antipopper

Extracts from a diary

09-NOV-2002 03:58

I was going to get into why I’m thinking these strange thoughts, but it got too hard. Instead, here’s something I wrote (on a mailing list) immediately after the Woomera 2002 desert protest against the Australian refugee concentration camps in April this year:

been watching the TV news coverage of the protests.. every news network is reporting and focusing on the violence. the ABC which i thought had the best coverage, reported that there are splits among the organising groups. can anyone who is there/ in touch with people there give us an account of what’s gone on?

I’m back from Woomera, and will be writing a much fuller account when I get time, as I suppose will others on this list who were there.

The Woomera 2002 action was one of the most inspiring and emotionally wrenching events in which I’ve taken part. People from all over the country came to work together in a remarkable spirit of goodwill — often practically full time as legal advisors, as medics, as cooks, roadies, etc. This commitment often left me speechless. The basis of the event was that many diverse groups with different approaches were going to come and act together, in different ways. For some, there was some frustration in coming to grips with a structure that didn’t involve getting the numbers, but for the most part there was a distinct lack of meaningless or disengaged rhetoric — the material situation was overriding, and the imperatives involved meant that the flaccid demands that have for so long demobilised radical action in this country basically evaporated, however briefly. It was the politics of the concrete. It was refreshing. So there was diversity and inevitable disagreement, but no “splits” within a fake or homogenised “unity”.

Most of the media coverage has been of the activities of Friday afternoon, so I’ll give my perspective on that.

The only violence that we had to really think about that day was visited on the asylum seekers inside the concentration camp during the night. As attested by those in long-running contact with those inside, the asylum seekers were beaten, handcuffed, locked in their rooms and canisters of tear gas were thrown in. Contrary to many conservative commentaries, this was not a consequence of our “irresponsible” actions, but “merely” the latest in a long line of violent actions against the asylum seekers. Often it’s particularly in response to their protest actions, which was why we were there that day — to show solidarity with an already existing action — to have a positive repsonse rather than the endless negative ones.

So we marched to the centre to join an existing protest, to create some solidarity, dialogue, freedom. Many of us climbed up the perimeter fence to wave to the refugee protestors inside. After a few shakes it fell down. We did the obvious thing: we took advantage of the situation to get closer to the people who’ve been facing the most barbaric isolation and violence. These fences are there to be broken down. They must be. Some people weren’t personally comfortable with breaching the perimeter in the immediate situation, and they stayed clear, which is fine. Obviously it’s not enough to just break down this particular fence, but I think breaching the perimeter in this case was a key part of a much bigger movement to dismantle all of the camps.

When we got to the inner fence, we were greeted by asylum seekers who were chanting “ACM: immigration mafia!”, “Where is human rights?”, and “Freedom! Freedom!”. We joined in. I shook hands with people who stretched their hands through loops of razor wire. One man told me that they were grateful to find that there were people in Australia who cared about their situation. Another told me that he’d been there for two years, and was desperate to get out, and that our government was rotten. I told them that I was glad to meet them and that people all over the country supported them, and would do all we could to help their cause. Most were from Afghanistan and Iran. We were all crying.

Then the cops came. I suppose a bunch of protesters, advancing resolutely to shake hands and speak with asylum seekers through the fence can be made to appear violent when a bunch of cops are trying to disperse them with riot gear and horses. When a horse came out of nowhere, pushing me aside, and the mounted cop lightly kicked me in the head, smashing my glasses, I just said, “What are you doing? I’m only trying to say hello!”. This kind of stuff was generally the extent of it as far as the visiting protestors were concerned — it was all quite mild, because we were largely Australian citizens who were able to disperse, unlike the people inside (who live with the obverse of our citizenship, whose relationship to authority, in the last instance, I resolutely refuse to celebrate or attempt to extend to others — the whole relation needs to come tumbling down).

[Meanwhile, on the front page of the Canberra Times there was a photo of me amongst a bunch of other people trying to avoid being trampled by horses, under the headline "BLOOD AND URINE THROWN AT POLICE". It's the same kind of bizarre fiction that has fueled so-called "moderate" groups to either condemn the protest out of hand or to imply that in contrast to our "violent" protest, any "real" movement to free refugees from the camps needs to somehow be "peaceful". Such extremely leading distinctions are nonsense. Those who participated in civil disobedience were simply resolute in our challenge to the authority of the refugees' confinement. Objects were broken in order to do this. Laws were broken. They need to be broken. Smearing this as "violence" is to fall into waiting hands of the State.]

Anyway, in the middle of this confrontation, asylum seekers were suddenly attempting to scale the fence. Banners were thrown to stop their hands being cut by the razor wire. The bars were being wedged apart. I saw the fence suddenly break, and people jumped through, disappearing into the crowd. I won’t say much more on this matter except to delcare that we all felt it was our duty to help these people do whatever they had decided. Some said that they would rather die than return. Others chose to simply enjoy what short freedom they had, and to face the consequences after recapture. In any case, away from any metropolitan resources, our options were limited. I have no details of what went on next, except that many visiting protestors showed remarkably fast thinking, respect and courage in helping these people do what they wanted. We never expected any of these events, and coped as best we could. I wish the best to those still at large.

---

I think Woomera 2002 was a watershed in the radical politics of solidarity and resistance in Australia. I’m thankful to everyone involved, especially the asylum seekers who gave the rest of us the example of resolute action, for the opportunity to have participated in a small way.

More later.

In solidarity,

Ben

• • •

09-NOV-2002 05:37

I guess I will write something.

I don’t think I’ve really dealt with what happened at Woomera. I don’t cry very often, but I cried a lot at Woomera. Crying in the South Australian desert is messy. The dust is fine, like talcum powder. It’s like being on Mars, as imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson — the dust gets everywhere: far, far up your nose, in your underpants, in your eye sockets. (I’d thought ahead and brought breathmasks for my friends, but they didn’t seem to make much of difference — my white mask was pure orange on both sides after a couple of hours.) Dust everywhere. And when you cry, you make your face all muddy.

A man with whom I shook hands through the fences had gotten his head caught in the bales of razorwire that were on either side of the double fence. The razors were cutting through his ear. Another had been cut all across the chest, and there was blood everywhere. Some of it was desperation to touch another, some was despairing self immolation (which happens on a daily basis in the camps).

Immediately after the breakout (I’m still amazed that they could break through the thick steel bars, since I’m pretty sure none of us had brought anything that could do such a thing), and during our retreat, I stood sobbing as a little boy who had broken through the fence was immediately reapprehended and bundled into a wagon by the authorities. A well muscled man was also tackled and thrown into the van. He was one with whom I’d exchanged words through the fences earlier. He began wailing. An older protestor, in his late 60s, fainted at this point, perhaps from heat exhaustion and dehydration, perhaps from the horror of it all. Federal Police forced us to move on, and we were unable to help him.

Back at our camp, which was a few hundred metres from the concentration camp, the remaining free asylum seekers were hidden behind a human wall of protestors, ten lines thick. (Other asylum seekers had been ferried out in cars immediately, making for Adelaide and Melbourne. A few are still at large.) I linked arms and joined the wall. Federal Police were all around us. Nobody moved. You could hear everyone breathing in the desert. Then someone started singing. “Peace, yeah peace, peace is possible / and you, yeah you you are responsible”. The sun was going down. The entire crowd began singing. People from an affinity group called Food Not Bombs were handing buckets of oranges around. Meanwhile, all this time, we had been surruptitiously smuggling the refugee children out of the human wall, and into a nearby tent, where they were given medical attention by volunteer doctors. The police were none the wiser.

After a couple of hours, the police gave up and dispersed. Most of our newly liberated friends ferreted themselves in our tents, and were provided new clothes so they couldn’t be easily identified by the cops. Some gave interviews at our desert.indymedia waystation. As in my original post, I won’t go any further into how we and the escapees dealt with their situation, for various overriding reasons.

The next day the police were much more prepared. They arrived with phalanxes of horses and were all kitted out in Judge Dredd gear. We attempted to make an offering of gifts for the imprisoned children: hundreds and hundreds of toys, which had been collected in the months leading up to the protest. (Some of the children inside grow up in the camps without anything to play with, let alone any education, and many attempt suicide.) The authorities allowed us to drop the toys off, but later we learned that they were immediately confiscated.

There was a tense standoff between us and the mounted cops. Unfortunately, I was in the front line. I’m not comfortable with animals at the best of times, let alone ones that are twice as tall and ridden by people with nasty jobs. I shared my water with my friend Tanya, with whom I’d locked arms, and then it ran out, and we were very thirsty. It felt like 40 degrees Celcius (104 degrees Farenheight), and it was midday. The horses moved slowly forward, their riders implacable. “I think I’m a bit scared,” Tanya said to me.

On the inside, the camp had been locked down. Nobody was there to greet us at the fence at first. (We’d managed to get some intelligence during the night that everyone inside had been locked in their dorms and teargassed.) Some managed to escape, though, and there was a heartbreaking moment when some women and children managed to get to the fences. All three layers of people — refugees, cops, protestors — were still. Nobody needed reminding that we were the first significant group of people that the people behind the fences had seen in Australia who weren’t involved in their processing or confinement. Who would call them something other than a number. (Prisoners are never referred to by name by the camp staff. They are routinely called “animals”, and are told that nobody wants them here.) Some of the police were crying.

Everyone (there were maybe 500 of us) made a sudden dash to the right, and then it was a mad dash for young and old. Our plan was to run around the compound, letting those inside know, even if they were locked in their rooms, that there were people outside. The police weren’t keeping up, so it was quite comical for a while. We met some more women and children (perhaps the authorities had decided, erroneously, that it was the men who were behind the events of the previous day, who were now under the tightest security).

“Don’t leave us,” the women inside were wailing. The horses arrived then. I looked further to the right and noticed that we were cut off — the camp’s armoured watercannon vehicle was edging around the next fence corner. Then someone threw a stone over the fence. My friend Claire picked it up, and when we examined it later we found this note wrapped around it:

Everything after that is a blur. I was wilting, exhausted and dehydrated, and so was everyone else. Throughout the day, the cops had regular visits from support personnel, and were well hydrated. We had some activist medics, one of whom gave me a swig of rehydration fluid, but it wasn’t enough. We were routed.

As we made our retreat, a few of us paused for to spell out the word “FREEDOM” with pebbles on the ground, for those we’d been forced to leave. It was instinctive, undirected, synchronous; we each worked on a different letter, and the word appeared within seconds.