Fighting migration controls is grinding, a daily and often terrible battle, mostly fought by individuals and small groups of people. Often it is inspiring. Since our last newspaper, there has been a lot going on - just on my radar - some of which is reported elsewhere in this issue. We argue for maximum solidarity, for mass actions of resistance, to abolish immigration controls altogether.
In Barnsley on May Day, a successful conference was held at the Miners’ Hall attended by 75 people. In London, there was the “Amnesty or Papers for All?” meeting in advance of the “Stranger in to Citizens” demonstration on the Bank holiday where Iraqi, Latin American, Philippino and Congolese contingents and anti-immigration controls activists all distributed materials, argued and chanted for Papers for All, forming a strong critical and oppositional presence to the dangerous and divisive amnesty campaign. Last Wednesday, a leading migrant worker activist, who spoke on the Latin American contingent, was arrested by police and immigration, shopped in by his company for his trade union activities, in the hope that he wouldn’t have papers. (When I got the text, looked up to two police officers walking to my front yard to detain me for not turning up at court about the Greek embassy protests).
On Thursday 7th May Ayodeji Omotade was acquitted by the Brent Magistrates Court of threatening and abusive behaviour, shaming British Airways and exposing the reality: In March 2008, CAIC activists leafleted the BA flight on which Biafran Independence activist Augustine was being deported. We asked people to speak up, to show solidarity - Ayodeji did, in response to screaming appeals from our friend. The whole economy class was emptied of passengers as they protested at Ayodeji being arrested. The flight took off later with only Augustine in economy, Ayodeji missed his brothers wedding for which he was carrying the rings. We give our support to Ayodeji in now pursuing an apology from BA. In his words: "What would you do if someone on your flight was distressed and crying out for help? Would you stay silent or would you speak? I spoke and BA didn't like it. This type of corporate tyranny must be challenged and stopped."
This Monday, the RMT, picketed the Israeli embassy in defense of Arab rail workers who are being kicked off the job through some pretext of a rule change that clearly only discriminates against them. Had some placards left over from the protest against the Nigerian charter flight two weeks ago where we didn’t have enough people to mount an action: a catch all slogan was recycled, “Freedom of Movement and Equal Rights for All”. I read on the way that in Italy they’re criminalizing being undocumented and have turned back another boat to Libya, denying the right to even claim asylum.
The most terrible and significant defeat this week was yesterday (Tuesday 12th May) when the 9th monthly mass deportation to Kurdistan in Iraq went ahead. Six activists from the newly formed Stop Deportations network blockaded Colnbrook detention centre for five hours where maybe 45 Iraqis had been herded to in advance of the charted flight. Using oil cans filled with cement and glass, in which two people could hook their arms to each other, they tried to stop the coaches leaving, a human road block. Two more people might have also blocked the pavement to stop other vehicles mounting it and carrying on work as normal. Others chanted, contacted media, co-ordinated with John McDonnell MP’s exemplary office, and called the coach companies involved, WH Coaches and Woodcocks. The International Federation of Iraqi Refugees had contact with a number of detainees inside the camp who resisted by removing their clothes supported by protests from people of other nationalities. Some had been on hunger strike for 10 days, but were deemed fit to fly. One person was set upon by seven guards. All were handcuffed on the coaches. I haven’t heard back, on writing, what happened to our Iraqi brothers after or what is going on for them now. On a previous flight the guard smashed the plane window with an Iraqi’s head. The six activists were released late last night, charged, strangely, with unlawful assembly.
The sight of watching comrades being arrested as three coaches pulled out in convoy is not one that I want to repeat. Some pushed back the curtains in response to our chanting and saw people were there, that they hadn’t been alone, some raised fists - in cuffs. Our comrade, Samira, from IFIR cried, as we all felt to, from defeat, from anger. There had been media, we had either created a window of hope but probably prolonged an agony for those being restrained and waiting: it is necessary to resist even when you lose, in the hope that it is towards a larger victory. We have to be able to stop these mass deportations for a hundred reasons of solidarity, paramount to socialists. And I think we can.
In the lift at Heathrow Terminal five, by now familiar, from climate and anti-deportation work, a young white woman asked us if we were the ones protesting outside Colnbrook. She said she would have joined us, she had wanted to come out and join us but we’d gone by the time she got out. She’s 23 and had been visiting her boyfriend who she’s been with since she was 14; they’ve got a 5 year old son who thinks he’s visiting his dad at work. She lives near me, we’re both Brent born and bred, and loyal to it! Her partner is Tamil (I told her I was too), he’s been in there for 7 months now, and due to be deported. He fled two years of detention and torture at the hands of the Tamil Tigers in his youth, he has scars all over his body.
She didn’t know what to do, solicitors cost hundreds of pounds per letter, he’s been through several. She knows and expressed well that this is all weighted against the poor. She can’t afford this. But neither is she the kind of person to give up. We talked all the way back to Alperton. We talked about the injustice of the system, our own backgrounds, in general and political. She pointed to some cranes where they’d demolished the shelter of a local homeless person. Her and her friend had organized a protest a few years ago. She thinks that even small demonstrations of solidarity are important and he was given sheltered accommodation as a result. We both want a more collective fight, we talked about a local support worker, GMB member facing eviction that LCAP are trying to build a fight around. At the Papers for All meeting, there was a Tamil solicitor who spoke and responded sanely when I asked about defending people who were fleeing not just the Sri Lankan Govt, but the Tamil Tigers. I said I’d get hold of him. In any case, her partner is being done as ‘foreign criminal’ for some petty crime (in the judges own words). She and her partner, as we do in CAIC, have argued that people cannot be punished twice: once for the actual crime; the second time, sometimes with their lives, for being foreign. She comes from a big Irish family, but says she feels for what’s going on in Sri Lanka, after all her son is Tamil. He shares both their features. We agreed to go to Parliament square together; I’d spent the night there before going to Colnbrook.
Back later last night at Parliament Sq, at 9pm, there was a speech updating people on the situation. 5 male students are on hunger strike, when they stop they are to be replaced by more, people think three thousand civilians have been killed in the last three or four days. There is utter desperation, and fears that, as in some villages in the East which have been turned into Singhalese colonial settlements, that the population must be being wiped out. A young Somali comrade and I spoke for an hour to one Tamil man from Birmingham at length about Sri Lanka. He’d been deported by the South Africans to Colombo where during interrogations, when he’d tried to intervene in the rape of a young woman, he’d lost his finger. Over an hour I explained our politics, that we are for self determination, we see the deepening hardships of the Sinhala workers to be directly connected to the rise in Sinhala nationalism, we see this as part of the State’s response to the global capitalist crisis. We talked about the massacres of JVP youth in the late 80s, left out of the Tamil nationalist narrative. I explained why I didn’t support the Tigers, couldn’t as a socialist, with a socialist program for the future, based on reality and the real history and prospects for Sri Lanka, for the Tamils. I explained my concern about a separate state, including the effect on the Tamil population Colombo. My Singhala friend has just got back from Sri Lanka and insists that things are getting better there for Tamils, on a policy and day-to-day life level, which I find difficult to believe. But can predict a massive backlash against the Colombo Tamil population, apparently now a majority in the capital through refugees from the north and east.
There’s always more to say, these conversations are important. This morning the Eurostar cleaners start an official ongoing action, refusing to clock-in to work with finger measurement recorders. This Monday, there is a student day of action for Tamils that I just found out about. Hatching a plan between writing for Alperton and Harrow with other local comrades. The fight goes on, for solidarity, for freedom of movement and equal rights for all.