Prologue

By Kasun Ubayasiri 

July 19 2013: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announces no asylum seeker arriving by boat will be settled in Australia.

March 29, 2017: 79 boats arrived in Australia between July 19, 2013, and July 27, 2014. Of the individuals on board, 1,596 were transferred to the Nauru Regional Processing Centre, 1,523 were transferred to the Manus Regional Processing Centre and 1,414 were issued with bridging visas in Australia. The selection is arbitrary, exercising an “non-delegable personal power” granted to the Minister.

March 1, 2019: The Medevac bill becomes law, paving the way for doctors to make medical rulings to evacuate refugees and asylum seekers detained offshore to Australia for urgent medical treatment. By the time the Law was repealed a year later, 192 detainees had been evacuated. They are detained primarily at the Kangaroo Point Alternative Place of Detention (APoD), and Melbourne’s Park Hotel APoD.

April 2, 2020: 120 Medevac refugees are locked up at the Kangaroo Point APoD when Queensland enters a hard COVID lockdown. 

THE YEAR LONG PROTEST:

The men first made headlines the day Brisbane went into COVID lockdown, when they stepped out onto a balcony perched above Route 15 to Brisbane’s Storey Bridge, holding handwritten pleas for freedom. 

Quietly spoken protester Farhad Rahmati said it was impossible for he and his ‘brothers’ to lockdown to protect themselves when the compound was breached daily by 80 or 90 people, including security guards, cleaners and detention centre heavies.

“This is a big industry,” the Iranian Kurdish civil engineer said over the phone in late April last year. 

“We are in a corner and we are defenceless and the opponents have no mercy on us, just throwing punches.”

“Detention itself has a high risk of depression, and you combine that with a pandemic and you feel like you are in a boxing ring,” he said.

To emphasise his point, he names those friends who’ve taken their own lives while tangled in the politics and red tape of being an asylum seeker in Australia.

Farhad is joined on the balcony by about two dozen fellow detainees – there are many more, 120 in fact, all men, all long-term inmates and all locked up in this repurposed Kangaroo Point motel after arriving in Brisbane under the MedeVac scheme months earlier.

Not everyone has access to the balcony, and those who don’t peer through barred windows at the handful of socially distanced people lined up outside the coffee shop on the corner opposite.

The men’s ‘balcony protest’ has attracted the attention of refugee activists who are starting to trickle in, to stand on the footpath outside the APoD in solidarity with those locked inside.

Veteran crusaders and progressive lawyers are joined on the roadside by young undergraduates in denim shorts and boots stretching their social justice chops. 

Pro-refugee protestor Matt Shepard says he simply cannot not sit back and do nothing.

“I keep coming here because some of the men inside are my friends, and even if they weren’t, they shouldn’t be locked up, and I don’t what to be a spectator to misery like this,” he said.

Within weeks the supporters’ ranks have grown and police order them to disperse, citing COVID rules around gatherings and essential activities.

But the detainees’ situation has not improved, and the protest must continue.

So in a cheeky move, the protesters develop an innovative socially distanced strategy to campaign within the legal limits of Queensland’s tough COVID restrictions.

They slip on their active wear, grab the nearest dog, bike or pram, and in what becomes known as the weekly ‘exercise protest’, walk, stretch and cycle around the detention centre all the while carrying signs of solidarity. 

From mid-April until well into a chilly June, they trod the same path, learning the detainees’ names and forging cross-fence friendships with each lap.

But then, late on the night of June 11, Border Force attempts to remove Farhad to BITA – the high security Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation centre in the industrial wasteland adjoining the Brisbane Airport.

He’s clearly become too vocal, too public and too accessible to sympathetic journalists.

Protestor Al Wicks is among a small group that rushes to the detention centre that night after receiving a ‘red-alert’ on the group’s heavily encrypted telegram messenger service.

And they don’t muck about.

Forming a blockade around the Border Force vans with their bodies, Wicks superglues their hands to the vehicle forcing the guards to return Fahad to his room.

But while the victory is sweet, it is short lived.

Wicks and another protestor are arrested, and Fahad is moved to BITA the following morning. 

“They have been detained here illegally and immorally…. and the one person we have contact with wants to silence him and wants to take him to a (high security) detention centre to further silence him,” Wicks says.

It would be easy to suppose the puff went out of the protest at this stage, but the removal of Fahad possibly to the government’s chagrin, seemed to galvanise the wider activist community.

The numbers of protesters now gathered around the APoD swells, and with COVID lockdowns relaxing, refugee advocacy groups and progressive organisations were free to call on members to join the defences and hold the line against further removals. 

The protest changes, also gear to a general call for the ‘KP120’s’ freedom and an end to seven years of detention limbo.

For the next 62 days the activists held a 24/7 blockade around the APoD with rostered shifts, meal rotas and checkpoints inspecting all vehicles going in and out of the compound.

It is loud, it is public and it is sustained. 

It is megaphones on Monday nights, it is music on the footpath and dancing on the road, it is  corflutes and recycled grocery boxes adorned with messages of support and hand -drawn hearts, it is poetry recitals directed to the windows, sleeping bags and beanies during the bitter nights, cards played on milk crate tabletop ,and over the phone pastoral care.

“We need to keep putting pressure, we need direct action and we need to see these people freed,” Wicks tells protestors on the first evening of the blockade. 

Locked up inside the compound but heartened by the visible support Iranian refugee Abdullah Moradi, tells the gathering via phone “You guys are awesome!”.

“We want to thank you all and we really appreciate your support.” 

He would later tell The Guardian newsite how the protest changed his life inside the ‘KP prison’.

“Before I wanted to sleep, I used medication. Now I don’t use medication to sleep because I look at a lot of people around, even in the rain, they stay in front of my window and they support us,” he said.

The first major mass rally of this new protest phase gathered even more momentum than organisers expected, drawing about 400 people to the now heavily fortified compound.

Setting a defiant yet sombre tone, 120 pairs of shoes are placed around the complex – one for each man locked up inside.

Protestors also mark a minute of silence for every year the men have spent in immigration detention – seven minutes for seven years.

 Like his ‘brother’ Abdullah, Amin Afravi says the protestors’ support gives him hope.

“We feel like people are behind us, so we are stronger, and we can fight for our freedom,” he says.

Weekly rallies and well-publicised disruptions continue for months, but the tide changes after plans for a mass sit-in on the Storey Bridge are quashed when Supreme Court Justice Jean Dalton issues an injunction prohibiting key protest organisers from mobilising.

It is a body blow to the movement.

It isn’t just that the organisers are sidelined, it’s the fear they’ll be in the dock for any protest activity on the assumption they organised by proxy.

So, the blockade is dismantled and it is whittled back to a small but defiant vigil outside the ‘KP prison’ gates. 

The activists continue to monitor vehicle movement in and out of the compound via their telegram forum until September 14, but by the end of Spring, the vigil is decidedly patchy, with a few snap actions, rush hour pickets and faith vigils punctuating the once bustling 24/7 landscape.

The local pizzeria that kindly left its toilets unlocked for the overnighters and provided pizzas for planning meetings has closed down; and in the absence of hands to hold them, ‘Free the Refugee’ protest signs have been taped or stapled to light poles and fences to remind rush hour drivers the war is not yet won.

The men on the balcony continue to hold their placards in the evenings when the traffic begins to crawl, but they are on borrowed time.

In a display of politics and sheer bastardry, detention centre authorities lock the balconies – effectively ending the daily protests and pushing the men out of sight. 

They wave to their friends now through the windows, but it’s not the same.

A few weeks later however, three of them are released on bridging visas. Over the next few months, 50 more.

Two young bold lawyers have entered the scene, and in a sense, have picked up where the protestors left off.

With strategies that could turn the spotlight back on the KP120 – just as the government has managed to douse the glare of public protest, the lawyers are offering the men a new hope.

The detainees, emboldened by the support of the protestors – their new friends on the outside who ensured they were seen and heard, have found renewed courage to fight.

Somali refugee Saif Ali Saif, who spent most of his life in refugee camps, would later say there was a different vibe inside the compound when the protests began, 

“The government doesn’t want to admit protests work so they tighten conditions even more for us, but then the relief comes later from another side,” he says.

There is no doubt in his mind. The KP120 would have remained out of sight, out of mind, alone and without hope without the protesters.

“I am thankful for their amazing humanity and support.” 

A little over a year since the protest began, the last of the Kangaroo Point medevac refugees are bundled into mini-buses and spirited out of the city. 

Their removal on April 16, 2021, brings the 379-day protest in and around the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel to an end.

The drab grey suburban motel that had been a virtual prison for a group of ‘Medevac’ refugees and asylum seekers, is now vacant and on its way to being yet another non-descript motel in the outer-city.

As for the KP ‘brothers’ who remain in the purgatory of detention, their eight-year battle for their freedom continues.

https://www.facebook.com/kp120multimedia

Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is a senior lecturer and Program Direc- tor of Journalism at Griffith University, Queensland Austra- lia. His research focuses on the role of journalism in Human rights including environmental rights, news media in armed conflict, and media censorship and its impact on democratic accountability.