G8 GERMANIC PANIC

From SchNEWS, the Direct Action Newsletter
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news587.htm#3

It’s countdown to the latest G8 shindig with the main event only a matter [of] weeks away. (6-8th June). And as usual, the warm up-act appears to be a spot of police repression.

While the build up continues apace across Europe, with all manner of sane thinking people (and probably some not so sane as well) preparing for their late spring break in Germany, forces in the Fatherland have been flexing their batons and forward intelligence muscles in the vain hope of spoiling the party.

Despite the chosen G8 venue being in the sleepy Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm in the far north-east of the country (already surrounded with a shiny new $17m fence), last week saw many hundreds of cops involved in around forty raids right across Germany, with convergence and social centres, squats and anti-G8 group offices all targeted.

Several projects and flats in Hamburg (notably the Rote Flora, shortly due to become the city’s main G8 convergence centre) and Bremen felt the crackdown as well as some farms in Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg and Niedersachsen.

In the capital, Berlin, at least eight properties were attacked, including a bookshop, flats, two offices, the kanalb radio and media group and the servers of autonomous tech collective so36.net were seized (a main website host for many lefty and anarcho groups.)

The main reason given for the raids was that catch-all 21st century ruse, “forming a terrorist association” - but as Hanne Jobst of the Berlin Bethanien Glocal anti-G8 office explains, “Who invites the G8 summit also invites the protest against it. All attempts to criminalize this movement will not prevent us from exposing worldwide inequalities during the G8 summit.”

Meanwhile the clampdown is proving more of a downer for the inhabitants of the most famous autonomous squat in Berlin, the Kopi centre. Germany’s largest, resisting, self-organised space has existed since the early nineties and has been no stranger to attacks from Police...but the latest problem is the small matter of the building and surrounding land being sold from under their feet. A hastily arranged auction was run by owners Commerzbank, and on May 8th the properties were sold (for a knockdown price) to a specially-created mystery shell company. Having only been informed a few weeks earlier, Kopites had attempted to warn off prospective buyers, as they had successfully done before, but this time to no avail. Mass protests were organised before and during the auction and cops responded by attacking the protesters at the Heinrichplatz with baton abandon, repeatedly moving and attempting to snatch individuals from the crowd, which spontaneously formed into human chains to stop them.

The cops also used the event as cover to storm a local alternative Café, brutally injured the guests and staff in the process. Five people were arrested, with one so badly beaten that he was hospitalised.

Kopi residents and supporters remain resolute and warn they’re not going to leave easily, regardless of who the state says owns the property and images of Copenhagen spring to mind...

See www.koepi.squat.net

* Over a hundred two-wheel activists involved in the G8 bicycle caravan were arrested and harrassed in Utrecht, Holland last Saturday (5th). But not for pedalling their own ideas about the elite knees up of course, but the spurious charge of failing to use bike lanes properly. Unusally for this offence horse mounted cops charged into the ride with batons swinging, and forcibly arrested everyone in sight, confiscating their vehicles and equipment – much of which was returned damaged, after activists were finally released 48 hrs later complaining of ill treatment and overcrowding. That it was all one big pre-G8 intimidation exercise was left in no doubt, with cops telling activists that what they’d done that day was nothing compared to what they’d do if they continued to carry out their actions. The battle lines are drawn... the next UK G8 Mobilisation meeting is on Thursday 17th MAY from 7pm-9pm (ish) at RampART Social Centre, 15-17 Rampart Street, London, E1 2LA.

www.rampart.co.nr