The Refugees' Movement, Two years later, part I

Coming for the first time to a squatted building housing refugees in their own country can be a culture shock for some people. The fact alone that people live in a building in such a bad state as the formerly abandoned garage can shock some, but also the crowdedness, the fact that so many people share a few rooms, beds aligned side by side as if in a hospital, or a hostel. The make-shiftness of the kitchens, the bathrooms. Indeed life at the vluchtgarage, or “refugees' garage” as this squat is called, is far from perfect. A newspaper article even called it “the worst place in Amsterdam”. Hygenic conditions are poor. Residents live crammed in with each other, which is especially prejudicial because people are often sick. There are many complaints about frequently defective toilets and showers, and a lack of washing machines. Even so, the city council doesn't do anything to better their situation.
And more people knock at their door every week asking for a place to stay, inhabitants having to turn them away.

The day the garage was squatted, in December 2013

On my first visit there, I arrived on the second day of Ramadan, at about nine in the evening. During my long bike ride through the outskirts of Amsterdam, the daylight had been gently fading, and as I entered the building, the inhabitants were in a real flurry getting food ready for the evening meal. For those who had been fasting, this was the first time since sunrise they would consume drink or food. Among other things foufou was prepared, a sort of very thick, hot porridge made of cassava, which I remember eating a lot in West Africa, but also some rice with meat, and copious amounts of salad with peanutbutter-sauce dressing.

I was invited to eat with everyone, and so I kneeled down around the table cloth spread out on the floor on which the plates with food were served. As I looked at the group I noticed the glow on many faces. The delight of breaking the fast with a first gulp of water was written on them. A friend once described it like this to me: "There is nothing like that first sip of water after a whole day of thirst. No mouthful of any other drink can ever be so delicious, so gorgeous and refreshing as that splash of water at that precise moment." The group ate, many visibly with happy relief.

After everyone had stuffed their bellies sufficiently, people layed back and relaxed, enraptured in the post-iftar glow.

One of the young men on the couch, Ali, shoved some chewing tobacco under his lip. "We call it toumbac`, he said. Someone else added, “it is grown in and around Darfour, but they consume it more in North Sudan." Most of the men living here are from East Africa, from Sudan and Somalia, although there are a lot of individuals from other areas in the world also.

What happened over the past two years

What can be said to have been achieved in two years of intense activism by the refugee movement in the Netherlands? In terms of laws and their execution the balance is a disappointing one to look at. Not much really changed, the real life situation of many people without papers is just as alarming as it has always been., retention centres have not been closed down, and deportations continue. If one thing can be said to have changed, though, it is that the media started writing about the problem, and in a positive light.

Picture from a demo in Brussels

I remember how I held in hand one of the first of these articles, and how surprised I was to see the word “deportation centre” in print in the mainstream press. Only a few years, or maybe months earlier, most passerby on the streets would certainly not have known what a deportation centre was supposed to be; these terrible, unjust prisons were a well-kept secret. As I am writing this, in 2014, migration and related topics are very present in the European mainstream media. The death of over 360 of refugees on sea in the environs of Lampedusa shocked the continent. Following it there were large demos across Europe, which turned into riots in Berlin. In reality, even those 360 are just a tiny percentage of the number of overall deaths. In 2013 research revealed that the number of deaths on the fringes of Europe was several thousands of incidents higher than previously assumed. Starting from the beginning of the millenium, the teller clocked in on 23,000 at the end of the year 2013.

People in Europe are becoming increasingly aware of this now. At least the information is out, there is no excuse now not to know.

But there is no end in sight to the deaths on the threshold of Europe: In September 2014, mafia smugglers sank two boats off the coast of Lybia, killing over 700 refugees who were on their way to Europe.This savage mass murder let the number of deaths off the European coasts go up to 2,900 for the unfinished year of 2014.

More specifically, what happened in Amsterdam

It would be illusory to deny that activism is immune to “fashions”. Migrants' rights, thankfully, have come into fashion over the past years. They are an extremely important topic, but it is not like it was not extremely important already a few years ago, when almost no one was speaking about them.The activist scene at that moment was dormant, and the general public was generally ignorant. The media in fact seemed to refuse to report on this.

It was not until 2012, inspired by refugee protests that had come into motion in Germany, that the first Dutch refugee protest camp opened in Ter Apel. Two other ones sprang up in Amsterdam shortly after. At first, there were just a few tents in the garden of a building appertaining to the protestant church. When, in early autumn, the tents moved to an old school yard on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the camp rapidly grew. The response of the neighbourhood was fantastic, and countless people living in the area regularly came to help the refugees with food and drink, or with blankets and clothes and other materials, and, of course, for the company.

Still, the conditions in the protest camp were difficult, especially with winter approaching and temperatures dropping below zero at night. A period of stability was needed after this so that everyone could fully recover their health.

After the eviction of the camp, an abandonned church was squatted in which, for the next six months, the refugees lived. It was an oddly mismanaged period. The protestant church garnered 10s of thousands of Euros in donations and spent it all in a few months time, even incurring more debt in that time. Building rooms cost a lot of money, as did heating up the immense building. But money was also wasted on things like hiring a professional security unit, because the city council wanted to prevent the activist group from growing. They made sure that every resident of the church was given an ID card indicating that they were a member of the group living in the church.

I don't think the irony of this move is lost on anyone, the city council insisting on documents for those whom they refuse to document.

In the late winter and early spring period, a string of arrests hit the refugee group. Several of their members were detained by police. Although this happened in different parts of Amsterdam or even the Netherlands, this made the group more and more afraid. And there had also been instances of the police patrolling the area asking for papers in the immediating vicinity of the church.

As the weather started to become warmer, people would have begun to sit outside on the steps to catch some fresh air. Instead they decided that it was safer to stay all day inside the structure which had almost no windows and let no daylight in.

The intensifying of arrests probably happened accidentally around that time, but it certainly worsened the living conditions for the refugees. By spreading fear of arrest the police de facto created a prison.

At the end of June the church was evicted at the behest of the City Council, promising everyone a one-time payment of 228 Euros, if they left voluntarily. The refugee group had earlier lived a violent eviction and decided to accept. The day they were told to go, I believe it was the 30^th of June, they took breaks from packing up their bags to form groups of several tens of individuals and walk to the municipality building that was a few streets away. There they lined up to each be handed the agreed sum.

Graffiti in one of the Refugees Squats

At the day that had been agreed upon for the group to leave, people took out their personal belongings, some stowed away in suitcases or backpacks, while other things were tied up in sacks and blankets. Mattresses, pillows, blankets and cooking utensiles were piled up outside on the grass, with no clear notion of where all this stuff could be brought. The previous eviction, the one of the tent camp, had ended with some spending the cold November night at the next bus stop, covering themselves in quilts. This seemed to be the prospect this time as well.

But then, one organisor´s telephone rang. When she told everyone to listen up, and yelled out the news, the group cheered. Swiftly, everyone worked together to put bags, suitcases, blankets, mattresses and everything else into cars and minivans, and transport it to the new building. An office block had been squatted for them less than two kilometers from the church.

I love how this represented a formidable symbolic middle finger to the City Council.

The new building had no electricity or warm water, but the refugees put in a lot of effort to make it a liveable space.

In the meantime, the newly abandonned church was converted to an art gallery. Those who ran it had to invite foreign artists, because local artists knew about the history of the place and wanted to stay clear of it.

In the new building, the number of the refugees grew again, and with that much of a crowd arguments between subsets of people are inevitable. At some point one sizeable group seperated from the rest and squatted an empty building nearby. “It was easy to get in. The roller shutter of the front door was broken, we just had to lift it”, they laughed.

But after a few months they were evicted again. The City Council, in a twisted and sick move, offered them a new place... in a former prison complex.

The Netherlands are closing down prisons for want of criminals, which is certainly a good thing. One corollary is however the allocation of prisons to make asylum seekers' homes having become some macabre sort of fashion.

After some hesitation and discussion about this offer, considering all the sinister things suggested by it, the refugee activist group acquiesced and moved in. They were hard pressed for any kind of alternative.

Their hesitance was not only symbolical. Living in such a place meant that many of the group had to relive personal trauma. Individually, many had earlier in their lives been incarcerated, sometimes also in Dutch deportation centres. Some had been imprisoned and tortured in their lifetimes, others had lost relatives who had died under the extreme conditions of incarceration and torture in other countries.

Given the prison building's physical characteristics, there was no way to forget its original purpose. It was an imposing, brooding dark brick construction which did not need the signs that were still in place and which identified it as a penitentiary institution. The barbed-wire on the walls surrounding it was still there, too. And as gloomily impressive as it was on the outside, it presented differently on the inside, but in no way more humane. Heavy metal doors opened onto small cells out of which people made their rooms. Several floors of cells gave onto one shared corridor, each floor girded by a gangway, a ridge protected with railings which took you from cell to cell. Strip lighting diffused a punishing kind of light in the open space.

If someone from the outside wanted to visit anyone, they had to leave a passport behind at the entrance. Indeed, the prison was allocated to the refugees replete with its former guards. Only a few months had elapsed since the place had been used in its originally assigned function. The guards were often as professionally coarse with the new inhabitants as they had always been paid to be.

Read Part II of this article.

Pictures of the prison the day of the eviction of the Refugees: