rishi Chandrikasing was shot in the neck on a platform of Hollands Spoor train station in The Hague! The shooter involved is already back to work. In the Schilderswijk (district) him and his colleagues find it business as usual to terrorize residents by demanding to see their ID, by arrests and by beating them up in cells.
The laws, they allow civil servants to cheat and lie in the name of democracy, indisputable. They allow politicians to exert terror on refugees, homeless, prisoners, unemployed, addicts and even the mentally and physically ill. All fall under the category: useless and does not bring in any money except income for those who owe their jobs to them. In the end a whole industry can be maintained by them after all. An industry that is being provided with more and more laws to fill up the cells.
The laws, they are made in favour of a small elite world-wide, in order to be able to make money by exploiting the most part of the worlds population, by clear-cutting land and water, by animal suffering, by patents on food, by polluting the planet... I could go on.
Against all these wrongful deeds it is admissible to act, not by law but certainly by moral. Direct action. Fire of liberation. It is a necessity. If we don't do it, we give up from the outset.
This is still my opinion, just as I still endorse all the words that the court convicted me for. A conviction that tells us that it is forbidden to call for actual deeds of resistance. Those deeds are called violence. A gotspe that is in the light of so much state violence by armies and police forces! Well, you can call the resistance what you want. Call it undermining the legal order or the democracy. So that it be replaced by true justice and veritable consensus, I am all for it!
Call it anything that has an effect on making impossible the dirty hands work of people that hide behind agencies, ministries, government services, principals, politicians, aiming for the social exclusion, physical incarceration and actual deportation of people that have already been trampled and sent away, displaced and rejected. Men, women and children. Patients, the elderly, the traumatized. Whatever you may think, whatever it may be called, I say: Yes! Do it. So that the immigration law will be exposed for what it is: a law of apartheid, with reversed burden of proof for those who request asylum. So that agencies that execute this law will be broken down. Literally.
You, who are sitting in front of me in robes and who may determine whether resistance is lawful, you can call it all you want. It does not change anything about the terror that is being incited by these laws. Your judgment is based on law books, previous verdicts, articles in treaties between states, all of which I do not acknowledge as determinant for my actions, my life and that of others.
You will probably find a way to justify any punishment by stating that it is not funny what I am saying. And that is correct. It is not funny. There is nothing to laugh about cause of death number one amongst refugees: migration politics. You call me extremist, terrorist, criminal, radical? I will consider them a badge of honor because I know who says so. This is why again I will not ask for any kind of leniency, and I refuse to accept forced labour and closed doors beforehand. Freedom needs to be fought for. Everywhere, and always.
Fight for freedom starts with questioning everything that is being considered self-evident. It starts by doubting everything, not accepting things as the truth, asking questions at all time. It starts with words, harsh words, because otherwise nobody will hear them. Do you not want to hear my words anymore, then silence me now because I have only just begun.
The prosecution wanted to silence me but gave me a platform. Maybe I should be grateful to the prosecution for the increasing number of people that, hearing about the case against me, wanted to know what it is all about and started to read about the degrading practices of border control and migration management, the violence against refugees, their imprisonment and their forced lives on the street, the hunt for people who are being called 'alien', 'illegal', 'undesired', 'profiteer', 'criminal', and the many deaths by illness, suicide and drowning, burning and suffocation that are the sad result of it. That is what the words are about and that is why we fight.
Each word a spark in the fuel of unrest! For freedom, equivalence and solidarity. Against authority, exploitation and repression.
The prosecution sees danger in words. Words could as well become acts. But if my words became acts as often as the repressive words of laws and measures became acts, then finally something would happen that would really damage the state or the multinationals, the true profiteers and criminals that call the shots and decide who has the right to exist! Now who has reason to worry about something?
Let politics and the law worry about the consequences of my words. But it is not up to me to decide what people do with my words. Other than the state I do not dictate rules of conduct. Take it or leave it. What I am saying, is that it is just and essential to burn down or sabotage the means of the state that are being used to cast down people, or just stand in the way of its execution. That word is public and everywhere because it needs to be said whether it is allowed or not. The call for resistance can no longer be removed from the public domain. You can remove me and only for a while, that is all. Do you want that? Then you sentence not only me but all voices calling for freedom for all, not just for a minority of rich people or for the popular hatred that is being sold as freedom. No, freedom for all and most of all those who want to live. Not to survive. To live. Living, in autonomy, in self-determination, without the chains of power and money.
These chains are not only being formed by cells, bars and walls. These chains are not only being put on by cops with cuffs, batons, guns, pepper-spray and tasers.
These chains are the morals of the legal order that demands unconditional obedience and if not, unconditional punishment. These chains are the so called tolerant society that grants you a favour if you resign to the fact that you are treated as if you are inferior.
Who can be held accountable for the true crimes?
What matters today is to point out the crimes of state and companies, committed by individuals that keep a destructive control machine running, provide it with oil and cogs, and victims. Individuals in unimpeachable positions that are nameless and faceless. Individuals that carry masks and blinders and that claim they are only doing their job. Individuals that think they are not responsible. But they are, for the deaths at the borders, on the street and in prisons.Whom the cap fits, let him wear it, you civil servant, guard, uniformed, decision maker, architect, constructor, supplier.
It is in the interest of the continuation of each form of struggle against the financial interests that rule society that we do not care about the law. It is also in the interest of that struggle that people who are not offered a chance to speak up in the mass media to really tell their story or give their arguments, are getting another opportunity to be heard. And I am not talking about the handouts that are being given every now and then as long as nothing fundamental is being said. The media want to see tears or evildoers or adapted survivors that have let themselves be assimilated so we can be proud that we, out of pity, have allowed these people in our midst.
It is all indoctrination, to be able to point fingers or to make us feel good about ourselves. Smothered, time and again, is the fundamental criticism on a society that claims to have the right to formulate demands to people who want to be part of it.
Language and integration tests. Abandoning your own identity. It has nothing to do with norms and values, but with total adjustment. In the current society that I see around me, the 'Own people first' of fascist Janmaat from the nineteen eighties, the scolding of what once was called multi-cultural society, has become commonplace. Continuously a litany of fashionable racist crap is being poured out in order to make the lives of whole groups of people miserable, even impossible. Who ever says something about it, however nuanced, is being ridiculed. The message is: shut up or the folks in the street may use you as a virtual target, threaten you, defame you, and if it is convenient also chase you away, hunt you down.
Capitalism can not exist without nationalism and xenophobia.
The racist provocateurs of hate, they are not the ones that are being gagged, even though they would like to claim victim-hood from their favoured position. The white privileged Dutchman that is so envious of people who are being trampled into the ground because of their descent or skin colour alone, has not yet had enough of always being given the Quite Right by the state. No, they want even more attention, even more right, and that is being facilitated more than ever. Even more so, all that bile that is being poured out lately is being directed by politics and subsequently being consumed by politics in the form of seats in parliament and subsequently being shit out in the form of yet another new law.
Politics, yes, not just one man that shouts 'less Moroccans' and wants to represents some sort of 'gesundes volksempfinden' and that provokes people even further. It is the establishment that has been fostering these sentiments for years, aided by the mass media. If a white Dutchman robs a jeweler, you will read that a jeweler has been robbed. If it can be said that is was for example a Moroccan, or an 'illegal', this will be widely reported.
Discrimination is 'in'.
The repression of the state by ethnic and racist profiling by the police and by politics has become popularly commonplace under the guise of freedom of speech. It is the breeding ground for the rising fascism of among others Wilders, Le Pen and the Winter, the intended extreme right coalition in the European Parliament. The established parties and politicians leaving the PVV may act as if they are shocked about Wilders statements, as if they do not agree, but they are not his statements but the clarity of them that brings about this startle reaction. With his blatant racism and fascism Wilders has exposed the silent form of it. What first was slumbering, can now run rampant.
Who stands up against this climate of hate?
Hatred, you can pick it up from the street. In Duindorp The Hague they know just what to do with it. And that was a shock. That did not mean to happen. The sneaky repression and smear campaigns do work a lot better. They go unnoticed like insidious poison, take possession of the minds of children that are spoon-fed with racist caricatures such as the black-face Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). Go ahead and make another joke about it, Mark Rutte, simply because you can. Yes, racism festers so much better behind the facade of bad jokes and forced cosiness. It is the hype of being able to say everything to not only hurt the feelings of entire populations, but also to make them the scapegoat for all sentiments of discontent.
In this climate you can excommunicate whole groups of people, banish them, create acceptance for more and more oppression. It remained uncriticized and inconspicuous for a long time, the Dutch racism, but has now come out in the open. Hurriedly politicians disassociate themselves from street violence and carry on their own policy. The mayors van der Laan of Amsterdam and van Aartsen of The Hague each have their own foul play with refugees. Tent action camps are evicted in order to kick them out on the street, 'offering' shelter, but under the condition of so called voluntary return that can not be voluntary because those who lay down the conditions, are blackmailing.
Return to be sent to your death or a live your life on the street or in a cell. It is policy. In Amsterdam, currently everything is being done to put pressure on refugees that have been housed in the former prison in the Havenstraat, to leave. Those who have not left will be out on the street June 1st. This is in fifteen days. You can either starve or leave. It is a merit of former state secretary Albayrak, by closing down the emergency shelters as a means to force people to leave the country.
Extortion by the state is not punishable.
Cooperate with your own deportation is the demand for shelter by national politics. Extortion and blackmail: society, politics, the law is drenched in it. When last year a group of people in detention centers went into hunger-strike for their freedom and because of fear of death, it was them that were accused of blackmail. And not just by Fred the refugee hunter Teeven! No, the allegedly sympathetic Sharon van Gesthuizen of the SP contributed to it and sided with him. Sanctimony, hypocrisy, it is characteristic for parties that call themselves left. But left or right, for what it's worth, they all serve that one large ideal: the capitalist free market economy, the neoliberal penal state, nowadays called: the participation society.
This is democracy, we cannot make it look any better, but we sure can pretend. The overt discrimination of Wilders and his followers actually serves as a pretty good lightning conductor to draw away attention from all the dirty plans and laws that are being implemented by the respectable and just as much law and order parties VVD and PvdA. And this is the current government I am talking about. But all those who went before them or will follow are not any better in their attempts to win the votes of the electorate. And those who agree to vote, agree.
Population policy and migration control are human trafficking!
Let us not forget that the EU, of which The Netherlands is part, has been vouching for the mass murder of refugees crossing the Mediterranean for years on end. It is forbidden for fisherman to save drowning victims. Navy frigates hunt rickety ships full of refugees down into their deaths. Border guards shoot at refugees that come swimming. Everyday it gets more dangerous to dare to try and cross the sea but those who flee for poverty and violence have no choice. This is why the past months hundreds of refugees at the same time have climbed the fences of Melilla and Ceuta, even though they are high and secured with barbed wire.
The EU with its outer borders, heavily guarded by border agency Frontex whose powers reach far beyond Northern Africa, is responsible for the many dead by demanding that there, in for example Morocco, migrants are being cramped in camps in the desert, and by barter and blackmail: deportations against trade agreements, destruction of lives against development aid. Let us not forget that with the Eurosur program the EU observes, keeps out, deports and defiles migrants.
A human being in nothing more than finger prints in a monitoring system.
Nothing more than a product of descent, worth more or less for an economy that is being called ours. Useful if a suitcase filled with money or a brain with knowledge comes along with it, useless if it has fled poverty and is only looking for a job in measly slave labour in a sweatshop or in the green houses, at least that is what we're being told, because in reality the rightless are also of good use to us as long as they remain hidden and rightless.
The EU is committing human trafficking, more than people who make money by hiding refugees in trucks and selling them false passports. The latter only make use of the system of migration control that creates a hole in the market for them. After all they are all capitalists, large or small, permitted or not. The one capitalist prosecutes the other to save its own face, the perpetrators and accomplices of the largest human trafficking of all are kept out of harm's way.
You cannot stop migration. So money is being made from exploitation and overpowering. For centuries nomads have traveled across the earth looking for fertile ground, safer areas. The earth did not come into existence with barbed wire, fences and cameras. Maps and borders are but inventions that have to safeguard profits, divide people to turn them against each other and tell them where they are supposed to be or not, namely there, where they can be used.
To want change is the start of revolution!
If there is one thing that scares governments, it is change they cannot control. Everything is being done to influence people, to make them believe that what they are being told is what they want. Repeat the lie and it becomes the truth. It is easy to hold something for the truth if you are in the right position, on the right side of the border. Stuck in the idea that one person is worth more than the other, that it is just the way it is that we are being considered to work for a boss, vote for a party, rent or buy a house and continue to pump money into it and to die for the state. Stuck in a presumed identity that is supposed to have something to do with nationality rather than individuality. Stuck in the thought that those who want things differently are strangers, aliens, a threat to order, peace and the regularity of the slavish existence with a bank account, an identity card and tax administration.
Let it all remain the same. That is the lesson that we are being given. The fear of change that turns the world upside down makes you realize that things can be different. The new neighbours that have different clothing, different music, other habits. Away with them! The beggars and buskers. Out of our sight! The camps of city nomads and refugee actions. No need to know! Demonstrations of unemployed with forced labour that are not unemployed after all, but mostly poorly paid. Work-shy scum! The psychiatric patients that are not being helped and roam the streets, live in dirty houses and grow lonely, lose track. We have institutions for them as well: drug 'm! Talking and therapy costs way too much money and takes way to much patience.
"Danger danger danger!" the state screams. But free spirits cannot be stopped. You cannot kick people in the gutter if they need help. Free voices cannot be silenced. Love of freedom cannot be confined.
"Danger danger danger!" Let the citizen think that his living standards are in danger. That his identity is in danger. That his future is in danger. Let them think that they want to be controlled, on every street corner, in all activities. For security, false security. And most of all: for themselves, not for somebody else.
Free rein for institutionalized racism and corruption!
As of March 1 this year the immigration police has gotten new powers. These serves the security of nobody, on the contrary. House searches, reading out phones, strip people naked and peek into their ass and genitals, they can do it all. That is, with so-called illegals. Or with people that might house illegals. Privacy? Physical integrity? It does not exist for them, just as little as any other human right to which many exceptions apply and because of that human rights treaties are but paper to whipe your ass with.
The Dienst Terreur & Verrek (Service of Terror & Departure) can also do anything they want. Free reign for intimidation to begin with. Stick nationalities that they do not have to people so they can drag them to several embassies claiming they are investigating and working on deportation, all to serve the goal of locking them up as long as possible. To soften them up. And now as well: buy false papers from representatives from Guinee that on our expenses get a jaunt into the bargain as well. Deportations with false papers? Not punishable. But refugees that out of fear for being sent back enter the country with a forged passport? Not credible! Lock them up, turn them down, deport!
But Teeven promised improvements, didn't he?
Hooray! We've got another pardon! And in exchange for a pardon for a few over and over again new repressive measures may be taken and laws implemented. If one of those bills doesn't pass, like the penalization of illegality, we may – no, we must be pleased and shut up further. But in the meantime it is forgotten that nothing changes about threats, fear, despair and the lack of future prospects. Nothing will change if the resistance keeps letting itself be bullied, deceived, tricked, played for a fool, be told that it isn't so bad, that it will get better.
Yes, it would all get better, if we are to believe Fred the refugee hunter Teeven. Do not believe it. More humane detention. For starters, that does not exist. Imagine being locked up for an indefinite period of time without rights and certainty, only questions and waiting and vacuity. And most of all: fear. The fear that drove Dolmatov to suicide, and many others with him. The appearance must be kept that detention centers are not prisons and so a new law is being made up. A law that is a copy of the Dutch 'Penitentiaire Beginselen Wet' (Prison Law), that applies to prisons, complemented by special articles, again for all those aliens for whom everything needs to be arranged separately in the context of the Dutch apartheid laws.
But one thing remains the same and thereby everything. The detention center is a prison with prison rules and prison regime, with prison cells and doors, with prison isolation and observation, with prison chow and prison punishment. Because punishment, that's what it is and will be, even though it is being called measure. Punishment for having the guts to be here. Punishment for asking asylum. How dare you!
Entry bans have made the penalization of so-called illegality superfluous already. The VVD hauls in an extra tax benefit for the rich by dropping the bill, and the poor are still on the street, with or without papers. Who actually does not profit from the Dutch variety of apartheid, colonialism and slave trade? Who actually does not profit from the barters of politics? Even all of us here present are accessories because we pay taxes to keep the whole machine going, the IND (immigration service), the DT&V (Service of Terror & Departure), the immigration police, the detention centers and all those who work there are being payed by us.
Guilty! All those who cooperate and pay for it. Voluntarily or compulsory complicit.
What are we going to do? Ignore or take action? Consent or combat?
If once again an e-mail passes by, asking if someone knows a place of shelter for a refugee that has been put out on the street,
If I read that someone hung himself out of fear, thrown himself in front of a train due to depression, or as an act of protest set fire to himself,
then that is yet another cry for help that the whole of society should take to heart. It is so easy to shove the responsibility onto those who feel that refugees have to be able to stay, in order to collectively turn the back to the call for the right to live, and subsequently zap through to the next channel, just as long as all the misery we like to shed tears for does not come too close.
Some groups of refugees on the street have taken matters into their own hands. They have made themselves visible through their actions and are currently forced to break the law openly by living in squatted buildings. In a few days from the day of this trial, on May 18, refugees and hopefully a lot of sympathizers will deliberately literally cross another border that they are not allowed to cross. The border Germany – France, to Strasbourg, the start of a march that will cross even more borders, the March To Freedom. The refugees demand among others that their filed fingerprints will be destroyed, that the trap of the Dublin agreement through which they can only apply for asylum in one European country, will be canceled. But also: equal rights, secure livelihood.
One of the refugees of the We Are Here group in Amsterdam, Mouthena, says something like this about the march:
"It is a matter for Europeans to protest against this system of their governments."
I say: it is our responsibility.
If it's up to me, I will be there, but even in participating out of solidarity I feel an inequality that I can not accept. For me the risk that I take is so much smaller when I cross the border without a passport. Even if France were to deport me to The Netherlands as an undesirable person that would not be the same. For me no long term immigration detention, no fear of deportation to a country where bombs en bullets are flying around your ears, where the penalty for expressing your opinion is a higher price to pay than here in The Netherlands.
I have seen a lot of people with boundless courage in a life-and-death struggle. They know that there are only few who effectively stand beside them, join them, or even just want to help without laying down conditions such as cooperating in what is euphemistically called: voluntary return.
Many years ago I said goodbye to a man who was forced to return to Afghanistan, which was also called voluntary. He did not want to await the humiliation of arrest, detention and gagged deportation and wanted to find his wife in Pakistan. Years later he was murdered in Kabul, by the Taliban. Nezamuddin Azimi. A man with courage.
The courage of refugees is in sharp contrast with the cowardice of hate!
How dare people here in The Netherlands have the nerve to say that Nezamuddin and all those others have to leave? How can people get it into their head to impose their own chicken-shit moral onto people who had to cover many miles on foot, had to risk their lives in the hands of human traffickers – with the danger of suffocating in the back of a truck, in the cargo hold of a ship or a plane, or to die of drowning or dehydration with many on a dinghy at sea – how dare people even want to be allowed to make a decision about it? How dare people speak of the responsibility to leave while in the meantime they walk away from their own responsibility? Nezamuddin took that 'responsibility'. He is dead.
Let those responsible for his death and the death of many others be known by their names and faces.Let those responsible for the hate, the fear and the witch hunt come out of their comfortable offices and their ivory towers and be confronted with the consequences of their acts, their policy. Have the guts to show your face, and to sign a deportation order with your name, you spineless bureaucrats!
Lay down your work and let computers crash, all you desk murderers, civil servants and law makers that man the offices of IND and DT&V, justice and police, that fill the cells, make the decisions, that keep the deportation machine going, or does someone else have to do it for you?
Throw sugar in the concrete of walls to build, so they will crumble, throw sugar in the gas tank of the machines, so they can no longer function, do that, and do not do your work anymore, all those who are building prisons, or does someone else have to do it for you?
Lay down ruler and pencil, architects, designers, and throw the drawings of your box spirit into the fire, or does someone else have to do it for you?
We will not wait until you have come to your senses and acknowledge the criminality of what you call your job.
So, doctors, stop declaring people healthy and fit to be interrogated even though they are severely traumatized, to lock them up, carry them aboard an plane in cuffs. Doctors, stop pretending that people who are ill will make it once they have been sent back to poverty and war.
Doctors, have the audacity to put your name below your advice. No, of course not! You might become a victim yourself! Sick minds you are! You are even prepared to force-feed hunger-strikers in the interest of the state.
All those who cooperate, stop collaborating with this regime of inexhaustible legal torture!
And we who are looking at it? Stop looking at it! Step in! The larger our numbers, the more we can do. With determination, by pushing through. Stories are known of passengers in planes that refused to sit down so that a deportation was canceled. You don't have to be a hero, all that it takes is to recognize injustice.
Let the courage of refugees catch on!
We who are powerless against so much hate, power and control, are we supposed to remain silent? Stop being quiet! Break through the powerlessness! Shut up no more, break through the silence to spread the call for resistance. Actually resist! Rise up against the increasing extreme right-wing front that bellows and scolds and calls for repression so loud that it overpowers all other voices.
Rise up strongly, it must, it has to be, in words and in deeds.
Celebrating liberation day is a hollow gesture, it is ridiculous. This is a fact and this year it was proven by the remarks of twitterers tweeting that a group of children that laid a wreath was not white enough. Liberation? Whose liberation? Again, data is being stored such as fingerprints, it is obliged to carry ID, and again the reasons why people flee are being called implausible and dictators are best friends with democrats that brag about themselves.
The registration and control of refugees at a European level calls for destruction the way on March 27 1943 the population register of Amsterdam was destroyed to make the persecution of Jews impossible. It is the only act that can do justice to the war against migrants in Europe.
Because it ís war.
If you have to hide when you see the police, have to fear busts, raids on the street, then it ís war. If people are being packed together in what easily can be named modern concentration camps, the repositories, the detention centers where people await deportation, then it ís war. And in times of war those who wish to be able to defend themselves may arm themselves, commit acts of sabotage and appeal to other people to resist. If that is not allowed, then the war has come closer than it first seemed. Then we are not far from the pre-emptive internment of people that are getting in the way, of punishing people that offer a place to hide.
Are we punishable if next Sunday out of protest we cross the border, hand in hand with refugees? I don't give a damn. My freedom is worthless without the freedom of someone else. Will this court rule that I am punishable because of what I am saying here and for what I have said and written, all the words that the prosecution found necessary to put down in a summons? Then so be it. I will not keep my mouth shut. No more fascism! Never again!
Joke Kaviaar, last word in court of appeal Amsterdam, May 15 2014
Translation: May 28 2014 (the day of the verdict)
Translation of Dutch original: Werk niet mee aan tirannie, maar werk mee aan bevrijding!
http://13-september.nl/laatste-woord-van-joke-kaviaar/
Recorded in court of appeal: http://13-september.nl/laatste-woord-joke-kaviaar-de-rechtszaal-opgenome...
