Title: acTVism Munich at the Wikileaks event in Berlin
Note: Note: The following transcript may not be 100% correct.
Zain Raza:
Welcome to acTVism Munich – I am your host Zain Raza reporting from the Volksbühne in Berlin.
Today journalists, artists, activists and politicians are coming together from all over the world to support WikileLeaks founder Julian Assange who was forced to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London 4 years ago on this day.
They consider the persecution against him illegal and immoral and are asking the world to stand up against this injustice. This event today will also deal with the issues of whistleblowing, investigative journalism and transparency.
From intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek, journalists such as Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill and artists such as Brian Eno, PJ Harvey and Patti Smith – the entire cultural spectrum is at display here.
We are here to talk directly to the organizers and participants, and to find out what this event means for democracy and the future of humanity. So stay tuned!
Angela Richter:
Well I was a theater director before I became an activist. So it was kind of natural in a way and I got bored by doing Shakespeare and all these bourgeois problems on stage and then I found out about Wikileaks and I thought maybe that's an interesting topic to make a documentary theater. And so I happened to have the lucky postion that I got to know Julien Assange and interviewed him several times during the last four years in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Sarah Harrison:
He stays very strong, he focuses on his work a lot and with his type of personality and work ethic this keeps him very busy and keeps him going. We have a lot of good publications coming up this year, and that definitely keeps him busy. There have been some interesting wins in his legal case this year. For example, the United Nations ruled that his detention is arbitrary and that the United Kingdom and Sweden should release him immediately. Sadly those countries are not actually following the United Nations judgment but it is still a positive move forward in his case.
They are very difficult conditions that he is there under. For example he basically is in one room within what is a very small embassy in the center of London. He has no outside space. He hasn't been able to be in the sun for four years now. So they are tough conditions but he works through and he stays strong.
Julian Assange:
I understand that I’m speaking to around ten cities. I’m normally pretty isolated here at the embassy, so understand that [it is] a bit of a shock to be speaking to perhaps 100,000 people from these different venues and online.
There are some consolations to being arbitrarily detained, there is some luck in being an accused person. Luck in being spied [on] as terrorist, luck in being accused of being a sex criminal.
You might think that surely it is a shock and a devastation to wake up and find one transformed into a demon, into a thing, into an unspeakable thing. A frightening thing.
No, it’s wonderful, because it is not that you change, it is that others change. You stay the same, but you now have a gift. You now have a super power. The super power of the accused. This super power is to reveal the true character of others.
Who does not long from childhood for such a power? To understand the true nature of one’s friends. We are not judges. We’re the accused. But the people and states around us are. Great characters rise and great cultures step forward to shine. False smiles fade, concealed alliances are revealed, the timid retreat and love is no longer merely a word, but it is an action.
This is the super power of the accused.
Michael Sontheimer:
Whistleblowers are not really protected in Germany. The German Bundestag, the parlament, is working on a law for the protection or the regulations about whistleblowers. But this debate is very controversial and I don't see that this law will come in the near future but at a certain point it will come.
But if you ask about the German government why they don't invite let's say Edward Snowden to enjoy his life in Berlin instead of Moscow then it is very clear that the Americans, due to historical reasons, I mean they liberated us from the Nazis, so there is a special relationship with the United States and German governments are cowardly following the American or US governments.
Hans-Christian Ströbele:
Newspaper and TV-Reports are fleeting. After a couple of weeks or months they just slump. That’s why there has to be a true movement of the population, to demonstrate that this is an unacceptable situation. This movement has to side with whistleblowers and find ways to protect and help them.
Whistleblowers don’t pass on their information to the public for their own sake. They do it for all of us. They do it for the societies in the US, Germany and other European countries. They do it in order to achieve a better democracy, a more transparent democracy and to end abuse. If they do this for us, than it is our duty to come through for them, even outside of parliament.”
Angela Richter:
I interviewed a bunch of other whistleblowers including Edward Snowden, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake and so on. So it was really a huge project and we also hacked into the audience. And that was actually the activist part to make the people feel how vulnerable their own devices are.
So yes, I think, for me it really changed my life to get to know all these people and then I discovered that art and theater can be a powerful tool to be used for activism.
Sarah Harrison:
For Julian and his long-defense fund as you can see even. These are the powers we're up against when even the United Nations is being ignored. So we definitely need as much help as possible there. And when it comes to Wikileaks, we have many, many good publications coming up for the rest of this year. And if you want to see them faster, then just donate more there.
Zain Raza:
600 people participated today at the Volksbühne Berlin. And Hundreds of thousands were tuned in in over eight cities globally. There was a consensus around developing citizens’ alliances and also institutional frameworks, which would safeguard and protect whistleblowers.
A great deal of focus was also put on the findings of the United Nations group on arbitrary detention, which has determined that Julian Assange is being held unlawfully and should be compensated.
We don’t know what the future of Julian Assange an Wikileaks will be. But what we can say for certain is that there’s a growing movement and consciousness developing globally, which understands the importance of whistleblowers and the impacts they have on democracy.
I’m Zain Raza, reporting from Volksbühne Berlin. Thanks for joining us today.