Sixth Hunger Strike

Today, we began a hunger strike.

Following the execution of Andreas, Gudrun, Jan and Ingrid—following the death of eight prisoners from the RAF in the past three years—following the Stuttgart parliamentary investigative committee’s official cover-up of the murder of the hostages, the final scene in the intelligence service operation has unfolded, occurring at the same time as the idea was being floated that now that the leading prisoners from the RAF had been liquidated, those remaining should be dispatched as well—following all of the hunger and thirst strikes of recent years, and the torture that accompanied them: we are beginning this strike both conscious of and enraged by the fact that we have only this wretched means at our disposal, and we are doing so in the face of the boundless desire for destruction that the imperialist strategists are mobilizing against us as prisoners in their war against the armed resistance.

Our isolation from each other and from the outside world violates the promise made by the federal government a year ago.1 In spite of the internal promises of “improvements” in recent months, nothing has changed. We continue to find ourselves trapped inside an all-encompassing machine, one that assails us on several levels, cutting us off from the conditions necessary to ensure our ongoing humanity. The murders of Andreas, Gudrun, Jan, and Ingrid constitute a turning point, after which everything we have gained in the way of minimum living conditions is to be wiped away.

Given that the federal government, state security, and their justice and prison systems have made the extermination of the prisoners into an example of their readiness to commit any crime, with the contemptuous hope of smothering the revolutionary process in the metropole, we will act to make it clear that our status as hostages is an example of imperialist politics. They will once again learn that people will not let themselves be liquidated like dogs, and that there exists a type of strength that their machine cannot contain.

We demand:

  • That the FRG respect human rights and apply the minimum guarantees for prisoners of war, as established in the Geneva Convention.

That means:

  • association for the prisoners of the RAF and the other anti-imperialist organizations in groups suitable for healthy interaction. We are only demanding what medical experts have been demanding for years, what Amnesty International has campaigned for, and what this state already agreed to during our April ’77 hunger strike.

Beyond that, we demand:

  • that all of Andreas, Gudrun, Jan, Ingrid, and Irmgard’s confiscated writings be published—especially Gudrun’s letter to which the prison chaplain refers;
  • that all facts and all material regarding October 18, 1977, be made available to an independent investigative committee.

We will not break off this strike until conditions suitable for life have been established—guaranteed by an appropriate international organization.

Hamburg Remand
for the prisoners from the RAF
March 14, 1978

  1. On April 30, 1977, RAF prisoners called off their fourth collective hunger strike after receiving assurances that they would be granted limited association. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 471. [↩]

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