BY BRIANNA PIKE
DARWIN — "Resistance called this high school walkout to demonstrate our anger at the federal government's treatment of the world's most desperate people", Resistance organiser Chris Atkinson told Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly.
Students from four schools converged on Raintree Park in Darwin's Smith Street mall on February 21 to demand an end to mandatory detention of refugees and the closure of all the governments refugee concentration camps.
Participants incarcerated themselves in a chicken-wire detention centre to symbolise the treatment of young refugees by the Howard government. Protesters opposed plans to use part of the Coonawara Naval Base in suburban Darwin as a refugee detention centre. Two three-metre high razor wire fences have already been erected around the camp.
"Not in the NT, not anywhere!", pledged Socialist Alliance candidate for Lord Mayor of Darwin, Ruth Ratcliffe. "The Socialist Alliance calls for all camps to be closed. The money saved from abandoning the Australian government's neo-colonial 'Pacific solution' should be used to provide housing, trauma counselling, English language classes and assistance in finding work or study", Ratcliffe declared.
"By walking out of school to protest today, we are helping build a pro-refugee alternative in the streets", Ryk Molon from Resistance told GLW.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 27, 2002.
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