Not in my name!

As some three hundred protestors outside the Villawood detention centre, listened to Majid Parhizkar (an Iranian asylum seeker on his sixth day of roof top protest) speak to us through a mobile phone, the  mother of another of the Villawood rooftop protestors, Kurdish asylum seeker Mehdi, stood weeping quietly in the crowd. The terrible pain on her face was there see but few Australians saw it.

Even fewer heard the words of 24-year-old Majid.

“I am very tired from everything I’ve been through at the detention centre…

“The reason why I am protesting on the roof is that I want to be free to live with my family, like any human being…

“We are human beings.

“I ask the people of Australia to support us and to support all the refugees in the detention centres.

“This is inhuman. We have been here for six days under the sun and under the rain. It has been cold and it has been hot. Without food and without toilet and no one has come to talk to us from the immigration authorities.”

It was Anzac Day, a day Australians are told, when we mourn those who died in war and to reaffirm “Australian values” like mateship and love for freedom.

But where were the expressions of “mateship” and solidarity for Majid, Mehdi, their families, and the thousands of asylum seekers locked up indefinitely in growing number of detention camps around Australia?

When they were not ignored, they were condemned, threatened with violence and deportation and demonised. Activists who showed there solidarity for these asylum seekers by marching on several detention camps around the country were accused of being disrespectful and “unAustralian”. Talkback radio and the comments columns of the tabloid press were awash with messages of hate for the asylum seekers and calls for even more draconian measures.

Where is the empathy and solidarity? Why is there so much hate for the small proportion of  desperate refugees from persecution and protracted wars (some of which Australia is helping wage) who managed to come to our shores?

This hate is incited and manufactured by the big business media, the Labor government and the Liberal-National opposition. They have combined to take Australian to another moral low-point, another Tampa moment where conscience and humanity are thrown overboard.

These manufacturers of hate and heartlessness think they have the wind in their sails today. But it stinks and there are some of us who say: Not in my name. We’ll be marching the detention camps, again and again, until they are closed and all the refugees are set free.

By Peter Boyle