Fourth Hunger Strike

“Those who understand their situation are unstoppable.”

Given the fact that the state has turned treatment outside of the legal norms into a permanent exception

and

that six years of state security justice has proven that when it comes to us, whether in manhunts or in prison, human and constitutional rights aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,

we demand

on behalf of the prisoners from the anti-imperialist groups struggling in the Federal Republic, treatment under the minimum guarantees of the 1949 Geneva Convention, specifically Articles 3, 4, 13, 17 and 130.[1]

Which, for the political prisoners in Hamburg, Kaiserslautern, Cologne, Essen, Berlin, Straubing, Aichach, and Stammheim would mean, at a minimum, and in keeping with the testimony of all expert witnesses at raf trials, that the prisoners be brought together in groups of at least 15 and that they be allowed to interact freely with one another.

Concretely, we are demanding:

  1. The abolition of isolation and group isolation in the prisons of the Federal Republic and the closing of special isolation wings, which are meant to destroy prisoners, and where any communication is recorded and analyzed.
  2. Investigations into the deaths of Holger Meins, Siegfried Hausner, and Ulrike Meinhof by an International Commission of Inquiry, support for the work of this Commission, and the publication of its findings in the Federal Republic.
  3. The government must publicly and clearly acknowledge that the claims that:
  • the raf planned to set off three bombs in downtown Stuttgart (June72);
  • the raf planned to poison the drinking water in a large city (Summer 74);
  • the raf stole mustard gas and planned to use it (Summer 75);
  • the Holger Meins Commando set off the explosives in Stockholm themselves (April75);
  • the raf planned to contaminate Lake Constance with atomic waste (September75);
  • the raf planned attacks against nuclear power plants and planned to make use of nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons (since January76);
  • the raf planned a raid on a playground to take children hostage (March75).

are psychological warfare fabrications, used to legitimize an aggressive police force and state security apparatus, to disrupt solidarity with the resistance groups, and to isolate and destroy them; that all of these claims are false and that the statements released by the police, intelligence agencies, and the judiciary in this regard are baseless.

The hunger strike

is an example of our solidarity

  • with the hunger strike of prisoners from the Palestinian resistance for prisoner of war status;[2]
  • with the hunger strike for political status of the ira prisoners in Irish and English prisons, status they are denied on the basis of a European antiterrorism law put forward by the Federal Republic;[3]
  • with the demand of the eta prisoners and other antifascist forces in Spain for an amnesty;[4]
  • with all those taken prisoner in the struggle for social revolution and national self-determination;
  • with all those who have begun to fight against the violation of human rights, the miserable conditions and the brutal repression in the prisons of the Federal Republic.

Arm the resistance!
Organize the underground!
Carry out the anti-imperialist offensive!

[1] See Appendix IV—The Geneva Convention: Excerpts, pages 554-56.

[2] Starting with a few dozen prisoners in February, within a month hundreds of Palestinian prisoners had joined a hunger strike throughout Israel’s prisons, and outside support was offered by left-wing Arab and Jewish organizations. The basic demands were better conditions and an end to racist discrimination within the prisons, whereby Jewish prisoners received preferential treatment in regards to food and visits. [Journal of Palestine Studies, “Strike of Arab Prisoners in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1977): 169171].

[3] Twenty ira prisoners were hunger striking at the time against brutal conditions at Ireland’s Maximum Security Portlaoise prison. The strike lasted forty-seven days before it was ended by the intervention of the Catholic hierarchy.

[4] The eta is the Basque separatist guerilla. At the time, there was a mass militant movement demanding amnesty for hundreds of Basque and antifascist political prisoners in Spain, many of whom had been incarcerated due to their activities against the fascist Franco dictatorship.