The Detainees Have Good Cause to Rebel (2003)

By Phil Griffiths

From the Canberra Times, Friday 3 January 2003

see also Why the fires? [Word document download]
and RAC’s fact sheet BEHIND THE NEW YEAR CRISIS IN THE DETENTION CENTRES
– also available as PDF [162kb]

THE REBELLION at Australia’s immigration detention centres was no surprise to most refugee advocates.

At the new detention centre, Baxter, frustration and anger have been building up for months.

Baxter was designed to be ultra-secure. What the Government produced was something out of Orwell’s 1984. Where detainees could freely move around the different compounds at Woomera and Port Hedland, in Baxter they have to ask for written permission to visit friends.

Such a visit involves a full body search each way, as does a visit to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs office, or the gym.

There is closed-circuit television everywhere, monitoring everyone’s movements. The detainees regard Baxter as worse than Woomera.

The most pervasive problem is boredom and anxiety. One woman knits every day, and then pulls it all undone and starts again because she has no wool. We have sent her some wool.

One of the most persistent problems is the systematic refusal by the authorities to provide timely medical care.

An asylum-seeker subject to anxiety attacks and seizures has been repeatedly put in isolation, supposedly to stop him harming himself. He was distraught at being separated from his friends.

A man who broke his leg went 16 days without treatment for it, being given Panadol for the pain. He was only treated when he threatened damage.

The entire regime leads to constant small protests, and protests are punished with bashing or detention in the isolation compound.

One detainee told how, in isolation, some people have had their hands tied with a bracelet, been blindfolded and beaten, stripped naked and put into a room 2m by 2m, and watched by a camera.

All this is being done to people who have broken no Australian law in coming here to seek asylum.

They are held in detention while their cases are “processed”, but this too is an affront to their rights.

Official figures show that in the 2001-02 financial year, the Refugee Review Tribunal set aside 62 per cent of all Afghan decisions appealed and 87 per cent of all Iraqi decisions appealed.

Hundreds of genuine Iraqi refugees had to go through the anxiety and trauma of being rejected by the department and threatened with deportation before getting a positive decision, many months later.

So if ordinary Australians are looking for someone to blame for the fires, Philip Ruddock and John Howard should be at the top of the list.

However, special mention must be made of David Penberthy and the Sydney Daily Telegraph, for their extraordinary feature on December 17, “Illegals live in five-star style”, which told of DVDs and Sony Playstations for detainees, of education and training, sport and excursions, shopping and Foxtel.

Nothing so thoroughly inflamed the bitterness of detainees.

When the fires started, Acting Immigration Minister Daryl Williams was quick to vilify asylum-seekers, and hint darkly at a conspiracy by refugee advocates to encourage arson.

In fact, there is strong evidence that the original fire at Baxter was the result of an electrical fault. Management was warned by a detainee doing maintenance that when the wind blew, one of the air-conditioners sparked. The fire started in a locked room, out of bounds to detainees.

Once it started, the fuse was lit on a rebellion that had been building for months.

Williams then came out with a warning that such criminal damage would not be tolerated by the Australian people. But a majority of the Australian population – including the Parliamentary Labor Party – has been prepared to tolerate the most extraordinary abuse of human rights, just as a majority of us at various times tolerated the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the stolen generations, the White Australia Policy and the Vietnam War.

A recent article in the British daily the Guardian commented that “even the most scathing of official reports is now met with bored indifference”.

Days after that article, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found that Australia had breached its human-rights obligations by transferring six uncharged asylum-seekers to prison. Now we find roughly 20 uncharged asylum-seekers in prison at Port Augusta and Silverwater.

Williams warned that the ring-leaders faced deportation. It was a largely hollow threat. The Government cannot deport people to Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan; and many from those countries who have been rejected as refugees remain stuck here, locked up.

Refugee advocates have also been lectured by the media that these fires will erode public support for refugees. There is not a shred of evidence for this – how can there be after just a few days?

What we can say is that protests by detainees so far have been a factor in alerting many ordinary Australians to the crime being committed in their name.

Thus the breakouts of 2000, the riots in 2001, the hunger strikes last year, were all followed by rising, not falling, support for refugee rights.

The New Year fires reveal the utter bankruptcy of mandatory detention. It should be scrapped and the detainees released into the community.

This is what we did before 1989, when Villawood and Maribyrnong were migrant hostels, with open gates.

Phil Griffiths, convener of the Refugee Action Committee, Canberra.