Mourning for Laye-Alama Condé

Demonstration in memory of Laye-Alama Condé
Saturday, 7th of January 2006, 12 O’clock (noon)
Obernstraße/Ecke Ansgarikirchof, Bremen


We mourn for Laye-Alama Condé, who has died a year ago, on the 7th of January 2005, as a result of the forced administration of emetic by the police.
Late on the evening of 26th December, 2004 Laye-Alama Condé from Sierra Leone, who had been living in Bremen for years, was arrested by two civil police commando and brought to the police station Vahr on suspicion of having drugs on him. There, Laye-Alama Condé was forcibly tied to a metal examination stretcher by the two policemen (both feet fixed with cable tie, his left hand fixed with handcuffs on the examination stretcher.)
In the meantime a second report has clearly verified (Weser Kurier 26th of November 2005), that Laye-Alama Condé died as a consequence of the forced administration of emetic. He suffocated as a result of the great amount of water, which Igor Volz, the doctor from the medizinischen Beweissicherungsdienst-medical evidence security service (under the leadership of Michael Birkholz) forcibly pumped into his stomach by means of a tube and flooded his lungs.

Laye-Alama Condé has been awfully tormented and drowned in the custody of the Bremen police.
Despite Laye-Alama Condés desperate try to fight the insertion of the stomach tube he had no chance against the maltreating might. Not against the two policemen, who held his head and his free arm, not against Igor Volz, who again and again inserted the tube into him and who pumped the emetic as well as the deadly water into his body and not against the rescue assistants who were present, and who surveilled the procedure and helped out with a wooden spatula from their ambulance, which was put into Laye-Alama Condés throat, in order to make him vomit more.
On the 27th December, 2004 the emergency doctor who was called diagnosed Laye-Alama Condé as brain dead.

Thereafter, the senator of the interior, Röwekamp stirred up a campaign of lies and hatred, which is unparalled and unprecedented with the impertinence and the cynicism involved. Several times he claimed publicly that Laye-Alama Condé had poisoned himself. Without ever uttering a word of regret, he insolently justified the deadly measure: He would find it completely justified, to „take such means against such people“, a „hardened criminal“ had to „reckon with physical disadvantages“. At a point, when Laye-Alama Condé had been diagnosed to be brain dead, Röwekamp said that Laye-Alama Condé was on the road to recovery and announced at the same time: „In case he dies, this has nothing to do with the administration of emetics.“
The obvious lies and the inhuman attitude of Röwekamp have not harmed his career – the opposite is the case: As the new ascender of the CDU in Bremen, he is in the meantime the Deputy Mayor of Bremen.

There are concrete persons who are responsible for the death of Laye-Alama Condé. But it is also a racist and inhuman policy which is responsible for his death, and which approvingly accepts such killings.
The death of Laye-Alama Condé is the result of hypocritical drug prohibition politics, which provides the legal basis for the use of emetic. One can call the practice of using emetic to be a purposeful racist persecution and torture method, because it is directed almost exclusively against blacks. According to racist ascriptions, blacks are the epitome of a dealer: Drug dealers are regarded as an outer threath to an otherwise ‚healthy‘ and harmonious (German) community – and because non-germans and especially african men are also imagined to be a threat from outside, the racist view equates blacks with drug-dealing. Here the racist production of images and the repressive drug politics are linked.
To perceive drugs as a „threat from outside“ and dealers as great seducers, is completely beyond reality. It is a fact, that the use of drugs is for a very large amount of people a daily craving – for whatever reasons. In this respect the drug market is in many regards a market like others in capitalism. It is reality that illegalized drugs belong in reality to the life of millions of people.
Drug users are everywhere. The open streets of the Sielwall junction is only a tiny, but also a very visible part of the big circle of drug consumers. Neither the drugs nor the petty dealers are the problem, but the inhuman drug prohibition politics, which is almost everywhere held on to and about which ‚success‘ is repeatedly lied even though the facts prove the opposite.
These politics, which favour criminalization and purposeful impoverishment, endangers people everyday: On the one hand, the illegalization of certain drugs lets the end-user’s price rise up to absurd highs and thereby drive many drug users into economic plight. On the other hand, dirty and many times diluted stuff is sold to the end-users.
Therefore: Stop the hypocritical and murderous drug-prohibition politics!

The death of Laye-Alama Condé is mainly the tragic and logical consequence of a praxis of maltreatment which the police has been practicing for many years against suspected petty dealers. Especially, black people are purposely picked out on a daily basis. And this for one simple reason: Because they are black. But the torture-method emetic is only one example of racist police brutality.

Many people are on a daily basis exposed to the capriciousness and attacks by the police. Police officers permanently carry out identity checks with people whom they perceive as non-german. Here racist insults, deep humiliation, arbitrary arrests and often also physical maltreatment by the police are the rule.
But these controls by the police are only one part of the purposeful racist discrimination and social exclusion. A wide range of special laws characterizes the day to day life of migrants and refugees in Germany.
One example is the „Residenzpflicht“-law, which is unique to Germany, and which denies refugees the basic human right to freedom of movement. The fact that refugees are not allowed to leave the „Landkreis“ where they are registered without a permission by the authorities, is used to justify permanent controls.
It is not an exception that racist police controls and arrests end with the death of the affected person. On the 7th of January, 2005 the same day that Laye-Alama Condé was officially declared to be dead, Oury Jalloh burned under unclear circumstances in a police cell in Dessau. Since months there have been investigations against two policemen in this case.
And in December, 2001 Achidi John was unscrupulously killed in Hamburg also by the forceful adminstration of emetic.
Therefore: Stop racist police control!

• A public and appropriate apology by those who are personally and politically responsible for the death of Laye-Alama Condé!


• Stop the adminstration of emetic once and for all!


• Away with the drug prohibition politics!


• Stop racist police control! Stop racist police brutality!

This article was published first from the :: Caravan for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants and from :: Flüchtlingsrat Hamburg.