12. Oktober 2009
On the 2nd of October we squatted the Triesterstrasse 114, an old
school building in the south of Vienna to establish a houseproject: a
space for self-organised, non-commercial projects and communal living.
The initial concept was to have an action-week with programs and
discussions there and force the city to talk to us (which they
otherwise don’t do). We got violently evicted today (12 of October) and
therefore we call for solidarity actions!
It’s about half past 4 in the morning, 12th of October. A men
dressed up in helmet and black military-type clothes and with his face
masked smashes the window of the dining hall on the ground-floor in the
empty school-building we’re staying in, without any earlier warning or
sign of attack. After him a whole line of military-like police forces
march in and they give orders in german which I don’t understand. Some
people are screaming, the noise wakes up the people who are sleeping in
the upper floors, we all run upstairs, after some short
coordination-discussion we decide to go into one of the rooms on the
top floor, sit on the floor and wait to be carried away by the police
forces. After some minutes of waiting, it might be around 5 am or so,
the units find us and warn us in german to leave, or this is more or
less what I understand from the situation. We ask for translation
several times which we didn’t get at all. We ask about any order of
eviction, or about our rights, and none of our questions get listened
to, neither when we explain that we actually know our rights, they
simply ignore them. Then they take us one by one, we show passive
resistance while being carried down the three or four floors.
Sounds like it’s from a diary from the second world war. But it
happened like this in 2009 in Vienna, Austria. On the 2nd of October we
squatted the Triesterstrasse 114, an old school building in the south
of Vienna to establish a houseproject: a space for self-organised,
non-commercial projects and communal living. The initial concept was to
have an action-week with programs and discussions there and force the
city to talk to us (which they otherwise don’t do). The building is
owned by the city (the MA34 – Magistrate for Construction and Building
Management deals with it). Over 80.000 flats in Vienna are empty.
Virtually a complete district waiting for self-governance and enough
space for emancipatory projects. We need spaces, which are too rare in
Vienna – Spaces we can take and form. Instead of negotiation, or any
form of warning to leave the house, we got evicted violently and the
police forces and the private securities broke several rules during the
process. Later on from the security organisations we got to know that
it costed all together about 400.000 euro to evict us today (and it’s
not illegal to squat in Vienna, however the authorities try to tell you
that, but it’s not a crime). They destroyed parts of building, and have
thrown out another theatre group that was using a separate part of the
building, they had a legal contract with the city and now have to face
difficulties and most likely lot of debt because their equipment got
destroyed and because they cannot prepare for their next show. It seems
like the police and the city don’t even know which buildings and rooms
are rented legally, and what real estate has been squatted, and because
they act without communication, they find it out too late.
When I look into the eyes of these robocops who try to ignore us and
later on during the day when we go and occupy the city council offices
(Stadtrat) to force the authorities to talk to us and there in the
office building when I look into the eyes of the bureaucrats and
security guards, I see the remote control behind them. I see the
routine, the acting on command only, the lack of self-determination,
the lack of the possibility to make their own decisions, to have
control over their own lives, and, what is more important, the lack of
personal commitment and desire and ambition and personal determination.
The love and rage. This is what we have and solidarity with each other.
They have weapons and they have the law and the politics, but we have
each other and although today dozens of our tools and materials and
dreams have been damaged by the police forces, on the command by the
city of Vienna, and even though we will most likely also feel destroyed
and wasted for the coming days, we still have each other, our desires
and our will to fight for them, no matter what! No pasaran! They won’t
break us! They make us stronger when they draw a clear line between us
and them! And while they cannot take a step without a command, we can
decide our own moves, and we support each other not because we have to
or because we get paid for it, but because we have trust, we have love,
we support each other and have solidarity!
The repression is growing, the anti-squatting forces are pushing the
frontline to defend private property supreme to anything else! But the
need for housing and social spaces doesn’t lessen in the fight! The
don’t obey the rules even though they themselves make them. We not only
demand our rights to be taken seriously, we will not be satisfied with
that because those rights are not defined by us anyway, but it is in
the hands of the elite! We will go on fighting for free housing,
freedom of movement, and free social places, against state repression,
private property, exploitation, sexism, racism, and in general
capitalism, and we call everyone who doesn’t agree with the supremacy
of private property to support us in our struggle by all means possible
and all means necessary! We call for local, regional and international
solidarity actions against all forms of state repression against
squatting in Czech Republic and Austria and all over Europe and the
world!
Watch out for action! No pasaran! We’ll come back!
contact: hausprojekt [at] riseup.net, more information (german): hausprojekt.noblogs.org
Eviction video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgril_j5EIc
[this article was first posted on at.indymedia.org]