The shame of a nation
The policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers in Australia is a narrative of despair and lost hope. It is a story of misuse of power and political abuse, which stands in stark contrast to our shared humanity. Far too many losses abound for children, women and men who were caged in Australia, including lost hope, lost connections and destroyed childhoods. The brutal policies and practices are briefly described in this paper before considering endeavours to re-story the way in which asylum seekers have been depicted.
In 1992, the Labor Government secured the system of mandatory detention through legislation. The policy was ramped up in successive years with the introduction of temporary protection visas, 'the Pacific Solution' with detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and the excision of islands from Australia's migration zone. Rather than recognising the desperation of people seeking safe haven, we were duped into believing that Australia was being swamped by bogus claimants, 'illegals' who had 'jumped the queue', would-be terrorists and people who threw their children overboard. The nation failed to be shaken by the deaths of 353 children, women and men who died on their way to Australia on a vessel known as the SIEV X, or to the Iraqis as the Ship of the Damned. We became immune to the increasing exposure of the harms done to people through the cruelty of long-term and indeterminate detention, where people were stripped of their autonomy and humanity.
Parallel to the harm done to individuals, the injury to the nation was immeasurable, and credible international human rights bodies continually condemned the shame of the nation.
At the same time that the dominant narrative was taking hold, another story unfolded. Refugee advocates and health professionals portrayed the harms being done in our name, and humanised the asylum seeker as a person worthy of embrace into our society. The advocates saw asylum seekers not as a threat but as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters and friends. Dispelling the notion of the devious 'invading other', the advocates offered what support they could to those detained, and after their release, while at the same time agitating for an end to mandatory detention. While detention stripped people of much of their autonomy in an attempt to render them powerless and compliant, the advocates pushed for policies that restored asylum seekers to their full humanity.
The advocacy movement represented a new history war and the government and the advocates used divergent means to present their polarised viewpoints. The government was cunningly able to invoke the power of the mainstream media, whereas advocates resorted to alternative ways of disseminating information including through email lists.
For the advocates, the language that predominated was one of abuse, broken lives, damaged health and death. Alongside these were some hopeful narratives of courage, resilience, freedom and hospitality. What was particularly moving was how the advocates put their lives on hold to deal with this policy scourge and to prop up asylum seekers who were subjected to the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Advocates speak of how once beginning to visit detention nothing else was more important and the obligation continued beyond the burnout frequently experienced.
The approaches of the advocacy varied and this paper tells of one project, The People's Inquiry into Detention.
The People's Inquiry
The People's Inquiry into Detention was an endeavour to present the stories from the perspective of those who had directly experienced detention. It represented a retelling of Australia's policy distortion so the stories of detention would be on the public record for the future of the nation.
This citizen's inquiry began after the cruel treatment meted out to an Australian resident, Cornelia Rau, was revealed. This severely mentally ill woman had been thought to be an illegal German immigrant called Anna who, through the ineptitude of the authorities, was detained in the Baxter Immigration Detention Centre in Port Augusta. After a public outcry the government was forced to conduct an inquiry into the circumstances of her detention, but refused to widen it to others. Out of outrage, compassion and deep concern, the heads of social works schools in Australia took on a citizen's inquiry into immigration detention.
With very few resources, this became a collective endeavour joined by many volunteer advocates and we held public hearings throughout Australia and received written submissions. The most compelling were the stories of the asylum seekers themselves – of the 200 people who spoke out at the hearings, one-third had been in detention.
We saw the policies and practices of the government as a catastrophic response to a global humanitarian issue that had only minimally reached Australian shores. We were spurred on by the resistance of government to investigate its own policies and practices and the failure to acknowledge that the asylum seeker was worthy of a similar investigation that was available to 'one of us'. We were disturbed that the locking up of people 'not like us' did not create the media and public eruption that followed Cornelia's detention.
We were also impelled by the increasing despair of those who had been detained for many years and for whom the courts effectively deemed could remain there for the rest of their lives. We were spurred on by the ethics and values of our social work profession as we saw that the actions of government were a blatant abuse of core human rights tenets.
The testimonials below are representative of those we heard from former detainees and their advocates. They are a mere slice of the gruelling and disturbing accounts presented at the ten public hearings throughout Australia, which spanned the issues of the journey into detention, the processing of claims, life in detention and life after detention.
One former detainee told of the harshness of his journey by boat to Australia, a story that was repeated by many:
The boats came and took as many people as they could and I was asking them what happened to my family. They kept assuring me they were on the other boat. Then I realised that there was a young woman who had died. My wife and I didn't know anything about our other children and she was crying continuously and asking the officers to find some information about them.
They managed to bring the husband of the woman who had died. He told us that 'your mother has unfortunately passed away, but your children are in the other boat'. I was devastated. I screamed, I cried, I was very, very sad but I couldn't do anything. As soon as we get into the big boat my wife was running towards our children. She started hugging them and crying with them. I asked the authority to show me my mother's body and they just show the body from a distance.
The detention of children is a practice that will forever haunt this country. One child told of what he had witnessed, something that a child could see.
The worst thing, I will never forget it, was people cutting themselves. It was horrible. I remember one time a person was harming himself up a tree and his children was crying under the tree. His wife was crying and yelling under the tree. His blood was dropping from the tree.
A children's rights' advocate said:
We have brought the most shocking damage to their children …I will never ever forgive them for what they have done. There have been children emotionally murdered in detention.
There were a number of dehumanising techniques used in detention. One was the replacement of people's names with numbers, akin to what Marvish Rukshana Khan writes in My Guantanamo Diary (2008):
It's easy to mistreat something called 1154. It's easy to shave its beard, to kick it around and like an object, to spit on it, torture it, or make it cry. It's harder to dole out such abuse when No. 1154 retains its identity …When you realise he's more like you than different.
A man who spoke to the People's Inquiry reinforced this:
The first day we were given a number and I was told that from now that's how I will be known. You will be ABC123. That was one of the most difficult things for us because having your normal freedom taken away from you and at the same time you lost your name. One of the most difficult things for me too was that there were three different head counts. There was one at six in the morning, one at midnight and another at two in the morning. No matter who you are, even a baby, they will have to wake you up, you show your card or shout your number .
Right up to the point of departure there was inhumane treatment, as shown by this attempt to remove a detained man from Australia.
I stood screaming and asking for help from passengers. Those escort officers beat me fiercely with kicks all over my body, especially my genitalia. The nurse trying to inject in my leg missed my body to hit the plane seat where the needle got bent. But he didn't change the needle and injected me again with that contaminated needle. I continued to scream and ask for help until few passengers cried and combined with each other to relieve my oppression.
For those released from detention, there remained ongoing hardship especially with the granting of the Temporary Protection Visa, which has thankfully now disappeared from the policy arena. The cruellest provision of this visa was the denial of family reunion and many people broke down as they told us they had not seen their wives and children for countless years.
When we started the inquiry, we had been concerned about the prospect of re-traumatisation: instead, an unanticipated consequence of the Inquiry was healing. Time and time again those who spoke told us about how it helped to be believed as they had previously been seen as liars and cheats. The advocates also did it hard. As one said, 'We did our best but nothing bloody well changes. And while we do our best we watch people get very very very sick – trying to kill themselves and wish they were dead. The overriding thing is the shame that this is Australia'.
Now and the future
As I write there is a reinvention of myth. As very small boatloads of people arrive, fleeing unstable homelands in search of safe haven, there is an image once again of 'influx', attributed to 'softer' policies of the one-year old Labor Government. The emerging hysteria continues to outweigh the reality and there is a moral obligation for voices of reason to speak out and debunk the falsification.
On 10 December 2008, Australia and other nations celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is only when racism is removed, rights are restored and accountability reinstated that we can truly say that Australia is a human rights nation with the ethos of a fair go for all. Although the current government is introducing some incremental and positive changes, they remain tenuous as they are not enshrined in legislation. In addition, mandatory detention and border protection policies remain firmly bolted in place and the abomination of a detention centre, unused until now, remains as a warning on Christmas Island.
For those of us who were shocked at what was done in our name, we need to remain ever vigilant about what the future may bring.
Linda Briskman holds the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair in Human Rights Education at Curtin University in Perth. She has a social work background and her areas of policy, practice and research focus are Indigenous rights and asylum seeker rights. She publishes widely in both areas. Recent publications include Social work with Indigenous Communities (Federation Press 2007) and Human Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia, co-authored with Susie Latham and Chris Goddard (Scribe 2008).