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Refugee Solidarity Meanjin

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25.01.2022 We've got a Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree next fridayhere's why you should come and keep the pressure up: Explosive footage of guards assaulting a person in their "care" was leaked just yesterday and has sparked calls for an immigration detention inquiry... The US resettlement deal is winding down, with nearly 300 people still in offshore concentration camps and over a thousand more on shore in hotels and detention centresand the government is sc...rambling for another way out of this mess... Senator Jacqui Lambie has just threatened to release details of a secret deal she made to repeal the medevac lawswhich many suspect was an agreement that these people would be resettled quickly instead... The New Zealand deal is still on the tablethey've offered to resettle these people for years, but our government has rejected itand the Prime Minister who offered it was just re-elected in a landslide... Alan Tudge MP is under pressure since the federal court ruled that "the Minister has engaged in conduct which can only be described as criminal"... Scott Morrison (ScoMo) is about to be dragged into a cash-for-visa scandal that he, as Immigration Minister at the time, must have known about... Hotel groups like the Mantra, the Meriton Suites, and Central Apartment Group, who've agreed to imprison hundreds of people indefinitely for money, think they're getting away with it... ... and Peter Dutton is about to come out of the bin and join us at our Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFreebring your brussel sprouts Click going, invite all your brussel sprouts, and come ready to take action: Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

24.01.2022 Let's get it straight: the police officer coward punched a non-violent protestor, caused an ear bleed, and sent him to hospital for 24 hours. Watch the videoit is undeniable. The police then called a press conference and knowingly lied about it to protect their own because they didn't know there was more footage on the way.... Here's what's going to happen: they'll investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing, the so-called journalists will stop asking "What responsibility do protestors have to keep the peace?", the he's-a-bad-cop-in-an-otherwise-respectable-police-force people will crawl back into their holes for a while, and that cop will keep his job. Maybe we can't get him fired. But what we can do is remember this video whenever we watch a man in a suit stand in front of cameras and say something isn't the way we know it is, and know that that's a lie too. When they say our friends are getting adequate medical care, remember this. When they say our friends are criminals, remember this. When they say they drowned children, put people in concentration camps, and locked them up in hotel rooms to keep us safe, remember this. Don't ever trust a word they say again. Trust this: we live in a colony built on stolen land that runs concentration camps for people (kids included), in which at least thirteen people have died and many more have tried, and hundreds drowned at sea, and both major parties support the continuing existence of these concentration camps, and anyone who resists them (on the inside or outside) is violently repressed by the state. A colony in which a white man being punched makes nationwide news, while First Nations people and People of Colour face this brutality every single day and barely get a mention. Our struggle is to abolish this colony, abolish its prisons, abolish the police that uphold it, and abolish the borders that imprison it, in solidarity with all those who suffer its oppression. . Take action in solidarity this Friday, 5pm, King George Square: Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

22.01.2022 "To all my dearest beloved friends This is to thank , send my warm greetings and gratitude to all of my dearest friends, and supporters of our great cause in General, and in particular those closest to heart that i would not only consider them as just friends or aiders but brothers and sisters who day -and -night stand up for my family out there at their time of their need for support. I know that you have been sacrificing and facing great risk on the account of your confor...ts not for personal gain but for the sake of our cause and humanity...too much pain you endured defending and standing up for justice infront of the tyrant cruel system, struggling and spending time,energy,money ....and all possible resources to be on our -side in our neediest moments of our life. On many occations when we felt down ,hopless and lost in dispair you have lifted us up, again -and -again ,gave us hope and most of all never gave up on us even though sometimes we were incapable you have always advocated , helped us ane our families when we could not even be with them ...you have left sometimes your work, home and family to help us, and for that i really have no words sufficient to expres my deepest gratitude and thanks to you all for your out standing and tireless humanitarian work. Finally, i am out of words and no word can express my gratitude,but i can only say two words....Tank you . Yours faithfully Saif Ali Saif" (Saif is pictured on the far left.) We love you Saif and all our friends inside See you this Fridaythe fight isn't over until they're all free: Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree Pat Ollason

22.01.2022 We will survive , we will fight, and we are proude to say out loud, we come to this world as free men ,we are not your slaves, you can put us in cages as you have done all these years but you can not stop us from breathing and we will live out loud.. We will crawl till our dreams come through, each one of us has part in this healing world and there's much to do to end this cruelty for tomorrow's freedom. - One of the KP120 on sunday, before they stole four of them away to ...BITA during the night They thought they could silence them out there, or that the taller fences would divide us. They were wrong. We are them. They are us. We go where they go. . In a few weeks, join us to camp out to get them out: GetThemOut Campout (11-13th December) #FreeTheKP120 ... and at the rally to bring the campout to a close: Rally: Abolish the Camps #FreeTheKP120

21.01.2022 For our friends on the inside, looking out through their barred windows or across that forbidden parking lot, this place always looks like what it truly is. A prison, a concentration camp, a torture chamber. But people walking by could mistake it for the hotel it used to be, before Central Apartment Group accepted blood money to turn it into a concentration camp for people fleeing danger.... Families used to stay here. Kids used to bomb into the pool out the back. People from the neighbourhood would come for a meal at the family-run restaurant. Now the pool sits unused, forbidden, this is a place where people are force-fed food that makes them sick or violates their religion, where families are ripped apart, not brought together. If you've ever walked around in empty old concentration campsin other parts of the world or here on this continent, where the First Nations peoples continue to be subject to incarceration like this and have been since colonisationif you've walked around in a disused camp and felt sick with the horror of it all, you should know that one day people will do the same thing here, in the city you live in. They will walk through the empty buildings, they will see the hole that someone was forced to live in for years, they will stand in the middle of a room with bars on the windows and weep for the suffering that took place there. If you ever stood in a place like that and thought, "How did the people here let this happen?" you should ask yourself one thing: Why am I letting this happen now? Last night, some people made sure nobody would mistake this place for what it used to be. But the concentration camp still stands. The #KP120, 120 people who came here by boat fleeing death, are indefinitely imprisoned in a modern day concentration camp at 721 Main Street, Kangaroo Point. This cruelty is not going to end itself. We need to rise up and end it. What's it going to take?

21.01.2022 Warning: This post contains descriptions of self-harm and suicide. Please, I just want to hug my son, just for one minute. You know our friend Saif.... He’s the man who stands up on the balcony with a photo of his wife and son. The man who’s been in the Kangaroo Point Concentration Camp for over a year now, and six years before that in an offshore concentration camp, the man who hasn’t ever been charged with a crime, has never seen a court room, and yet doesn’t know when he’ll be freed, if ever. The man who just wants to hug his little son. This morning, at 3:30am, on the 2654th day of his imprisonment, our beloved friend Saif tried to die. He wanted to die. He tried to do it. Some guards stopped him just before he could. Saif has a son who just wants a hug, and he still tried to die. His wife Sabbah is in hospital and some of us are looking after his son Saami. He’d asked yet again to visit them, and again they said no. It was dark. He stood out on that balcony again. Over the wall, across the street, dark houses, full of sleeping people, free people, people with families, loved ones, lives well lived. He tried to hang himself. Imagine how dark a place our friends must live in to want to die like that. How can anybody justify any of this, for anything, in any way? Some guards got him down just before he died. He was not taken to hospital. He was not taken to hospital. He tried to hill himself, and he was not taken to hospital. He was taken to high-security prison at BITA. This is because, for them, the idea of him escaping to freedom is worse than the idea of his death. Later, one of our other friends saw a guard break down and cry. But he’ll be back at work tomorrow, guarding a concentration camp full of people who just wanted a safe place to live. This all happened at 721 Main Street, Kangaroo Point, in so-called Brisbane. In your city. In the country you live in. Why has he been imprisoned for over seven years? Why are any of these people in prison at all? Why can’t a wonderful, gentle, loving man just hug his little son? When will they be free? When will they be free? When will they be free? When will they be free? When will they be free? When will they be free? When will they be free?

21.01.2022 There will be more. Some Afghans fled this same violence only to end up locked up in our concentration camps, to be tortured by the same soldiers returned home. Many are still imprisoned to this day just for fleeing the country we bombed.... Meanwhile, the soldiers murdered innocents overseas, returned home, became private security contractors in our offshore concentration camps, and tortured and killed the same people who'd fled their violence. On their weeks off, they'd attend white-supremacist "Reclaim Australia" rallies: https://www.theguardian.com//detention-centre-guards-suspe They called the people they imprisoned "the enemy." Our concentration camps torture innocent people all day every day, protected by a line of police and private security guards, many of them ex-soldiers. Cops, soldiers, concentration camp guards: this isn't about good and bad apples. The whole orchard is rotten to its core. So-called australia was founded on war crimes, and we have perpetrated them here and abroad ever since. #AbolishTheArmy #AbolishThePolice #AbolishThePrisons #AbolishTheColony

21.01.2022 We’ll find them wherever the government puts them - rally with them at BITA the day before eight years become nine: https://fb.me/e/2Fz8FpQJj

19.01.2022 BREAKING: Ten people detained in the hotel-turned-prison at the Meriton Suites Adelaide Street, Brisbane have been released into the community this morning. Tonight they will sleep without a guard outside their room for the first time in nearly eight years. These ten people were brought here several weeks ago from Nauru, where our government still indefinitely detains over a hundred people.... But hundreds more people are still locked in concentration camps across the continent and offshore. So yes, give yourself a moment to feel joy. Maybe even sneak a bit of hope. But we must also grieve for what we did to these people. Grieve for the years they've lost. Grieve for what others are still losingand what some have lost forever. Grieve. Get angry. Then act.

19.01.2022 Tonight (free event at La Boite Theatre)! HWY Live: Longer Tables, Not Higher Fences Or if you can't make it tonight or tomorrow (or next week) at La Boite Theatre, we'll be bringing the installation to the prison this sunday for our family-friendly community solidarity day: Community Solidarity Day: Longer Tables, Not Higher Fences #FreeTheKP120

17.01.2022 8 years. Don't let it get to nine. Take a stand at our next action (13th of December): Rally: Abolish the Camps #FreeTheKP120 Join us that whole weekend in raymond park for a campout, a sharing of ideas, art, music, food, resistance: GetThemOut Campout (11-13th December) #FreeTheKP120

15.01.2022 Their lockdown never ends.

13.01.2022 Hours turn to days. Days turn to weeks. Weeks turn to years. And nothing changes. It's been over 7 years. 2654 days.... 63,696 hours. A cage is not a place to live a life. Today as the rain falls from the sky and lands on your skin, remember you get to feel it, while others don't. As you walk freely, remember that your friends are trapped and tortured. This is the price Bla(c)k or Brown people pay for seeking safety from persecution in a world that so deeply favours white. The penalty that white supremacy imposes on POC is lifetime imprisonment. Our silence enables torment. On the 30th of October 5pm at King George Square we will be making noise against the cruelty our government upholds every single day. We will remind all institutions profiting off the torture of human beings that they've got blood on their hands and wont get away with it any longer. If you are done being silent, we will see you there at the Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

13.01.2022 Free Mehdi. Free Adnan. Free everyone imprisoned in concentration camps run by Australia and all political prisoners across the world.... Over a year ago, they called for solidarity from the balconies at 721 Main Street, Kangaroo Point, and many of us answered them with action. We must do so again. KP is shut. BITA's next. Rally at BITA: 8 Years No Freedom: https://fb.me/e/1sxfyF3Xx

12.01.2022 #FreeTheMantra60

12.01.2022 BREAKING: (Part 2 of 2) New footage of Senior Constable David Giddins (badge number 7763) assaulting the people trying to give first aid to the person he'd just coward punchedwho was now bleeding from the ear on the ground in front of him. Giddins also assaults several other people and attempts to stop cameras from filming his name and badge number close up. This afternoon, Acting Assistant Commissioner Brian Conners said in a press conference that he believed the actions of... the officer were "appropriate". What do you reckon? #FireGiddins #AbolishThePolice #AbolishTheColony See ya this Friday, 5pm, King George Square (cops aren't invited): Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

11.01.2022 BREAKING (Part 1 of 2): New footage of Senior Constable David Giddins (badge number 7763) assaulting a man standing on the footpath protesting to #FreeTheKP120. He hit him in the back of the head. The man fell to the ground, began to bleed from his ear, and is still in hospital now, 24 hours later.... Senior Constable Giddins then proceeded to assault the people trying to administer first aidwatch that here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=660525091322168 Queensland Police Service at their press conference this afternoon: The officer did not strike the male person directly, however has reached out with an open hand and grabbed the male person on the back of the clothing in order to pull him away from the fence. As a result of that action, the male person has fallen to the ground. First aid has been given to the male person. Cops lie. Politicians lie. Footage doesn't. Watch this video, see the lie. Hit the streets this Friday, 5pm, King George Square (Cops not invited): Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree #FireGiddins #AbolishThePolice #AbolishTheColony https://freethekp120.com.au

11.01.2022 LIVE: Snap rally outside your local concentration camp at 721 Main Street, Kangaroo Point. Yesterday one of our friends tried to kill himself after over seven years of torture, with no end in sight. This has to end. #SetThemFree Take action this Friday, 5pm, King George Square: Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

10.01.2022 Mehdi Ali speaks to the crowds gathered in solidarity with the hunger strikers down south. Mehdi and many others are imprisoned in the concentration camp called BITA near Brisbane Airport. They've lost eight years of their lives, which for Mehdi and his cousin is a third of their life. Later in July, they'll start their ninth year of imprisonment. It is absolutely fucked and on the 18th of July people are going to march against it: Rally at BITA: 8 Years No Freedom

08.01.2022 We Are Better Than This defied the cops to protest outside Scott Morrison (ScoMo)'s Horizon Church today. We're encouraging local faith groups to plan vigils, workshops or speak-outs for the GetThemOut Campout (11-13th December) #FreeTheKP120get in touch! And please mobilise your congregations for the rally on the sunday: Rally: Abolish the Camps #FreeTheKP120

08.01.2022 Australia is a stain upon this continent.

06.01.2022 SNAP ACTION at 4:30pm today! Yesterday morning one of the men imprisoned at Kangaroo Point tried to commit suicide while his wife (who lives in the community with their son only 20 minutes away) was in hospital. The man was then transferred to BITA, a higher security prison, further away from his family and without even the small relief of a balcony where he would be able to occasionally see his family from afar. This is what the barbarity of the mandatory detention regime pu...shes people to. It’s ongoing torture tries to wear people down until they have no hope. It has to stop. We will be rallying on Walmsley Street in Kangaroo Point today at 4:30pm, in solidarity with the men inside and to call for their freedom. #FreeTheKP120 #FreeThem #LetHimHugHisSon

05.01.2022 On the 19th of July, it will be eight years since they slammed the door shut on people thousands of people just looking for a safe place to live. On Sunday the 18th, we'll march on BITA, a concentration camp for many of the people who're still imprisoned after eight years, with no end in sight. March with us, in solidarity with those behind the fences: Rally at BITA: 8 Years No Freedom

05.01.2022 They call it a hotel, but they've locked 120 of our friends inside. It is a prison. Call it what it is.

04.01.2022 Join Love Makes A Way and other faith groups at 4:30 this afternoon for the Solidarity Sunday Faith Vigil #FreeTheKP120everyone welcome

03.01.2022 Join us at a snap solidarity action this afternoon, 4:30pm, at 721 Main Street: SNAP ACTION: FREE THEM NOW!

02.01.2022 So-Called Australia's Dirty Secret: Hotel Prisons ( Upcoming rally: Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree) "This isn't a hotel... it's a torture centre." - Moz, detained in the Mantra Bell City Hotel, in so-called Melbourne... 200+ people locked in hotel rooms for over a year (and over six years offshore before that), and many more in detention centres offshore and across the continent. $350,000. The cost per person per year to torture them. $0. The cost of setting them free. Offshore detention is winding down. The US resettlement deal is nearly over. Indefinitely imprisoning human beings (in a concentration camp or hotel prison or anywhere else) is a violation of international law. Now's the time to hit the streets, drag the names of those hotels through the mud, and pressure the government to do the only humane thing: set these people free. Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

02.01.2022 Vile. Rage against this cruel regime this Friday, 5pm, King George Square: Rally + Mass Action: Close the Hotel Prisons #SetThemFree

01.01.2022 This is Officer Giddins (badge number PSRT 7763) from the Public Safety Response Team coward-punching a non-violent protestor. He fell to the ground, started bleeding from his ear, and had to be taken away in an ambulance. One punch can kill, they say. The police don’t protect anyone - they exist to uphold the racist regime that locks up our friends and perpetrates human rights violations on a daily basis. #ACAB... #OnePunchCanKill #AbolishThePolice See more