ASYLUM SEEKER CONCENTRATION CAMP IN PRESTON - AND OTHER CONCENTRATION CAMPS AROUNDTHE WORLD

Photo on front page of Preston Leader (now closed down) on 10 MARCH 2020

Hotel hell for refugees

No freedom in sight for asylum seekers at Mantra Bell City

By Richard Pearce, Preston Leader, 10 March 2020

The 55 asylum seekers detained in Preston’s Mantra Bell City for 7 months have had no sign of impending freedom, despite increasing public support for their release.

The men were brought to Australia from Manus Island and Nauru, some having spent up to six years offshore.

But seven months later there is no sign they will be returned or released, leaving them in permanent purgatory inside the 4-star hotel.

The men have received great community backing, with more than 100 people turning up to Bell Mantra on 29 February to show their support, holding signs calling for compassion and their immediate release. The refugees are being housed in 27 rooms, taking up an entire floor of one wing of the hotel.

The Leader has estimated the cost over 223 days, at $160 a night, to be $963,360.

Social media posts have also detailed an extensive guard presence, with rooms checked about three times a day.

The asylum seekers were brought here under the Medevac Bill, a piece of legislation allowing refugees access to healthcare as long as they had recommendations from two Australian doctors.

They would have been released into the community after treatment but that legislation was repealed in December last year, leaving their fate in the hands of the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton.

Refugee Action Collective spokesman Chris Breen said while the idea of staying in a hotel might seem like a holiday, there was no mistaking the men were prisoners.

“It’s become a place of torture”, he said.

“They can’t open the windows to get air. They’re stuck inside 19 hours a day.”

“The only way they can get exercise at all is if they request to go back to Broadmeadows Detention Centre.”

Some of the men have used social media to seek support for their cause.

“We have been locked up in hotels by the Australian Government,” Kurdish musician Moz Azimi wrote on Twitter.

An Australian Border Force spokesperson said detainees transferred to Australia for medical treatment were expected to be returned afterwards.

The spokesperson said decisions to place detainees in hotels or other forms of accommodation were determined case-by-case.

They refused to answer when the asylum seekers would be released.

The Department for Home Affairs and Bell City Mantra were contacted for comment.

This photo was provided by Gary Jaynes on 30 JUNE 2020 and the middle column of the wall obliterates the bottom word on the banner. The banner reads:

"FREE REFUGEES FROM MANTRA THEY ARE NOT CRIMINALS"

Demonstration in Bell Street, Preston, outside Mantra Hotel in support of Asylum Seekers incarcerated in one of the concentration camps in Australia

Photos by Gary Jaynes 4 JULY 2020

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My Article submitted to Overland, but not accepted for publication

18 March 2020
SOUTH AFRICA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; ISRAEL - APARTHEID POLICE STATE
"HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES" Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )

Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?

Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.

Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.

He wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.

A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.

One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.

The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.

Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble - and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.

I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.

Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.

Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment. This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.

What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.

Some of those of us who have experienced the 'joys' of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!

At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.

Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.

Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other similar religious states.

.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.
Posted by Mannie De Saxe at 4:12 PM
Labels: anti-semitism, apartheid, apartheid South Africa, Australia, democracy, Israel, police states, South Africa, theocracy

04/05/2020 (2 months ago)

RACISM NOW THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT'S WAY TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION

Plus ca change - the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Racism was introduced to Australia on 26 January 1788 and it has been a vote-winner ever since.

It was, after all, the British who were at the forefront of the ntroduction to the world of concentration camps in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902.

After the genocide got into full swing during the 19th century, the race card was an easy one to use in every field of endeavour as people needed employment and other services from governments and as is so typical of governments who have set up institutions with race barriers it is generally the underclasses who suffer most.

So, who are the underclasses?

Well, first it was the indigenous population, then it was the Chinese miners, then the Japanese pearl divers, and so we go through every wave of immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees, until we get to - wait for it - the Africans who are mostly black.

Not only are they black, as the media and politicians tell it, they form gangs and do terrible things. Notice how selective they all are when it comes to other groups who do the same or even worse, and so, who gets the blame for everything, despite evidence to the contrary?

Well, who has low ratings and needs to win the next elections?

PRIME MINISTERIAL HYPOCRISY SPILLS OUT YET AGAIN!

How much longer are Australians going to be prepared to put up with the hypocrisy of the politicians whose rantings and ravings get worse and worse every day?

Today, Sunday 28 January 2018, we have the current prime minister raving on about the Holocaust, while his government locks the indigenous people in prisons and areas around the country which are worse than prisons and concentration camps , does the same with asylum seekers who are treated worse than animals - they treat their pets better than the human beings in Papua New Guinea and Nauru - and pontificates abut human rights and what needs to be done in Australia and around the world.

One really needs to carry one's vomit bucket around with one where ever one goes, and to be careful to spill it only on politicians.

ASYLUM SEEKERS AND AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS - YET AGAIN!!

The above sign was seen in an upstairs window above a shop in High Street, Thornbury, Melbourne, and the sign reads:

BRING THEM HERE

CLOSE THE CAMPS

When one assesses the total number of human beings involved with this disaster, the number is so tiny in proportion to the refugee problems everywhere else in the world that it adds to Australia's shame that this has been allowed to happen at all, and to continue for so long without roars of outrage from the Australian population.

Which all goes to show how dulled are the senses and sensibilities of the Australian population.

And then think of the numbers who come by plane who outstay their visas and the responses of the politicians to the whole sorry saga.

It is all totally heartbreaking, and do you think anybody will read this and feel ashamed of their attitudes to asylum seekers? Of course not!


Peter Dutton makes one ashamed of the human race, together with his government and their loyal opposition.

Each time the federal government does or says something about asylum seekers that hasn't been done or said before, it doesn't take long to see they have all sunk to depths no one could have believed was possible.

Their cruelty is no different from the dictatorships and police states which we have seen so much of in the 20th century and which has carried on into the 21st century. It just reaches new levels of depravity all the time.

It is only a matter of time before politicians in Australia follow the lead of their zionist masters and start a genocide of sorts against asylum seekers who now seem to have no possibility of resolution to their problems after fleeing from the countries which were persecuting them.

MANUS AND NAURU - NOT ONLY AUSTRALIA'S CONCENTRATION CAMPS, BUT NOW THE DEATH CAMPS TOO!

There are too many politicians and journalists in Australia who have remained silent for too long.

Another death on Manus - and someone who was desperately in need of assistance and attention - and the responses from the politicians?

Silence all the way.

And the citizens of Australia?

A vague stirring.

Will it lead to a campaign to stop this criminal activity on the part of the government and its loyal opposition?

Probably not.

Where is the humanity, human rights, protections, assistance, and all the other issues which need immediate attention?

One can't even quote Alan Paton any more - no doubt the generations of today have not heard of the famous South African book "Cry the beloved country."

This is probably not exactly genocide, but it is not far removed from what genocide is and what it does.

Those of us who care are too old or worn out to be able to actively campaign as once we might have done, and we hoped later generations would fill the gap, but alas it has not happened.

People should be marching in the streets throughout the country and screaming from the roof tops till everybody is awakened to the criminal activities taking place in their names.

I despair, and at 90 I see no solutions in my lifetime.

MANUS AND NAURU - AUSTRALIA'S OFFSHORE CONCENTRATION CAMPS GOVERNMENT'S LATEST OUTRAGE COURTESY PETER DUTTON

It would appear that it is possible to reinvent the wheel.

Remember John Howard's and Peter Reith's Children Overboard when the Tampa ship rescued some asylum seekers offshore from Australia?

We have now had a similar sort of incident at Manus where Peter Dutton is accusing asylum seekers of paedophilia after a nasty incident involving Papua New Guinea soldiers and/or police who fired shots into the concentration camp because, according to Dutton, the camp inhabitants took a 5 year old boy into the prison.

We are waiting for evidence, for proof - to substantiate the story.

Is there no end to how low and despicable Australian politicians can sink?

Apparently not!

DUTTON, JOYCE, TURNBULL AND ALL OTHER PARLIAMENTARIANS

It really is time that parliamentarians got their acts together.

Their behaviour is becoming more and more appalling as time passes, and instead of the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull putting a stop to the abuse, he just ignores it. In the ultimate, is there any difference between Turnbull and Abbott?

Peter Dutton has made a pronouncement about certain business leaders - I don't hold many briefs for them either - which is disgusting, to say the least, by saying that they should just get on with their knitting and leave pronouncements about gay marriage to others who are involved with the political scene.

What unbelievable arrogance!

Then Barnaby Joyce throws in his penny's worth on the same and similar issues - parliament has more important issues to deal with than dykes and poofters wanting to tie the knot.

Let's face it - homophobia is alive and well and living in Australia, and we in the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS (GLTH) communities will have to continue fighting until we have achieved equality in every aspect of society.

Taking Dutton to other levels, his behaviour and that of his government and opposition colleagues have been guilty of breaching every human rights conditions available and contnue to do so on a daily basis.

We watch with horror the unfolding of the dramas of desperate people in Australia's concentration camps in Nauru and Manus and the ones in Australia's mainland and wonder how long this nightmare will continue.

We watch with horror the ongoing apartheid in our communities with out of proportion incarceration rates of the indigenous population, racism attacks on people of various communities, unquestioning support in overseas policies of apartheid states such as Israel, Palestinians living in the world's biggest concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank occupied territories. and the horrors of ongoing wars in many countires aided and abetted by the military countries USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Australia, China, and many others too numerous to mention.

Disaster at every turn, and no end it sight.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS - AUSTRALIA LEARNS FROM ITS BRITISH TEACHERS

Australia's apprenticeship on concentration camps ended some time ago, even before the establishment of the infamous pair Manus and Nauru.

Those on Christmas Island and on the Australian mainland were already emulating the best in the world - the British ones in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, the German ones during World War II, and, from 1948 onwards, the Israeli ones in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of the Palestinian West Bank which the zionists have always claimed as zionist homeland territory after falsifying history in the best traditions of colonial and occupying powers over the ages, not forgetting one of the other more infamous ones of the modern era such as the USA one called Guantanamo on occupied Cuban land.

One of the best ways of ridding oneself of unwanted refugees, asylum seekers, "foreigners" of various origins - is to lock them up in concentration camps and help them to die off while in imprisonment and then blame them themselves for their deaths.

Manus has been a particularly fruitful camp for asylum deaths in custody - people who have committed no crimes but who have fled from their countries of origin because of illegal wars perpetrated on their countries by such imperial powers as Australia, UK, USA, France and many others too numerous to mention - the African continent bears the brunt of so much these days.

The 20th century has seen endless crimes committed by countries spending untold amounts of money on arms and war equipment, and killing millions of innocent people on an ongoing basis - the Israeli government is a "good" example of this ongoing tragedy, and Australia has willingly joined its masters around the globe in these exercises in order to gain resources, territories, markets, and all the other spoils of war.

The one "spoils of war" issue that none of them wants is the influx of millions of refugees and asylum seekers from around the world, and what do we do? We lock them up and wait for them to die!

MANUS ISLAND, NAURU, AUSTRALIAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND RELATIONSHIP TO DEATH CAMPS.

The Manus Island concentration camp in Papua New Guinea has now had its 4th death in custody.

The people in the concentration camps have not been tried in criminal courts or in any sort of tribunal, but life has been removed from them so that they will die tortured deaths from a variety of reasons.

The British have got a proud history of concentration camps, having developed them in South Africa between 1899 and 1902 in what is known in some history records as the Boer War.

The people locked up in them, men, women and children, died from all manner of causes such as Typhoid and other diseases, starvation, and brutal treatment at the hands of their jailers. The Afrikaans population of South African never got over their treatment at the hands of the victors of that war, and their bitterness persisted even after the end of official apartheid in 1994, when Nelson Mandela's ANC party became the government of South Africa.

On Nauru, where some people are not actually locked up in the concentration camps there, if they have limited freedom to walk around the country, the Nauruan population resent their presence and attack them and harass them and their so-called freedom becomes non-existent. There have been some gay people walking around who have been assaulted so badly that they have feared for their lives and are now petrified to walk around the island.

Compare the current Australian government with other concentration camp governments - Israel - think Gaza and the West Bank, UK, USA - think Guantanamo, and others too numerous to mention - and you end up with the appalling state of the Australian camps which are apparently worse than some of Australia's worst prisons.

Added to the total inhumanity of the situation is the fact that these concentration camps cost an absolute fortune to maintain and the government tells us that we have to tighten our belts - parliamentarians excepted. In order to rob the poor and pay the rich, organisations such as those who run the concentration camps, no doubt keep offshore accounts and don't pay taxes in Australia.

And, as ever, religions continue to live tax-free existences, costing the community billions to pay for what these organisations don't pay for, and what are these religions doing for the people in our concentration camps to make their lives easier - well of course - exactly nothing.

ASYLUM SEEKERS - WHAT IS MORE DISGRACEFUL THAN AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS' DISGUSTING POLICIES?'

Is there anything more disgraceful than what is going on in Australia at the moment - 8 November 2016 - than the responses of the federal politicians to some of the most unfortunate human beings on the planet?

Locked away in the concentration camps established by Australia in Nauru and Manus (Papua New Guinea), the asylum seekers have just been dealt another death blow by the Australian government which is in the process of passing a bill to deny entry to Australia - EVER - of these unfortunate people.

Those of us who live in Australia and are mortified by the shenanigans of our politicians are in a situation where all the protests we have been able to be part of for the last several years have found it all to be of no avail, and the situation deteriorates daily.

Why is there not an outcry by the people who live in this country - ALL - except the indigenous population - of whom are migrants and asylum seekers? Why are they not screaming at their politicians and demanding humanitarian treatment of human beings who are desperate for some safety and security in their lives for themselves and their children?

To continue Alan Paton's refrain - "Cry the Beloved Country" - but this is no longer a beloved country - its human rights abuses are horrific and relate to regimes we have known over the past 100 years and more.

CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS

What is it about Australian politicians - do they really think that 24 million people living in this country are dumb?

People understand torture and abuse when they see it - or even when they don't see it - although we are not supposed to believe the reports that manage to get through the smokescreens and other subterfuges that governments use to hide the human rights abuses they are perpetrating behind closed doors.

So we don't know what went on in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Auschwitz, Gulags and other equivalent horror hot spots such as Gaza and the occupied West Bank of Palestine?

Despite their best attempts information manages to get out into the public arena and is seen and read by thousands if not millions of people around the world.

Even today, the New York Times, one of the most conservative papers around, has an article condemning Australia's treatment of asylum seekers in Manus and Nauru.

The Nauru cowboys get a free run to further torture asylum seekers who are not locked up in their cages all the time by harassing them and assaulting them at every given opportunity.

The main problem is that the public has been so apathetic about what governments are doing in Australia that there hasn't been a massive outcry with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, getting on to the streets and demonstrating their objection to this police-state-like activity on the part of government and opposition alike.

There are solutions available, but some politicians are cruel and enjoy their sadistic cruelty and insist that they know best what they are doing and everybody else is wrong.

One has to continue to believe that this will come to an end one day, as usually this sort of regime ends - think apartheid South Africa - and with ongoing pressure apartheid Australia, apartheid Israel and a few other apartheid states will come to an end.

Maybe some of the perpetrators will end up in international criminal justice tribunals and be forced to admit to their atrocities.

ASYLUM SEEKERS IN NAURU AND MANUS, PALESTINIANS IN THE WEST BANK AND GAZA - SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

Concentration Camps seem first to have entered the world stage when the British Government established concentration camps in South Africa between 1899 and 1902 when the Boer Republics were fighting the British government to retain control of their lands - rich in resources such as gold, diamonds and other minerals - which the greedy British were trying to steal from them.

During that time the concentration camps contained many South African locals who were locked up in conditions which were criminal - and illegal - then, as the later concentration camps in modern times are illegal and criminal.

Think of the conditions of the millions of Palestinians locked up in Gaza and the West Bank, and the hundreds of asylum seekers locked up in Manus and Nauru.

The world is ignoring these crimes against humanity as they continue unabated.

Genocide is what is happening in Israeli occupied Palestine and in Australia what politicians are perpetrated can not be called genocide because it does not consist of any particular groups being targeted, the outcomes are the same in the fact that people's lives have become not worth living.

CLOSE CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Over the last few years I have started petitions concerned with closing the concentration camps and freeing asylum seekers into the community.

The petitions were met with a stony silence generally, the first one obtaining less than 90 signatures. The second one reached about 40.

All of a sudden, because there has been talk of the numbers of children in the camps, their treatment in the camps and torture and disease growing alarmingly, the population is gradually stirring and more people are becoming concerned about the situation.

I don't know what would happen if one tried to start another petition but I am not game to try, being too worn out by the disgusting politics of the whole situation.

Who caused the situation in so many countries around the world that as of today, there are millions all over who are trying to escape the disasters unfolding in their countries of origin?

Why, none other than the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and other countries too numerous to list ---------- and as they say, ......."and the band played on".

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CONCENTRATION CAMP AND A DEATH CAMP?

Basically one could start with the premise that a death camp is designed to lock people up and systematically kill them, as the Nazis did in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other places. A concentration camp is where you lock people up indefinitely. They will either be let out one day or they won't.

Take Gaza and the West Bank as modern (?) examples. In order to get rid of the Palestinians - not by sending them to gas chambers but by keeping them in prison conditions and killing them off by provocation in small numbers at a time with the aim of total demoralisation so that they beg to leave of their own accord - presumably the theory is that eventually there will be less and less Palestinians and the Israelis can occupy Gaza and the West Bank totally and incorporate them in Israel and Palestine will be history.

Unfortunately for the Israelis the Palestinian population is increasing more rapidly than the killings so plan A is not working very well.

Also bit by bit the outside world is starting to wake up to the criminalities of the state of Israel, and at last there are more and more protests around the world.

Take Manus and Nauru. Lock up asylum seekers and throw away the keys and leave people with no hope whatever of any future. This will deter asylum seekers, people smugglers and human rights defenders who see these concentration camps for what they are - hell holes.

Concentration camps were an invention of the British in South Africa during the South African War of 1899-1902. The British made themselves hated by the Afrikaners who were incarcerated and who died of ghastly diseases and other issues of helpless incarceration.

Think of other parts of Africa and Middle East areas around the world and consider how you feel about concentration/death camps.

ASYLUM SEEKERS AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS

As the asylum seeker situation spirals out of control, the international crisis is one in which most countries around the world have responsibility, both for causing the crises in so many countries and for then needing to deal with the situation in which hundreds and thousands of people who have fled disasters have to be housed and given sustenance and everything else to keep them alive and address the problem.

Most countries in Europe are affected, and the situations in the Middle East and Asia join the disasters from the African continent fleeing to Europe for some hope of survival and a future life.

One of the countries least affected by many thousands of asylum seekers is Australia. The number trying to get to Australia has always been small, the majority having tried to get to countries in other parts of the world.

An Australian prime minister who was nominally from a political party of the left introduced the first concentration camps to Australia in 1992, and in the last 24 years the crisis of asylum seekers has deteriorated so that some thousands of people are imprisoned in countries other than Australia and where they have no opportunity of ever obtaining justice for being locked up for "crimes" they never committed.

As a South African who lived in apartheid South Africa for the major portion of his life, I saw the consequences of the people who were incarcerated in the British concentration camps during the South African war of 1899 to 1902. Those people who had been locked up lived with the traumas ever afterwards and passed the traumas on to their children and grandchildren and beyond, to this day.

There will be the same outcome for the people Australia has locked up in its offshore concentration camps in Nauru and Manus Island of Papua New Guinea.

The population of Australia is to blame as much as successive governments because politicians and the media have continued to demonise innocent people fleeing tragedy and disaster in the countries from which they have fled.

Very few politicians do anything about remedying the disaster and the horror continues.

We need to use whatever forums we have at our disposal to keep on pursuing the issue until something is done to stop the tragedy unfolding.

MANUS ISLAND - THE STORY OF ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES CAUSED BY ALL AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS

This article by Arnold Zable was published in The Age on 22 SEPTEMBER 2015.

It is a story which could be told hundreds of times thanks to Australia's politicians.

The story of Australia's indigenous population writ large in the concentration camps - "WE STOPPED THE BOATS!"  

 Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani tells of the horrors of Manus Island: out of sight, out of mind

September 22, 2015

Arnold Zable

Instead of being imprisoned and harassed, deserving detainees should be welcomed and granted asylum in Australia.

The Manus Regional Processing Centre on Los Negros Island, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. Photo: Andrew Meares
 
His name is Behrouz Boochani. He was born in Ilam city in west Iran on July 23, 1983. He graduated from Tarbiat Madares University in Tehran with a masters degree in political geography and geopolitics. He worked as a freelance journalist and for several Iranian newspapers – Kasbokar Weekly, Qanoon, Etemaad – and the Iranian Sports Agency. He published articles on Middle East politics and interviews with the Kurdish elite in Tehran.

Boochani's passions are human rights and the survival of Kurdish culture. With several colleagues, he founded, edited, published and wrote for the Kurdish magazine Werya, documenting Kurdish aspirations for cultural freedom. He wrote a paper advocating a federal system for Iran, protecting minority rights. The paper was delivered at a conference in France on his behalf after he was denied a passport to attend.

On February 17, 2013, officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps ransacked the Werya offices in Ilam and arrested 11 of Boochani's colleagues. Six were imprisoned. Boochani was in Tehran that day and avoided arrest. On hearing of the arrests he published the information on the website Iranian Reporters, and the report was widely circulated. Boochani feared for his safety and went into hiding.

During his three months in hiding, colleagues advised Boochani he was at risk of arrest and interrogation. As a member of the Kurdish minority in Iran, and of both the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the National Union of Kurdish Students, he had experienced threats and was under surveillance. Having been interrogated and warned previously about his work promoting Kurdish culture and having signed an undertaking he would not continue this activity, he was in grave danger.

Boochani fled Iran on May 23, 2013. In July of that year he was among 75 asylum seekers intercepted by the Australian Navy en route to Australia. It was his second attempt at the crossing from Indonesia. On the first, the boat sank. He was rescued by Indonesian fishermen, and jailed on his return.

He immediately asked for asylum in Australia. He was detained on Christmas Island where he developed a deep bond with Reza Barati, a Kurdish-Iranian, also from Ilam. He was transferred to the Manus Island Immigration Detention Centre in late August 2013.

Boochani's predicament is both unique and emblematic of the horrors facing the men detained on Manus Island. There are currently about 900. Behrouz is among a group of about 100 who are refusing to be processed by PNG immigration officials, claiming the right to be processed for asylum in Australia.

He maintains his sanity between descents into depression with his continuing work as a writer and journalist, and his lifeline via various channels with a few advocates in Australia, including Castlemaine resident and refugee advocate Janet Galbraith. She is in touch with him daily, and has arranged for his writings to be translated from Farsi to English. His accounts of his incarceration on Manus Island read like a Kafka nightmare.

He continues to write articles for Kurdish publications from detention. He remains active as a human rights defender, and is recognised as such by the UN. He collaborates with Australian journalists and human rights agencies, reporting on human rights abuses occurring in the centre. He was torn apart by the murder of Reza Barati, and has reported on the death, through medical neglect, of Manus island detainee Hamid Khazaie. Boochani was one of several asylum seekers arrested and jailed without charge in Lorangau prison during a hunger strike early this year. He remained peaceful during this action.

He says his communications are monitored by Transfield, the company that operates the detention centre, and that, as a result of his reportage and his human rights activity on behalf of fellow detainees, he has been threatened, regularly searched and is subject to surveillance.

The men detained on Manus Island have not been convicted of any crime. Yet they are imprisoned. Isolated. Kept out of sight and out of mind. Those who have been found to be refugees remain in the Lorangau transit centre. They have not been resettled. The men know they are the fall guys, punished as a means of deterring other would-be asylum seekers, as are the men, women and children detained on Nauru. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have been palmed off, abandoned and all but forgotten. They are being driven mad.

The fate of Behrouz Boochani and his fellow detainees is Australia's responsibility. Instead of being imprisoned and harassed, he should be welcomed for his courageous stand for democracy and granted asylum in Australia. It is a profound irony that he is now experiencing levels of surveillance and harassment that have some parallels with his treatment by Iranian authorities.

In recent conversations with writer and trauma worker Janet Galbraith, he has said that when he sailed for Australia, he was happy because, "I knew Australia as a modern and democratic country. I thought that when I arrived in Australia they would accept me as a journalist. When I arrived at Christmas Island I said: 'I am a journalist', but I did not get any respectful response. I was wondering why it is not important for them that I am a writer. When they transferred me to Manus, I said to immigration: 'Don't exile me. Don't send me to Manus, I am a writer.' They did not care."

PEN International, a worldwide association of writers with members in more than 100 countries, has this week launched an international campaign on behalf of Boochani in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders and a range of human rights groups in Australia.

Arnold Zable is a Melbourne writer and immediate past president of PEN Melbourne.

 

CHILDREN LOCKED UP IN AUSTRALIA'S FOREIGN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Content warning: this email mentions incidents of self-harm, suicide attempts and sexual assault.~



Dear Mannie,

Imagine if you heard about a government that was locking up children up in a place where they were being exposed to violence and assault,and suffering from significant mental health distress.

A place where children were detained out of sight and locked up for prolonged periods of time – in many cases, more than a year. Kept in conditions so inhumane and hopeless, that they were wetting their beds at night for fear of being assaulted on the way to the bathroom, subject to such mental distress that they were biting their nails down to the knuckle. Imagine if you heard kids as young as 12 were so mentally distraught that they were ready to give up on their young lives, and were resorting to acts of self-harm.

Would you intervene and ask that country to free those children? Welcome to your Australia.

We're said to live in a lucky country, which prides itself on providing a "fair go for all". Yet, Australia is being called out around the world – by the United Nations, international personalities like Russell Brand and human rights watchdogs – for its barbaric policy of indefinitely detaining children.

Today's long-awaited release of the Human Rights Commission's report on children in detention, titled "The Forgotten Children", paints a sobering picture of Australia's immigration policies – which could only be described as government sanctioned child abuse. But while these children have remained forgotten by our leaders for far too long, it's not too late to make a difference – starting right now.

Many of us are all too aware of the harmful effects of detaining children, but there are many more who aren't even aware it's happening. This is why it's so important for us to speak up. We've produced a video with a message from those who worked directly with children in detention. Our plan is to put it on the air to reach as many Australians as possible, for as long as possible. There's no time to waste. Will you speak up for all children, who remain locked in detention, and get the word out now? 

LET THE CHILDREN GO!

Click here: https://www.getup.org.au/kids-out

It will come as no surprise to most that the Human Rights Commission's inquiry found "detention was inherently dangerous for children". These are just some of the more disturbing findings uncovered by the Human Rights Commission's inquiry that show why it's so dangerous:

• There are still 221 children being held in mainland detention centres, and a further 119 children in detention on Nauru.¹
• More than 300 children in detention committed or threatened self-harm in a 15 month period.² This includes incidents of self-inflected cuts, repeated head banging, and ingesting harmful substances such as insect repellent.
• In the same 15 month period, there were three attempted hangings and five incidents of self-stranglulation.
• "Children are exposed to danger by their close confinement with adults who suffer high levels of mental illness. Thirty per cent of adults detained with children have moderate to severe mental illnesses."³

Now we've heard the evidence, it's up to us to ensure others hear it too. If we're to have any hope of changing government policy, we first need to change the way Australians think about the issue. We need to encourage as many people as possible to add their voice and speak up on behalf of all children in detention. Because no matter your position on this issue, or your politics – there aren't many Australians who would agree with locking up children.

The public outrage has definitely been there – at a simmer that heats up from time to time – but we need to reach boiling point, fast. Now is when our movement, our country, needs to band together to show we have a conscience that will not be silenced. It's time to free all children from detention and show them they're not forgotten.

Speak up. Get the kids out. Chip in to help us get the word out: https://www.getup.org.au/kids-out

Now is the time for renewed hope. The GetUp community is partnering with Amnesty International, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, ChilOut, Save the Children, the Human Rights Law Centre, Welcome to Australia and Children's Rights International, who are supporting the call for all children to be immediately released from all Australian immigration detention facilities, including Nauru where 119 children still remain.

Our movement and its many friends are still lighting the dark, and our light is growing stronger by the day. We can provide hope for all the children still being detained in our name, and together we will make sure Australia returns to the right side of history.

Thank you for speaking up,
Alycia and Erin for the GetUp team

PS. It's worth noting that this report was tabled at literally the last possible minute in Parliament this evening, in order to meet the deadline for its release. But we won't let this strategic timing, which coincidentally is the time when the media are less likely pick up on stories, prevent the plight of these children from reaching as many Australians as possible. Can you help ensure it does? https://www.getup.org.au/kids-out

~ References ~

[1] Immigration Detention and Community Statistics Summary, 31 January 2015
[2] Children in detention exposed to danger, Human Rights Commission finds, The Guardian, 11 February 2015
[3] The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention 2014, The Australian Human Rights Commission

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GetUp is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations. If you'd like to contribute to help fund GetUp's work, please donate now! To unsubscribe from GetUp, please click here. Our team acknowledges that we meet and work on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We wish to pay respect to their Elders - past, present and future - and acknowledge the important role all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within Australia and the GetUp community.
Authorised by Sam Mclean, Level 2, 104 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills NSW 2010.

ASYLUM SEEKERS AND AUSTRALIA - HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES WRIT LARGE!

There seems to be no bottom to the pit started being dug in 1992 by Paul Keating, prime minister of Australia at that time to incarcerate asylum seekers in Australia's concentration camp hell-holes around the country.

Since 1992 the position by successive politicians has been made worse and worse as they endeavour to outdo each other in their cruel treatment of human beings who are fleeing from their own hell-holes and who have now unfortunately landed in new hell-holes in another country.

Existing hell-holes and equivalent concentration camps have long been features of the indigenous landscape of Australia, so human rights abuses can now be spread out into areas unthinkable some years ago.

There may be terror attacks taking place all over the world, but Australia is guilty of terror attacks relating to torture and worse of human beings being incarcerated in camps even apartheid South Africa hadn't quite achieved in its years of horror.

Mind you, the Israelis are overtaking most of the world's oppressors with their treatment of Palestine and the Palestinians, but one horror does not excuse another horror, and, as used to be the old saying, two wrongs don't make a right!!

The latest appalling situation is taking place in the Manus Island concentration camp where news has managed to leak out of people sewing their lips together and swallowing razor blades -ffs!! What next - operating on themselves and removing their guts from their bodies while they are potentially still alive? Burning themselves to death? The potential horrors are endless and beyond contemplation.

Who is going to put a stop to it all - and when???

I certainly won't be living long enough to see it all come to an end with a just and humane resolution.

PALESTINE IS A COUNTRY AND PALESTINIANS ARE ITS PEOPLE

Look at, watch, listen to, read - any mainstream media - and you could be forgiven for believing there is no such country as Palestine, and there are no such people as Palestinians.

There is a concentration camp - the largest the world has ever seen - and it is called Gaza and it is closely controlled by a police-state regime known as apartheid Israel - and the "terrorists" enclosed in this concentration camp - well over 1 million of them - are all Hamas "terrorists".

There is another concentration camp which is not so gradually being occupied by apartheid Israel, and this one used to be called the West Bank before it became Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.

The zionists have taken over Palestine and control practically the whole of it, and they have been aided and abetted by the United States of America, the United Kingdom which started the rot in the 1850s or thereabouts, by the whole of Europe and, worst of all, by all the Arab countries in the region.

Zionists who live in these countries, not just those who are not Jewish, don't choose to go and live in the "land of their dreams" Israel, but choose to stay comfortably in their countries of residence, safe from bombs and terrorists of all shapes and sizes.

RALLY for PALESTINE 

In our thousands, In our millions, We are all Palestinians

RALLIES for PALESTINE

Melbourne: 1pm, Saturday 26 July, State Library

Sydney: 1pm, Sunday 27 July, Town Hall

Brisbane: 2pm, Saturday 26 July, King George Square

Adelaide: 12pm, Saturday 26 July, Parliament House

Perth: 11am, Saturday 26 July, Murray St. Mall

DON'T LET ISRAEL GET AWAY WITH MURDER!

From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free

Time to put a few things into a proper perspective.

Nearly 300 people were killed on a passenger plane in a pure act of terrorism. The media coverage has been enormous and non-stop.

Over 600 Palestinians have been killed and the media coverage has blamed Hamas for the most part while condoning the apartheid zionists of Israel.

Sarah Ferguson of the ABC's television current affairs programme 7.30 interviewed a Hamas representative. Her interview was disgraceful in that she interrupted him all the time, didn't allow him to finish any statements, and harangued him about what Hamas is doing to Israel with its rockets. No David and Goliath in this interchange - would she have conducted a similar interview with one of the zionist apartheid regime's spokespeople? I don't think so!

John Kerry goes to Egypt to try and broker a cease-fire between Palestine and Israel - aka Hamas and zionist state.

Egypt has collaborated with the USA and apartheid Israel by keeping the borders of Gaza sealed, adding to the humanitarian crisis which is the largest concentration camp in the world.

It is time the world stopped their unqualified support for the terrorist apartheid zionist state and brought it to book and accountability for its crimes against humanity which are now too numerous to list!

We also have the inmates taking over the asylum - the USA supports Israel and Egypt and wants Egypt's assistance in trying to broker a "peace" between Palestine and Israel. Spare us the irony and tragedy of the endless circles of  non-achievement because neither Israel, nor Egypt, nor the USA want to achieve a lasting peace by creating a one-state democratic solution to the intractable war in Palestine started by the British government zionists in 1850 and perpetuated by all sides occupying Palestine since then.

PALESTINE - TIME AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS LEARNT SOME HISTORY!

Palestine - the great taboo in Australian politics.

Is there a parliamentarian in the federal parliament - and probably in most state and territory parliaments - who is not a zionist?

Even the Greens, who, at some stages in their short careers in Australian parliaments have been "supporters" of the Palestinians, are these days hedging their bets, shamefully!

Now we have a current federal parliament government minister showing his ignorance about the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem!

It is a fact that Israel occupies the whole of Palestine, which is controlled by the Israelis as a giant concentration camp, aided and abetted by their US and other allies around the world, who are too afraid of losing Jewish support money in their own countries to think of changing their allegiances.

Israeli apartheid is worse than South African apartheid, and the only way a chink has managed to appear in Israel's armoury is by way of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement which, after years of getting nowhere, has at last started making inroads into the Israeli government consciousness.

Since Israel became an occupying state in 1948 it has continued to make the lives of Palestinians worse and worse in each successive year, and the stage has now been reached where there is no possibility of a viable separate Palestinian state ever being possible.

Where are the politicians - both here and around the world - with the guts and courage to stand up to their governments and to the Jewish/Israel lobbies within their communities, and demand that Palestinians be recognised as equal citizens of a combined Israel-Palestine territory?

Oh - of course! the answer came in a flash of lightning!

The Israel-Palestine affair continues to cause the Western World and their allies to keep fighting wars in support of Israel, and the armament manufacturers would be devastated if there was peace in the Middle East.

So, to make sure that never happens, everybody must go on supporting Israel and condemning the Palestinians to life in their concentration camp.