ON RECENT EVENTS
Over the past few years squatters in Melbourne have struggled to build an active, dynamic, and supportive community. For us squatting is an act of liberation where we create spaces where rulers cannot define our lives and where we refuse the management of our needs by the state.
Recently a conflict has arisen in the Melbourne squatting community that we feel necessary to issue a collective response to.
In a house in North Coburg that has been squatted for 4 years, 2 people (M & C) who moved in less than a year ago have tried to claim the house as their own and evict the other occupants. This has been done primarily through using the police and M & C’s relationship with the owners to threaten others, and through various other deceitful and manipulative behaviours.
M & C have a history of intimidation and abusive relations with others. They have a history of creating problems in our community. And now they have threatened to call the police on some comrades if they don’t vacate their own home. This is an inexcusable and despicable act. M & C are trying to take advantage of their perceived weakness of our community to dominate spaces for their own selfish needs, while throwing their supposed comrades out on the street.
A ‘mediation process’ was asked for by M & C in response to the situation and turned out to be a complete farce. The “unbiased mediation” was used by M & C to enforce their terms, to keep the evictees out of their own home and to exclude and silence the community gathering in solidarity outside the house.
When M & C outright stated that they will use the intervention of the state, police and the owners to ‘resolve’ the conflict in their favour, the ‘non-violence’ mediators stayed completely silent. It is complete hypocrisy to stay silent, and therefore complicit, when such extreme violence is threatened against others. We recognise that the police and the state are the forces which continually and overwhelmingly impose systemic violence on all of us.
As an assembly of squatters and people in solidarity from around Melbourne, we see M & C’s actions to be an attack not just on a few individuals, but to all of us who identify as squatters or as anarchists. We strongly emphasize the need to raise our voices together in defiance. We are calling out these snitches. We won’t tolerate people in our community or political space who use the threat of legal and police violence to coerce others to bend to their will.
We actively oppose M & C’s attempt to seize control of the house. We collectively express our solidarity to the comrades that M & C have attempted to throw out of the house, and who refuse to be quietly evicted by false “anarchists” and snitches.
– Squatting Solidarity Assembly
Cool story Bro. Sounds similar to what’s going on in the Chhattisgarh forests, more important though cos it’s in Australia.
As you were.
P Justo, does that make the SSA’s gripe less valid? Of course there are worse things happening in the world. I suppose this blog should be a compendium of all the bad things happening in the world simultaneously, should it? With the bad things itemised according to their relative importance to the Earth and its people? Except that that would take forever, and be impossible, and would be about as unwieldy as a thing could be. If it’s so important to you, write your own damn blog about it, instead of bitching on other people’s blogs about issues that they feel are of importance to them, and hence wish to highlight.
Cool story Derek.
That’s the problem with anarchy. There are no rules.
And can people stop saying “cool story”? Sarcasm is the charlatan’s excuse for wit, and is a pretty piss-poor way of convincing anybody you’re right, because it just makes you sound like a brattish, entitled dick.
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Riveting tale, chaps.
Intriguing history, gentlemen.
Is there a squatting community in Brisbane?
Also- is it possible to be able to live self sufficiently in relative comfort while squatting, and entirely avoid, or at least severely limit, one’s contribution to the capitalist economy, through either work or purchase of commodities? Are there any modern examples of this on a large scale or continuing long term? Or any in Australia?