Refugees push back Nazis in Melbourne
More than 250 refugees and their supporters chased away 25 neo-Nazis who tried to crash a protest at Melbourne’s Home Affairs Department on 16 August.
After the Nazis slunk off down an alley, Tamil kids rushed around the demonstration, laughing and shouting. Refugees who came to Australia by boat hugged each other, cheered and shouted: “Refugees are welcome, Nazis are not!”
The refugees have been camping outside the Home Affairs Department for more than a month, demanding permanent visas. The federal Labor government has left roughly 12,000 refugees in limbo. Most participating in the encampment arrived in Australia by boat before 2013 and have been through a combination of offshore detention, onshore detention and years of living on six-month bridging visas.
Not long after the protest began, members of the National Socialist Network (a Hitler-supporting white supremacist group) arrived in black shirts and combat boots to hold a counter-protest. They carried a banner reading, “Fuck off, we’re full”. They covered their faces with balaclavas and dark sunglasses.
Refugee organisers, socialists, activists from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, unionists from the United Workers Union and Palestine solidarity campaigners established a picket to defend the camp. The crowd outnumbered the Nazis ten to one, filling the footpath and the road, drowning out the Nazis with chants of “Justice for refugees!”
The Nazis tried to march around the picket to get into the camp, but the protesters cut them off and, keeping together in a large bloc, followed them as they looked for an opening.
When the Nazis gave up and retreated down a back alley, there was a deafening cheer. It was the perfect picture: a group of supposedly tough guys who dream of driving non-whites out of Australia, forced to back down in the face of a united group of Iranian, Tamil, Afghan, Palestinian and other anti-racist activists.
“The refugees were determined to chase them away”, Aran Mylvaganam told Red Flag at a Palestine rally the following Sunday, which the refugees led in a march through the city. Mylvaganam is one of the organisers of the encampment, a member of Socialist Alternative and a founder of the Tamil Refugee Council. “After twenty minutes of them throwing racist lines at the protest, they just walked away like cowards. It felt really good.”
Australia’s politicians have done everything in their power to demoralise the 12,000 refugees. Many don’t get access to Medicare, and private health insurance companies won’t give them coverage. Universities will let their children attend only if they pay full fees as international students.
Many of the refugees involved in the encampment work in factories and recycling plants run by bosses who pay them below the minimum wage and use the threat of deportation to force them to accept deplorable working conditions.
But when they chased the Nazis away, the atmosphere was anything but demoralised. The thrill of defeating a group of gym-junkie white supremacists kept everyone awake until late into the night, telling stories, joking around, playing chess and organising the next demonstration.
Kids gathered around a six-week-old puppy to help his owner name him: “Freddo”, for Free Da Refugees. One Tamil refugee commented that sitting at the camp was like being on a train in India: you couldn’t go five minutes without someone offering you ginger tea or a snack.
“The refugees don’t feel intimidated”, Mylvaganam said. “They’re not worried about the possibility of the Nazis coming back because they can see that they’ve got the community support needed to chase them away again.”
