“Several KuBiZ” projects have recently published their views on the current conflict about the eviction of a flat. Our collective is active within the associations OBUK e.V. and solar e.V. and the conference and seminar house tagungswerk. We want to comment on this because we did not co-author and support this KuBiZ statement, but have been approached from many sides about the conflict and the numerous controversial discussions.
We have not been part of the “self-administration” in the highly fragmented KuBiZ project, which is suffering from processes of domination, bullying and othering, for some years now. Not because we don’t like self-administration, but because we consider an intensive processing of the conflicts in the house, in which all parties in the house participate, to be a precondition for a functioning self-administration. However, for years there has been no agreement on this and no sufficient provision of sufficient resources by all parties involved.
We did not participate in the decisions that led to the renewed escalation and finally to the eviction of the squatted flat-share and only heard about them afterwards. However, we did participate in the negative effects of the sharply rising rents and the lack of maintenance measures.
From our point of view, the group that occupied this flat behaved in a completely unsolidary way. They destroyed the infrastructure in the building, repeatedly graffitied the walls with fighting slogans and even threats and thus put other collectives and political groups in the building in danger – regardless of their own position – and this even in the particularly difficult time of Corona for all of us!
They lived at the expense of other collectives who were themselves in need of money, including us (collective with people from different social positions).
We are critical of the involvement of the police to evict the WG and see the responsibility for this with the association leadership and the project council in KuBiZ, not with the bailiff.
From our point of view, violent relationships in the KuBiZ project are virulent on different levels and in the different factions of the project and they urgently need to be addressed structurally. We consider approaches of dealing with the relations of violence in the project by assigning blame to individuals without taking into account their structural anchoring and conditions to have failed.
We are therefore very sceptical about the “possibility” claimed in the statement to end the existence-threatening situation, to provide people with a safe space and a low-conflict life and work. Nevertheless, we hope that a further escalation of conflicts can be avoided by all actors consciously and willingly embarking on the (probably long and certainly exhausting) path of conflict resolution.
Since we are often asked about the Corona issue: We see vaccinations as a sensible and effective means of combating the pandemic and consider measures of contact reduction as they have been applied (more or less sensibly and successfully) in the past years and which have also affected our work in an existential way to be urgently necessary. We see this as a self-evident act of solidarity especially with the weaker people in our society and also worldwide. We are critical of the participation of people from the KuBiZ project environment in right-wing open protest events of vaccination opponents and Corona deniers. But also in this point we do not see the project’s internal handling of the topic and the renewed linking of the issue with the eviction issue as a contribution to understanding and conflict resolution.