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lyrics

Flights of Shame

In the back of the holiday flight there's someone shackled, crying to be free
Beaten up, throttled, silenced by private security
Sent back to death and torture by a shameful policy.

Remember Jimmy Mubenga
Remember Joy Gardner
Remember Faith and her children, and all the other exiles looking for peace
Who have suffered or died at the hands of immigration.

Our wars of aggression and our economic policies make innocent people into refugees.
We have no right to deny them sanctuary
Shame on us to deny them sanctuary.

To avoid embarrassment, the European governments charter flights of shame.
Like KQ 101, the Shame of Africa - death flight could be its other name.
Our post-colonial policies make people into refugees,
We have no right to deny them sanctuary.

Remember all the children and families
Seized from their homes at dawn
Crying with terror, locked in vans, driven for hours, held in detention indefinitely.
How can you justify such a policy?
We have no right to deny them sanctuary - shame on us to deny them sanctuary.

Jimmy Mubenga died in 2010 while being deported from Heathrow to Angola. Three G4S security staff who used violent 'restraint techniques' were arrested subsequently and are still undergoing investigation but at the time of writing no-one has been charged with his murder.

Joy Gardner, originally from Jamaica, died in hospital in 1993 after a struggle with police and an immigration officer who came to to her home in London to serve a deportation order. Her head was bound with tape until she suffocated and went into a coma.
The three police were acquitted of manslaughter in 1995.

Nigerian Faith and her three small children were snatched in a dawn raid from their home in Birmingham and taken to a detention centre. Subsequently the children saw their mother beaten up by guards who tried to force them onto a flight to Italy.

See 'Outsourcing Abuse' by Birnberg Peirce and Partners, Medical Justice and NCADC

KQ101 - Kenya Airways - the so-called 'Pride of Africa' , Flight KQ 101 flies deported asylum seekers from Heathrow to Kenya, from whence people are returned to countries with dubious human rights records all over the continent of Africa, such as DC Congo and Cameroon.

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from Songs for interesting times, released April 4, 2012
All songs written and performed by camilla
cancantata

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Camilla Cancantata Knighton, UK

Camilla Cancantata, composer and improviser, and founding member of Footloose, a community arts group.

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