At the end of august, one of the central actions of the nobordercamp in bulgaria took place at the nearby detention centre in ljubimetz. On the opposite side of the new constructed prison is a roma community space, from which lots of people came to see what is happening and especially children and young roma people had fun with the masks and samba music.
Leaflets were distributed to the few people present in the small town and loud music and shoutings, including a lawyers number for the imprisoned were present all time. One of the aims of the demonstration was direct solidarity with the imprisoned, who often are inside without knowing their right to call a lawyer or without any contact to supportive people in bulgaria.
“The Detention Center was opened in march 2011 and it’s designed to detained there around 300 inmates. Since then, 180 people have been arrested and detained there. Curentlly, there are 33 Sans Papiers inside. Many of whom were brought there despite the fact that they had applied for political asylum. The main rascus against them being their illegal entry and the erasure of their citizenship as like the dissolution of the Sowiet Union. Nevermind the Europian Convention of Human rights, migrants were improsened without court decision. Expirience from Detention Center in Sofia suggests that this may be the case for more than one year.”
(source: http://noborderbulgaria.org/en/node/49)
As it was one of the goals of the camp to get in touch with local people to rise awareness, a photo exhibition “welcome to europe”, showing living conditions of roma in hamburg, germany, was put at the walls next to the demonstration.
Another action was that leaflets were sticked to walls in the city centre and around to show solidarity with migrants, showing a shape of a killed person and naming the facts that borders are made to divide people and that everybody has reasons to move.
There were some few interactions with people inside the prison, but language barriers as it was unclear what languages the imprisoned might speak. Eventhough there had been lots of attempts in languages spoken by activists to make a connection to get to know more about what the situation looks like inside. It was a nice athmosphere and people inside wrote a message saying “thank you” but sadly this action had to end as usual leaving the imprisoned behind. Some people next to the police line made some efforts to step over the line and provoked some little comfrontation, which i found a bit pointless but maybe emotionally necessary for some people. Nontheless i think it was officially registrated action, probably the first action of this kind at all at that just invented prison and we made a lot of good effords to support people inside and show our solidarity.
Another nice outcome of this day was the invitation of local roma people to the camp eventhough it seemed to me that in the evening when our guests came to the camp there were not really preperations how to get a nice athmosphere together and it was rather improvised with some disco and alkohol. Probably it would have been easier to make a common lunch or coffee time, as it was taking place with local people quite often as the situation with communication and exchange would have been on a different level.
In general, this day was positive and as we filled up fresh water from the neighbour village and the bar played nice music the mood seemed good.
more pictures of the day: http://bulgaria.indymedia.org/article/38020
a french written article about the action: http://bizegranice.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/svoboda-ouvrez-les-centres-de-retention/
