04/05/2019
As many may have read about the violant Death of a camaronian psychiatric patient after the deployment of security personnel in - we here repost a very insightful class and race conscious article by on why the case of is symbolic for the structural experience of Non-White People in Germany.
(It´s the 4th time already that the public prosecutor's office is investigating against the security-service of the hospital.)
says: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is the rule. We must come to a concept of history that corresponds to this. Then our task will be to bring about the real state of emergency; and thereby our position in the struggle against fascism will improve". The story of Oury Jalloh's death and the struggle for his enlightenment are symbolic of this state of emergency.
Oury Jalloh stands for the fight against police violence and racism in the FRG. January 7, 2019 marked the 14th anniversary of his death. The official enlightenment has made no progress at all. Instead, despite the investigation, which revealed the circumstances of his death, the trial was discontinued and not resumed. It is no longer a matter of finding out the truth. It is a matter of acknowledging it. Oury Jalloh was murdered by the German state, which since then has done everything in its power to cover its tracks and protect those responsible.
Recently, a case occurred which shows frightening parallels to the murder of Oury Jalloh: The Syrian asylum seeker , who was wrongly held in police custody for months due to a mix-up, was so badly injured in a fire in his cell in the prison in mid-September that he died shortly afterwards.
The cause of the fire has not yet been clarified, but for the judiciary it already seems to be certain, as with Oury Jalloh: that he must have started the fire himself. As in Oury Jalloh's case, however, the official version of the events is doubted by Expert*inside.
Meanwhile, reports of right-wing networks in the Bundeswehr and the police are accumulating. Rights plan and carry out terrorist attacks with the help of the authorities, with their knowledge and consent, and bourgeois media repeatedly adopt the perspective of the right in their presentation.
The perpetrator of the fascist attacks in Essen and Bottrop, who several times drove a car in groups he perceived as non-German, wanted to "prevent attacks by Syrian or Afghan refugees".
This kind of justification of racist violence has a historical model in the lynchings in the south of the US. Black people were brutally murdered. The justification was that they r***d, harassed or even looked at white women. Even the imputation of an intention was enough for a death sentence. For only through violence could r**e be prevented, argued and argued racists*, for example from the .
The bourgeois media landscape plays its part in the fact that even today in Germany people marked as foreign - mostly men from African countries or the countries of Western Asia - are constructed as a danger to white, German women.
But that's not all: a large part of the bourgeois media adopts the concept of xenophobia as a motive for right-wing acts of violence. This term suggests that violence is a reaction to the presence of allegedly "strangers", blaming them in the end: if they were not here, everything would remain peaceful. Suffering is so played down and trivialized.
But it is about racist violence in an atmosphere where being fled or not being white is enough to be exposed to a general suspicion. With their reports and supposedly investigative reports on alleged Arab mafia clans and African dealers, illegal migration and asylum fraud, based on press releases and police statistics, the media have helped to construct a picture of people whose fate can expect no sympathy.
One comrade comments on class versus class: "Today it's violent drunks who get onto [the] target - young people who hardly anyone wants to defend. Tomorrow there will be larger sections of our class who can be classified as violent and deported as leaders of strikes and protests. While migrant women have never received full representation in German society, the state continues to arm against them. It is the climate in which new fascist perpetrators* are growing up."
, , , are just a few of the many who have fallen victim to the racism of the German police. The culprits have nothing to fear consequences, because their victims are black on the one hand and members of the lowest class of this society on the other. According to a newsletter on the appeal procedure in the Oury Jalloh case at the Regional Court of , "all three named [those responsible for the delay of the trial] were promoted under Interior Minister (SPD).
The former Public Prosecutor to the Chief Public Prosecutor, the former National Director of Criminal Investigation to the Chief of Police and Head of Department 2 Public Order and Security at the Ministry of the Interior and the former Police Commissioner of the Police Directorate East (Dessau-Rosslau) to the Deputy Chief of Police and Head of Department 21 Law of Security (on 1 September 2008)".
The promotion of those responsible is another slap in the face for all those involved in clearing up cases of police violence. The same applies to the case of the policeman convicted in the trial of Jalloh's death, not for murder, but for negligent homicide. He was pleased that the reactionary "police union" (GdP) paid court costs of 430,000 euros and lawyers' fees of 155,000 euros. Meanwhile, of course, all activities to solve the murder of Oury Jalloh had to be paid out of one's own pocket, not to mention all costs incurred by the repression of the initiative.
, the Senator of the Interior in Hamburg responsible for the use of emetic torture, by means of which was murdered in December 2001 at the Hamburg Institute of Forensic Medicine, was also never called to account, as was forensic medicine in Hamburg. Instead, in July 2017, during the protests against the G-20 summit, he was able to once again cover the entire city with police terror.
Trinidad-born socialist theorist and writer wrote that racism was aimed at sending blacks to their place. As wage earners, they are at the mercy of their bosses. Racist violence serves to eliminate resistance to miserable living conditions, so that any condition, however bad, would be accepted.
Against this background, the class character of racist normality becomes clear. Each of these individual cases, which have been accumulating for years and paralyzing us every time, bears the signature of German imperialism. From the systematic subordination of people in post-colonial states to German economic interests, the destruction of their livelihoods, which forces them to flee, to their sorting into camps, to isolated living conditions in which they are exposed to racist attacks.
The new immigration law is intended to make an even greater distinction between "useful" asylum seekers - i.e. those who can be used for the German economy - and the others, who are then to be deported more quickly. It is symptomatic that the police murders and the right-wing violence have not been solved; on the other hand, the state has put what can only be done in the way of those who work for the solution.
The measures range from criminalisation to deportation of those who resist.
Like the relatives of the victims of the NSU, they were targeted by the police because they were committed to enlightenment. And like the asylum seekers who protested at Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg against German migration policy and the dehumanizing camp system, many of them were deported.
What the racist police murders and the complex have in common is not that the state is simply blind in the right eye. No, its officials are often enough with their right arms, marching with them and providing violent rights with information and practical support.
Precisely because the police, through its task of defending property and maintaining the bourgeois order, on the one hand attracts rights and provides the basis for organizing rights, the perspective of achieving justice not only for Oury Jalloh but for all the murdered must focus on the capitalist economy that produces racism and, just as the police makes violence necessary, too.
In view of the police laws planned and passed in the various federal states, it is all the more necessary to build broad resistance. From the use of mobile police stations and surveillance vehicles to the extension of controls in railways and railway stations - the more the armed arm of the state is spread around, the more the freedom of movement of illegalised and criminalised people is restricted.
Often enough, this happens in neighbourhoods that are to be upgraded, where the poor, the homeless, asylum seekers and migrant youth do not fit into the image of a modern, cosmopolitan and liberal city. Experiences with state repression are commonplace, but they are concentrated in migrant districts and neighbourhoods and constructed danger zones such as and .
The answer to this racist normality, which for us represents an everyday state of emergency in which physical violence is only the last resort in an almost infinite arsenal that takes our breath away every day, can only lie in collective resistance. When we regain control over our lives, in schools, factories, universities, streets and public squares, we bring about the state of emergency of capital. But as long as the state of emergency is normal for us, there will be no peace.
Origional Article in German here:
https://lowerclassmag.com/2019/01/11/rassismus-und-toedliche-polizeigewalt-oury-jalloh-war-kein-einzelfall/?fbclid=IwAR3bComNI6ZaupRrSOQEhX3LrkPdmMsgdOAACwk8yDnEVREqS1P64gbkuV4
Translation by AFROTAK TV cyberNomads
