From our guestbook:
A new wave of squatting has hit Malmö in south of Sweden. An empty factorybuilding was squatted by 5 squatters for about 20 minutes. When the secret police showed up, home made explosives where thrown at them. The squatters left the building the backdoor before the riotcops arrived and closed the entire area. Earlier that week a building was ment to be squatted. [Read More]
On November 4 a group of 30 or so squatters occupied an empty church-owned building (the Trocadero) as part of their campaign to set up squatted social centres in Sydney. Later that evening police and fire brigade broke through the barricades and evicted the squat.
The building had been occupied @ 8am that morning by 30 members of a new squatgroup called SCAN [Social Centre Autonomus Network]. SCAN – who had been meeting and planning the occupation – aimed to transform the building into a squatted social centre with spaces for political organizing, infoshop, cinema, doof/band space, artspace, copwatch, food not bombs kitchen, and Neighbours alerted police soon after the occupation began. Police twice tried unsucessfully to access the building. Later that night, however, the police returned with the fire brigade under the direction of the local conservative church. They used hydraulic cutters and axes to smash through the front doors and enter the building. No-one was arrested in the eviction though church members did try to deliver a sermon to everytone on the importance of private property. [Read More]
| Bialystok/Poland : De Centrum squat still fighting ! |
On October 27th, big police forces attacked the De Centrum squat (in Bialystok, Poland) after small scuffles with police officers outside, when cops tried to enter the building with drawn pistol without any warrant and doors were closed before them. Riot police and special units were deployed and after negotiations didn’t have any success. Fire brigade cutted door and police entered the building, detaining 40 people. One person, stopped near door at the beginning of the whole incident was CS sprayed in face, beaten and handcuffed, later charged with violent resistance and threats to police officer (felony, up to 3 years).
Police first tried to present us as dangerous bandits showing things which they found inside, telling that they found a lot of weapons (actually it was slingshot, a fake gun, one stick, a belt with used ammunition and few bottles with petrol). Our case was on the first pages of newspapers and in TV. Police said that they were attacked by few people with baseball bats and that was the reason for calling reinforcements and breaking the door (also without any warrant). In next day we gave our statement correcting those lies.
Also next day police came again with paper for our eviction and gave us one day to leave. After a meeting we decided to barricade ourself inside and occupy the building. It lasted for three days and owner tried to negotiate few times, atlthoug without any success. Now it seems that he gave up and he will leave the building for us. However we are still in bad financial situation as all police raids (we didn’t really recover from raid on 7th of August) costed us a lot of equipment stolen by police and we have a lot of damages.
In Warsaw local anarchist organized solidarity action, blocking gates to Ministry of Internal Affairs. We are determined to stay in the bulding despite of all attacks from police forces and nazis.
De Centrum-struggle continues !
Contact/infos : soja2 [at] poczta [dot] onet [dot] pl
soja
