Sarah Ross: 'their incarceration is killing them slowly, progressively, surely and without mercy
Channel: Green Left
Date: 2014-04-13

Refugee Rights Action Network member Sarah Ross speaking at Palm Sunday refugee rights rally in the grounds of St George's Cathedral, Perth on 13 April 2014.

Refugee Rights Action Network:
http://www.facebook.com/rran.org

Green Left TV:
http://www.greenlefttv.org.au

Video footage from Alex Bainbridge and Zeb Parkes

#Justice4Refugees

Transcript of Sarah Ross' Palm Sunday speech, 13-4-14.

I stand here today, delivering one of the most difficult speeches I have ever written. The past few weeks have been filled with heartbreak, injustice and stories that are longing to escape the confines of the fences they are contained in - and I have to grapple with my desire to tell you all of them. I have never felt a more pressing or urgent time or sense of responsibility to tell them than now.

I deliver this speech to you today with the voices of a man in Yongah Hill Detention Centre - who has been denied as a refugee, despite having Taliban bullets still physically embedded in his body - in the back of my mind and at the forefront of my heart.

I deliver this speech to you today, with the assumption that my friend on Manus Island who first introduced himself to me as FRT 003 -- his boat ID number because he had forgotten his name -- is yet again under suicide watch as I haven't heard from him the past three days - and having had him confess to me that he had tried to hang himself and would undoubtedly try do so again.

I deliver this speech to you today with the knowledge that last week an asylum seeker on Manus Island tried to electrocute himself, and another put his head through a glass window. That in Sydney a Tamil refugee doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire because he would rather burn to death in Australia than be sent back to Sri Lanka.

I deliver this speech to you today with the knowledge that there are two Syrian men in Manus Island Detention Centre who have been on hunger strike depriving their bodies of food for the past 60 days.

That symptomatic of starvation, their bodies are breaking down their muscles, their organs, their nervous system and that the beat and strength of their hearts grows fainter with each day. That they are on hunger strike because they wish to be returned to Syria - a brutal warzone - rather than stay in an Australian Immigration Detention Centre.

As someone who visits in detention I can say with no greater certainty or authority that Australian Immigration Detention Centres are factories for mental illness. They are institutional machines designed to detain, to deter, to degrade and most of all to break people. They are machines engineered to replicate conditions more horrific and more inhumane than the horrendous genocide and the blood soaked war zones that people are fleeing from.

Read more (with photos): http://socialistallianceperth.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/palm-sunday-march-for-justice4refugees.html