DISOBEDIENCE IN SUPPORT OF LOCKED-IN MIGRANTS CURRENTLY IN HUNGER STRIKE

SEVILLE IN GLOBAL WAR

Those in charge have imposed a siege on Seville.

Comrades from all over the world have been detained at the Spanish borders and at points of access to the city. Secret police who read the newspaper upside-down and who are cooking in the heat under their sad uniforms intimidate people with their arsenal, identify them, control their belongings and peer into their privacy. Propaganda about supposed activist violence and intimidation of the local population is distributed by the authorities. The seige on truth to protect their lies. Just like in a war. They have converted Seville into one more setting in the global war.

In this setting, publicly convene a concentration Saturday the 22 at 11.30 in the Plaza del Salvador de Sevilla constitutes, de facto, an act of disobedience.

Disobedients from all over the world, a diversity of collectives, movements, people, have come together here in Seville, and through this act of disobedience we make public:

-- Our support for the lock-in of immigrants in the University of San Pablo de Olavide. We understand it as a moment of struggle which puts in question the consensus with respect to the repressive border policies which they have enacted for the European Summit in Seville. Their lock-in is a political tool of disobedience which demonstrates the emergence of a political subject, the struggle of migrant workers in the context of globalization. This is the counter-image of the entrenchment of the powerful in the Summit.

-- That the European border policies institute a violent division in possibilities of living together in the ever more transnational cities of the so-called First World. That we defy these policies because they effect all of us directly. We reject whatever condition of European citizenship which builds upon a base of division and social exclusion.

-- That we demand the opening of negociation between the assembly of locked-in immigrants and the relevant municipal, regional and European authorities. That this negociation refers to all the claims made by immigrants, which should be accepted.

-- That the Spanish government has a direct responsibility for the causes which originated the lock-in: hundreds of people, precarious workers, suddenly saw themselves without the employment they had foreseen due to the use by companies of the so-called ‘contracts at origin,’ one more instrument for the new forms of exploitation.

-- That we insist, for these reasons, that the Spanish government not expel any of the locked-in migrants, but rather that it introduce all the necessary modifications in the relavent laws in order to permit the regularization of their immigration status. And we declare our will to combat the ‘Foreigners Law’: cooperating with the entrance of immigrants into European territories and politically associating ourselves with their struggles through diverse forms of disobedience.

We are deserting from your war. No human being is illegal.

Seville, June 22, 2002