Nine refugees held in the Northern Immigration Detention Centre in Darwin staged a protest on top of a building in the centre’s compound on March 15 after they witnessed Serco guards assault another detainee.
The refugees — who are Rohingya people, an ethnic minority in western Burma — told refugee advocate Carl O’Connor on March 16 that the protest was sparked by a physical assault on another Rohingya detainee.
“One man was refused rice in the mess room,” the refugees said. “Out of frustration he broke a glass. He was then chased down and tried to escape from two Serco guards.
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As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar.
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched”, while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.
But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is.
Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks.
Emboldened by the successes of Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Libya, a number of Arab regimes have escalated crackdowns on pro-democracy protests while the world’s media was focused on the earthquake disaster in Japan.
With the exceptions of Libya and Iran, the governments brutally cracking down on their citizens have received minimal criticism from the West.
Calls for “restraint on both sides” obscure the fact that it is governments armed with weapons made in the West ruthlessly attacking mostly unarmed people.
This video is from a protest by homeless people on 14-4-11 in response to plans by the state government to sweep homeless people off the street during the October CHOGM summit.
Late on March 12, a group of drunken men yelling abuse and threats of physical violence entered the site of the Aboriginal occupation of the planned Brighton Bypass in Tasmania.
Trudy Maluga from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre described it as a “Ku Klux Klan-type” incident, the Hobart Mercury reported on March 17.
“A group of Aborigines has been harassed and racially abused by a large group of drunken men and youths at the Kutalayna camp at Brighton,” Maluga said.
Western Sahara is the last country in Africa awaiting decolonisation.
Invaded by Spain in the late 19th century, mass mobilisations in the early 1970s heralded the birth of the modern independence movement.
In 1973, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro (Polisario Front) was established to wage an armed independence struggle.
By 1975, Polisario had fought Spain to a standstill. Rather than grant independence, Spain made an agreement with neighbouring countries Morocco and Mauritania to occupy Western Sahara.
More than 100 protesters joined a March 14 blockade of the Queensland Gas Corporation (QGC) gasworks on the QGC-owned property “Kenya” near Tara, 300 kilometres west of Brisbane.
Resistance supports the fight for equal marriage rights for Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) people.
Resistance believes that the capitalist system has a vested interest in preventing people from uniting, and in continuing to repress queers. This oppression takes many forms, and includes laws that discriminate against LGBTIQ people.
It is incredible that queer people in Australia still do not have the right to get married. This injustice has broad consequences for the whole LGBTIQ community.
"We all knew that this was going to happen, but now many people are going to be saddled with this gigantic debt," David White, president of Community Action for Sustainable Transport (CART) told Green Left Weekly on March 11.
He was commenting on the move to place the Clem7, Brisbane’s first and only cross-river road tunnel, into financial administration the previous week.
The article below is based on a speech by veteran feminist activist Eva Cox to the March 12 Sydney International Women’s Day protest.
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I wore my 1973 T-shirt to the march today to remind myself of what we were hoping to do. It was printed by Canberra Women’s Liberation for the women who were short-listed for the first ever Prime Ministerial Women’s Adviser’s job with Gough Whitlam.
It has the clenched fist women’s symbol on the front and the word superwoman on the back.
Opinion polls are predicting that the likely winner of the April 10 Peruvian presidential election will be Alejandro Toledo. The candidate of Possible Peru, Toledo was the neoliberal president from 2001-06.
After the narrow victory of the moderate left candidate Susana Villaran from Social Force in the Lima mayoral elections last year, it was predicted that the left’s prospects might improve nationally.
So far this has failed to materialise, owing partly to a redoubled effort by the elite and its foreign backers to promote Toledo.
About 300 refugees at the maximum security Red Compound in Christmas Island’s detention centre were fired on with tear gas and modified shotgun rounds during protests over the weekend of March 12-13.
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