Dear refugee women, dear friends, dear sisters,
as you probably know, we have started 2011 in Brandenburg, the campaign'‘ No Lager for women! Abolish all Lager! It has attracted interest and support nationwide. Therefore we would like to be more active on the nation wide field than in the past and are looking for new refugee activists, Sisters and Friends who want to share and to carry on our work together with us.
Therefore, we want to invite all who are interested to a nationwide working meeting.
The meeting will take place in Göttingen from Saturday,14h to Sunday 14h, so everyone can arrive and depart with weekend tickets, and we also have time to get to know each other.
Please give us information if you are interested in organising translations in more languages, besides english and german, it would be useful if you could translate this invitation into this language too.
At the moment we do not have a clear plan how to create a working-process for the future which includes several languages, but we would like to organise it together with interested people.
Below you will find briefly what we want with the campaign and what we are planning. We will tell you in detail at the meeting.
17.08. 2013 14°° til 18.08.2013 14°°
in Göttingen
Tickets can be refunded- childcare can be organized.
Please send us an email if you want to attend the meeting: nolager4women(at)riseup (dot)net
We would be delighted if you would join!
Best Regards
Women in Exile & Sisters & Friends
http://womeninexile.blogsport.de
nolager4women(at)riseup(dot)net
The campaign ‚No Lager for Women! Abolish all Lager!
‚Women in Exile‘ is an initiative of refugee women who work since 2002 in Brandenburg for the rights of (female) asylum seekers. The campaign is carried out by ‚Women in Exile & sisters & friends‘, a group of feminists who are also active in other refugee or political queer / feminist contexts to some extent. Since early 2011, we brought these demand with different actions with this requirement to the general public and to the decision-makers.
The campaign hightlighs on the most urgent problems of refugee women and makes the entanglement of racism and sexism in which refugee women have to suffer significantly: Living in Camps exposes women to sexual violence and exploitation. We demand that all women asylum seekers and their children be provided private housing, because in our experience privacy and a safety are possible only in apartments.
The objectives of our campaign ‚No camp for women! Abolish all Camps! can be assigned to different levels:
1. On a nationwide level, we fight together with many other refugee self-organizations and anti-racist initiatives for the abolition of the collective accommodation of asylum seekers in so-called Homes, which is enshrined in the Asylum Procedure Act and the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act. This objective will be to achieve very long term.
In the nationwide networking, we see our role in this struggle is to sensitize refugee women to aspects of the camps system and thereby encourage the refugee women to participate in these struggles. As a result of our work we also try to involve other refugee self-help organizations, anti-racist and feminist organizations include the work of the situation of refugee women into their work.
Our Plans on the nation wide level:
* we want to build our homepage to a nationwide level with different languages, with information which will be helpful to refugees and other women activists
* We want to establish a newsletter, which is also found nationwide interest.
2. based on the state level Brandenburg we will demand the implementation of Parliament resolution: In Brandenburg, to be created by the end of the year by the presence of new minimum standards and a new accommodation concept new regulations. Therefore, we hope that we can reach some of our demands in the foreseeable future at least, by making it clear that the actions of the state government are contrary to the political statements of intent and the decisions of Parliament..
Our plans on the state level:
We will write open letters to the state government and state legislators, press releases and other forms of action to comment on the developments in Brandenburg and contribute our views in current debates. Depending on further developments in Brandenburg, we may schedule an online petition to build more public pressure and a large demonstration at 25.11., the international day against violence against women.
3. Local level
An important objective of the campaign is also the empowerment of refugee women: We try to motivate them to participate in the campaign and even having to fight for their rights. Therefore it is necessary to visit them in the camps in the individual counties.
Our plans on the local level:
* In the individual counties in Brandenburg, we will make contact to women asylum seekers and support them in making applications for housing and to bring their demands for private flats into the open.
* We will also document the situation in the individual districts. In some districts, we would also scandalize the building of new camps with actions, but this will very much depend on good contacts with refugee women in the respective districts, that need to be built in part.
