ON RECENT EVENTS<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Recently a conflict has arisen in the Melbourne squatting community that we feel necessary to issue a collective response to.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s relationship with the owners to threaten others, and through various other deceitful and manipulative behaviours.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
A \u2018mediation process\u2019 was asked for by M & C in response to the situation and turned out to be a complete farce. The \u201cunbiased mediation\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
When M & C outright stated that they will use the intervention of the state, police and the owners to \u2018resolve\u2019 the conflict in their favour, the \u2018non-violence\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
As an assembly of squatters and people in solidarity from around Melbourne, we see M & C\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
We actively oppose M & C\u2019s 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 \u201canarchists\u201d and snitches.<\/p>\n
– Squatting Solidarity Assembly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading