Author: earthfirst

Turkish Army Burns Down Forests in Kurdistan – Call for an International Delegation!

With the restart of the war in North-Kurdistan by Turkish state in end of July 2015 the Turkish Army has started to burn down forests.

With the restart of the war in North-Kurdistan by Turkish state in end of July 2015 the Turkish Army has started to burn down forests. After 2,5 years of negotiations about the start of a peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, the Turkish side decided to attack the PKK Guerrilla HPG (Peoples Defense Forces) and legal political activists.

In a planned and systematic manner the Turkish Army shoots with munition and bombs which result in forest fires. Particularly in the provinces of Dersim (Tunceli), Sirnex (Şırnak) and Amed (Diyarbakır) the Army has burned down several ecologically highly sensitive forests in its operations against the HPG. Thereby the Turkish Army hopes to limit the mobility of HPG. This method in fighting the long-lasting Kurdish rebellion has been used widely already in the 90’s in North-Kurdistan. Almost every greater forest in the contested regions has been burned down in that years.

The most forest fires have been initiated in areas which have been declared by the Turkish government as “security areas” just after the restart of the war. That is why local people and activists – like from our movement – have been hindered by the Turkish Army to go to the affected areas and try to extinguish the fires. These initiatives have been created while the responsible governmental bodies did not act. We assume that they have been instructed by the government not to intervene. To date several hundred hectares of forests have been burnt down in North-Kurdistan where the main tree type is the oak.

We call on the international political activists, social movements and NGO’s working on ecological issues to join an international delegation. This delegation could investigate the dimension and impacts of the forest fires of the last weeks, the subsequent behavior of Turkish officials, the efforts of locals to extinguish the fires and if existing the ongoing fires and inform the international public based on their observations. We think that the extremely destructive behavior of the Turkish State in this dirty war must be treated also on international level. The period for the international delegation is planned from the 8th to the 12th September 2015. Write us in case of interest.

Ercan Ayboga
for the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement

Contact:
email: e.ayboga@gmx.net
fb: www.facebook.com/mezopotamyaekolojihareketi

Sources about the fires:
Al-Monitor, 21.07.2015: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/07/turkey-kurds-pkk-forest-fires-cause-political-mayhem.html
Firat News Agency, 05.08.2015: http://en.firatajans.com/kurdistan/forest-fires-caused-by-turkish-army-expand
Kurdish Daily News, 09.08.2015: http://kurdishdailynews.org/2015/08/09/forest-fires-caused-by-turkish-airstrikes-in-zap-and-xakurke/

Call out to get involved in a research project on sexual violence in activist communities

Was your sexual abuser a high-profile activist? Have you felt unable to speak out about it?

Was your sexual abuser a high-profile activist? Have you felt unable to speak out about it? Or have you spoken out about it only to be accused of making it up and/or dividing the movement? Did your anti-state activism and/or experience of police brutality rule out going to the police? Were you able to kick out your abuser using other methods? Did the accountability process backfire? Did your abuser just move on to a different group and do the same thing to someone else? Was the trans community so small that you didn’t want your partner to lose it? Do you want to be involved in taking action and challenging sexual violence in activist communities?

We want to hear from survivors who identify as women, gender-queer or trans who are ready to talk about their experiences of sexual violence within current or past organising in radical social justice movements in the UK. This may have happened once or multiple times, we are interested in hearing from folks with a variety of experiences of sexual violence including unwanted touching, flashing, harassment, stalking, sexual assault and rape.

Salvage is a collective of academic-activists, survivors and activists. We got together through a workshop on survivor-led approaches to gendered violence and abuse at AFem 2014. This is our first research project. We aim to develop resources, information and practical recommendations to work towards creating effective challenges to gendered violence, abuse and harms within social justice movements and communities.

If you are interested in getting involved and/or want more information about this research project:

Web: https://projectsalvage.wordpress.com/research

Twitter: @Project_Salvage

Flood the System Organising Booklet is Now Available to Print or Download

Click here to download the Flood the System organising booklet! This 35 page booklet has everything you need to know about organising an event to #FloodTheSystem.

Click here for the same booklet as above, but set up so when you print it front/back, you can fold it into a booklet.

We envision Flood the System as a step towards building the DNA of a robust movement that has the collective power to challenge global capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and oppression.

This booklet is designed to give you a sense of why we need to escalate, what Flood the System might look like, and what structures we will all use to organize.

The authors drew inspiration for this booklet from the 1986 Pledge of Resistance Handbook, the 1999 WTO Direct Action Packet and the 2014 Ferguson Action Council Booklet.

Protesters Storm Open-Pit Coal Mine in Western Germany

Protestors look at a huge bucket-wheel excavator as they arrive for a demonstration at the open-pit coal mine near Garzweiler

Protestors look at a huge bucket-wheel excavator as they arrive for a demonstration at the open-pit coal mine near Garzweiler, western Germany Saturday Aug. 15, 2015. Several hundred environmental activists have stormed a lignite mine in western Germany to protest against the use of coal for electricity production. dpa via AP Marius Becker

August 15th, 2015

Environmental activists have stormed a lignite mine in western Germany to protest the use of coal, a major source of greenhouse gases.

The German news agency dpa reports that several hundred people from a group calling itself Ende Gelande — which loosely translates as “it’s finished now” — broke through a police line in Garzweiler, west of Cologne.

Police spokesman Anton Hamacher says officers used pepper spray to stop the crowd and are removing protesters from the site.

A spokesman for German energy company RWE says several huge bucket-wheel excavators used at the open-pit mine had to be shut down for safety reasons. Spokesman Lothar Lambertz says RWE has canceled plans to bring employees onto the site to rally in favor of coal mining.

from Associated Press

Tarnac 9 Cleared of Terrorism Charges Over Rail Sabotage

An alleged “anarchist cell” at the centre of one of France’s most politically-charged legal sagas is finally to be tried for sabotaging high-speed train lines.

August 9th, 2015


An alleged “anarchist cell” at the centre of one of France’s most politically-charged legal sagas is finally to be tried for sabotaging high-speed train lines.

But in a major blow to police, who conducted a seven-year investigation into the group, the four will not face terror charges, judicial sources told AFP on Saturday.

The so-called Tarnac group was rounded up in high-publicised raids in November 2008 accused of sabotaging the TGV network around Paris, a powerful symbol of French national pride and technical know-how.

Thousands of passengers and more than 160 train services were delayed after steel rods were put across overhead power cables on three high-speed lines between Paris and London, Brussels and the French regions.

Then interior minister Michele Alliot-Marie branded the group a dangerous “ultra-left anarchist movement”, but the group — who lived in a rural commune in central France — and many on the French left, accused President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing government of trying to frame them.

But in a major blow to the authorities, anti-terrorist judge Jeanne Duye came down against their demands in her long-awaited judgement Friday to try them for terror offences.

Yildune Levy, suspected of belonging to a ‘terrorist organisation’ with her then-boyfriend

– ‘The Coming Insurrection’ –

She did, however, send the group’s reclusive leader Julien Coupat, his wife Yildune Levy and two others for trial on conspiracy charges, sources said.

The group’s lawyers called the decision a “total repudiation” of the allegations against the four.

“After nearly seven years of trying to pin the blame on them, we finally have a courageous judicial decision. It is a total repudiation of the prosecution case,” Marie Dose and William Bourdon said.

“From the beginning, our clients were considered and treated like terrorists. Finally they have realised that it doesn’t stick,” they added.

“Our arrest was purely political and was based on false testimony from the police,” said another of the accused, Mathieu Burnel. “All this will fall apart at our trial.”

The case centred on the charismatic figure of Coupat, 40, a far-left intellectual from a wealthy family who had gathered a group of 20 followers around him in a remote village in the Correze region of central France.

Relying heavily on passages from a 2007 book attributed to Coupat, “The Coming Insurrection”, investigators claimed the group — the “invisible committee of the imaginary party” — had tipped over from radical anarchist politics into terrorism.

The book discussed sabotage and other ways to “finalise the fall of the state”, and mentioned the high-speed TGV network as an “easy” target.

But Coupat, who refused to confirm he was its author, said it was “risible that terrorism charges could be brought on the basis on a book on public sale.”

Coupat and Levy, 31, admitted being close to TGV lines east of Paris when an iron bar was placed on the track on the night of November 7, 2008, but denied putting it there.

Coupet spent more than six months in jail as police tried to build a case against him, with Levy also locked up for more than two months.

The prosecution has five days to appeal the judge’s decision.

from AFP

Addition: their arrest was in part down to Mark Kennedy, the British undercover cop embedded in Earth First! and the wider ecological direct action movement for over 7 years.  More info

Germany: Last Living Barricade in Hambach Forest Evicted; Freedom for Jus!

Germany: Last Living Barricade in Hambach Forest Evicted

July 28th, 2015

On the 22nd of July the tower – to this date the only remaining living barricade – got evicted. The tower blocked an important access way to the Hambach Forest [previously on S!N]and its occupation.

During the 14 hours of the eviction, four activists were arrested of who three have been released, while one is in detention awaiting trial in the JVA (jail) in Köln-Ossendorf. Jus is accused of resisting the eviction. The cops are trying to justify the detention by claiming that Jus doesn‘t have a legal address and allegedly “no social obligations in Germany”. Therefore, they think that it’s likely that he will “stay away from trial”.

Innu Blockade Hydro-Quebec Construction in Northern Quebec

photo thanks to Warrior Publications

July 17th, 2015

Quebec’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs is urging members of Natashquan’s Innu Community to stop their blockade near the La Romaine construction site.

The group of protesters set up a barricade Thursday near Havre-Saint-Pierre in eastern Quebec, about 200 kilometres east of Sept-Îles.

It says Hydro-Québec is not respecting an agreement it signed with the community before work on the hydroelectric project began.

The protesters have been letting workers out of the site, but they say they will not let anyone in until Premier Philippe Couillard speaks with them in person on the North Shore.

Rodrigue Wapistan, the chief of Natashquan’s Innu band council, said Hydro-Québec has flooded basins near the worksite without the community’s consent.

He said that will drown more than half the trees in the area.

“They have completely trampled on our rights. It is something that is unacceptable in my book — all while creating a situation that is catastrophic for our next generation,” Wapistan said.

Aboriginal Affairs Minister Geoff Kelley said he recognises there are differences between the Innu community and Hydro-Québec, but said protesters should try to resolve its issues through negotiations.

map thanks to Warrior Publications

from CBC News

Panama: Indigenous Activists Block Entry to the Barro Blanco Hydro Dam

Ngäbe activists standing in front of the Barro Blanco dam site

Ngäbe activists standing in front of the Barro Blanco dam site (Photo Jennifer Kennedy)

July 14th, 2015

A 30-strong splinter group of Ngäbe from the M10 resistance movement has blocked the entrance to the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam in western Panama, preventing workers from entering the site. The 15 year struggle of the Tabasará river communities to protect their livelihoods, their culture, and their ancestral heritage now appears to be entering a tense new phase. With negotiations exhausted and the dam 95% complete, M10 has an issued an ultimatum for the government to cancel the project by Monday, June 15, 2015. It is unclear how the government will respond.

“Being Ngäbe-Buglé cultural patrimony,” said Clementina Pérez, part of the group camped at Barro Blanco’s gates. “Our river, our mother earth, our ecology, our existence, we are here to make known to the national and international community that this patrimony belongs to us and to the church of Mama Tata. With the conservation of peace, liberty, justice and unity, liberation and social justice… [we ask] the President of the Republic the cancellation and removal of the dam from our communities, our river and our mother earth, which belong to us as original people of the Americas…”Funded by European banks – the German Investment Corporation (DEG) and the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) – the dam is set to inundate a string of Ngäbe and campesino communities, all of whom have voiced their objections from the outset. The flood will destroy ancestral petroglyphs, fertile agricultural grounds, and Mama Tata cultural centres, including a unique school where the emerging written script of the Ngäbere language is being developed and disseminated. The dam will significantly impact the river’s marine life, wiping out migratory fish species which many communities – both up and down stream – rely upon for essential protein. None of the Tabasará communities have provided their free, informed and prior consent to the dam, a fact recently confirmed by the FMO’s own independent complaints mechanism (ICM).

“Lenders should have sought greater clarity on whether there was consent to the project from the appropriate indigenous authorities prior to project approval,” said an ICM report, published on May 29, 2015. “[The plan] contains no provision on land acquisition and resettlement and nothing on biodiversity and natural resources management. Neither does it contain any reference to issues related to cultural heritage…”

The report is the latest in a series of professional analyses that pour a thick layer of scorn over the dam project’s owner, Generadora del Istmo (GENISA). Demonstrably unlawful, GENISA has been condemned by numerous independent investigators, the United Nations, several international NGOs, and Panama’s own environmental agency, ANAM, who found a raft of flaws and short-comings in their environmental impact assessment.

But despite failing their own due diligence, the banks appear to have shrugged off the ICM report with an insipid call for ‘constructive dialogue’ and ‘a solution for a way forward’. In February this year, the FMO chose to threaten the government of Panama after building work was temporarily suspended on the recommendation of ANAM. Writing to the Vice President, the FMO warned that the suspension “May weigh upon future investment decisions, and harm the flow of long-term investments into Panama.”

The government seems to have taken this threat to heart. Panama’s president, Juan Carlos Varela, who was elected to office in 2014, flip-flopped on Barro Blanco before finally falling in line. Last week, while proffering flimsy reassurances about having found a human rights solution, his government left the negotiating table and signaled an end to the suspension of works. M10 claims the work never stopped and has been continuing clandestinely. They are now mobilising for action.

Clementina Perez (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)

“If this situation is not resolved,” said Clementina Pérez, “We will go to the Panamerican highway to ask together, at a national level, the cancellation of Barro Blanco…”

Rising with stark grey walls above the denuded banks of the Tabasará, Barro Blanco has become a symbol of the previous administration, its fundamental violence and contempt for the rule of law. The former President Ricardo Martinelli – now on the run in the United States and facing a corruption probe back home – provoked no less than four major uprisings as he grasped for land and resources in Panama’s indigenous territories. Heavy-handed repression resulted in the deaths of several protesters and bystanders, including an unarmed teenage boy who was shot in the face by police. Barro Blanco is the visible legacy of a proudly thuggish President who serially abused Panama’s Indigenous Peoples and plundered the country at will. Thus far, Varela has been keen to strike a more decent and humane tone. How he now handles the crisis evolving on the banks of the Tabasará River will be a demonstration of his sincerity, or lack of.

by  IC Magazine

Germany: Hambach Forest Defenders Occupy Four Bucket Wheel Excavators for July 4th Climate Games

July 14th, 2015

At the Climate Games in Amsterdam today countless playgroups make their moves. Team Blue (the police) and the team of industrial companies play their usual strategy: In Amsterdam they want to expand the West port for coal transshipment and in the resident companies they strongly contribute to the fact that the world’s climate passes several points of no return. Thereafter, the further warming would get unpredictable and irreversible. Our teams hamper them, as far as possible without being beaten by Team Blue. Their game objective is to enable a smooth flow of the work of destruction.

This year, a team in the Rhineland has stumbled over the fact that the playing field is not limited to the Amsterdam West Port. While it is folded by all sorts of boundaries together, but we can unfold and make our move at any time, anywhere – after all, the other side also works as good as anywhere in the world.

Our “new” expansion pack is the Rhenish lignite mining area between Aachen and Cologne. This industrial-scale clockwork (consisting of five power stations, three mines, a network of coal railways, tens of kilometers of conveyor belts and pipelines for pumped off groundwater) is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe – and in many places it is damn easy to attack for sabotage! A good man on this game board is the occupation of excavators: In the largest machines in the world, that [destroy] landscape around the clock here and produce coal, a lot of capital is at work – until we stop them! On the occasion of the last occupation, a spokesperson of the group publicly confirmed, that RWE can not stop actions of this kind in the future just because of the huge dimensions of the open pits.

The motto of this year’s Climate Games is “BIGGER, BOLDER, STRONGER”, and so we want to do things in style. Therefore, this time since 2:55 h we are occupying four excavators : The first as usual at the rim of the open pit, where now it can not swallow any more landscape for a while. The three other occupied excavators are at the bottom of the open pit: This means that in the Hambach mine, for the first time in the Rhenish mining area, among other things, the two coal diggers themselves are occupied! At least one person did not reach her/his destination and now supports others by bugging her/his warders of Team Blue. He/she will certainly not be alone a very long time …

The game goes on – also in the Rhenish lignite mining area. From august 14 to 16, our friends of the Campaign “Ende Gelände“ (“end of the area”) mobilize to a mass blockade action in the Rhineland, and we are very keen to see what is about to happen around there. In october, a Skills Sharing Camp will be held again on the occupated meadow at the rim of the Hambacher Forst, which is acutely threatened by deforestation. And in December delegations of the United Nations gather in Paris on the question of how to talk climate change away, without changing anything in their exploitative economic systems – and, of course, many other teams are also there to play to unmask the lies. Make Your Move!

If you have got time and desire, we would be glad if you look in on the meadow to support the occupations and retain the ticker track of when solidarity is needed outside the police station!
Here you will find pictures of the most recent similar occupation of a single excavator. (Click in thumbnails to enlarge.) Pictures of the current action will follow here.

Please spread out the Action Statement (above) and also the press release and communication.

Press Release

Dear Sir or Madam!

We hereby send you a press release entitled “Four bucket wheel excavators occupied in open-cast mine Hambach”.
You can reach us at the following phone number:

+49 1573 7181446

You are also invited to visit us for more information or sound bites at the meadow occupation in Morschenich. On our blog

www.hambacherforst.blogsport.de

incoming news are switched in a live ticker.

Best Regards,

Kathrin Schneider
Tino Sturm

Press Release

Four bucket wheel excavators occupied in open-cast mine Hambach

Düren – Last night 2:55h climate activists started again to occupie bucket wheel excavators of RWE. This time it were four excavators in the open pit mine near Hambach. Two of them are located on the bottom of the mine in depth 450 m, where the coal layer is. For the first time, the declared aim is to stop coal production. With the action they are protesting against the mining and burning (electricity production) of lignite and this way they offer direct resistance.

As with previous excavators occupations, the activists climbed up the stairs, ladders and walkways on the machines to the top.
At 70 meters high they installed themselves, with tarpaulins for sun protection, and they rolled out banners on which they demanded once more an immediate withdrawal from coal mining and a clearing stop in the Hambach forest. “It has long been known that the habitability of the planet is at stake. Is just as clear that there are alternatives to inefficient electricity production out of coal,” said an activist who wants to remain anonymous, and added: “An economic system that is dependent on constant growth, cannot do anything else than exploit the environment at the expense of us all.”
The action statement puts these occupations in the context of the “Climate Games” in Amsterdam. There, the West Port will be expanded, which is an important coal trading center. Via Amsterdam among others coal from South America is transported to the Rhineland to be incinerated together with lignite.

The action ended at 9 pm, July 4th, when the last arrested activists left the police station.

Meuse, France: Nuclear Waste Landfill Project Sabotaged

July 14th, 2015

anonymous report / Contra Info

Not far from Bure, an analysis site of ANDRA was attacked by a few determined night owls.

At Bure, in Meuse, power is trying by all its means to have accepted a nuclear waste landfill project 500 meters underground.

Despite that the project has not yet officially started, that of the nuclear waste not arriving before 2025, the ANDRA installations (the National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management, in charge of the landfill project) are already swarming in the area.

One night around the 25th June, a construction site containing multiple electrical installations and a well, to analyse the condition of the rock and water table, was devastated.

The well was then forcibly blocked up with concrete, and all the cabinets were fractured and destroyed by the rage of those who don’t want to wait for the exhaustion of legal resorts to attack this project.

Attack the infrastructure of power wherever they are, in Meuse like elsewhere.

Against Cigéo and its world, resistance and sabotage!