February 18, 2016

A Heroes Magazine

tags:	#alternative media, #anti-capitalist media, #Berlin, #EU, #immigration policy, #Mohammad Rahsepar, #Movement Magazine, #Oplatz, #Refugee Movement, #Refugee protest
by:	Deniz Zehra Tavli

The suicide of Iranian refugee Mohammad Rahsepar in 2012 in Würzburg/Germany due to the unimaginably insufficient and isolating conditions, refugees in German collective shelters have to endure until the present day, was the primal motivation for the formation of the first international Refugee Movement: a protest movement which came from the inside of refugee camps, shelters and collective houses out on the streets, showing up the desolate living conditions and the injust legal situation of refugees in Germany and criticizing the profound lack of general public and political interest on the topic.

The now four year long protest "from within" expanded on all mayor cities of the whole Federal Republic and far beyond its borders, bringing an absolute necessary publicity and focus to the misery of European migration policies and far more: making the borders of the EU and its politics visible by making themselves visible and heard as those who passed through them, by naming the ones who died at trying to cross them and who suffer by being inside these borders as "non-citizens", als "ilegals", as people "without status", pushed to the margins of society and made invisible - this protest meant a revealing and a critique of the essential dynamics of isolation.

In order to break this isolation which is caracterized by standstill and silence, the Refugee Protest Movement - now having their long fought, permanent squatted space in a former school building at the so called "O-Platz" in Berlin - is speaking to the public through their first self-published medium, a magazine called "Movement". This great attempt to not only give a voice to the voiceless through self-made media, but also to speak up for themselves instead of being other-defined and "covered" by national and international mass media - which operates in the same institutional realms as the policy and the law which discriminates, isolates and thus sileneces them - is also a true act of emancipatory media-making in its best sense.

The magazine's first issue is available online in a work version but also purchasable as a final print version on the webpage. The makers of "Movement" pursue an anti-capitalist policy which includes that none of the contributors and participants receive money. Only the printing costs will be covered with the sale of the magazine and donations. Feel free to contribute and donate for this amazing project from and for people on the move!

Photo: Oliver Feldhaus