The talk of the town over the past week has been the arrest of five activists on charges related to protests against the G20 summit in Melbourne, last November. Although there were arrests soon after the protests, this swoop on five homes and arrests by the ‘Police Terrorism Information Squad’ has people talking because of the severity of the charges, and the involvement of an anti-terror police unit.
The organisation targeted by police is known as the Arterial Bloc. In response to unprecedented levels of forceful policing, the AB used tactics unprecedented in Australian protest: they covered their faces to stop themselves being identified, and they used direct action, pushing through barricades and damaging one police van in an attempt to push through five lines of police. These actions got them harshly criticised from within the activist community, but the buck doesn’t stop there.
In response, police set up a task force, called Operation Salver, which used video footage and photographs of the protest to identify protesters. Rumour has it that they’ve also been watching communication on the internet.
Some of the people arrested on Tuesday morning were people I know. So people, especially people in the local activist community, are all abuzz about this latest development. And me, I’m scared.
The rumour that ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Aussie equivalent of the CIA) has been infiltrating campuses has even made it into the pages of one of the more conservative broadsheets, the Sydney Morning Herald. The other major rumour — that some of the arrestees weren’t even in Melbourne at the time, and that the police have just gone after anyone affiliated with anarchist organisations, doesn’t seem to be getting much news time. Why would it? It’d challenge the legitimacy of the state that gives the press its privileges.
The fact that videos and photographs were used by Taskforce Salver really does bring home the truth of how repressive the collusion between the state and news media really is. Why does the government need to use propaganda, when large private organisations organise, produce, and pay for it? All it needs to do, really, is put on a state funeral for its owners now and then (as well as pass legislation to enable further centralisation of media ownership), and they’re set.
Sarcasm aside, this conflation of protest and terror (when it was the police and the state that shut down the Melbourne CBD for a corporate summit), of military and police, can only be repressive. It’s a crackdown on all forms of challenge to the state and the capitalism it supports. More than anything, it’s actions like these which have characterised the consolidation of political regimes that terrorised their citizens.
I, for one, am terrified.
