With the increasingly restrictive harmonisation of asylum and immigration policy in Europe, there have been several attempts in the last few years to improve the networking between anti-racist grassroots organisations.
Under the slogan "more control, more exclusion, more deportations", different European groups appealed to demonstrate against the meeting of heads of EU governments in Tampere/Finland in October 1999, where the coming into force of the Amsterdam Treaty was discussed as another stepping stone towards Fortress Europe. In eight different EU countries, demonstrations and direct actions were organised against the European project of deportation and exclusion. On the basis of this common practical experience and due to the increasing interest in cross border cooperation, the first noborder meeting was held in Amsterdam in December 1999. Activists from France, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium and Germany took part and groups from Poland, the Ukraine and Spain joined this attempt of grassroots networking at next regular halfyearly meetings. A common English speaking mailing list has been set up in the beginning of 2000 and many grassroots groups, even from outside Europe, are actively using this networking project to exchange information and discuss migration and borders.
Two practical campaigns are central to these cross border activities: Deportation-alliance http://www.deportation-alliance.com This common web site connects campaigns against airlines that take part in the deportation business. During the past few years, there have been a plethora of successful actions against Martinair in the Netherlands, Air France, Swissair and against the Belgian airline Sabena. From these experiences, and from long-lasting aviation campaigns such as the Lufthansa and KLM campaigns, the resistance against deportations has gained a new impetus. New initiatives are starting to target British Airways and Iberia in Spain, and in June 2001 another campaign against Romanian charter-deportation-airline Tarom could succeed in Germany. The exchange of experiences and the development of common bases for action have on the one hand proven to be an effective tool in disturbing the EU's deportation machinery. On the other hand, this new "alliance" has served as a mutual encouragement at a time when prospects of resistance seemed bleak.
During the last four years, activists have created new forms of resistance against the brutal and often deadly border regime of Fortress Europe with different actions and noborder camps. This new approach has been taken up and developed further in the noborder network in 2000 and 2001. "Freedom of movement" was the main objective of a chain of camps last summer: simultanous activities took place in the beginning of July at the polish border to Belarus, in Slovenjas triangle to Hungary and Croatia, and in South-Spain at the coast to Marocco. After participation in Genova against G-8-summit, in particular with no border-no nation - caravan from activists in Austria, another noborder-camp with more than 1000 activists took place at the end of July close to Germanys most important deportation-airport in Frankfurt. For summer 2002 a proposal is circulating now: to organize an international noborder camp in Strasbourg, directed mainly against the SIS, the Schengen Information System, which includes the first supranational electronic database to deport and exclude non-europeans from fortress Europe.
Furthermore, on noborder mailing list many calls for actions in the individual countries circulate and attempts are being made to coordinate activities, for example to establish the 13th of October as a common action-day or to mobilize in resistance to official European summits. This practical approach, to coordinate actions as an expression of a fundamental critique of EU migration politics, is central to the noborder project. This involves continuous networking and information exchange. Because our aim always remains not only to criticise, but to create European-wide structures for practical and effective resistance. http://www.noborder.org
