April 2017 – DISACCORDS

Sydney: Anzac heckler charged over offensive yells

25 April 2017 – A man has been charged with offensive behaviour after he yelled out during the one minute’s silence at the Anzac Day dawn service in Sydney’s CBD.

The 32-year-old man interjected during the minute of silence between The Last Post and Reveille at the commemoration service in Martin Place on Tuesday.

“The courageous will never be silent as long as these wars continue. Senseless violence. Stop the wars. Bring peace to the world,” he yelled.

The man was arrested and later charged with behaving in an offensive manner in a public place, a police spokeswoman told journalists.

He was granted conditional bail to appear at Downing Centre Local Court on May 18.

Self-styled “General” Joseph Mekhael, 32, posted a picture of himself giving the thumbs up after being released on conditional bail earlier today.

“I just got out of jail after disrupting the celebration of war that is #anzacday and being assaulted by some of Sydney’s weakest pencil-necked police puppets!” he wrote.

On Monday, a war memorial in Melbourne was defaced with anarchist symbols and anti-war slogan “War is Murder”.

The red paint was scrubbed off the brick monument outside Warrandyte RSL in the city’s north ahead of Tuesday’s commemorations.

Melbourne: Warrandyte war memorial vandalised with anarchist symbols on eve of Anzac Day

25 April 2017 – A war memorial in Warrandyte has been vandalised with the words “war is murder” on the eve of Anzac Day.

The stone memorial was also spray-painted with red anarchist symbols.

The RSL will try to remove the graffiti in time for Tuesday's Anzac Day march.

Warrandyte RSL president Henk Van Der Helm said he was “utterly disgusted” by the vandalism.

He suspected the vandals struck overnight and said the RSL would desperately try to remove the graffiti in time for Tuesday’s Anzac Day march, which will conclude at the stone memorial.

About 600 residents and local MPs are expected to take part in an Anzac Day march in the picturesque suburb in Melbourne’s north-east.

Philipines: Militant Farmers, Peasants Fight to Bury Feudalism With ‘Occupy’ Movement

26 April 2017 – Taking aim at the most powerful oligarchs in the Philippines, rural poor militants are striking at colonial-style feudalism through #OccupyLuisita.

In a bid to reassert their right to rural lands, farm workers and peasants in the Philippines have directly seized and occupied property claimed by one of the archipelago’s largest banks and main oligarch families, the Aquino clan. The move is an escalation of a long campaign to dismantle the unjust system of feudalism and landlord rule inherited from the period of Spanish colonialism.

Gathered in the hundreds and carrying signs with slogans such as, “Land to the Tillers, Not to Their Killers,” members and supporters of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas — a militant mass movement of small farmers, landless peasants, farm workers, rural youth and women — converged on a walled-off section of Hacienda Luisita, a massive sugar plantation in the Tarlac province controlled by the Cojuangco-Aquino political dynasty..As hundreds of police and private security guards looked on, 700 farmers took turns destroying a concrete wall enclosing large tracts of land that were illegally sold to the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation. Eventually, a farm tractor was brought in to pull sections of the wall down. While the farmers dispersed that afternoon, they swore to return and undertake the collective cultivation of the land.

For the farmers, the walled-off enclosure represents the broken promise of land reform that the Philippine rural poor have been fighting for decades to win in the face of illegal and semi-legal methods of dispossession and open robbery by ruling elite families.

“The farmers’ united and militant assertion of their rights and interests is an effective strategy to confront repulsively unequal class relations,” the group said. | Photo: Amihan Mabalay

“Kadamay expresses its full support for the #OccupyLuisita movement as it echoes our own call for the government to own up to its sins and finally begin to give to people what is due them,” Kadamay chair Gloria Arellano said, noting that the land remains abandoned “simply because the landlords and the government hold on to their spoils rather than fulfill their duties to the people. Just like the idle housing units, the ruling class would rather see homes and land go unused rather than be owned or made productive by the broad masses of the Filipino people.”

The mass action, given the hashtag #OccupyLuisita by the peasant movement, recalled the recent successful takeover and redistribution of government housing undertaken by allied urban group Kadamay in Bulacan province, called #OccupyBulacan.

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May Day Call-Out

May Day 1M Poster

From the 1m Collective:

As part of our call-out for an Anti-Capitalist May Day we would like to provide some information about an event we will be holding, as well as some general information and ideas surrounding the initial call-out.

We are an initiative made up of various individuals who are working towards organising an Anti-Capitalist themed May Day event in Armidale, which is situated on Anaiwan land (an area in so-called Australia). The aim of the event will be to bring people together to hold discussions on our conditions and experiences as workers; to devise strategies for improving our lives; and to build support for all sectors in struggle, whether worker, unemployed, local or refugee.

Our initial call-out was a general call to action, and for those who would wish to, or are interested in, an encouragement to organise their own events wherever they are. Here, in so-called Australia, yearly we see a sombre march made up of political parties, bureaucratic trade-unions walking the same set-out route with no feeling, inspiration, or general opposition to the status-quo. What is worse, is that at the end, it usually culminates in a speech from a labor party leader.

From many anarchists/anti-authoritarians/anti-capitalists, we here the same arguments year after year: that is is a great opportunity to get our information out, that we need to be involved with those who are already involved in a union or want to take part in a march. While this may be true in the smallest way, the fact we walk passively behind a contingent of labor, liberal and greens party members is really enough to chuck any argument in defence of this misery out the window. How can we really demonstrate a shift from the perspective of beautifying an exploitative system when we are only tagging along to a procession that has long forgotten the need to struggle against capital and state? We do not condemn those who take part in these rallies, we just envision and hope for more; we desire a movement that can point to, and address the disasters of capitalism. This one day won’t amount to that, but it can highlight so much more than a march made up of political parties/supporters of this cruel system.

We take inspiration from our comrades in Montreal – as well as those throughout the world – who have in determined fashion continued to remember and demonstrate the anti-capitalist and subversive spirit May Day emanates from.

It may not be much, it may not be taken up everywhere or even elsewhere, as we desire, but it will not prevent us from trying. To start somewhere is all we can attempt.

Perth: Riot police pelted with bricks at wild party

Several police cars were damaged as police tried to break-up an out–of-control party.

19 April 2017 – Police officers called to break-up a party in Perth’s south have been pelted with bottles and bricks.

The officers were called to a home on Murchison Road in Waikiki around 11.25pm on Tuesday night after receiving reports of several men fighting.

It will be alleged as police went to assist one group of people, bottles, bricks and wooden stakes were thrown at them.

Several police cars received minor damage as an out of control gathering was declared.

Riot squad officers attended to disperse the crowd, with bricks and other items thrown at their shields.

A 22-year-old Baldivis man has been charged with criminal damage and a 16-year-old Caversham boy will be summonsed to appear in court at a later date for trespassing.

Cambodia: Villagers, soldiers in land battle

Local Phan Sina (centre right) on Friday confronts soldiers she accuses of attempting to steal land she has cultivated for years

11 April 2017 – Villagers involved in a long-running land dispute in Kratie province’s Sambor district have prevented soldiers from building a fence around disputed land that the army intends to use as a sniper training ground.

The two-year-old conflict surrounding 20 hectares in O’Krieng commune’s O’Kandie village between villagers and the military’s Regiment 42-Ngor flared up again on Friday morning when 10 soldiers, one of them armed with a rifle, brought material to build a fence around the land, which locals have been cultivating since 1997, according to rights activists and villagers.

“I stood in front of [the soldiers’] tractor. I told them to shoot me, but they did not,” said villager Phan Sina, who belongs to one of the six affected families.

Sina said soldiers had been trying to use her 180-by-600-metre plot for sniper training since 2015. She said land titling volunteers measured her land in 2013 as part of a nationwide reform effort and issued a receipt for her, though she is still waiting for the actual title because of a complaint by the soldiers.

“The soldiers accused us of grabbing their land. I said that if I did grab the land, you would have beaten or handcuffed me already,” she said, in turn accusing the soldiers of slashing hundreds of her cashew trees.

Philipines: Homeless Families Occupy 6,000 Vacant Public Housing Units

31 March 2017 – Thousands of homeless families have occupied over 6,000 abandoned and empty housing units in six public housing sites in Bulacan province north of Metro Manila since March 8, 2017, International Working Women’s Day.

Led by the Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (Kadamay), an urban poor organization, and supported by various activist groups, those who taking part in the occupation have put up barricades and held their ground for almost a month already in the face of harassment and threats of eviction by housing authorities and police forces.

Early into the occupation, President Rodrigo Duterte accused the movement of sowing “anarchy” and vowed to use force to evict them from the mass housing units. “If you want to ignore the law, you cannot do that. I will force the issue with eviction,” he said.

Insisting that the occupied households have been vacant and left to rot for years while thousands remain homeless, Kadamay did not back down from their assertion of the right of the poor to avail of free public housing.

After a dialogue by housing officials with Kadamay, the Duterte government backed off from the planned forced eviction of the families, which was scheduled to begin last March 27. Kadamay called this an important victory of the collective struggle of the poor.

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