Oppose Plastic Bullets and Twenty-Eight Day Detention

by iosaf - ( no laughing matter & so no sarcasm needed) Thu Aug 06, 2009 21:07 barcelona

Joaquin Gatti a French citizen and activist in the French sans papiers movement took part in the 2004 lock-in protests of non regularised workers in Barcelona, Catalonia. His activism and negotiation techniques and sheer charm came to the fore and general recognition during the sin papeles protest of that year and the following in Catalonia as he managed to sort out many problems of ethnic and cultural difficulties between the migrants taking part in many lock-in or hunger strike sites. Last June he was attending a gathering of migrants in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) near Paris, France which was broken up by the police using exceptional brutality during which many plastic bullets were fired. Joaquin lost his eye and suffered several fractures to his skull.
original report in catalan http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/377275 and in castillian from BCN IMC http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/376760/...x.php On the 24th of July we had a protest at the French Consulate here in Barcelona, a consulate which in the past years when we could count on more activists, popular support and general politicisation we had managed to occupy. This time less than 50 of us turned up to chant a few slogans and face off an equal amount of local Catalan police who are as happy as any "law enforcement agency" to use plastic or rubber bullets.

yet never seem to understand the basic rules & guidelines in the handbooks of the corporations who make these supposedly "non-lethal" weapons : you bounce the projectile to land at least ten metres in front of a group of people, the shock of the bullet than landing without inertia amongst the crowd will disperse them.

As Eirigi knows, and anyone who has been a situation where these weapons are used knows - the polcie who use them never shoot to bounce. They aim directly at protesters.

that is the difference between an instrument of supposed indiscriminate crowd control and a weapon which maims and sometimes kills

My colleague Joachim has now, we understand, been offered the expensive "luxury" of a type of artificial or glass eye which was developed in the north of Ireland due to the demand in such prosthetics which all the rubber, plastic bullets and flying exploding glass of the Troubles caused up there.