The Australian government is a human rights abuser, argues Liz Walsh in Socialist Alternative. It presides over a refugee policy that condemns around 5,000 asylum seekers to rot in Australia’s ever-expanding immigration detention system.
Detention centre: prison by another name.
Some languish behind barbed wire in suburbs like Villawood and Maribyrnong, and in Perth or Darwin, boxed in like sardines in tiny white rooms and under 24 hour guard.
Others are held in remote detention centres, like Christmas Island, where an ocean and the legal fiction of excision from the migration zone separate them from us. Or they’re shunted off to Curtin and Leonora in remote Western Australia, with its searing heat, primitive support services and precious few visitors to relieve the boredom or bring connection to the world of the living.
Refugees who reach Australian waters by boat have often experienced great trauma in the countries from which they have fled. Perhaps they have seen family members killed before their eyes, or perhaps they are torture survivors themselves.
Our government’s treatment piles trauma on top of their already deep wounds, so much so that there is an acknowledged epidemic of self-harm and suicide as detainees give way to their despair. Not a day goes by when there isn’t an attempted overdose on anti-depressants, an attempted hanging, or maybe it’s another wrist, arm or chest that’s been cut, or a hunger strike that’s begun.
Ena Grigg, a mental health nurse working in Darwin’s Northern Immigration Detention Centre (NIDC), in an interview with Lateline last year, broke the silence on life inside the detention centres: “Being locked in a prison with not knowing how you are going to get out or when you are going to get out or why you are even there, and not getting any answers as to how they can get out is driving people mad.”
But most of this human tragedy unfolding every day behind the wire goes unreported. Sewing your lips together now appears to be considered by our mainstream news editors to be an unremarkable act. They’re too busy raising the alarm about another boat in Australia’s waters.
Hundreds of minors also still remain locked away in places like Darwin Airport Lounge, a so-called Alternative Place of Detention (APOD) in government bureaucratic speak. It is a prison by any other name. You can’t choose to leave the compound. And the guards watch over you just the same.
Illustrating the insanity of it all, ASIO have just given their first adverse security assessment to a refugee child – Ali Abbas, an accompanied teenager from Kuwait who arrived in Australia by boat in 2010. He can never know on what grounds ASIO consider him a threat to Australian security. Nor does he have any legal avenues to challenge this absurd assessment. Unable to be deported back to Kuwait, having been found to be a refugee in need of protection, this young man now faces a life of indefinite detention or deportation to a third country, a fate shared by dozens of other refugees.
And then there are the thousands of adults who have fled from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran, Burma and beyond, whose lives and dreams of a life worth living are deemed by our government to be less important. They are still wasting away in detention, stewing in a combustible mix of overcrowding, distress and anger at the injustice of it all.
This mix frequently ignites in mass hunger strikes, breakouts, riots and roof top protests – where banners proclaiming “We are human” are hastily made out of bed-sheets and are held up hoping someone out there will read them.
In November last year it seemed that some of these detainees might get a bit of relief when immigration minister Chris Bowen announced that asylum seekers in detention could be eligible for a bridging visa, allowing them to live in the community with family or friends while their refugee claims were being processed. Bowen slated that up to 100 bridging visas a month could be issued – which if you did the maths, meant it would take years for all detainees in the system now to be released into the community.
The policy announcement was far from an end to mandatory detention. Many asylum seekers would not be eligible for the visas. What’s more the level of support the visa provided was far from adequate. But anything would be better than detention.
The bridging visas have, however, become a chimera for most detainees. Despite interviewing all detainees in NIDC, raising hopes of release, little more than 100 detainees have been given bridging visas. While the rest of Australia was celebrating the coming of the New Year, a detainee inside NIDC spoke to refugee activists on the outside about their frustrations: “This is not fair. They are playing with us. People have been waiting for too long.”
The bridging visas appear to be little more than PR spin and yet another carrot and stick mechanism for “behaviour modification” – if you don’t agitate and protest about your unjust incarceration, if you don’t self-harm, then maybe, just maybe we might release you. But if you engage in “non-compliant” behaviour, then punishment awaits.
While the immigration department denies that the existence of such a regime, leaked documents from the department published by The Age tell another story.
Often the punishment involves moving detainees to a detention centre in another city or remote location, severing them from friends made in detention, supporters on the outside, as well as their caseworkers and legal support. Christmas Island has become a modern day Devil’s Island, a dumping ground for refugee “troublemakers”.
Here 50 Guantanamo style cages are being built for the purpose of “behaviour modification”. For 23 hours a day asylum seekers can be held in these cages, and only let out into an open air cage at the back of their cell if they’re well behaved. Alerting the refugee rights community to this new horror, Pamela Curr, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre’s campaign coordinator, wrote: “Don’t be shocked – this is Australia. No police investigation, no judge or jury, no court required. Summary extrajudicial punishment in our administrative detention only camps.”
These are the sordid torture techniques used on refugees who get to Australia. But the Labor government is working hard to make sure refugees never set foot on Australian soil. Despite the High Court ruling that the Malaysia “people-swap” is illegal, Labor hasn’t given up.
Having the good sense to slam this attempt at trading in human cargo, Anwar Ibrahim, the Opposition leader in Malaysia, said to ABC Radio: “How do you expect us to support a program knowing the notorious record that we have treating foreign labour, treating illegal immigrants in this country? Have you forgotten and thrown the whole principle of the rule of law [and] constitutional rights to the sea?”
The sales pitch for offshore processing changes depending on the week. Sometimes they’re hard line “border security” nuts protecting us from an imminent refugee invasion. At other times they simulate concern for the safety of refugees. Offshore processing they say is merely an attempt to stop refugees risking their lives.
If this concern for the lives of refugees was genuine they would not have just refused settlement of 40 refugees processed in Indonesia by the UNHCR and referred to Australia. The 40 are Sri Lankan Tamils who were among the 240 refugees aboard a boat headed for Australia in 2009 that was intercepted by the Indonesian navy and taken instead to the port of Merak with the urging of the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
They were promised resettlement within a year, but over a hundred remain in limbo in Indonesia. Running out of options they are being pushed once more to try to reach Australia by boat. Nimal, one of the Tamil refugees stuck in Indonesia, spoke to Sydney’s Refugee Action Collective:
There is no justice. We have been very patient for over two years, but we are losing patience. We were processed by the UNHCR. There is a big risk for us to get a boat to Australia. But we are left with no choice. Is the Australian government is trying to kill us?
Then there is the criminalisation of people smuggling which makes the boat journey more dangerous than it need be. Rather than being able to organise boats ferrying refugees in the open, the whole process is driven underground. And the Australian government’s policy of impounding and destroying all seized fishing boats, makes it more likely that unseaworthy boats will be used.
Even if fortress Australia succeeds in deterring refugees from seeking asylum in Australia, this will not stop desperate people from fleeing war and persecution. They will still try to find somewhere safe to live. Only they’ll be forced instead to undertake equally risky journey’s to America or Europe, where they will potentially suffocate in a shipping container or be crammed into the back of a meat truck and freeze to death.
But saving lives is not the name of the game when it comes to the two parties that compete to run Australian capitalism. They want us to see refugees as competitors for the crumbs thrown down from their table rather than as potential allies in the fight for a better world.
Those of us that see through the lies of the media and the politicians need to join with those at the frontline of the fight for a society that welcomes refugees and treats human beings with the respect they deserve.
Abdul Baig, a former detainee, will be speaking on the experience of detention at this year’s Marxism 2012 conference
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