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| Oleg Kyreev |
| "MILITIA IN AMSTERDAM" |
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| We can now confirm the rumour that a fake Russian police officer has been checking people's IDs on the streets of Amsterdam. In fact, here is the first hand report by the imposter himself! |
My aim within the project "Debates & Credits" was to show the contemporary Russian reality by transplanting the most usual feature of Russian living to an Amsterdam scape - the procedure of documents check on the street. Done by the militia (a Russian police) it has now become the most recognisable scene at any Moscow public space. Introduced in 1997 under the claim to resist Moscow population against the intervention of foreigners and migrants, it became nowadays a mechanism directed especially against the Russian citizens. This procedure obviously violates the basic human rights, and leads to corruption of militia and various forms of repression.
So the idea of my performance was to examine the mechanisms of repression and obedience under completely different conditions - in a city claimed to be the most liberal in the world.
During the days of my stay here I was patrolling the Amsterdam streets and checking people's documents, being dressed in a uniform of a Moscow militia sergeant. The procedure consisted of introducing myself as a "militia sergeant" and demanding for the IDs of the citizens. My patrolling consisted of two sessions taking place at Bijlmer, the mostly criminal and illegal Amsterdam area, and the mostly well-known touristic spaces such as Dam centrum, Damrakstraat, Nieuwmarkt and Central Station. It took nearly 7 hours in total and nearly one hundred people have been checked.
Insufficient for a profound sociological research, but quite enough to summarise some of my artistic impressions. Here are some thoughts on my experience of being a militionaire.
The performance in whole was successful and showed that the mechanisms of obedience are extremely powerful and are much stronger than the instincts of liberalism and human rights. In fact, very few of the informants showed any small doubt concerning the legitimacy of a documents check procedure. The first reactions were in general fear and servility. As I felt, the people are sometimes ready to show the documents in order to prove their social establishment before a representative of the power (whom they instinctively took me for). They even don't consider such a procedure a humiliation of their rights. During these days I saw multiple IDs of the Dutch citizens, Canadians, Nigerians, Turks, Hong Kong citizens, British, French and German people, etc. It means, they obey with pleasure.
In this sense, the tourist areas of Amsterdam and Bijlmer were a contrast. The Bijlmer experience was much less successful. The white people have been showing their perfect ignorance (probably considering me an another lunatic) and the African and Asian representatives reacted with fear or anger. An understandable fact, taking into consideration an unprecedented amount of illegals and migrants having their residence in Bijlmer district. This is an another proof that the dominated social groups are the most revolutionary ones in potential: they don't run a risk of loosing their social establishment and conformity because they don't have any.
The mostly fearful and obedient were the teenagers, and its valid for both performance areas. The other category I would classify as the mostly obedient were, unexpectedly, the UK citizens.
The sexual factor played a role in my action as well, because some attempts to check women's documents were unsuccessful due to it. As I understood, women reacted not on my uniform but rather on my male nature. Unlike Russia where the sexual relations are always overemphasised, the women were probably counting my attempts as machist and phallocentrist.
I would summarise the statistics of people's obedience approximately this way: at Bijlmer nearly 10% of informants agreed with the ID check procedure, in central areas - 70% of those.
These are my general observations of the action experience. It seems to me that the performance had artistically diagnosed the Amsterdam street society as potentially obedient and not liberal. But the reasons which lead to resist and disobey are not the ones which deal with human rights issues, they're very basic and primitive: fear and hopelessness.
Having experienced a universal language of power, I would say, I can state that the power is effective only when you don't play it, but really believe in it. When identifying yourself with a force of domination, you make the person identify himself/herself with the one of the dominated.
To conclude this report with a more optimistic note: I have witnessed a few examples of political and social consciousness. A few people - these were the teenage school students from Bijlmer, African, and a young rasta-gentleman from Finland - demanded from me, that I show my own ID first, because they weren't satisfied with a uniform. Than I was having a long talk with them saying about an importance of having their IDs ever with, about the "introduction of new rules" etc. The greater relief for them (and for me) it was when after their conscious and correct refusals I was saying: "Thank you for participating in our art project".
An action video documentation has to appear at Park TV in November.
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