Freedom Flotilla spokesperson speaking at this event with the Beyond Borders Collective
6pm Saturday 30th November Trades Hall Melbourne
It seems like every day we hear of some new tragedy at sea. We hear about Operation Sovereign Borders extending into Indonesia and Malaysia. We see slave-like conditions created by cruel visa rules. Every day people’s hopes and attempts at a future are destroyed by Australia’s shifting border practices. These are moments in an ongoing and brutal assertion of sovereignty by a regime built on stolen land and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. A lot of us are feeling hopeless about the state ofpolitics around the Australian border.
It is now, in this moment, that we want to organise, think, and speak together. The border is not a natural or inevitable thing. What can a cross-border, a no-border, a pro-refugee and migrant politics look like in Australia, today? Whose actions have come to count as political? Which actions, movements, and struggles are being ignored? How can we break from the language that defines the discussion now? – ‘genuine refugees’ ‘economic migrants’ ‘dodgy international students’ and ‘457 workers taking Aussie jobs’
We don’t have the answers: this forum is about discussing these questions and building solidarity and the potential for resistance.
SPEAKERS:
Lia Incognita is a Shanghainese/Melburnian writer, performer and mediamaker who co-hosts Queering the Air on 3CR Community Radio.
Kaneez Raza is a student from Pakistan. She is here on a scholarship (endeavour award) from the Australian government and is now studying Nursing. She is a Hazara by ethnicity.
Angela Mitropoulos (University of Sydney) was a founding member of xborder in 2000, and involved in producing noborder media for Woomera2002 and the Flotilla to Nauru in 2004. She has written extensively on borders and some of her most recent writings can be found in Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (London: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia). Her current book project is titled Infrastructures of Uncommon Forms.
Dawood arrived in Australia in 2011, having lived illegally in Quetta, Pakistan, for many decades, where he was a politically active Marxist. Dawood is an Afghan Hazara who arrived in Australia by boat and was subsequently recognised as a refugee.
Ruben Blake is a co-ordination of the Freedom Flotilla to West Papua, an unprecedented act of creative resistance that challenged the borders between Australia, West Papua and PNG in many directions.
More to be announced…
freedom flotilla 
Well I do have the solution for West Papua, a nation which has been subjected to cruel abuse by the United Nations including Indonesia, Australia, the US, and other UN members since September 1962. For questionable & immoral motives the US blackmailed the Dutch into signing an agreement asking the UN under article 85 & chapter XII of the Charter of the United Nations ( http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter12.shtml ) to occupy & legally take over responsibility (article 76) for the colony.
By making General Assembly resolution 1752 (XVII) authorising the UN occupation of West New Guinea the UN irreversibly made itself legally bound to the obligations of articles 76, 85, 87, and 88 of the UN Charter in relationship with the colony of West Papua; and under article 103 of the Charter nothing in any agreement can ever set aside those legal obligations of the UN Charter.
Under international law and under Australian Commonwealth law in Australia it is our government’s legal duty to promote “self-determination or independence” of West Papua…
.. all we the public need to do is force our government or get any UN government to add notice of General Assembly resolution 1752 (XVII) to the agenda of the UN Trusteeship Council. That will compel the UN Security Council members to commence their legal duties under articles 85, 87, and 88 of the Charter which in turn will compel Indonesia and the rest of the UN members to begin their legal obligations under articles 1 and 76 of the Charter in their relationships with West Papua. Sovereignty is an absolute legal right the people of West Papua have, and we should call on our governments to honour that legal obligation of being members of the UN.