There was uncontrollable energy as refugees led a march of hundreds of activists from a permanent protest encampment outside the Home Affairs Office in Docklands to Southern Cross Station, Melbourne’s biggest transport hub. The march, held on Friday night, grew as it made its way down Bourke Street. Passengers on trams waved and raised their fists in support.
The rally was the largest mobilisation for refugee rights in years. It comes after refugees have become increasingly active in the past year. There has been an <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/charged-for-protesting-for-refugee-rights">occupation of a Labor Party office</a>, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-i-walked-melbourne-canberra-refugee-rights">a march from Melbourne to Canberra</a> by a group of Tamil women and now the 40-day Tamil, Iranian and Afghan refugee <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/refugees-still-fighting-under-labor">encampment outside Home Affairs</a> in Melbourne. Their demands have always been clear: permanent protection for all refugees.
The rally, organised by the Tamil Refugee Council, the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, and Unionists for Palestine, was called not only to show solidarity with the refugees, but also to stand against racist attacks they have endured—and resisted—since establishing their camp. Only a week ago, they had to stand up to a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/refugees-push-back-nazis-in-melbourne">neo-Nazi group that turned up to intimidate them</a>. 
Yet, while we beat the Nazis last week, the real villains of this drama are in parliament: the Liberal and the Labor parties, which are responsible for the policies that have devastated so many refugee lives and that have normalised a regime of cruelty. 
In 1992, Paul Keating’s Labor government <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/library/prspub/1311498/upload_binary/1311498.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf">established mandatory detention</a>. The ALP has never rescinded this diabolical policy. But because the Liberal Party is viewed as even worse, many refugees have campaigned for Labor on its promises to deliver justice. 
After the Albanese government was elected in May 2022, it did offer permanent protection to 19,000 refugees. But 12,000 were left in limbo after being deemed ineligible to be part of that deal. The government has indicated it doesn’t intend to lift a finger for these people.
Many of them are angry and feel betrayed. Now they are getting active to demand permanent protection. 
As Friday’s march progressed, chants of “Labor! Labor! End this limbo!” and “Shame! Shame! Labor shame!” echoed. 
The defiance has inspired refugees in Sydney and Brisbane to set up encampments outside the offices of Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke and Treasurer Jim Chalmers. 
The Tamil Refugee Council, the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, and Unionists for Palestine have called another rally at the encampment outside Home Affairs in Docklands for this Friday, 30 August, at 5:30pm. 
The refugees say that they will continue their encampment until they win.

Ada Pascoe

Refugees keep protesting in Melbourne

“The vision of the International Olympic Committee is to Build a Better World through Sport.”
A noble goal from the leaders of the Olympic Games. So, what does building a better world through sport look like? 
In Paris, it could be mistaken for George Orwell’s 1984. The streets are lined with temporary fencing. AI-powered surveillance watches everyone. Tens of thousands of police stand on corners checking people’s QR codes to make sure they are where the state thinks they are. The French government has pulled out all the stops for “the games”, turning Paris into a city in which even residents cannot move freely.
In the run-up to the Olympics, thousands of homeless people were displaced by authorities. Hundreds were bussed out of the city and abandoned. Homeless encampments have been aggressively torn down and fenced off. The government claims it’s unrelated, but when <a href="https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-the-shadow-of-paris-olympic-village-migrants-are-pushed-into-the-cold/">400 migrants are driven out of an abandoned factory</a> a few hundred metres away from the Olympic Village, you can’t help but think there might be a hidden agenda. 
The area hosting the Olympic Village, Île-Saint-Denis, is one of the most impoverished in Paris. Around 40 percent of residents live in social or public housing. When the games are finished and the athletes’ village empties, the luxury apartments will be sold, and an ever-shrinking one-quarter (formerly one-third) will be left for social housing. The area will likely be gentrified: two train lines have been established, and luxurious restaurants have been built next to the river Seine near the new aquatic centre. Meanwhile, working-class residents are pushed further and further to the city limits. 
This is a familiar story. Apparently, this “better world” for the International Olympic Committee is a better world only for the rich and powerful. It’s a world where they can move around in luxury without being bothered by the ugly reality of the poverty they are responsible for. 
Olympic host cities yammer on about how the games will boost their economies and enrich the lives of their residents. Anticipating the 2028 games in Los Angeles, the city’s mayor has <a href="https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/olympics-anaheim-antisemitism-peanuts/karen-bass">expressed the hope</a> that the Olympics will be a “catalyst ... that eventually ends street homelessness”.
In 2023, volunteers counted <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/homelessness-los-angeles.html">75,518 homeless people</a> in the city, a 9 percent increase on the previous year. Solving the problem would require more public housing, increasing the minimum wage and increasing community services. Unfortunately, capitalist sports competitions will never create a better world for struggling Angelenos. Instead, the Olympics will mean what they always mean: heavy-handed policing, militarisation and forced displacement. 
The last time the Olympics were held in Los Angeles, in 1984, the police department dramatically increased harassment of Black and Latino youths, further normalising the excessive violence and setting the foundation of the brutality of the federal government’s notorious War on Drugs. 
In Atlanta in the lead-up to the 1996 Olympics, cops arrested up to 9,000 people and demolished the remaining social housing in the CBD, replacing it with commercial real estate. The Olympics destroyed ordinary people’s worlds in order to make it better for the wealthy.
The story was little different in Rio, Tokyo, London and more. 
The presence of Israel at this year’s games is impossible to ignore. Athletes from Russia and Belarus have been banned from competing because their governments broke the Olympic Charter. The IOC Executive Board <a href="https://olympics.com/ioc/news/ioc-issues-recommendations-for-international-federations-and-international-sports-event-organisers">in March last year ruled</a> that athletes with a Russian or Belarusian passport “must compete only as Individual Neutral Athletes”, and that those who “actively support the war” in Ukraine and those “who are contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies” cannot compete.
Israeli athletes, however, remain, competing under the Israeli flag and with no conditions related to their support or otherwise for the unfolding genocide in Gaza or to their links to the Israeli occupation forces. 
Nor have athletes from the United States, the destroyer of several countries, ever faced sanctions at the hands of the Olympic Committee.
Over-policing, ubiquitous surveillance, forced displacement of the homeless, hypocrisy: that’s the “Olympic spirit”.

Games of shame

Members of the National Tertiary Education Union at the University of Melbourne walked off the job for the second time this year on 21 June. University management has not budged in workplace contract negotiations, prompting staff to strike for 24 hours and rally outside a meeting of the university board. The rally of 300 was an important step for the ongoing campaign. 
The night before the strike, workers received a 6 percent pay increase offer. The proposal was a complete sham. Not only is 6 percent well below the 15 percent staff are asking for, but the university proposed to fund the pay rise, not with the millions of dollars it already has, but by reducing the university’s contributions to staff members’ superannuation.
One of the biggest achievements of the day was student support workers shutting down their entire department. Activists in the department recruited five people to the union in the morning on their way into work.
The Students Support Staff Strikes campaign group also had a presence at the strike and held a campaign meeting afterwards that was attended by members of the staff union. The student turnout was not as big as it had been for the first strike in May. 
Students are either finishing their exams or are on winter break right now, which made mobilising students, who have very little experience with strikes, a challenge. Staff know this, so the smaller student turnout did not detract from confidence of staff at the strike. 
Those who did mobilise arrived with gusto. “If the NTEU wins, we all win!” a student declared in the campaign meeting after the strike. It is important that students do not let university management isolate the staff or play us off against each other. 
The question “What next?” is on everyone’s mind. That will be up for debate in the staff union. Semester two will be an excellent opportunity to build both staff and student campaigns against University of Melbourne management.

UniMelb staff strike again!

How many deaths is the United States responsible for in the 21st century? According to new research, millions of people. 
<a href="https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths">How Death Outlives War</a>, a paper published by the Watson Institute at Brown University, an Ivy league college in Rhode Island, estimates the direct and indirect number of deaths caused by the twenty-year war on terror. “The total death toll in the post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen could be at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting”, its authors write. 
United States President Joe Biden withdrew American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 as his administration made a final shift away from the war on terror, which caused misery across the Middle East, to focus on starting a new war in Asia. 
But the millions of people ensnared in the post-9/11 carnage cannot move on. Their livelihoods have been destroyed by Western intervention in the Middle East. Their families have been maimed and killed. The war on terror brought imperialist violence into people’s backyards. Villages and cities were plundered; in many instances they were reduced to rubble. 
The destruction of infrastructure and the associated economic collapses have led to acute food insecurity in some places. In 2022, 95 percent of Afghans were not getting enough to eat. And with malnutrition, unsanitary conditions and inadequate healthcare comes disease—children in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer inordinately high rates of cholera, diarrhoea, typhoid and measles. 
Fallujah, a city bombarded and doused with chemical weapons during the Iraq War, has been wrecked by environmental contamination. The exposure to uranium in the weapons used by the Americans “increased rates of infant mortality, leukaemia, and cancer”, according to the report. 
Doctors have told women in Fallujah to avoid conceiving because “they could not bear healthy children ... and the attempt to do so was killing them”. The full extent of the environmental contamination will be felt for some time as children continue to be born with defects and higher chances of developing cancer. 
Unexploded ordinances pollute the Middle East. At least 3-5 percent of bombs dropped by the US did not detonate when they hit the ground, and nobody came to safely clean them up. Civilians are forced to live with this constant danger. A 2021 <a href="https://www.unmas.org/en/programmes/afghanistan">UN report</a> found that 160 people were killed each month by unexploded weapons in Afghanistan alone—79 percent were thought to be children. The estimate does not account for the people who have been seriously injured by these deadly leftovers.
The post-9/11 wars displaced 38 million people from their homes, uprooting them from family and friends, and replacing one form of dangerous insecurity with another. Refugees spread across the Middle East and Asia struggle to access safe shelter, food, water and healthcare. More than 80 percent of Afghan refugees in Pakistan said their greatest needs were for “shelter, livelihoods and food”.
The war on terror has left the countries it terrorised in a hideous state of poverty and insecurity. 
The inhumane consequences of the wars expose the brutal motives of the West. It was not a benevolent battle to liberate the oppressed people of Iraq and Afghanistan, but a vain attempt at strengthening Western influence in the region, no matter the cost. 
The post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Central Asia have been a tragedy for the people of the region, and some of them are still being fought. But those who are responsible for starting the wars are not wasting time crying over the lives they destroyed. They are too busy telling everyone to get ready for the next war.

Refugees keep protesting in Melbourne

Games of shame

UniMelb staff strike again!

US ‘war on terror’ cost millions of lives, reveals new report

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