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We from Women in Exile and Friends, want to continue with the topic of “”Women* Breaking Borders” this summer.
We want to visit with you in solidarity the cities in the south especially Bavaria and condemn Seeholfer now minister for Interior and Heimat, and during years responsible of creating more restrictive asylum laws and refugee camps. His “Anker” (Ankufts-und Rückführungszentren”/ Arrival and deportation centers ) role model system, will keep refugees totally isolated from independent German help and society: no legal counselling, no visits, no German course, no work, no school for children. This way it will be easier to deport them – without resistance, without security only full of despair.
Seeholfer wants to export this role model of detention camp idea German wide, it is bad enough with the ones existing in our areas without integrating the radical ideas from the AfD.
Our aim is and has always been to enable refugees who identifying themselves as women* to stand up for our rights as women* living in this society.
On our dangerous routes to Europe, as women we are faced with different boundaries and borders such as; frontiers between countries, sexism and racism etcetera. These borders expose us to all types of prejudice, during and after our flight.
When we arrive in Germany and request for asylum and think we have managed to break the visible and the invisible borders. We are immediately threatened with deportations because some of us don’t fit into the BAMF concept of “legitimate refugee“.
The authorities ignore social and economical reasons of flight which affect many refugees and migrants who come to Europe. Reasons such as climate and economic crisis, gender issues, grassroots political activism are not acknowledged by the European policy makers.
In our experience, every woman seeking asylum in Europe has a so called “legitimate reason” since freedom of movement and residence (not just of goods) should be implemented as established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The double discrimination of refugee Women makes life more difficult for us and results in depressions, stress, trauma and sometimes desperate measure including suicides.
Women are a target of system violence through sexual assaults, sexual violence, lower wages, work discrimination, invisibility, in a system that systematically discriminates them, even European women are not protected by European laws as they should, leaving them exposed to all sorts of violence. In that framework refugee women have the worst starting point in the host society. For that reason our daily fight is to demand the recognition of the human rights of refugee women* and women* in general, they want us divided but there should be no discrimination when talking about women’s rights, refugee women* are women.
We want to raise our voices “Loud and Clear” in breaking racist and sexist borders, borders which are visible or invisible, borders which the society ignores or looks the other way because they do not affect them directly. Borders termed as “cultural” or those existing in our minds. We are aware of those borders and we want to point them out and make them visible, so that we can break them.
We would like to make political actions, to empower refugee women together with you and your organisations in your cities.
Of course, we cannot visit every city, but we want to build networks to make possible decentralized collaboration. Working on smaller regional networks opens the possibility to distribute tasks and responsibilities amongst cities. It will be possible that one city can come to the cities nearby to meet us and join the actions that will take place, this way the local and national network will get reinforced.
