From the forests of Poland to the cells of Germany, this cross-border investigation examines the threat of the institutionalised violence and death faced by refugees both in police custody and on the border to Europe.
“And the question arises: Is it possible to refuse to obey an order? Can you say; I am not taking this child to a forest?” (Jacek Leociak)
It was still early in the morning when the tanks entered the red zone. This guilty procession of filth was followed by a bulldozer, a remote command unit and thousands of police officers from around Germany to 137 Köpenicker Strasse in Berlin; the battleground for an eviction that has taken the unified state of Germany it’s entire history to resolve.
She sells the arts of the working class to the rich but I know she doesn’t believe in it. A newspaper held in shaking hands and eyes deep in the horror of hunger, her voice echoes across the street.
We were both corrupted that way, standing together on Bergmanstrasse, a famously gentrified street in west Berlin.
You know what’s great about Capitalism? Choices! Lot’s of fucking choices. As the workers of the west are mostly dependent on wage slavery, this international workers day is dedicated to our most powerful illusion – choice. Everyday I am faced with an avalanche of choices and I don’t even have a wage.
After over a year of lockdown and the demand to stay at home, this year has also been an opportunity for landlords and courts to push through evictions and put people out on the streets. Since lockdown, every place I could call a home has either been evicted or is on the edge of eviction.
In the crypt of a church built into the face of a cliff, I wait to meet the action director of the Palestinian Freedom Theatre, Nabil Al-Raee.
The theatre group was touring across the UK, so I decided to take the train to Hastings and meet the director during the production of The Siege.
Prison and Publication
At the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, two investigations focused on the incarceration of publishers in the United Kingdom and Russia.
The first was Julian Assange, former founder of Wikileaks, now held in Belmarsh Prison awaiting extradition to the United States of America after his arrest at the Ecuadoran embassy.
The second was 14 year old Russian anarchist Nikita Uvarov, who is accused by the Russian Secret Services (FSB) of planning to blow up their headquarters, simulated with a video game. He was in fact arrested while trying to post flyers he had printed with two others, in solidarity for anarchist mathematician Azat Fanisovich Miftakhov.
It’s the old coming of age story.
You go to school, you study, you make friends. You open your text books. You realise you are only learning what the state wants you to know. You rage against your teachers, your headmaster and your school. You laugh in the face of society, state and authority.
The surreal circus of the arrest of Julian Assange is a show trial for investigative journalism across the world. The open and subsequent torture of this publisher for the betrayal of his source illustrates the open aggression towards journalism and could not have been achieved without the complicity of the news media.
Their silence in the face of tyranny is a death sentence for all of us.
I am aware that it is protocol to issue a Prevention of Future Death (PFD) post-mortem. These extreme circumstances force me to break tradition. I would like to explain, pre-mortem, why welfare conditionality in the time of Coronavirus will lead to my own death.
I hope then, Secretary of State, you will understand your responsibility for the lives of millions of others, and so act accordingly.
I was diagnosed with a brain disease last year but I have lived with it for over 13 years of my life. My European neurologists tell me; “You are going to die.” It was time to make my way back to England.
I was in Europe when the last seizures took place and since then my mental health has suffered, exasperated violently by my next move. I applied for Personal Independence Payment, a disability welfare.
Health and State
In the months leading up to 2020, I applied to the British Government for Personal Independence Payment; a form of social disability welfare. Knowing the governments history of using private companies and sanctioning to exclude vulnerable people from benefits and support, i documented my experience.
These two investigations cover this period into the outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus and Lockdown of the United Kingdom in the first half of 2020.
The investigations were also written as an open letter; addressed to the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn, the Senior Coroner of North London and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
None have replied.
Borders and Refugees
At the beginning of 2020, two investigations were published spotlighting the treatment of refugees in refugee camps and in custody – examining the actions of both the Greek and French police, as well as the conditions in which this brutality exists.
Re-examining investigations from 2016, the spotlight is on the citizens of Europe and it’s institutions of journalism that have failed in the pursuit of the truth, furthering the lie that refugees are criminals, or worse, parasites.
In February 2016, half of a refugee camp known as the ‘Jungle’ on the north coast of France, was cleared with bulldozers and riot police. The images below are from the camp in the week after the eviction.
The borders of the United Kingdom are militarised with both the language of fear and the chemical burn of tear gas. From the fall of the Berlin wall to the building of a new wall on the English Channel, the wars and movement of people from Kosovo to Afghanistan; the former humanitarian shelter in France has become a war zone of police brutality and public opinion.
A culture of aggressive indifference that lead its brutal eviction in 2016, following the Brexit vote.
The failure of authority in Europe extends across nationalism and borders, it is explicit in our internationally shared crimes on the deprivation of human liberty. There appears to be no other group in society, except for foreign nationals, where there is a popular notion to deny the same human rights afforded to other citizens, than with the prison population. Those who are both can be the most vulnerable to this power.
Housing and Gentrification
In 2019 and 2020 I moved between Berlin and Barcelona investigating gentrification, as well as squatting and left-wing associations under threat from a changing city eaten by property development companies.
This two part investigation looks into both the landlords that are tearing apart communities across the city and the culture it shares, but also those who resist and create free spaces, bars and youth centres.
Written in the political environment of resistance to gentrification and independence referendums in the UK and Catalonia.
Far from the mainstream nationalist debates on independence, our failure to coherently confront power and offer meaningful alternatives, a community of squatters and expropriators live on the coast of Catalonia.
Today thousands of people marched through Berlin for the Interkiezonale Star Demo against a wave of radical centre evictions – and for the occasion we are pleased to publish this meticulous probe into the situation by anarchist investigative journalist Joe Reynolds.