Messages for Refugee Week

From Mostafa (Moz) Azimitabar, detained without sunlight for 8 months in the Preston Mantra Hotel in Melbourne.

This is my message : We are one family and one nation. Today part of this family is locked up in jail, in detention. My message to this beautiful family is love.

My own message for Refugee Week is a bit less benign.

How can we do this to our fellow humans? Even pets are allowed sunshine and a run in the park! So much for "health" care under Medevac! These are people kept hostage to deter boats for over 2500 days.

These are people who have committed no crime apart from picking an unpopular mode of arrival.

On the weekend at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane a socially distant crowd of refugee supporters sang "Amazing Grace", "Blowing in the Wind" and chanted "Let Him Hug His Son".

The story of the separation of one Kangaroo Point detainee from his family has moved many.

The mostly loving but sometimes boisterous crowd outside Kangaroo Point is now said to be intimidating to the 130kg Serco gorillas who have caged 110 innocent Medevac detainees for up to a year. We are caging whom and for what? This is not a David Attenborough film with the cameras turned on inmates and keepers alike. Who needs defending from these exhausted refugees? Noone!

These people are as calm and dignified as depressed, unvisited inmates, medically under treated inmates could possibly be.

Today, slender detainees are not currently receiving food because vehicle inspections by demonstrators have hurt Serco's feelings. (The detainees have asked us not to complain).

Men such as Farhad Bandesh were moved for speaking out. Last Friday Farhad Rahmiti in Brisbane has been isolated with criminals in the high security Thompson compound of BITA. Apparently he is just a bot too articulate.

Meanwhile Dutton has politicised the AFP, is seeking to extend his security powers and ban mobile phones. Ministerial discretion is used to torture the Biloela family on Christmas Island but not the high rollers, cronies, gamblers & church goers that the LNP favours.

Shame on tv reporters that ignore all this and yet focus on minor expressions of protester negativity.

Shame on those who fail to tell the story of human compassion, the creative musical and artistic expression, the order and self discipline of protests. Shame on media there only to witness minor expressions of frustration.

Shame on the media ghouls wanting argy bargy with police and not kindness. Shame on those who "other" people who have a need to express their concern, trauma or care.

Shame on the "tut-tutters" sitting in their living rooms still scandalised that protests occur during Covid. Shame on them for identifying with the "needs" of crowded supermarket-, Bunnings-, Ikea-, footie-, school- and church-goers ... but not of altruists concerned about indefinite detention or BLM. Shame on their silly dullness.

Shame on Labor for failing to put hard boundaries on LNP questionable contracts for detention, Sovereign Borders hard nuts and Dutton who would ramp up security legislation and remove mobile phones from detainees. Labor is complicit in the erosion of human rights in this nation. Not once did Keneally discuss the abuse by proxy in PNG's Bomana Transit Centre where men were bullied and starved to shadows of their former selves without access to phones. Dutton paid the Papuans to do it so as to circumvent Aussie law. This nasty experiment only ended when UNHCR stepped in. Keneally needs to visit the detainees, to check her privilege and campaign against the indefinite, mandatory detenton that has seen a frail 78 year old woman languish behind bars for 11 years.

The 8th year of Sovereign Borders and offshore abuse begins in Jul 2020. People who still carry the weight of trauma they escaped in their homelands and the scars of abuse received in our care are still being denied freedom.

The typical 8th anniversary gift is bronze or pottery. Some also exchange salt or linen. Perhaps we need a pottery jar of vinegar brine or bronze cuffs and matching neck chains for those that perpetuate the nastiness of offshore detention.

No more linen shrouds for offshore detainees. No more heartbreak and salt in the wounds of families broken by Immigration.

Shame on us all that there is no end in sight.

Shame on us for milking cash from richer migrants and then abandoning them during Covid. And shame on us for denying migrant workers the means to live during lockdown or the adjustment to life in a new land.

The vibrant activists on the streets of Brisbane prove that we can care, we can be better than this.

All those deprived of their liberty for so long have expressed is gratitude to activists.

Moz is right. It only with love we can fix this.