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hey kids. this is gonna be kinda quick and probably hideously incoherent, since it's 2am and i've been up since about 6am. so, i'm in the desert. there's a protest going on. there's about 1000 people here, maybe more, a huge tent city covering about 1km all up. it's really windy and dusty, my lungs are totally fucked, although this probably has more to do with how many cigarettes i'm smokin'.
today at 6pm there was sposed to be a fairly tidy action to support the detainees inside the camp, who had planned their own protest at that time. instead of walking to the police road-block (about 1km from the camp) as planned, people spontaneously detoured to a huge razor-wire fence which marks the outer perimeter of the camp. we all started pushing at the fence, and under enormous pressure, it came down! so we walked in. and in, through sand-bagged no-mans-land. and then suddenly we were approaching the inner perimeter fence, and there were detainees -- prisoners -- right on the other side of the fence from us. a pretty emotional moment. i think about half of us were crying. they were talking to us, ribbons and 'No-One Is Illegal' orange armbands and bandannas were being exchanged for handshakes and names. and then suddenly detainees started escaping; someone had cut a hole in the fence. we don't know how many, but probably around thirty escaped.
so. back to camp, on the run, to hide them. i'm not sure how much more i should say about that, except that lots of detainees are hiding in peoples' campsites. i think in general the people sheltering detainees are in out of their depth; there are roadblocks everywhere and police looking like they want to raze the protestor's camp. none of us have slept for days, from either being on buses or having to stay awake last night to keep the cops at bay. i think in some ways, we're out of our depth... no-one ever considered what we'd do in the event that detainees actually escaped. on the bright side, no-one has been arrested yet as far as i know, and injuries are at a minimum. i'm safe and so is Crunchy.
so, why can i write this when i'm far from civilisation? we have a secure space with a net connection in woomera itself, and are uploading reports from the protest twice daily. i've just been screwing around with an indymedia feature for two hours. argh. tired. probably quite insane. please check out melbourne.indymedia.org -- it's where all the breaking news is going... some of it written by me *g*
anyhow, i'm gonna go to bed now, but just one small thing: this thing we're doing, whatever it is, it found a purpose today in talking and holding the hands of the people who are locked up. it's not fun, this protest... it's more like a big game of chess with the cops, with added extra pieces moving at random tangents through the board. but someone from iran told me his story today, and someone else is wearing my orange wristband. i'm fucked if i can think of a better way to cut through the borders and the wires. |
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