ASYLUM SEEKERS: APARTHEID AUSTRALIA

Australia became an apartheid state on 26 January 1788.

White people from England invaded Australia and the war with the indigenous population - who were black, "savage and heathen" - began.

That war has continued into the 21st century, and despite having reduced the number of indigenous people to now number only about 2 per cent of the population, the numbers incarcerated at any given time exceed those of the "white" populations by thousands.

From 1788 onwards the people arriving in Australia to settle here and build Britain's colonial empire arrived mostly by boat, until in the mid-20th century, air travel became more and more popular and ultimately became the norm.

As Australia continued to be a lackey of the main imperial powers - the UK and the USA - wars which those countries were involved in also became Australia's wars, and this continues today into 2014 and onwards.

Because of these wars, more and more people around the world have become displaced and have been forced to flee from their countries of origin and residence due to various factors leading to their oppression, persecution and murder.

Thousands of people around the world have been seeking refuge and asylum in whatever country they have been able to get to, and to plead for refuge.

Mostly, these refugees arrive at countries which have been involved in imperial wars and caused the exit of terrified people who only want to try and live their lives as they always have, but greed and tyranny and related causes have forced them into decisions which have meant they need havens of refuge which in many cases has been denied them, causing untold misery and deaths on the way to their destinations which are difficult to get to in most cases.

Australia has been the destination of thousands fleeing desperate situations, and many of these have found homes here and managed to build lives for themselves under difficult situations. Most of them have come from countries in which Australia has been involved with imperial wars of various sorts.

In 1992, Australia's then prime minister, Paul Keating, decided that there were many people trying to arrive here for asylum who, in his opinion, were not worthy of becoming "citizens" of this "great" country, so he instituted concentration camps, similar to those which were built by the British in South Africa during the imperial wars being fought there by the British and the South African "white" occupiers who were mainly of Dutch, English and French extraction. These wars were known as the "Boer" Wars.

In 1996 John Howard became prime minister and we were then treated to the hysteria of the "Children Overboard" episode in which minsters of the crown lied through their teeth about the fact that desperate asylum seekers were throwing their children off the disintegrating Indonesian fishing boats as they were sinking, in order to save themselves.

The Australian population, including those who themselves had been "boat people" over the decades, and influenced by the main stream media who have behaved appallingly over the last 30 years in relation to desperate asylum seekers, became politically shrill voices to "stop the boats" because they were sinking and people were drowning, so we had to "stop the boats" to save lives!!!!!

From 2007 onwards we then had Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard trying to outdo each other in their demonising of the desperate people trying to get into Australia away from the countries where Australia troops were fighting the US/UK wars aided and abetted by the rest of the imperialist powers.

So we had to plan for offshore concentration camps to lock these traumatised people where the Australian population would be saved from "terrorist" threats from people who were already unable to say boo to a goose!

Manus Island was re-opened and Nauru became "viable" once more as centres for concentration camp operation.

Lock them up, out of sight, out of mind and - the boats have stopped coming!!! Objective achieved, until the Papua New Guineans had other ideas about the new prisons in their country and attacked the "inmates", killing one and injuring dozens of others. Of course the privatised companies running these concentration camps had nothing to do with any of this, did they???

The scandalous behaviour of the Australian government and many Australian citizens over the business of incarcerating innocent people in camps reminiscent of some of the world's worst prison regimes leaves those of us opposed to the carnage absolutely horrified by this behaviour.

I come from the country (South Africa) where the first concentration camps were established between 1899 and 1902, and in the last few years, post apartheid, some incarceration regimes in South Africa remind us very much of those early camps. South Africa has been flooded with refugees fleeing the brutal regimes in Zimbabwe and other neighbouring countries and the numbers involved are tens of hundreds of time greater than the numbers trying to enter Australia.

Time for the peoples of the world to unite and not allow the bosses to rule the roost which they are damaging more and more on a daily basis.