Today's meeting had representatives from Droits Devant!, Sans Papiers, Indymedia, WOMBLES, Social Centres Network, Federation Anarchiste, and NO BORDER.

Issues discussed included the legitimization of political repression after September 11, international legal cooperation, immigration and repression worldwide, and a theoretical analysis of social control.

Repression in society includes jails, surveillance, police violence, etc, but also schools, mental hospitals, and social institutions. There is also internal repression within the movement, but that's another debate. Political repression includes riot police and governmental discrimination against groups.

Migration control at the national level is linked to the international question of criminal (in)justice and social control: repression is the stigmatization of certain groups, targeting them for criminalization as an example to keep the wider society quiet and afraid. The creation of a moral system (good vs. bad) divides populations and groups to divide populations and to pit groups against each other. Repression is the visible manifestation of the invisible, ubiquitous system of social control, which is reinforced by the paranoia and internal divisions among activists who wish to remain within the rubric of "civil society". We should stop activist self-victimization, whereby people feel as though they are victims of persecution because they are subversive; in truth, we are victims of persecution only because society needs someone to persecute to reinforce social control.

Among women, self-oppression and self-censorship happen all the time. The feminist critique has always been that society pushes control processes to transform people into objects. The feminist response has always been solidarity, via associations, collectives, etc., but new "anti-association" law enforcement such as the Madrid Declaration criminalizes people even for signing a petition or attending a meeting.

In Scandinavia, there is a public myth of a conflict-free society. Before September 11, the question of sans-papiers was not part of public discourse. Now, sans-papiers are seen as a huge social threat. In France,immigration has been very politicized because it highlights the historic French relationship with the French-speaking colonized world. While Francophone regions are not important to mainstream French society, colonized populations are divided by poverty, environmental destruction, overarmament -- divisions created by the French to control local elites. In France, immigrants are denied basic rights because the rights of the citizen are tied to work: people who do not have the right to work are denied health, services, autonomy, etc. One activist present had previously been deported back to his home country in the company of 5 police, who treated him brutally, as if he were a criminal. He wonders whether the violence comes from the police, the State, or the entire power structure.

Another activist countered that to say, "I was treated like a criminal" begs the question of "who is a criminal"? We shouldn't argue against unjust repression or unfair persecution, because there is no such thing as just repression or fair persecution. All prisoners are political prisoners; all prisoners are prisoners of war. We must have solidarity with all prisoners, and create Direct Action Networks for resistance both within prisons and detention centers and outside of them. It is now time, not only to defend people in reaction to police repression, but to create an overall framework for offensive struggle against social control.

There is a mechanism for removing a society's sense of responsibility. The first step is fear of the monstrous "other", whether that be criminals, foreigners, poor people, terrorists, mentally ill people, or any other group. The second step is that the society becomes incapable of making rational decisions as to who fits into the category of "the other," and so society considers itself the victim. Society then abnegates its own responsibility for having created this "other," and hands off its undesireables to technical institutions to be handled by the experts (jails, mental hospitals, schools, etc.) After September 11, all of society and the government itself considered itself the helpless victim, leaving the responsibility for reaction to be taken by the head of the military.
Historically, the final step is the "humanization" of repression, via prison reform, educational reform, psychiatric reform, etc. Stigmatized people are to be "rehabilitated, for their own good." The job of the police and the army is now done by civil democratic society's army of social workers, priests, teachers, social agencies and institutions, etc. Repression is total.

The criminalization of "hooliganism" is really just a tool of class war. One UK activist noted, "Whenever working-class people get together in the street, police attack them. They treat us all as criminals whether we are political or not, because they think that we are low class, that we are scum, and that is the way they have always dealt with it throughout history. ...We need to have more mass presence in the streets, to hold the streets, to keep the police from taking over, not just during demos, but all the time." We need to create free spaces both in the streets and elsewhere by occupying buildings and creating centres.

The idea of increased repression since September 11 is a red herring. Police violence, repression, random raids, concentration camps... none of this is new. The media and the state use the spectre of September 11 to create a culture that justifies repression in the light of the threat from the outside world.

To combat this culture of paranoia, Indymedia UK created links with mainstream civil liberties groups and trade unions. Now it is time to expand those networks of solidarity, to get the mainstream groups who are in solidarity with Indymedia to support the more marginalized groups that Indymedia also supports.

In France, the "Islamicist Attacks" of 1995 justified an increased army presence in subways and public spaces. Since the last elections, police are everywhere and are secure that they will not be criticized for violence. The new interior minister, Sarkozy, is in favor of more jails, more prisoners, and targeting immigrants especially, especially Blacks and Arabs

In 1998, in France, 150 people from Mali were deported en masse. They resisted, smashed up the airplane, and hurt their deporting officers. Since then, there have been no more mass deportations of a single population. It is necessary to mobilize the trade unions, churches, and elements of mainstream society as to how the repression of migrants represses them as well, so that they can act in solidarity against deportations.

The WOMBLES in UK (Britain's verions of Tutte Bianche) are targeted for extreme police surveillance and persecution, harrassment, demonization and personal attacks in the mainstream media, and random raids of the social centres. Everything suspected of being linked to the WOMBLES is criminalized.

There are many organizations (www.statewatch.org, www.fipr.org.uk, www.apc.org, www.pi.org, www.corpwatch.org, www.genoaresistence.org, Fortress Europe, www.a-infos.ca, etc) that deal with the documentation of repression on a daily basis. We need to establish coordination among these groups so that they do not create unnecessary work by repeating each other's data. We also need to establish networks of coordination among the various protest-specific "legal teams" and among the various national support groups for the defendants after global summits. This international antirepression collaboration can be coordinated under the rubric of the European Association of Democratic Jurists. We cannot organize the whole world, but we can create the resources and support platforms to provide a context for activists can act more effectively.