Statement Regarding the Association of Political Prisoners [1]
December 1984
We want the association of all revolutionary prisoners in large groups.
We can only achieve this by fighting. By resisting the whole escalated
program of annihilation, we are defending ourselves and uniting in a
new stage, something that they want to violently destroy.
When domination depends on separating, dividing and annihilating
individuals, in order to strike all and to weaken the whole, then
solidarity is a weapon. It is the first subjective political experience
for everyone who begins
to struggle here, the core of revolutionary morale, solidarity as a
weapon, concretely, materially, action springing from one's decision to
fight in
this war.
That's what it's about; it is both a condition of our struggle and a
leap forward within it. It has a new quality for each of us and the
prisoners from the resistance have this in common with everyone who
struggles for
their identity in prison, who struggles for counter-power – we are all
imprisoned, isolated, and confronted with the total brutality of the
system’s war against us - so it is both possible and necessary for us
to struggle together.
It is in this struggle for collectivity, unity, morale and structure,
that we resist the effects of the counter-revolutionary war.
We demand association as the practical condition of prisoner
collectivity, because in a place where we are supposed to waste away in
conditions of
subjugation, association offers a living and material process, new
ideas
and experiences and opens new possibilities, new relations and new
politics.
Collectivity provides practical protection against torture, against the
permanent terror of these conditions, because when we are together the
totality of the siege is broken by the collective process.
Collectivity is both the structure and the goal of the liberation war.
It is the only space in which commitment, learning processes and
self-determined and conscious relationships can develop between people.
It is the actualization of a new reality between us and for us that can
no longer be reached and controlled by the enemy.
This structure is both subjectively and objectively necessary,
particularly in the metropoles. This is because of the absence of
revolutionary mass
struggles and the weakness of the broad legal opposition to fascism
here,
because it is clear how uncommitted these political structures remain,
how
they are only occasionally active, because one cannot be the subject of
one’s
own actions within structures controlled and manipulated by the State.
Collectivity is determined by the goal, which is to attack; not one
isolated attack, but rather a continuous, common process of political
determination and action. It exists only in struggle and is only
developed against domination and oppression. It is not simply the
negation of everything that the State and capital represents, but
rather the social organization of free people, as is already possible
here and now, wherever people struggle.
We want to unite all political prisoners in the struggle for liberation
- in prison our perspective is not the same as in imperialist society
generally, which offers no life perspective - and so we want to come
together with
all who have made the break with the system, who fight against prison,
the
State, imperialism and State thinking, and who take as their starting
point
the revolutionary struggles, initiatives and experiences of the last
few
years, and who now want to pass onto the next level by uniting in
attack.
NATO is escalating its war in Western Europe against the guerrilla and
against the resistance in prison as well. Against this we demand prison
conditions as set down in the Geneva Convention as minimum guarantees
for
prisoners of war against torture and isolation: association of
prisoners
from the resistance and with all militant prisoners in large groups,
the
abolition of single and small group isolation and acoustic and visual
observation
and control, the lifting of the communication ban, visits, letters,
books
and unimpeded political discussion and information.
It is clear that a total confrontation will be necessary to
achieve our goal. This war has no negotiations; they themselves removed
that option long ago; they make no secret of this, as they not only
want us destroyed, they want us destroyed quickly. For the longer we
fight, the more their
fascist project and the escalation that they are bent on become a
disadvantage
for them, the more this struggle develops a dialectic in our favour.
The
politics that they want to eliminate have taken root.
The escalation is clear to see: Rebmann [2]
in December 83. The "Greetings to Political Prisoners"
action[3] was an attempt to break
through
the communication ban, a new stage in an old program, which has been
the
reality of political prisoners in the FRG for thirteen years - nine
dead
prisoners, isolation torture, security wings, suspension of contact.
They have tried everything: brainwashing through dead wings [4], forced psychiatric testing, differentiated and
constantly observed isolation in the so-called general population,
beatings and physical attacks, forced anesthesia and mace, violent
gynecological
cavity searches, extended periods of handcuffing, transporting
prisoners
naked, force-feeding and water deprivation, stress manipulation, daily
cell
raids, frequent strip searches, the hole, day-long confinement to plank
beds, sleep deprivation, denial of medical care, monitoring every
expression
of life, with the corresponding fine-tuning of the daily terror to each
individual personality, deprivation of information and the means of
orienting
oneself to reality inside and outside of the prison walls, deprivation
of
daylight by covering the windows and of darkness by leaving the lights
on
at night, further deprivations in one's surroundings for years on end,
including
fresh air, noises, daily changes, colours, the possibility of space for
oneself, a radio, books, newspapers; prohibiting movement outside the
isolation
area, taking away everything that can possibly be taken away from a
human
being, even those things that differentiate him from an animal, such as
the possibility for social interaction, by terminating all contact by
the
mail, raiding apartments and holding people for up to two weeks because
they
received a letter from one of us, terrorizing visitors in order to
deter
them from coming, the LKA and BKA [5],
writing down every word at visits, a ban on all visits including those
from
the closest family members because of publicity work against the
torture
and annihilation ("supporting a terrorist organization”)[6], listening in on discussions with lawyers, raids on
lawyers' offices, arrests. Since 82, this has included the suspension
of
contact at the prison's discretion and during BKA cell raids. And now
there is the communication ban. Rebmann said, "We will combat
association even
more strongly in the future." Plainly stated, against us, and at this
point
also against prisoners from the resistance, they will use airtight,
hermetically sealed, solitary isolation in high security wings and
cells.
After eight, ten, thirteen years of imprisonment, the long-term contact
ban is now the fascist norm for us, so that (as in 77 [7]), any attack is deemed legitimate.
There is only one way to respond to their terrorist program; to fight
and to attack them with our collective consciousness and our will to
win. We do this even from the extremely defensive position of
isolation, for the only way they can stop us is by killing us. It is a
question of power -
even in here this is the central issue for us - and the question of
whether
we manage to break this State Security offensive cannot be separated
from
the question of how we can do so For they fear that new conditions are
established when we are united as revolutionary prisoners IN STRUGGLE,
when we succeed in acting.
The imperialist states are molding West Europe around the FRG [8], turning it into a strategic zone
of
opposition to the worldwide liberation struggles. In this situation
every
breakthrough in building resistance, every advance towards the goal of
the
internal front, becomes a question of power. After the defeat of the US
system
in Vietnam there was a reconstruction phase, during which NATO was
fascistically
realigned as a strategic military alliance to support US policies
internally
and externally. Because NATO is meant to be involved in EVERY
intervention,
it has become a question of survival for the US to keep control of the
West
European metropoles. They are to form a bulwark against the liberation
wars
and their repercussions in the imperialist centres, against the young
national
States and the socialist States in the East, and against the emergence
of
the front in the center itself. Following more than ten years of armed
politics
in West Europe, these possibilities are beginning to materialize in
strategic
attacks and the development of an anti-imperialist front, through which
any
of the various revolutionary struggles here could develop into a
flashpoint
with an offensive function for the global front.
After Zimmermann[9] was
attacked by the United Nations because of his fascist policy towards
immigrants,
but then was able to force them to swallow the human rights violations
against refugees; after his permanent undersecretary traveled to
Grenada following the US invasion to demonstrate what is meant by
"world domestic policy"; after the new anti-torture convention was
ignored by the FRG and other NATO states from the very beginning ;
after the FRG continues to extradite Kurdish and Turkish comrades to
its NATO ally, Turkey, because torture and murder have now been
sanctioned as normal at the level of the EEC … after all of this, then
of course Rebmann is allowed to demand that the public accept
torture here as normal. Meaning that he can continue what he has been
working
towards for a long time, that which has been internationally outlawed
by
the UNO [10] as a form of torture:
the
communication ban. It's the same with their overall aim to repressively
establish
another kind of normality: the militarization of politics, the State
and
society. This normality depends on getting people used to it, because
such
habits will create a state of calm, a calm that feels nothing, thinks
nothing,
understands nothing. The main thing, therefore, is not spreading
information
about torture, but creating a revolutionary counterforce that can act.
There
is only one thing that will block the complete arrogance of this
imperialist
display of power; strong, self-confident resistance, both illegal and
legal,
will establish its limits.
Since the FRG has pushed through the integration of the West European
police as an openly military pre-emptive measure against armed
antagonism within the imperialist centers, the new imperialist project
is the transformation of the State Security bloc into the European
pillar of NATO, whereby the military is supposed to enforce the
“political unity” of these States with the US military doctrine because
it didn't work the other way around. It
is a structure that is meant to function independently of the consensus
of
the national States, and in the interests of the strategic power bloc.
Against that, the millions who protested remained ineffectual. The
resistance failed to correctly understand the FRG State, to understand
its growing
and developing power as being part of the US imperialist policy of
extermination. In its confrontation with the total preventive
mobilization, the resistance failed to become a factor in the
international relationship of forces in which and from which we fight
here.
Rebmann's communication ban is now being used as a threat against us
and all those who engage in discussion with us, all those with whom we
wage a common struggle, with whom we are connected without ever having
seen
them or ever having communicated one word with them, because they know
that a radical solution is necessary, that it is a concrete perspective
for struggle. There are many who, on the basis of their experiences
over
the last few years, want to work towards a breakthrough with the
prisoners
from the armed struggle.
For that is what it's all about now.
By breaking through the counterrevolutionary blockade, we give
new meaning to a variety of oppositional initiatives, experiences and
structures: against the logic of destruction, against the life sentence
in the metropole, to liberate the frustrated possibilities, needs,
hopes and goals and the narrowed political horizon from State control.
To push the revolutionary war to a new level, to make the leap forward
now, the leap forward that,
for every one of us here in the prisons and in every sector of the
confrontation, is meant to push through the revolutionary solution in
the face the counterrevolutionary one, to destroy the global projects
of reaction and the strategic pillars that they want to raise, that is
to say:
preventive counterrevolution. The increasing police participation
in the war. The organization of the metropoles as total, destructive
and self-destructive relationships of violence penetrating all social
sectors and relations. The campaigns of destruction against the
liberation movements, the people and the revolutions in Asia, Latin
America and Africa,
the organization of these societies into garrison states. The
imposition of IMF [11] policies,
culminating in the use of hunger as a weapon against millions of people
so that even when they want to take back their stolen lives, they won't
pose any threat to
imperialism’s plans for world domination,
the threats and provocations pursued on the basis of global
superiority all around the world and especially against the socialist
States in the
East. The haste with which they are preparing for conventional and
nuclear
war. Trying to outrun the ripening conditions for developing a front in
the liberation war within the imperialist centre. Trying to outrun the
liberation
struggles and social explosions on all continents.
The situation is such because the contradiction grips the whole social
system of capital. The imperialists want to make the maximum security
wings and concentration camps "factories for the annihilation of the
class contradiction." The prisoners of war in West Europe are
confronted with the unified measures of the NATO states; political
status was taken away from the Irish comrades by a decision of NATO,
and in Spain and in Italy, the West German model
of luggage locker prison wings and violent isolation is being applied.
Now
it is being used against the mass struggles of the Turkish and Kurdish
prisoners; thirty-eight new high security and isolation prisons are
meant to make collective resistance impossible.
They aim to attack revolutionary morale and all that is new, everything
the prisoners of war from the anti-imperialist and communist guerilla,
the people's struggles and the movements have experienced, everything
that they are and continue to struggle for.
The prisoners of war in West Europe are close to each other.
Their struggles are antagonistic to and an offensive against the system
of capital and the NATO counterrevolution.
They disrupt the totalitarian claim of the imperialist project on the
terrain where it has the most power.
If it is the project of the NATO States to wipe out the development of
the front in this sector – that of the prisoners - then it is our task
to confront them precisely here with the strategy and morale of the
front
that we desire.
The hunger strike of the Irish prisoners in 81 [12] shows us the way, as do the struggles of the
Turkish and Kurdish prisoners. They have a particular international
strength. They are struggles that prepare the victory.
Prisoners from the Red Army Faction
December 1984
Footnotes
N.B. All footnotes in this document were
added by the translator and editor. None are originally from the RAF.
[2] Rebmann - Attorney General, leading figure in
counterinsurgency campaign.. [return to text]
[3] Greetings to the Political Prisoners - a
letter-writing campaign, in which supporters flooded the prisons with
letters to political prisoners, as an attack on the communication ban.
[return to text]
[4] Dead wings — sensory deprivation wings. [return to text]
[5] LKA - State Criminal Bureau, one exists in
each German state. BKA - Federal Criminal Bureau. [return
to text]
[6] Paragraph 129a - a draconian law targeting
and criminalizing virtually any sign of support for the underground or
political prisoners.
[return to text]
[7] On October 18th 1977 Jan-Carl Raspe, Andreas
Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were killed in their cells. Irmgard
Möller, was found seriously injured with stab wounds, survived the
attack. This was the State’s response to the kidnapping of Hans-Martin
Schleyer by the RAF and the hijacking of a Lufthansa airliner by the
Palestinian "Commando Martyr Halimeh". [return to text]
[8] FRG - Federal Republic of Germany, West
Germany. [return to text]
[9] Zimmermann — Minister of the Interior. [return to text]
[10] UNO - United Nations Organization. [return to text]
[11] IMF - International Monetary Fund,
imperialist vehicle for controlling the economies of Third World
countries. [return to text]
[12] In 1981, Irish political prisoners of the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Irish National Liberation Army
(INLA) engaged in a hunger strike for association and prisoner of war
status.
Ten prisoners died during the hunger strike. [return
to text]
