POLICE are looking for 14 asylum seekers who escaped from the Campsfield Detention Centre, run by the US Company GEO and secured by Group 4, after a fire was started there. The 14 remain free after 12 asylum seekers were recaptured.
Asylum seekers imprisoned in Campsfield are not criminals, and have never been found guilty of any crime in this country.
Yet they are kept in worse than prison conditions, behind locked doors, walls and barbed wire.
In the operation against the escapees so far, many officers in riot gear have been brought in to the camp, with police dogs, to maintain order and prevent others escaping, while large numbers of officers are searching for the liberated asylum seekers using a helicopter.
The fire started on Saturday evening after more than 150 asylum seekers had agreed to suspend a hunger strike that they had been engaged in.
The hunger strikers maintained that they were being illegally imprisoned and badly treated in extremely overcrowded circumstances.
A statement issued by the detainees last week said that the centre ‘is a health hazard with 70 per cent of people infected with flu.
‘Paracetamol is the only medicine made available and two weeks ago even this ran out.
‘Campsfield is rife with scabies, but only staff are issued with gloves.
‘Although detainees are held as civil detainees, not convicted prisoners or prisoners on remand, food, toilets and showers are a lot worse than in prisons.’
It was also alleged that some detainees were being held even though they had won appeals against deportation or had agreed to go back to their countries of origin.
These illegal measures are in use against asylum seekers who would be only too happy to work to keep themselves and their families!
At the same time as the government is persecuting asylum seekers, many of whom are from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Serbian province of Kosovo which the imperialist powers have destabilised and destroyed with their so-called wars of liberation, hundreds of thousands of migrants are streaming into the country from all over eastern Europe and are being welcomed by the bosses and the government as cheap labourers.
It seems that what the government has got against the asylum seekers is that they are, in the main, brown or black skinned or Muslim.
Whereas the eastern Europeans from the new EU states are all white Christians and therefore much more suitable as far as the government is concerned.
We have seen thousands of Indian doctors forced to return to their countries of origin by changes in government regulations that stipulate that would be NHS doctors from EU states must take first place in the queue for NHS jobs!
Of course there is a lot of history to this, even in post imperial days. The release of papers from the 1951 Churchill government show that in 1954 his government was seeking to keep ‘coloured people’ out of Britain.
He was later superseded by Enoch Powell with his Rivers of Blood speech made in 1968, fourteen years after the Churchill papers were drawn up.
Now we have the Campsfield Detention Centre and the others modelled on it, where non-criminal asylum seekers are treated as if they were criminals when they are only Asians or Muslims.
The News Line demands that Campsfield Detention Centre is closed at once, and all of the centres like it.
We demand that all racist immigration acts be repealed and that all workers be allowed to come to the UK to seek work and raise their families, not as cheap labour slaves but at trade union rates and conditions of employment.
Racism is a product of capitalism and imperialism. All three need to be abolished by the world socialist revolution.
