LONDON — Since September 28, a group of 40 refugees, migrants and their supporters have been travelling across England, providing support to black and migrant communities who have suffered from racism and telling people that the campaigns for victims of racial violence and for asylum rights and the fights against instititutionalised racism and state-sponsored xenophobia are one and the same.
The Civil Rights Caravan is the latest awareness-raising project from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, formed in the late 1970s to counter a rise in racist violence, often organised by the National Front and condoned by Margaret Thatcher's Tory government. Besieged by policing, racial attacks and immigration laws that tore families apart, black and migrant communities began to organise in their own defence: CARF was one of the products of these efforts.
On the first day of their caravan, September 28, activists from CARF and the National Civil Rights Movement released 157 black balloons outside Downing Street into the sky above London. Each balloon represented one person who had died from racist violence in the seven years since the brutal 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence by a gang of white racists.
The caravan visited Exeter, Plymouth, Bristol, Margate, Dover, Coventry, Birmingham, Newcastle, London and Manchester in October. Its activists organised public meetings, visited migrant communities and staged demonstrations outside detention centres.
In the northern industrial town of Newcastle, the caravan arrived to join a demonstration of 500 people backing the Angel Heights Seven, a group of refugees who campaigned for improved living conditions in a Newcastle hostel, only to be charged with violent disorder. The seven are still awaiting trial.
Even before its official launch, caravan activists visited Leicester on September 15, a city known as a dangerous and hostile place for asylum seekers.
In June 1999, a Somalian asylum seeker, Liban Ali, was beaten by a gang of racist youths while waiting with a friend at a bus stop. While he survived, he remains in hospital in a vegetative state.
Only one of his four attackers was charged with attempted murder, a charge later reduced to grievous bodily harm. He will probably be back on the streets within six months.
The 300 people who attended the caravan's Leicester meeting heard from refugees at the International Hotel, a run-down hotel which is being used as a hostel for around 400 asylum seekers. They spoke of regular racist attacks on them which, in some cases, left them with serious injuries. An Iranian refugee said that a couple of months after an attack, he still has difficulty walking. While the attacks were reported to the local police, the refugees have had no response on their complaints.
Teresa, a Colombian activist working with the London-based Latin American Solidarity Collective against US Intervention in Colombia explained why she became involved with the Civil Rights Caravan.
"I came to the UK with my two sons, aged nine and four, as a political refugee from Colombia", she told Green Left Weekly. "My partner had been a political prisoner for four years. Then within a few months of his release, he was 'disappeared'. Seven days after his assassination I found his body hidden in a rubbish tip, there were visible signs of torture. For me the caravan represents the right to defence and the right to protest by refugees and immigrants from Colombia and other countries."
The Civil Rights Caravan is calling for full rights for asylum speakers, refugees and undocumented workers, an end police brutality and deportations and the closure of the detention centres.
Contact CARF via email <info@carf.demon.co.uk> or via web <http://www.carfdemon.co.uk/>.
BY LYNDA HANSEN