Endspiel für Assange – der Freitag digital
https://digital.freitag.de/0119/endspiel-fuer-assange/
Endgame for Assange
Kaltgestellt Director Angela Richter visited the Wikileaks founder in Ecuador's embassy in London. For the last time, she fears
Julian Assange looks very pale. "Pale" is not really true, his skin looks parchment, almost translucent. He has not seen any sun for nearly seven years. He sits opposite me in the so-called Meeting Room of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, his snow-white hair, his trademark, is shoulder-length and he wears a long beard. We joke that he looks like Santa Claus. He wears a thick down jacket and eats a piece of the sushi I brought for lunch. It is cold in the room and I regret having left my winter coat at the reception.
It's just before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just about the worst time of his stay at the embassy. Since March 2018, he has been in isolation, no telephone, no internet and no visits. Above all, the Internet ban must be difficult for him, it was not only his field of work, but his only access to the world.
The mood in the embassy is tense, the new ambassador is expected. Assange has turned off the heating and taken the bed, sleeping on a yoga mat. I can not help but feel that everything is done to complicate his stay so much that he finally defeats himself and leaves the embassy voluntarily. But what awaits him then?
For the first time since I've known him, he's really taken aback, his once boyish face, always peculiar to his silvery white hair, has adapted to his age. The nine months of isolation have visibly weakened him, he has become thinner, but in conversation he is mentally very clear and determined as ever.
Surrounded by microphones
When I ask him how he endured the isolation for so long, he replies that he was almost pleased with it at first. He had been sure that such a blatant violation of his human rights would cause great public outrage and that even European politicians would press him for pressure from the media. But nothing like that happened, and as the months went by, he lost his faith in it.
In the meantime, it had even come to the public that the US authorities filed criminal charges against Julian Assange. Accusations allegedly kept under wraps until Assange could no longer escape arrest. They confirm what Assange fears for years and for which he has often been declared paranoid in the press. But even after this revelation, the indignation remains.
His stay at the Embassy in 2012 as a political asylum is now more and more akin to imprisonment with sometimes severe punishment. The isolation is still not completely lifted, from Friday evening to Monday morning is still the contact ban, and who wants to visit him, must make a formal request to the embassy. There were probably rejections, he tells me. I was lucky and got two of the four hours I had applied for.
I visited Julian Assange 30 times between 2012 and 2017 in the embassy of Ecuador. This resulted in three plays and a friendship with one of the most controversial people of our time. It has not always been easy to defend him, especially since Donald Trump's election as US President, for which many journalists, former supporters and friends of mine have shared his responsibility. Moreover, most journalists seem to have agreed that there is an insane conspiracy between Trump and Putin, with Assange as liaison and helper. In late November, the Guardian claimed'Paul Manafort, head of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, met Assange three times in London in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Fidel Narváez, the then Ecuadorian consul in London, formally denied it. Wikileaks initiated a lawsuit against the Guardian , Manafort denied the meetings in public. His name does not appear in the guestbook of the Ecuadorian embassy and there are no pictures of him entering or leaving one of the best-guarded buildings in the world.
Of course, Assange followed all that; When I ask him about it, all he says is that the story was fictitious in the Guardian . As he asks about my family and we eat sushi, we try to ignore the fact that we are surrounded by cameras and microphones. Even in the small kitchen in the hallway, there is now a camera installed, which used to be the only non-surveillance corner we sometimes retreated to. Lately, the staff has been replaced gradually, the new staff know Assange not good, only the cleaning lady is the same. The diplomats who sympathized with him are no longer there.
For distraction, I unpack a few presents for him, German whole grain bread he loves, fresh fruit, Ovaltine, a letter with a child's drawing that my eldest son sends him, and a Ukrainian sausage specialty from the Crimea, a friend and a former Dramaturg by Frank Castorf has given. I try again to direct the conversation to him and his precarious situation, but that proves to be difficult. I hardly know anyone who is so reluctant to say "me" as Julian Assange, which is amazing, considering how often he is described as narcissistic and egomaniacal.
Blueprint for us all
It's hard to describe the complex character of Assange. But one thing has become clear to me in recent years, it is simply not communicable to the average intellectual. He is a meticulous archivist, a courageous reveler and uncompromising iconoclast, highly emotional and at the same time matter-of-fact, besides most of the artists and intellectuals I know, who act like devotees who profitably sell their personal wealth novelties.
But if Assange is not the nefarious Unsympath who caused his situation through his egomania, what does that mean in reverse? Is not he a blueprint for us all? What has happened to him in the middle of Europe for years shows what could happen to anyone who dares to raise his voice and reveal the truth about the powerful. And not in Russia or China, but in the free West.
His motto "Let's make trouble" has never given up on Assange. He tells me he was hoping during the isolation that he can do some "holidays of Wikileaks". But then everything fell asleep, nobody was tempted to take the helm, which is not surprising, if you see the consequences. He says he thinks his isolation was a test run for what would happen if he ever went to jail: Wikileaks would probably dissolve slowly.
I think he is right. Since I met Assange, I realized that his organization can exist only through his immense perseverance. He often cheered me up with the sentence "Courage is contagious", courage is contagious. I can confirm that for me, it has this effect that encourages you to risk more. Fame and glory have not brought him his insistence on the truth of documented facts. On the contrary. And yet he has never resigned, I have experienced some ups and downs in recent years, I talked to him and his team at the Embassy for hours, sometimes for nights, but also quarreled, laughed, eaten, drunk, sung and scared.
Three ambassadors were replaced during that time, on the day of my visit, the fourth has just arrived in London, and his main task will probably be to get rid of Assange as quickly as possible, with the least possible political damage to Ecuador's image. The New York Timesrecently reported that in 2017 there were several talks between Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno and now notorious Paul Manafort. Manafort had traveled to Quito to boost China's investment in Ecuador. Allegedly, the meeting with Moreno also talked about Assange, about a deal to deliver Assange to the US, in exchange for which Ecuador debt would be waived. Assange quips as to whether it would not be ironic that the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, will decide on its fate. He laughs tormented, in the end, always decide the big money. We realize that there is no secret anymore about his persecution by the US, everything is open and it happens - nothing. It is to despair.
In the end, it's four hours that I'm there. As I say goodbye, we embrace each other, it may be the last time we see each other. Outside, I talk to some supporters who camp with self-painted banners and lighted candles in front of the embassy, they hold for years through what I find admirable.
On December 21st, three days after my visit to the embassy, Wikileaks publishes a shopping list: 16,000 procurement orders from US embassies around the world, including for espionage equipment. Julian Assange is online again. On the same day, the UN Human Rights Experts of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) reiterated their demand of 2015 that Britain comply with its international obligations and immediately release the Wikileaks founder from the Ecuadorian Embassy to freedom. This would be possible by guaranteeing his safe conduct, or at least by not being extradited to the United States after a possible brief detention in the UK.
Assange's fate is in the hands of the United Kingdom, it could easily put an end to this blatant situation, which it refuses to do so far. And Europe is silent. What else has to happen to change that?
Angela Richter is a theater director and met Julian Assange in 2011, when she made a play about Wikileaks