Chanting, "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!" demonstrators massed outside the front gates of the center. Participants wore stickers saying, "Close the camps, open the borders, free the refugees!" There were banners representing the National Union of Students and the New South Wales Teachers Federation. A large number of the protesters were immigrants from the Middle East. A group of immigrants from Aceh, where an independence struggle is challenging the Indonesian government, joined the action.

During the protest 100 cops lined the fence in front of the detention center and a police helicopter hovered overhead. From behind barbed wire fences refugees chanted back their support for the demonstrators. Organizers held a phone hookup with a detainee at Curtin, in Western Australia, who thanked demonstrators for their support and called on the government to "close the detention centers and to stop demonizing us to the Australian people."

Protesters observed a minute of silence to commemorate Shahraz Kayani, who died after setting himself alight outside Parliament House to protest the authorities' refusal to allow his wife and three children in Pakistan to join him in Australia.

Secretary-elect of the New South Wales Labor Council John Robertson told the crowd that a number of unions were supporting the actions and the Labor Council backed the campaign to close down the detention centers, which he called "a national disgrace and an international embarrassment." He added, "Innocent people, struggling for a better life, are being treated worse than convicted criminals."

Two thousand people turned out for a demonstration in Melbourne the same day and smaller rallies took place in other cities across Australia. The protests called for an end to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers and the racist scapegoating of those who come as refugees.

The actions also pledged support for detainees who have been protesting the conditions they are subjected to and mistreatment by the guards inside these remote prisons. For example, 150 people held a protest June 1 at the Curtin Detention Centre in Western Australia after 57 men, women, and children were told they would be sent home without being given a chance to apply to stay in Australia. The action was broken up by guards using tear gas. Four detainees suffered minor injuries.

In a pre-dawn raid May 26, some 170 federal and state police occupied the Port Hedland Detention Centre in Western Australia for six hours. They arrested 22 asylum seekers and took them to the local police station to be interviewed and charged over a protest that had taken place at the center on May 11. So far this year inmates have organized three protests and a strike at the jail. Involved in the raid were cops from Australasian Correctional Management, which runs the center along with five others under contract with the government.

After the arrests, Philip Ruddock, federal minister of immigration, slandered those who remained jailed at the center, saying some would continue to "misbehave" as a tactic to get themselves released. The federal government has a policy of imprisoning all refugees arriving without valid visas. Those who come by boat are held for long periods in prisons in isolated desert regions in South or Western Australia.

Ruddock claimed that many of the detainees are illegal immigrants trying to get into Australia by claiming to be refugees. "We're told a lot of people go to very extensive preparations before they come," he said, "even in some cases going into Afghanistan to see some of the areas which they'd be able to claim [they're] from."

A parliamentary committee report released on June 18 criticized the running of the detention centers and recommended a maximum of 14 weeks detention. Ruddock and Prime Minister John Howard rejected the report as naive. "The best signal we can send to would-be illegal immigrants is, 'don't come in the first place, we are not a soft touch,'" Howard said.

Only 4,174 asylum seekers reached Australia last year compared to 300,000 who made their way to Europe. Of the 1.2 million refugees from the war in Afghanistan currently in Pakistan fewer than 5,000 were referred for resettlement by the UN last year and only 450 to Australia.

Linda Harris is a member of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees' Union.  
 
 
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