Dariush Sokolov
We actually did it: No Borders Calais organised a successful week-long music festival (6-12 September 2010) in Calais, one of the shittest towns in Europe, in the teeth of the French police and the local authorities, with no publicity at all, a few hundred euros, and little of what you could call organisation. And some of us say it was just about the best party we’ve ever been to.
It’s safe now to let the cat out of the bag: anyhow there’s a crop of videos up on YouTube already, and…
25 June 2010, Steenokkerzeel by the airport outside Brussels, 60 people occupy the building site of the new 127 tris immigration detention centre, shutting down work for a day, taking direct action against the construction site, and upping the ante in a campaign of resistance against the border regime in Belgium.
Over the past year: successful blockades of most of the six existing detention centres, including the simultaneous blockade of Bruges and Vottem by over 150 people last…
Sometimes a place – it could be a town, a camp, a crossing, or some muddy field – becomes a concentration point, a sink, a trap, for all the latent evil of the system of power that surrounds it.
Calais is not just a symbol of the brutality of the European border regime, of the violence of colonialism turned inwards and compressed by “Fortress Europe”.
The repression and misery here is very real, every day. Calais is the only town where the French police division…
I’m neither a summit-hopper nor a pacifist, yet the plan for mass nonviolent action at the COP15 Climate summit in Copenhagen caught my imagination.
“Using only the force of our bodies”, went the call-out by the Climate Justice Action network, “we will overcome any physical barriers that stand in our way” to “push into the conference area and enter the building, disrupt the sessions” and hold a “horizontal” assembly.
Images of the raid on the Dharasana salt works, 21…
