Violence at Radboud: Security Brutilise Protestors
Today, students marched to the Berchmanianum building, where the university board works. Education and Protest regading Palestine has been heavily restricted at Radboud, resulting in increasing security and an unsafe campus environment, especially for people of colour.
Students outside wrote in chalk 'Free Palestine' in protest of the restrictions. Two students then entered the building, simply to go to the bathroom. When they tried to leave, they were subsequently brutalized by Radboud security.
For months, students and staff have been taking action against the university's ties with Israeli apartheid and in support of Palestinian liberation, and the university is trying to to prevent it. Critical discussions from professors trying to educate on the genocide are removed, cancelled, or banned to a parking lot. Student initiatives including demonstrations, teach-ins and an encampment, are violently removed by Radboud policy, using their own security, as well as private security guards, police and even riot police. Childen's shoes laid out in memory of the murdered children in Palestine were thrown in garbage.
The executive board (College van Bestuur, CvB) refuses to engage meaningfully with the students and their demands. Rather, treat staff and students who think critically with contempt and violence. By repeatedly calling the police on its own demonstrating students, by cancelling lectures about the genocide, the university administration has shown its true colour: entrenching its ties with Israel and suppressing any student dissent against complicity in genocide.
Today, students marched to Berchmanianum, the building where the executive board works. Protesting loudly in spite of onlooking guards, they used temporary sidewalk chalk in front of the building to write slogans like ‘Cut the ties’ and ‘Divest from apartheid’. Two students entered the building, simply to go to the bathroom. When they tried to leave the building, they were stopped by two Radboud security guards.
The guards demanded that the students prove they were not part of the protest, while blocking the door. One student was then pushed to the ground by security, sustaining injuries that drew blood. The other (Black) student was then targeted by the guards, one grabbed by his arm, back, and shockingly by his neck, and he was held, pinned against a wall. The student even has marks on his neck where he was grabbed. He repeatedly told a guard not to touch him, but the guard responded only with ‘Yes, I can’. In the video footage, you can hear the guard say ‘I’m just holding you, I’m not doing anything wrong.’ The student then replies with ‘no, it’s not lawful to hold me’. The student started running away from the security guard, seeking protection from other Radboud employees, but they failed to intervene. No one in the building tried to stop the security guard, or protect the students from this extreme violence. Without any legal right to touch students, these guards' acts constitute assault (mishandeling) under law article 300 of Wetboek van Strafrecht.
The rest of the students saw some of what was happening inside through a window, and entered the building to check on their fellow students. In the meantime, Radboud called the police. When the police arrived in 5 vehicles, staff members explained that the security guards had committed serious assault. The police listened to Radboud's head of security but told student victims to file a complaint against the perpetrators.
The CvB then sent a spokesperson to explain the level of security violence with students and staff. He showed no remorse for the assaults by the security guards. Rather, he defended the guards and even attempted to justify their actions, further exemplifying the concerns of the students about violence on campus. One Black South African student told the spokesperson about her fear of the university's institutional racism: 'This university makes me scared, because I do not believe that you would protect me if anything happened.' She emphasised her growing concerns about institutional racism at the university: 'There was someone of color inside who was tackled by a security officer, and you are more concerned about why we are here (protesting for Palestine), than about why your employees are attacking a student.' She urged the spokesperson to properly reflect on today's events: 'I pay a lot of money to be here, and for me to not feel safe, means you need to look in the mirror and see how you keep preserving that.'
This CvB's increasing security forces and repression of academic and political freedom is a threat to our academic community. The lack of accountability for their violent guards cannot be hidden behind their 'tolerant' spokesperson. The CvB has shown again that they do not prioritize ending their ties with and complicity in genocide, but instead focus on suppressing its academic community from educating and demonstrating, even at the cost of racial violence.
These actions are totally unacceptable from a university towards students. Even if they weren't peacefully protesting against genocide, physical violence against the students by staff cannot be normalised. But they, the students, are also indeed protesting for the university to cut ties with universities that support and enact a genocide, and so in return the violence directed towards them is extra inappropriate. It is consistent however, with a university and regime in the Netherlands that ignore international law, that support settler colonialism, and that consider the enemy within to be the fee-paying peaceful students. History will judge them.
Shame on Radboud for supporting a genocide and brutalising its critical students.