It’s not about asylum policies, it’s about profit.
Translation of the speech Het gaat niet om asielbeleid, het gaat om winst, held by Dhjana on May 1st 2015
When a country is destroyed by bombs, innocents are shot apart by drones or crushed by poverty, then that has nothing to do with fundamentalism, terrorism, so-called peace-missions or failed harvests. No fatalities, fate or adversity.
It has to do with profit. Big profits.
Bulging wallets of the weapon traders and stolen resources. Because a war ravished country forced on its knees just has less weight at the negotiation-table then western multinationals.
It’s not about war, it’s about profit.
When thousands of refugees die each year on the borders of Fortress Europe, that was nothing to do with rickety boats, human smugglers, or walls with razor wires. It doesn’t even had much to do with the desperation of the refugee or the frenzy of the borderguard who kicks that refugee to death.
It has to do with profit.
Profit for frontierguard Frontex, profit for the high-tech security sector, when they divide their 118 million Euros in annual profits. Greedy and insatiable as they are, they will use each washed up child corpse to ask for more budget, more boats, more drones, more infrared cameras. So the refugee routes get even more dangerous and more people die.
It is not about border control, it is about profit.
When the steel cell door falls into it’s lock with a bang and the refugee is left shivering in the fluorescent light, that has nothing to do with a so-called last resource when deportation is imminent. Detention is big business for the private consortia who build and run detention centers and the stock exchange listed security multinationals who hire underpaid and hardly trained guards.
EGM, Strukton, Ballast Nedam, Smits van Burgst, ISS, the banks, Dutch city councils, BAM, G4S and their million-Euro contracts.
It’s not about detention, it’s about profit. Profit.
Profit for the corrupt Guinean task-force who stays in luxurious hotels at the expense of the Ministry of Security and Justice and received a thousand euros per identified and deported refugee. Profit for the airlines like KLM who collaborate in weekly deportations of dozens of refugees to certain death, for a price. Luxurious paychecks for officials of the ministries, departments and services, like the Service Return and Departure, the Service Special Bookings and the corrupt doctors of the BMA who in the delusion of their paper schadow world ensure their own existence in an ever expanding bureaucratic maze.
Political power and profit for those who carry out asylum policies from government seats while they spend their nights dreaming of the lucrative jobs they will be offered after their political carreers. Regardless of whether whose careers achieved anything.
Profit in ratings, subscriptions and advertising revenues for the media who uncritically repeat the careful criminalizing propaganda of politicians, without a care for reality.
It is not about refugees, it is about profit.
And even for the refugee who survives all of this and achieves residency status, it is about profit. Because the myth that every refugee with status receives a fully furnished home, is a lie. It’s a loan that has to be paid back by the refugee cent by cent. A loan artificially pushed upward because city councils make it mandatory to get a shiny new brand washing machine, stove and fridge. Plundered and sucked dry are the status-holding refugees, with absurd legal fees, mandatory and ludicrously high health insurance fees, mandotory and expensive integration courses, forced labour. And that while they have to wait months to receive the measly allowances that they have a right to.
No, it is not about refugees, human rights, protection or asylum. It is about money.
To us, it is about refugees, human rights, protection and asylum. And that is why we will stand side by side, unwavering in solidarity and mutual respect, helping each other where we can and in constant resistance against the ones seeking to profit from these so-called policies at the expense of the lives and happiness of others.
And that profit, that it’s all about? We can work with that.
Because isn’t it heartwarming to see all that profit vanish because broken windows need to be fixed every week? And graffiteed walls need to be cleaned and repainted? And design-costumes need to be taken to the dry-cleaner after being smeared with cake or red paint? When blockades and occupations make business impossible? When wealthy friends need to be flown in by helicopter because the streets are full of burning barricades, as recently happened at Blockupy in Frankfurt? There are plenty of ways, and to borrow a catchy one-liner from their own vocabulary: the sky is the limit.
Let it be clear: When profit is the goal of oppression, then profit will be the target of resistance. Because every cent earned in the asylum industry is stained in blood and reeks of death. Let those banknotes burn! Let the self-serving profiteers burn their greedy fingers! let their profits go up in smoke!
No borders. No nations. Stop deportations.
