Chapter 10 : 
“Weet je waar een kraakpand is?”
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Author : Peter Gelderloos

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“Weet je waar een kraakpand is?”



Maandag, 7 Augustus



Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Groningen, where I had some faint notion
to spend a month, gain some appreciation of the anarchist movement in the
country, and try to learn Nederlands (the word “Dutch” is actually a
bastardization of “Deutsch,” which means German, whom some time ago the
English evidently mistook for Nederlanders). Right as I was biking into the
city I suddenly began to wonder why exactly I thought Groningen was the
city to find anarchists in. I didn’t know anyone there and had never
heard the place being mentioned in connection with radical activity. All
around me I saw a thoroughly mediocre city startlingly devoid of radical
graffiti and plastered propaganda. Hold on a second, why the hell did I
come here? Even a solitary spraypainted circle-A would have flooded my
heart with joy, and in fact my first glimmer of hope, the first good omen,
came from the sight of an Anti-Fascist Action sticker stuck boldly to a
lamppost on Hereweg.  Little did I know that the person who had placed it
there would later give me a tour of all the city’s squats. At the time it
was just a little sign that somewhere in this city, hiding among the
shoppers and students, was one of my kind.



By now the routine of scouting a new city had become automatic: memorizing
the main thoroughfares and looking for squat symbols, signs of political
life, parks with hidden places I might sleep in at night, places safe and
dry to lock my bike, dumpsters, cheap internet cafés, places to get water
and go to the bathroom.  After hours of fruitless searching I finally
decided to join, if only temporarily, the 21st century, get on the
internet, and look for mentions of social centers or squats in Groningen. I
soon got an address for Oude RKZ: once a hospital, then a squat, and now an
alternative residence for some 300 retired hippies, lefties, punks and
sundry others.



An acquaintance I made there permitted me to put down my sleeping bag in a
storage room for the night, and pointed me towards a protest in support of
asylum seekers happening the next day in the Grote Markt, where I
introduced myself to a rapid succession of people that in the span of four
hellos and three minutes landed me with floor space at a squat just west of
the center.

What exactly is a squat?



A squat is a vacant building occupied by people who for a variety of
reasons do not respect the property rights of the absentee owner, and
either openly or covertly take up residence therein.  Once inside they fix
up the decaying building, hence the connection of the squatters’ movement
with the DIY (do-it-yourself) culture.  They often hang a banner with some
concise “fuck you” to established order, or cover the façade of the
building with graffiti of varying esthetic and political content, perhaps
also peppering the surrounding neighborhood with the squat monogram to
point the way to travelers. In Nederlands, the word is kraakpand, in
Deutsch besetztes Haus and in Español casa ocupada.



Squatting, in Nederland, is legal in buildings that have been abandoned at
least a year.  There are a number of loopholes, and to the
business-sympathetic ear of the courts and police who retain sole power to
interpret the concept, “abandonment” takes on a startling degree of
metaphysical complexity. In other words, liberal Nederland deals with the
potentially insurrectionary phenomenon of squatting with a strategy of
legalization, a permissive release-valve that tolerates discontents
creating their subcultures in buildings truly abandoned by capitalists, and
forces resistance, from those squats the powerful wish to retake, into
disarming legal channels. To defend your squat, you don’t pick up a brick
the honest, old-fashioned way — you need to get a lawyer.  Property
owners have also taken up the tactic of establishing anti-squats by renting
out vacant, squat-vulnerable apartments to people willing to sign away all
their rights in return for a rent as low as 20 euros a month.  Owners have
no obligations to anti-squat tenants, and they can kick them out with a
couple weeks notice.  In Groningen and other cities in Nederland, many of
the best buildings that would otherwise be available have been filled with
anti-squats.



The opportunistic socialists in Nederland have come to the defense of
anti-squats.  In Groningen for example, they are known to dramatically
squat a big building, co-opting the enthusiasm of the youthful
participants; they win publicity for themselves as humanitarians by moving
students, poor, or homeless people into the building; and then they
pressure them all to sign an anti-squat contract and trumpet it as
low-income housing.  It’s not unheard of for them to stage-manage the
whole thing with the owners from the get-go.  This sort of action is great
for the owners, and it opens a back door to destroy Nederland’s
progressive housing rights, creating the reality that poor people must
surrender all their housing rights in exchange for a cheap place to live,
which the speculators can maintain as flexible properties because at any
moment they are able to kick out the tenants and demolish or sell the
building.



Despite Nederland’s progressive laws, owners commonly win eviction
processes against squatters, and then the police come to kick them out. 
Other times, owners skip the courts and hire goons to attack squatters with
crowbars.  Not too many years ago, squats in Groningen were defended
forcefully.  The high point was in 1991, when the city evicted the
Walters-Noordhof Complex, a huge squat near where the university library
stands today.  All of Boteringestraat was covered in burning barricades,
rubble, and riot police, where now shoppers stroll past yuppie stores
consuming above all their illusion of social peace.



In Germany, squatting is less legal, hence the term “former squat” used
so frequently in reference to the occupied dwellings in that country. If
they do not want to retake a particular property by force, the government
or property owners can bring it back into the pale of legality by making
the attractive offer to the rogue tenants to purchase or rent the building
for an extremely low amount, “legalizing” it.



In the US, there has never been a countrywide squatters’ or autonomous
movement as has existed in Europe. The only squats I knew about in Virginia
were either covert, or “permission squats” allowed by the absentee
owner.  Housing and building-use codes seem to be stronger tools in the US
for preventing any unorthodox  use of buildings. It certainly would be much
harder in the US to run a squat bar and sell alcohol to raise money. Some
of the key squats on the Lower East Side during New York City’s squatting
heyday were evicted because they were “not up to code” and supposedly
presented a danger to the occupants.  Not that we have to pine for
irretrievable days of glory or covet Europe’s fabulous squatting
movement.  These days, squatting seems to be a growing phenomenon in the
Rust Belt, where municipalities do not have the money to demolish all the
condemned buildings in the largely abandoned cities.



Here in Nederland, the center-right government in power was proposing a law
to illegalize squatting, sparking a number of protests, mostly around
Utrecht and Amsterdam, and also a number of raids by police, who had just
forcibly evicted a large squatted farm in the center of the country, in the
week I arrived.  In Amsterdam a large squat was repeatedly evicted and
reoccupied.  Elsewhere a squatted castle was stormed by police.  The
occupiers resisted, though I was told they were hippies and didn’t put up
a good fight — no catapults, crossbows, boiling oil, or anything like
that.



Vrijdag, 11 Augustus



The guy I was staying with, Joop, lived with a friend, Jan, at 31 Taco
Mesdagstraat, in a small squatted apartment just above a pizza place.  We
hit it off easily, going on long walks, dumpster-diving for groceries,
discussing economics, media, radical propaganda, and similar themes.  After
getting to know me for a couple days, they invited me to stay there the
whole month I was in Groningen.  I was considering going on to Utrecht, but
Joop described the anarchist movement locally as experiencing a decline.
I’m a sucker for hard cases, so I decided to reject the big city syndrome
and stay on to help them with a few projects, and to explore this smaller,
less exciting city and its fascinatingly apprehensible routines.



Three days a week there was an open air market on the Vismarkt, and you
could skip vegetables.  Outside the city center were a few supermarkets
with generous dumpsters.  And you could use the internet for free at the
university, if you could get a password.  It would be pretty easy to
provide for myself this month.  I felt immediately comfortable there, and
satisfied with my new home after days on the road.  I used to think it was
impossible to make real friends in less than a year, but as my friends back
home seemed increasingly distant with each meager email, I was amazed by
how quickly I could become close to new people I met, brought together by
hospitality and a shared struggle.  It wasn’t enough to hold off a heavy
nostalgia, but it did make living worthwhile.



A week after we met, Joop, Jan, and a friend of theirs took me out for my
birthday.  We saw The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach’s latest
film, a brutally honest chronicle of the struggle for independence in
Ireland.  People can desire freedom so strongly they will sustain torture
or take a life, and at the threshold of victory they can suddenly begin to
doubt themselves and sell the revolution short.  I wonder, if we ever get
that far, will we miss these calm days of powerlessness?



     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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     Chapter 10 -- Added : January 21, 2021

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