<nettime> No Borders Camp in Ustrzyki Gorne

[florian schneider <fls@kein.org>]

  From: "Laure Akai" <cube@zigzag.pl> 
  To: <alter-ee@most.org.pl>

  more informations soon: 
  <http://noborder.eu.org>


We've returned from the camp in Ustrzyki on the Ukrainian-Slovakian-Polish
border. Everything went fairly well given the conditions: it rained
pratically the whole time making mountain hiking a bit tricky. 

Over 150 people from different countries came: we had people there from
Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Slovakia, Holland, Finland,
Austria, Bulgaria and Spain. The area has few inhabitants; the entire
population of Ustrzyki Gorne was deported after WWII after the UPA
(Ukrainian partisan army) became active in the area. There were three main
actions. First, there was a demo in front of the border police in
Lutowiski where people shouted slogans and burned a symbolic border
crossing. The second action was supposed to be the most important - the
illegal crossing of the border. But there were torrential rains and only
about 25 of the most enthusiastic and hardy campers decided to make the
four hour hike up the mountain trails. Still, when they got there they
found out that the border police had been waiting there for 3 days and had
to mobilize everyone they had (about 1500 people) to stop us. So, needless
to say, nobody managed to cross. Finally, during the last action there was
a protest at the building site of a new border guard HQ; people climbed a
tower and hung a banner. These actions got some press coverage and
generally they were fairly successful despite the rain. During the actions
there was no great problems with the police (we outnumbered them and also
they came to the camp the night before the actions when we were showing
riot videos and got scared of us).  Unfortunately as people started to
leave they began to harrass folks and deported Slovaks who had come
illegally to join us. (We welcome them the alter-ee!) 

We have some good ideas for next year to make an action on the
Polish-Lithuanian-Belarussian border (with a possible side trip to the
Kaliningrad region). The town of Sejny has had some ethnic and border
conflicts recently; there is a Lithuanian majority in this town on the
Polish side of the border. After the camp, Belarussians hopefully will be
able to do a concert/festival on their side of the border. 

Laure



#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net