Christmas Island : "l’Ile-Prison" attend les Réfugiés.

Écrit par Shar Adams, La Grande Époque, à Brisbane.

Un nouveau centre de rétention pour immigrés, sur l’île Christmas en Australie, se prépare à accueillir plus de 800 personnes, y compris femmes et enfants. Les résidents de l’île et les associations de défense des réfugiés parlent d’un Guantanamo australien, avec un niveau de sécurité militaire.

«Nous ne savons pas pour qui cet enfer est construit», dit Pamela Curr, coordinatrice du centre de ressources pour les demandeurs d’asile (ASRC), «mais nous savons que quiconque emprisonné ici… sera privé de ses droits humains et n’aura pas accès aux droits que garantit la loi australienne.»

Madame Curr dit que les plans complets du centre ont été diffusés, suite à une fuite, le mois dernier auprès d’avocats, de chercheurs, de défenseurs des droits de l’homme. Ces plans indiquent que le centre sera la prison au plus haut niveau de sécurité jamais construite en Australie.

«Aucune prison en Australie n’a des grillages électrifiés dernier cri, des détecteurs de mouvements, des surveillances par micro-ondes, des caméras, des micros et une pièce de contrôle à distance à Canberra», dit-elle.

D’autres éléments incluent des bornes d’identification pour scanner les badges des détenus, des cellules d’isolement et des guérites blindées pour les gardes.

Un projet qui – même si la fonction est totalement différente – fait malgré tout penser à une autre prison, sur une autre île... la tristement célèbre prison de Guantanamo à Cuba.

Le plus effrayant, dit Mme Curr, est la présence d’un «quartier des bébés» avec huit bâtiments, des aires de jeux, tout cela séparé du quartier des familles par des portes électriques et des caméras.

L’île Christmas est à 2.400 km de Perth, 360 km de Jakarta et presque 2.000 km de Darwin. Le centre de détention est au Nord-Ouest de l’île, un endroit de falaises et de rochers.

«Une personne qui s’échapperait n’aurait pas beaucoup de solutions, et on peut se demander pourquoi toute cette sécurité alors qu’il n’y a nulle part où aller», dit Mme Curr.

Depuis 2001, moins de 200 immigrés ont tenté d’arriver en Australie par la mer, ce qui pose des questions quant à la volonté du gouvernement de dépenser 400 millions de dollars pour un centre high-tech en plein océan indien.

«Même si notre politique d’immigration a pu enrayer le flux d’arrivées maritimes non-autorisées, nous devons avoir les capacités nécessaires si ce flux augmentait», a déclaré le Département de l’Immigration, cité par le Sydney Morning Herald.

Le président de l’assemblée de l’île Christmas, Gordon Thomson, a dit à La Grande Époque que le site est «massif», de la taille d’une vingtaine de terrains de football, et que le coût final est 60 % au dessus du chiffre initialement prévu. Des rumeurs circulent, confirme-t-il, selon lesquelles l’île pourrait servir de base militaire. Rumeurs abondamment alimentées par la visite d’une délégation militaire américaine courant 2006.

M. Thomson, s’exprimant en son nom personnel, se dit opposé au principe de centre de rétention. «Nous ne devrions pas enfermer ces personnes» dit-il. «Je crois que ceux qui échappent à toutes sortes de régimes oppressif méritent des encouragements et un traitement meilleur que d’être enfermés.»

Pour les insulaires s’ajoutent à ces considérations des aspects plus pragmatiques : la peur d’affecter le tourisme sur l’île et ses retombées économiques. «Nous ne voulons pas non plus être appelés "l’île-prison"», conclut M. Thomson.

Source : http://www.lagrandeepoque.com

David Hicks: Shame and the Lucky Country
By: John Pilger
January 2007

Donald Horne meant the title of his celebrated book, "The Lucky Country", as irony. ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck,’ he lamented in 1964, describing much of the Australian elite as unfailingly unoriginal, race-obsessed and in thrall to imperial power and its wars.

From Britain’s 19th century opium adventures to America’s current travesty in Iraq, Australians have been sent to fight faraway people with whom they have no quarrel and who offer no threat of invasion. Growing up here, I was assured this was a ‘sacred tradition.’

But then another Australia was ‘discovered.’ The only war dead Australians had never mourned were found right under their noses: those of a remarkable indigenous people who had owned and cared for this ancient land for thousands of years, then fought and died in its defence when the British invaded. In a land littered with cenotaphs, not one honoured them.

For many Whites, the awakening was rude; for others it was thrilling. In the 1970s, thanks largely to the brief, brave and subverted Labor Government of Gough Whitlam, the universities opened their studies to these heresies and their gates to a society Mark Twain once identified as ‘almost entirely populated by the lower orders.’ A secret history revealed that long before the rest of the Western world, Australian working people had fought for and won a minimum wage, an eight-hour working day, pensions, child benefits and the vote for women. And now there was an astonishing ethnic diversity; and it had happened as if by default; there simply were not enough Britons and ‘blue-eyed Balts’ who wanted to come.

Australia is not often news, cricket and bushfires aside. That is a pity, because the regression of this social democracy into a State of fabricated fear and xenophobia is an object lesson for all societies claiming to be free.

In power for more than a decade, the Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, comes from the outer reaches of Australia’s ‘neo-cons.’ In 1988, he announced that a future government led by him would pursue a ‘One Australia Policy.’ a forerunner to Pauline Hanson’s infamous One Nation Party, whose targets were Black Australians and immigrants.

Howard’s targets have been similar. One of his first acts as Prime Minister was to cut $400 million from the Aboriginal Affairs budget. ‘Political correctness,’ he said, ‘has gone too far.’ Today, Black Australians have one of the lowest life expectancies in the world, and their health is the worst in the world. An entirely preventable disease, trachoma — beaten in many poor countries — still blinds them because of appalling living conditions.

The impoverishment of Black communities, which I have seen change little over the years, was described in 2006 by Save the Children as ‘some of the worst we have seen in our work all around the world.’ Instead of a political respect in the form of a national lands rights law, a war of legal attrition has been waged against the Aborigines; and the epidemics and Black suicides continue.

Howard rejoices in his promotion of ‘Australian values’ — a very Australian sycophancy to the sugared ‘values’ of foreign (American) power. The darling of a group of White supremacists who buzz around the Murdoch-dominated press and radio talk-back hosts, the Prime Minister has used acolytes to attack the ‘black armband view of history,’ as if the mass killing and resistance of Indigenous Australians did not happen. The fine historian, Henry Reynolds, author of The Other Side of the Frontier, has been thoroughly smeared, along with other revisionists. In 2005, Andrew Jaspan, a Briton newly appointed editor of Melbourne’s The Age, was subjected to a vicious neo-con campaign that accused him of ‘reducing’ The Age to ‘another (liberal) Guardian.’

Flag-waving and an unctuous hand-on-heart jingoism about which sceptical Australians once felt a healthy ambivalence are now standard features at sporting and other public events. These serve to prepare Australians for renewed militarism and war, as ordained by the Bush Administration, and to cover attacks on Australia’s Muslim community. Speak out and you may break a 2005 law of sedition meant to intimidate with the threat of imprisonment for up to seven years.

Once described in the media as Bush’s ‘deputy sheriff,’ Howard did not demur when Bush, on hearing this, promoted him to ‘sheriff for south-east Asia.’ Like a mini-Blair, he has sent troops and Federal police to the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Papua New Guinea and East Timor. In newly independent East Timor, where Australian governments colluded with Indonesia’s 23-year bloody occupation, ‘regime change’ was effectively executed last year with the resignation of the Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri, who had the temerity to oppose Canberra’s one-sided exploitation of his country’s oil and gas resources.

However, it is one man, David Hicks, a spectacular loser in the new Australia, who now threatens Howard’s ‘lucky’ façade. Hicks was found among the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and sold as bounty to the Americans by CIA-backed warlords. He has spent more than five years in Guantánamo Bay, including eight months in a cell with no sunlight. He has been tortured, and never charged with any crime.

Howard and his Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, have refused even to request Hicks’s repatriation, as is his Constitutional right, because there are no Australian laws under which Hicks can be charged. Their cruelty is breathtaking.

A tenacious campaign by his father, Terry, has ignited a kind of public shame that is growing. This has happened before in Australia, such as the march of a million people across Sydney Harbour Bridge demanding justice for Black Australians, and the courageous direct action by young people who forced the closure of notorious outback detention camps for refugees, with their isolation cells, capsicum spray and beatings. Asylum seekers caught in their leaking boats by the ever-vigilant Australian Defence Force are now incarcerated behind electric fences on tiny Christmas Island more than 1,000 miles from the lucky country.

Howard faces no real opposition from the compliant Labor Party. The trade unions, facing a rollback of Australia’s proud record of workers’ rights and up to 43 per cent youth unemployment, have stirred, and filled the streets.

But perhaps something wider and deeper is coming from a nation whose most enduring and melancholy self-image is that of disobedient larrikins. During the recent Ashes cricket series, Ian Chappell, one of Australia’s most admired captains, walked out of the commentary box when Howard walked in. After seeing for himself conditions in a refugee prison, Chappell said, ‘These are human beings and you can’t just treat them like that … in cricketing parlance it was like cheating. They were being cheated out of a fair go.’

This is an edited version of a piece written for The Guardian and posted on John Pilger’s website johnpilger.com

Source : http://www.newmatilda.com

Pourquoi les australiens et les aborigenes laissent faire ça ?

Pourquoi les australiens et les aborigenes laissent faire ça ?

Parce que la majorité des Australiens (51,82% aux dernières élections fédérales) ont voté pour Howard et sa clique et sont aussi racistes qu'Arnault,

Mais bien sur, l'Australie est un pays bien connu pour son totalitarisme!
D'ailleurs c'est bien simple tous les jours on voit des refugies australiens debarquer sur les cotes d'Asie! .... Ces immigrants sont tous retenus parce qu'ils ont des visas en bonne et due forme! c'est bien connu...
l'Australie est une Coree du Nord dont le monde ignore l'existence! merci de nous avoir fait partager ton experience personnelle!

Alors que veux tu faire? les relacher dans la nature? leurs donner un visa temporaire? mais voyons! ils vont disparaitre et personne ne les reverra.

Refugee Mortezza Poorvadi
Last Update: Monday, February 12, 2007. 2:13pm AEST

Mortezza Poorvadi was born in Iran to an Iraqi mother – a source of constant persecution for Mortezza’s family. They struggled against Iranian Mullahs and the army of Saddam Hussein before finally escaping to Australia seven years ago after paying people smugglers in Indonesia to transport the family. Their tiny fishing boat – crammed with 280 people – was intercepted at Christmas Island and Mortezza was subsequently detained at Port Headline, Villawood and Woomera Detention Centres.

The Poorvadi family was forced to leave Iran after Mortezza’s mother’s true nationality was discovered. Mortezza was 16. "We had no power at all. Here we were like a toys in the hands of people smugglers, and they were passing us around. We knew it, but we couldn't do anything for it. He got us Indonesian visa, and put us on a holiday ship, which was great - three stories, swimming pool and everything. I have never had trips on ships so I thought, wow that's great.

"We stayed in Java three days and after that we were transferred to Jakarta, where we met the third people smuggler - the biggest one. And he asked us, ‘Where do you want to go?’ We thought, London.

"We spent twenty days in Bogur (Indonesia), when the people smugglers came to us and told us, ‘I can't send you to England from here - is there anywhere else do you want to go beside London and England?’"

Options like Canada and the US were discussed, but the time in limbo had taken its toll on Mortezza’s father. "My dad had had it,” remembers Mortezza. “I mean, he was just over his patience. He said ‘Look, where can you send me from here? I don't want to move again’, because any time we were passing through those immigrations was like five years off our life. It was hard to pass through immigration with a fake passport, fake visa and everything. [The people smuggler] said ‘Australia’. My dad said, ‘Where is Australia?’"

All the family knew of Australia was Skippy and the Australian World Cup soccer team, but they agreed to come. Mortezza’s mother was terrified of water, but finally agreed to board the boat to Australia. "It was a four metre by twelve metres fishing boat and [there were] 284 people on board already.

"When we saw that fishing boat, in the middle of the ocean with all that crowd on it, my mum just panicked. She said, ‘I don't want to go on that boat.’ The guy who was driving the boat said, ‘You have no choice, you have to get on.’ My mum started to panic, crying, screaming, but they wouldn't take us back. The only choice we had was, just go on board.

"The first thing [that] came in my head was, these people smugglers took our money, want to dump us in somewhere or probably sink us in middle of ocean and no one would find out as they said don't take anything with you, don't take any luggage or anything and we didn't have any documents. They had our money, they had our passports..."

The boat was boarded by Australian officials not far from Christmas Island, and the family was interviewed by immigration officials before being sent to Woomera Detention Centre. "As soon as we were reaching the Woomera, my mum saw the barbed wires and the fences, she start to cry. We knew exactly our troubles would start just now. It was absolutely hell. They put us in the middle of the desert where there was no proper food, no medication."

During his time in detention, Mortezza attempted suicide seven times. He believes his conversion to Christianity was his salvation, and his life took another happy turn when he was recognised as a refugee in 2003 and was released from detention. He’ll soon become a permanent Australian resident. "I'm studying mathematical science. Now I'm going to university where I always wanted to go."

Source : http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/conver ... 54.htm?nsw

En France 80% des clandestins le sont a cause de visas perimes.... Te souviens tu de ce bateau charge de plusieurs centaines d'immigrants qui s'etait jete sur une plage du sud de la France il ya quelques annees? et bien l'administration leurs avait donne un visa d'un mois pour presenter leurs demandes. Et PAS UN n'est revenu, ils se sont tous volatilises.

En admettant que l'administration australienne n'ait aucun coeur, il serait pourtant bien moins cher pour elle de filer un visa et que ces immigrants se debrouillent. Ils restent longtemps enfermes? ben oui, ils arrivent rarement avec des visas et des passeports. Rassembler toute cette documentation prend du temps.

De toute facon ces immigrants sont arrives comment? surement pas a pieds! ils ont du etre exploites par des passeurs en bateau qui n'hesiteront pas a recommencer en cas de succes.

Par contre si les australiens ont signes ces lois internationales concernant l'accueil des refugies, il est effectivement completement anormal qu'ils ne remplissent pas leurs engagements. S'ils n'ont rien signe et bien c'est la loi australienne qui prevaut, point barre.

Quant a ma soit disant photos "raciste" (mon pauvre garcon tu as vraiment besoin d'un dictionnaire!) et humiliante, elle est plus la par ironie qu'autre chose. Quand la betise atteint des sommets, le mieux est d'en rire!

Desole, moi je pense que l'on peut rire de la religion et de ses exces, ca s'appelle la liberte d'expression. Aujourd'hui elle est en danger a cause d' integristes religieux d'un cote et d'integristes politiquement correct comme toi de l'autre.

Quand tu tapes sur google 'clandestin mort' regarde un peu tous les articles qu'il y a :
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=bat ... DcountryFR
...55800 resultats!!! Tu veux vraiment encourager ca??

Il suffit de reconnaître officiellement aux plus sincères d'entre eux

en particulier les mineurs qui n'ont jamais commis de délit

Voici un autre exemple récent fort optimiste cité par la Presse nationale australienne ABC qui va dans le sens d'une régularisation progressive par visa de résidence temporaire:

Mortezza Poorvadi was born in Iran...

"We had no power at all. Here we were like a toys in the hands of people smugglers, and they were passing us around. We knew it, but we couldn't do anything for it.
[...]
It was hard to pass through immigration with a fake passport, fake visa and everything.
[...]
but finally agreed to board the boat to Australia. "It was a four metre by twelve metres fishing boat and [there were] 284 people on board already.
[...]
"When we saw that fishing boat, in the middle of the ocean with all that crowd on it, my mum just panicked.
The guy who was driving the boat said, ‘You have no choice, you have to get on.’
[...]
"The first thing [that] came in my head was, these people smugglers took our money, want to dump us in somewhere or probably sink us in middle of ocean

Oui, c'est exact. Très peu étaient revenus. Et trois d'entre eux avaient été retrouvés morts par les forces de l'ordre française. Des instructions pour homicide furent ouvertes.

Encore exact sur la forme. Sauf que sans les points nécessaires au Skilled Visa et sans argent pour payer les fees, ils continueront à postuler indéfiniment sans aucun succès.

surtout celles concernant ces pauvres femmes lapidées dans des pays islamistes où aucun droit des femmes n'existe.

relgion ont de toutes façons probablement vocation à disparaître dans les siècles qui viennent à l'heure où la science, la philosophie douce et le réel progrès humain permettront à l'humanité de trouver un équilibre sain.

De plus, toutes les religions qui ont fait acte de crime et de génocyde dans l'histoire,

Rick Posté le: 14 Fév 2007 à 10:36 Sujet du message:

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ca doit etre un hiver long, froid et tres c***** au canada

Arnaud: Le religion a répondu aux attentes de la société pendant ces deux milles dernières années. Aujourd'hui l'homme n'est qu'un consommateur dont l'unique but est de "jouir" du dernier produit à la mode.