(translated mostly with DeepL)
Yesterday, a rally of the Seebrücke Ulm, announced at short notice, took place. Although there were only two days between the announcement and the rally, several hundred people were on site. We and the people from the Seebrücke estimated 300 to 400, press reports speak of 500 participants.
It’s nice that more people than ever before take part in rallies of the Seebrücke, but it’s unbearable that we have been going out on the streets for years because of the same topic and almost nothing has changed.
This was also part of the speech that one of our activists gave yesterday. Here is the english text version:
We stand here again today.
For the same reasons that many of us stood here in April.
The humanitarian catastrophe and the complete failure of the EU in dealing with refugees. But not only in Moria.
The people there have been homeless not only for a few days. They have been homeless for years. And for years we have been hearing the same old phrases.
- There must be contingents.
- There has to be a European solution.
- Yes but we have the Dublin Agreement, our hands are tied
And nothing has happened for years.We know about the terrible conditions in the mass accommodations.
We know about the enslavement of fugitives during their escape, about torture in Libyan camps.
We know that 10.000s people drown in the Mediterranean Sea.And nothing happens.
The mass camps at the European external borders are immense.
There is a controversial discussion about sea rescue.Those who are rescuing are accused of smuggling.
The European countries, whose geographical location allows them to do so, sit it out.
German politics is vacillating. They want to let a few minors into the country here and there.
Large parts of the civil society remains silent. They act according to the motto “What I do not see is not there”. (german saying)The 13,000 people whose perspectives are now even bleaker, whose living conditions have become even more catastrophic. They are also blamed for the fire that robbed them of what little they might have had left.
This is no more than inhuman cynicism.
But even if the people of Moria were all somehow decentrally accommodated in a humane way. We can’t just put the issue of migration on the side and get on with business as usual. Because day after day people will continue to make the decision to leave everything behind. Because the place where they have lived up to now is lost for them. It is the lack of perspectives, conflicts and climate change that makes right now regions uninhabitable. And this will go on.
Even if some people would like to see the topic to go away, it will not. Not tomorrow and not in 10 years.
Free the ships,
leave no one behind,
we have space!