Today we remember Şehid Ulrike Meinhof, who was found dead in her prison cell on the 9. Mai 1977.
Şehid Ulrike was born on the 7. October 1934 and was a member of the first generation of the RAF (Red Army Fraction), a group in Germany that fought an anti-imperialist armed urban guerrilla war from the seventies until the nineties. We want to share short extracts of communiqués of the RAF that are describing their motivation, the situation of the society and the aims of the RAF.
“The guerrilla – not only here, it wasn‘t different in Brazil, Uruguay, Cuba and for Che in Bolivia –always comes out of nothing and the first period of its formation is the most difficult one; as far as the origin from the bourgeois class, prostituted by imperialism and the proletarian class colonized by imperialism provides nothing useful for this fight. You are a group of comrades that decided to act, to leave the layers of lethargy, the verbal radicalism (radicalism only in words, without any practice), the strategic discussions that are loosing more and more substance, to fight. But right now everything is still missing – not only any means; it is only now getting obvious, what kind of a human you are. It is the individual in the metropoles that is getting visible, that comes from the process of decay, the deathly, wrong and alienated living conditions of the system – factory, desk, school, university, revisionist groups, teaching and precarious jobs. The results of the division of work and private life, the division of labour into mental and physical work, the disempowerment in hierarchical organised working processes, the psychological deformation through the society of commodities, the decay and in stagnation staying metropolitan society, is shown. But this are us, there do we come from: The breed of the processes of destruction and demolition of the metropolitan society, of the war of everyone against everyone, the competition of everyone against everyone, of the system in that the rule of fear, of the pressure of efficiency is in power, of the one-on-the-price-of-the-others, of the division of the people into men and women, young and old, healthy and sick, foreigners and Germans and the fights for prestige. And from there we come: from the isolation in the blocks of houses, from the silos made of cement in the suburbs, from the prison cells, asylums and from the prison block From the brainwashing by the media, the consumption, the beating penalties, from the ideology of nonviolence; out of depression, sickness, out of being declassified, from the insulting and humiliation of the human, of all exploited people in the imperialist system. Until we understand the suffering of each of us as the necessity of liberation from imperialism, as the necessity for an anti-imperialist fight and until we understood that with the demolition of this system there is nothing to loose, but in the armed struggle everything to win: the collective liberation, life, humanity, identity; that the cause of the people, of the masses, of the workers assembly line the lumpen, the prisoners, the apprentices, the lowest masses here and the liberation movements in the third world are also our cause. Our cause: armed anti-imperialist struggle the cause of the masses and the other way round – also if that can only become real, will become real in a long lasting process and the development of military political offensive of the guerrilla, in the liberation of the revolutionary peoples’ war.”
Also the RAF had an idea of solidarity that reminds us of the concept of hevaltî of the Kurdish Liberation Movement:
“In the sense of the revolution everyone who is acting in solidarity is a comrade. Solidarity becomes a weapon when it is organized and consequently applied: facing courts, the police, authorities, bosses, agents, traitors. If any cooperation with them is denied, if we don’t miss a chance to keep them busy, don’t let them proof anything or give any information. Part of solidarity is: to fight the liberalism in the Left, to work on contradictions within the left as they would be contradictions within the society but not as they would be the contradiction of classes. Every political activity depends on solidarity. Without solidarity the political work does not have any protection from repression. We have by any means to avoid loosing anyone. Everyone within the ranks of the revolution has to care for one another, approach each other full of love, to help each other.”
Şehid namirin.
No comrade will ever be forgotten.
The Şehids will live on in our resistance.