Oury Jalloh Killed in Police Cell in 2005

Germany: Cop Terror, Nazi Provocations Over Commemoration of African Immigrant

The following article is translated from Spartakist No. 192 (March 2012), newspaper of our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany.

On 7 January 2005, Oury Jalloh, a refugee from Sierra Leone, burned to death in a police station jail cell in Dessau, Germany. Since then, to keep his memory alive, his friends and supporters have been protesting against cop harassment and criminalization of immigrants in Dessau. In a trial going on now, they are demanding that murder charges be brought against the police.

A December 2008 district court trial in Dessau-Rosslau acquitted two cops who were on duty when Jalloh died, citing a purported lack of evidence. The cop in charge that night is again standing trial following a 2010 Federal Court decision overturning the earlier verdict. Reflecting the state’s contempt for immigrants like Jalloh, the charges brought in the first trial were limited to “manslaughter” and “bodily harm with fatal consequences.” In the latest instance showing that judicial neutrality is a farce, the bourgeois state is again trying to cover up its responsibility for Jalloh’s death. The judges and the cops are determined to conceal the truth about this ghastly immolation. They go so far as to absurdly claim that Jalloh, his hands and feet chained to a bed with a fireproof mattress, ignited himself and is thus responsible for his own death.

In the lead-up to this year’s demonstration on the anniversary of Jalloh’s death, the cops threatened that the slogan “Oury Jalloh—that was murder” would not be tolerated. When the 200 demonstrators refused to be cowed, they were beaten with truncheons and several were injured. Police pepper-sprayed protesters in the eyes and snatched veteran black activists out of the demonstration. Mouctar Bah, one of the initiators of the demonstration, was beaten unconscious and had to be taken to the hospital with a concussion. From the moment he began demanding an investigation of Jalloh’s death, Bah has been subjected to regular harassment by police and other state authorities. Hands off Mouctar Bah!

This latest orgy of state violence was followed by a campaign to criminalize leftists that has also incited Nazi terror. Already on January 16, a Nazi-led mob in Dessau was spewing racist slogans. Following a January 18 arson attack on the police station where Jalloh had died, Sachsen-Anhalt’s interior minister Stahlknecht ranted that the “leftist autonome [anarchoid] milieu” was “consciously carrying out provocations against the police,” prompting a “disproportionate” reaction from the cops.

Thus encouraged, 370 Nazis marched on the evening of January 21 through Dessau, some of them attacking a festival in commemoration of the Jewish composer Kurt Weill. Prior to the Nazi march, two counter-demonstrations were canceled by their initiators. In a January 24 “self-critical explanation,” a representative of the “No Nazis Dessau” group admitted that the organizers had thought that the police would not permit the Nazis to march. They believed that since knowledge of “possible racist complicity on the part of police headquarters had grown following all the entanglements of the Oury Jalloh case and again after the scandalous and violent tirades at the Oury Jalloh demo of January 7,” the cops could “no longer justify” allowing a Nazi march.

Confronting an increasingly dangerous situation for the left and immigrants in Dessau, 30 leftists occupied the town hall on February 7 to demand that “the city distance itself from the racist demonstrations and seriously consider how these could be prevented in the future.” The mayor then did what he is paid to do…and pressed charges against them. As irreconcilable opponents of bourgeois rule, we Marxists defend leftists and immigrants against criminalization and attacks by the state. Drop all charges against the occupiers of City Hall!

The events in Dessau and elsewhere in the state of Saxony-Anhalt are but a few examples of the flagrant collaboration between the state and the Nazis, already evidenced by the complicity of the Verfassungsschutz [domestic intelligence service] in the series of murders by the fascist “National Socialist Underground” (see “The Fourth Reich and Its Nazis,” WV No. 995, 3 February). The starting point must be the understanding that society is divided into antagonistic classes: The capitalist state and its laws serve to maintain private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie. That is why the state cannot be made to represent the interests of the oppressed and working masses. The capitalists use the Nazis as a means of inflicting fear and terror; they keep the fascists in reserve against the working class for times of social upheaval, should police violence and illusions in bourgeois democracy no longer suffice to maintain capitalist rule. This is why their state protects the Nazis and sharpens its repression against the left and immigrants.

It is necessary to smash the murderous Nazi gangs by mobilizing the multiethnic working class, independently from the state and the bourgeoisie, at the head of all the Nazis’ potential victims. Through its position in the process of production, the working class has the social power and historic interest to sweep away through socialist revolution this system that breeds poverty and racism.