Vestia Rats!

This text appeared on the front of two houses on the De La Reystraat in the Tweebosbuurt on the 15th of April. The same building was squatted three times (and violently evicted) within a short period of time in 2020 as a protest against the demolition of the neighborhood. Vestia made sure that within 24 hours a cleaning crew appeared to clean off the message, but it has been all but forgotten.

Squatter collective Wielewaal will make sure that the message Vestia Rats will remain unforgotten and is starting a t-shirt action with the national housing demonstration Woonopstand coming up. The group will print 50 shirts with the picture of Joke Schot and by this will keep the message Vestia Rats and the important buildings on the De La Reystraat visible during the protest on Sunday the 17th of October. Another group has already started a sticker action as well with the message Vestia Ratten.

Last residents evicted

At the start of this month, after a long fight, the curtain fell for the last residents of the Tweebosbuurt. Residents who didn’t want to move out of their homes fought their eviction in court, which ruled in their favor. Vestia started an appeal against the ruling and both parties had to wait until later this year on a final ruling before eviction and demolition of the Tweebosbuurt could continue. But Vestia didn’t want to wait and started a new eviction process. On the 1st of October, this new case appeared in court and the judge ruled that the last residents have to leave their homes within 4 weeks so Vestia can continue its destructive mission.

Het Actiefonds shows solidarity with the residents of the Tweebosbuurt, supports squatter collective Wielewaal with their t-shirt action, and supports the organization of de Woonopstand on the 17th of October.

Follow @vestiaratten and @woonopstand on Instagram and sign-up for the #Woonopstand on the 17th of October!

Picture by Joke Schot

Just like with any other crucial problem the world faces at the moment, the demissionary cabinet has struggled too long with the logistics and political situation around the evacuations of the Afghani people and has ‘hugely underestimated’ the uprising of the Taliban. This political tug-of-war about who does and who doesn’t have the right to be evacuated, in combination with the monstrous underestimation of the situation has cost human lives. Especially as it turns out that the British and the French have been preparing evacuations for months already. Not to speak about the giant stream of refugees that will start up in the following weeks and months to Fortress Europe and the human lives that the European border policy is costing and will continue to cost.

After the recent events in Afghanistan, an action committee of Dutch Afghans and 7 organizations, including Comite 21 Maart, Fite Qlub en Stichting Kaihan, will organize a demonstration on the Dam square in Amsterdam, on Saturday the 28th of August. The protest is part of an international network through which protests are organized in different European countries in solidarity with Afghanistan. Their demands are clear:

1. Stop deportations of all undocumented Afghans in the Netherlands for an indefinite period of time.
2. Acknowledge Afghanistan as an unsafe country and reconsider the safety declaration.
3. Start taking in stranded Afghans from Camp Moria and increase the number of refugees to be rescued from the camp.
4. Evacuate all Afghan civilians and their family members who are in danger because of their cooperation with the Dutch government, NGO’s or media organizations.

The action committee has started a petition together with De Goede Zaak. Sign the petition through this link. Het Actiefonds supports the organization of the demonstration and shows solidarity with the Afghan population.

Endless waiting lists, old-fashioned and degenerating diagnosing procedures, inability, misuse of power, and lack of participation. The problems within transgender healthcare are big. While patients with a problem in the regular healthcare system will get an explanation of the pros, cons, and side effects of a certain medical procedure, patients in transgender healthcare face all kinds of selection procedures and psychological assessments before they are able to get the help to need or want. This limits patients to speak freely about their situation or they might not get the necessary help, recourses, or diagnosis they need for their transition process. There is a lack of participation in their own transition or the policy that is formed around the healthcare they need.

This is why Trans Zorg Nu! organizes a demonstration in Eindhoven on the 29th of August and communicates the following demands:

1. Trans healthcare now; away with the waiting lists!
2. Self-determination; no diagnosis, no gatekeeping!
3. Despecialize, decentralize; break the monopoly!
4. Trans care in trans hands; no decisions about us without us!
5. Assurance of insurance; stop playing with our lives!

Het Actiefonds supported and wrote the following article about the demonstration in Amsterdam on the 26th of June. The demonstration in Eindhoven on the 29th of August can also count on our support. Show your support and share the Facebook event.

On the 17th of October, we together make a fist for a radically different housing policy. Everybody should have access to affordable and secure housing: it’s a human right! The current housing policy of the state and the municipalities is failing for years to secure this human right. A broad coalition of organizations demand:

• Housing policy that guarantees availability, affordability, and housing security.
• No homelessness, no evictions, no forced relocations.
• Investment in widely accessible public housing: stop the marginalization of the social sector, abolish the landlord levy.
• No discriminatory housing policy. Get rid of the Rotterdamwet and more homes for people with disabilities.
• Policy that includes and supports residents to participate in the development of their homes, neighborhoods, and cities.
• Containing the financialization of housing: houses are not commodities. Freeze rents for 5 years.
• Fewer market forces, lower rents: extract the WOZ value from the rent, regulate rents also in the free sector, and make the point system generally binding. Penalize excessive rents.
• Treat buying and renting as equal. Support housing cooperatives and provide access to land.
• Reverse flexibility and guarantee housing security: fixed rental contracts and permanent housing.

Het Actiefonds supports the organization of de Woonopstand. Come to Rotterdam on the 17th of October and make a fist for a radically different housing policy! Sign the call to action as an organization? Go to www.woonopstand.nl!

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GrowSPACE wants to collect information about as many schools as possible and collect the most shocking statutes and articles. Following that, the group will hold a press conference, in which they will present the statutes and call for them to be removed, and urge other schools to do the same. In the next school year, the activists want to monitor the situation again.

The group is committed to making education in Poland more inclusive, both on a social and institutional level. According to surveys, as many as 70 percent of young LGBTQIA+ people in Poland have had suicidal thoughts at least once.

With the press conference, the GrowSPACE Foundation hopes to get a lot of media attention, so that they can address this persistent problem and create awareness. Because everyone has the right to a safe education.

Mesarvot is a network of anti-occupation activists that aims to support political military service objectors and promote public discourse on the subject. Mesarvot sees the political objection as a tool to help end the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. The organization was founded at the end of 2015 by activists from what they call the “Objection Community”. Over the last couple of years they supported a great deal of imprisoned refusers. These campaigns usually include personal support before imprisonment by previous imprisoned refusers who know the military prison from the inside, legal assistance, media coverage work, assistance in writing a declaration, solidarity demonstrations and international solidarity.

Their activities touch the nerves of the Israeli society, as serving in the army is still seen as a big part of the Israeli identity. Hence, objecting it and refusing military service, is frowned upon and criminalized. While refusal is a great challenge, it is also an opportunity —through the extreme way in which refusal is preserved— to politicize and raise issues of resisting the occupation.

Their recent action, funded by Het Actiefonds, was the facilitation of a public refusal letter. Such public refusal letters, when published by youth before conscription age, are traditionally called in Israel “Shministim” letters (Shminitim means 12th graders). The activists formed a group of young people interested in refusing publicly, and assisted them in formulating their message and created a campaign around it, thus maximizing the outreach of the letter. The letter was signed by more than a hundred teenagers, a considerable achievement given the current extreme nationalist discourse in the Israeli public.

This new generation of anti-occupation activists criticizes the importance that the Israeli society asserts to the military. They emphasize that the huge respect it has to military officials has bad effects on all areas of living. Het Actiefonds supports Mesarvot’s anti-military activism to oppose the illegitimate Israeli occupation.

The group Matilha Paganas de la Percusión has been active for a couple of years and has fought for the legalization of abortion in South America, called out femicide and gender-based violence and stood up against the stigmatization of social protests in general. To provoke, and quite literally, create more noise during their protests, they are starting a South American percussion group, or, batucada. They see their percussion group as a form of artivism and, when played by a militant group of women, as a strong sign of resistance against the colonial and patriarchal system of repression.

With the help of Het Actiefonds, Matilha Paganas de la Percusión wants to buy professional instruments and organize protests, to contribute to the wave of social unrest that rages through the country since April this year. Through sit-ins, protest marches, and flashmobs, they contribute to this social fight from a feminist perspective.

On June 20, there were about 7,000 wooden memorials on the beach of Scheveningen, as a pop-up monument to all the deceased. Commemoration events were also held in Greece (Lesbos and Ioannina), Romania (Timisoara), Poland (Katowice), Germany (Berlin), Portugal (Lisbon and Porto), England (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cambridge, Newcastle) and Ireland (Dublin).

This campaign, supported by Het Actiefonds, was a huge success: at least ten thousand people came into contact with the campaign somewhere in the Netherlands. A very difficult and heavy subject, but at the same time a perfect momentum to inform people about the terrible European border policy. MiGreat received a lot of media attention and will continue their actions against violent pushbacks and other human rights violations of refugees and migrants.

No borders, no nations!

In May 2020, the group partnered with Passio FM, a community radio station in Uyo to broadcast a program called Citizens Report which was aimed to sensitize the public on Covid-19 prevention and safety measures. Citizens Report is a public phone-in program where a volunteer team of experts answered questions and addressed public concerns related to Covid-19 transmission, treatment and preventive measures. From January 2021, the radio hosts noticed that the feedback they received from members of the public indicated a lot of disinformation and discrepancies from the government regarding vaccine quantities, distribution and the number and demography of people actually vaccinated. They decided to investigate the case:

“We subsequently wrote to the Ministry of Health seeking clarification, but were waved aside with a response that a special committee was assigned the role of overseeing the vaccine distribution to the public. Information about the vaccination program was generally sketchy, they couldn’t present any data showing equitable vaccine distribution and our investigations showed that the major political party in the state was scheduling vaccination programs mainly to favour their members, relatives and political acquaintances over the elderly, medical staff and essential personnel.”

The group states that, as Covid-19 is a serious threat to humanity, vaccination processes should be transparent, free, accessible and comprehensive to all, regardless of gender or social status. Sadly this is not the case in Nigeria, where currently only politicians and their relatives and the rich are prioritized in the vaccination program.

Thus, the Covid-19 Ambassadors organized a three-day protest to bring to public awareness the corrupt practice of vaccine hoarding and nepotism in vaccine distribution. Next to the protest, the activists committed themselves to tracking all the data concerning the vaccine distribution. With a group of volunteers they aim to verify, track and publish vaccine distribution statistics with photo evidence. With this data they highlight the corruption and ineptitude in the vaccination program and call out government officials on their malpractices.

Het Actiefonds supported the group with funding for website development, radio airtime, personal protection equipment and camera equipment for onsite monitoring of vaccine distribution.

NB. We speak about a local action here, but we shouldn’t forget that the worldwide vaccine distribution is far from equal as well. A global, even distribution of vaccines and accessible health care is needed to overcome the pandemic. Speak up if you can and help to diminish the inequalities that lie at the root of so many global [health] challenges.