It will be another very sad birthday: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been deprived of his freedom for 11 years. Assange turns 50 on July 3rd. But there is no champagne and no party. Assange is sitting in the maximum security prison Belmarsh near London, sick and desperate. Only a few days ago he was able to see his family and children for the first time for a short time. Then the heavy prison gates closed again.
Julian Assange is waiting for the decision on whether he will be extradited from the UK to the US. In January a court ruled that he would not be extradited – but not because he needed protection as a journalist. Only his poor health saved him from being transferred to one of the notorious US prisons. The US government has appealed. The endless wait goes on. The oppressive uncertainty remains. The isolation is slowly destroying Assange, as supporters such as the UN torture commissioner Nils Melzer and other friends report. The US war crimes investigator is rotting in jail.
Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld passed away this week. The international press sent Rumsfeld respectful obituaries. Occasionally there were critical nuances. However, it is not the person who is responsible for the war crimes that sits in prison, but the person who exposed them.
“Julian Assange has been deprived of his liberty for years without charge. It’s a shame for the West, ”says Sevim Dagdelen, member of the Bundestag for the Left Party and one of Assange’s most committed supporters. Dagdelen wants to help Assange and wishes him for his birthday “that he has the necessary health and the strength to persevere until the international solidarity movement frees him from prison”. Dagdelen says that Assange is “a dissident” and that the West must grant him precisely those human rights which “we rightly urge in authoritarian regimes”.
Dagdelen, together with a parliamentary group in which representatives of several parties are committed to Assange, has been holding talks in the background for months on how Assange could be liberated. The chances are not that bad, apparently there has been movement in the matter. Just a few days ago, the US prosecution’s key witness, a man from Iceland, admitted that he lied for his testimony against Assange. He retracted his allegations in an Icelandic newspaper.
Edward Snowden said in Moscow that the US government’s indictment had lost its foundation. The international media hardly reported about the sensational turnaround. One of the exceptions: the alternative US broadcaster Democracy Now. After all, the new development is already noted in Assange’s Wikipedia entry. The revocation was also noticed in political circles in Washington. But even among liberal politicians, there is little willingness to get involved with Assange.
“If anyone can make a difference, it’s Merkel”
Bernie Sanders is said to have given up when he was asked for help. He does not want to mess with the “deep state”, say insiders. Assange is therefore dependent on intermediaries from outside. Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is not trusted very much, on the contrary: One is happy when Maas stays still and does not do the wrong thing, say Assange supporters from the Bundestag behind closed doors.
The greatest hopes rest on Chancellor Angela Merkel: Members of parliament positively note that “there is an open ear in the Chancellery” for the matter. One parliamentarian says: “If anyone can make a difference, it’s Merkel.” The MPs hope that Merkel might be guided by the idea of ending her term with a humanitarian gesture. Assange could then travel to Switzerland or Germany, primarily to recover health.
But first the US authorities would have to drop the extradition request. Otherwise Assange would remain a hunted, no matter in which country he finds refuge. The decisive factor is that the Americans have to be able to make their decision while saving their faces. The revocation of the testimony by the key witness could build a bridge for them.
Sevim Dagdelen believes that Assange is primarily about the humanitarian gesture. But the release of the publisher and journalist has a meaning that goes far beyond the individual case: “His fate concerns us all. We have to defend the freedom of the press if we want to preserve our democracy. ”Therefore, public pressure is also necessary: On Saturday, Assange’s birthday, there will be a vigil in front of the US embassy on Pariser Platz. At 5 p.m. Sevim Dagdelen, among others, will speak. Representatives from “Reporters Without Borders” will also support Assange. The vigil has been held every two weeks for many years.
He has done nothing wrong, and critical journalism should not be a heroic act, but normality.
Coral Franz, UdK student
Assange’s supporters in Berlin are people who are worried about democracy – like “Anna”, a business graduate who says: “I have always assumed that if I don’t do anything wrong, nothing will happen to me. It is shocking that this is not the case with Assange. ”
Another supporter is “Robert”: He is a software developer and came to Berlin from Poland in the 1980s, during “the dark Jaruzelski times”, as he remembers: “Back then I went to the West because I thought that it is different here. Disillusionment has set in over the years. I notice: the mechanisms are the same. ”Wikileaks was an initiative for more transparency. This is necessary, and it is not enough for him, like many other software colleagues, to simply have silent sympathy for Assange: “We have to do something if we want to defend our democracy.”
Coral Franz, an art student at the UdK, sees it that way too. She came to Berlin from Bolivia via Switzerland. She says: “For me the question arises: In what time is my generation moving?” Franz refers to the enormous changes in information processes due to digitization. Wikileaks is the opposite of Facebook: The Assange platform has controlled the powerful, Facebook collects the data of unsuspecting users. It is about a balance in the information channels: “It cannot be that they know everything about us, but we shouldn’t know anything about them,” says Franz about the imbalance between users, governments and technology corporations. For her, Assange is neither an enemy of the state nor a hero: he has done nothing wrong, and critical journalism should not be a heroic act, but normality. ”Digitization threatens to“ break the boundaries of informational self-determination ”. That is why it is important to support Assange – because with Wikileaks he has created exactly the right counterweight to the rulers in order to control them.
Positive sign from the British Embassy in Berlin
Almut, a retired elementary school teacher, sees the lack of transparency as a systemic problem and refers to the secret negotiations on the free trade agreements TTIP and CETA. She says: “It is important that we signal to politicians with our protest that we want to defend ourselves against this development.” She wrote Assange letters again and again, and once even a short answer came: “At least I knew that the letters got through to him. “
However, this thought frightens them, as does Thilo Haase, a typesetter, an Ostler who wants to defend himself against the “scissors in the head”. Even in the days before the fall of the Wall, he was present at demos under the roof of the church against the SED leadership. He knows what he is talking about, he says: “We need a free press so that we can be free citizens and not become subjects.” Haase says he is amazed at how much the “corridor of opinion” has narrowed more and more in recent years have: “I know that from the GDR: There was a public and a private opinion. I didn’t think that we would come back there in the west. “
Today, power is no longer with politics, but with corporations and international companies. Haase therefore believes that the support of Berliners from the vigil for Julian Assange will also be viewed with sympathy among government employees. It is true that the US embassy has never received a sign of life. But one met again and again in front of the British embassy, which is around the corner, who nodded encouragingly to the protesters. Some even stealthily stuck their thumbs up. Thilo Haase: “We knew: They don’t have total control – if they can’t even convince their own people in the embassy.”