Avalanche - The Anarchist correspondence zine Avalanche-EN-13 | Page 4

On the struggle against
Bässlergut and on
insurrectionary practices
January 2018 - Switzerland
This small text, that intents to give a little insight into
the struggles against Bässlergut and some consider-
ations about specific struggles in general, has been
written by myself as an individual. It is my thoughts
and my history that you will find in here. The text is
obviously not talking about the whole complex of the
struggle. Others probably would give more space or
value to other aspects.
***
It’s a Friday night and once more some people gather on
a clearance in the forest and start their way to a nearby
prison in Basel, a small, rich city in the small, rich terri-
tory of Switzerland. It’s the 11th of September 2015 and
the group runs towards Bässlergut, a prison in the sub-
urbs of Basel. Around 30 people can be in deportation
cells, another 43 cells are there for serving sentences
in it. Arriving at the walls, fireworks are set off, slogans
are shouted and a banner hung at the fence. On the ban-
ner it reads “Director Arsehole – Politics fascist”, a slo-
gan shouted by an inmate during a previous visit like
this. The prisoners are shouting back and bang against
the barred windows, as always during these rebellious
visits, that happen once in a while. Before the group dis-
perses in the forest, a pole with a surveillance camera
on top on the parking lot is destroyed. In the aftermath
of the prison demo the call to resist the planned con-
struction of another prison next to the old one spreads.
This took place a week before an announced demo
against a military training called “Conex15” in the Re-
gion of Basel, at which the scenario of a collapsing Eu-
rope is supposed to be simulated. “Economic crisis”,
“sabotage and looting of oil-, gas- and grain-depots”
or “refugee streams” are just some of the keywords
of this. The demo is heading towards Bässlergut once
again, where it is clashing with the police, trashing
everything on its way that should be trashed and can
be destroyed quickly – even though just for a short
amount of time, few days or weeks after the facade of
social peace shines again.
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Since then, two years have passed. In spring 2017 they
started to build another prison right next to Bässlergut.
There they plan on imprisoning 78 people. The two dif-
ferent types of imprisonment – sentenced prisoners and
those awaiting deportation – will then be in separated
buildings. In the following years, the “reception centre”,
which is right next to Bässlergut, will be turned into a
“federal asylum centre”, combining different parts and
forces of the asylum machinery in one administrative
authority. The “federal asylum centres” will be build
in numerous parts of the country and in a lot of places
there is resistance against them.
One example for this is the city of Zürich, where they
where testing this form of camp management since ear-
ly 2014 – here, a radical and direct struggle against
it developed itself. Actions, sabotage and occupations
happened in other places as well, even before they
opened the camps.
So, in these two years it wasn’t just the authorities
working on their repressive project. Besides the call for
resistance against Bässlergut II (after the before men-
tioned prison demo), a leaflet and poster called “When
the enemies of freedom get a move on…” was published
in early 2016. This put the developments of Basel into a
wider context, in which similar prisons and camps will
appear, in Europe as well as in other parts of the world.
In this context, this one specific prison and detention
centre is just a small, local picture of the ongoing, world
wide war of the ruling order. Here an extract of the text:
“…it’s no problem to find more and more examples for
the war waged against the migrants that has caused
the death of thousands already. Unfortunately, this war
waged in the still young 21st century by far isn’t the only
one. The different newly imposed surveillance laws in a
lot of countries, the improvement of military and police
infrastructure, the construction of different jails all over
Europe, cities turning into open air prisons and the in-
creasing repression against those who chose to resist,
all this is part of the same blow of those in power. A war
that became so normal that it simply doesn’t need ex-
planations any more – webbing the net of the society of