Inside Woomera 2002

Jacquie Everitt is a lawyer who has worked on behalf of detainees. Among her clients were Shayan Badraie and his family, whose case was reported on the Four Corners Program “Inside Story” in August 2001. She is now forbidden to enter the detention centres. This is the text of the talk she gave at a Refugee Action Committee forum on 10 April 2002.

Good evening. Tonight we are here to speak about Woomera.

Woomera, Curtin or Port Hedland – which is the worst? Who cares. I’ve been to Woomera and Port Hedland. I’ve also been to Villawood, sometimes called “the 5-star detention centre”. Yes, there’s a difference. I believe there is a far more sinister regime in action in the desert camps – they’re more secret, far from our gaze, far from interference from the bleeding hearts, the do-gooder lawyers.

Villawood in suburban Sydney and Maribyrnong in Melbourne can be accessed by us, and so they are not really safe for the government any more. Our support of asylum seekers has opened a large chink in the plan to keep asylum seekers under wraps, so we won’t learn these people are human, we won’t learn that Muslims are not so different from Christians, Buddhists, atheists or anyone else.

Since the story broke about Shayan Badraie, the little six-year-old so traumatised by the sights he witnessed in Woomera and Villawood, no further families with children have been transferred to Villawood. It is too dangerous for them – do-gooders will get hold of them and let Australia know their stories, will tell of their trauma, their depression, will give them hope and take on their fight. Now, only overstayers and families about to be deported are ever put into Villawood.

But no matter, whatever detention centre an asylum seeker is in, the effect is similar. The tragedy for those who are locked up is the same.

As everyone who has been there will attest, Woomera is a shock as you drive towards its gates. I went there with the Woomera lawyers in October last year. The brutal desert panorama, the dejected underpopulated town and then, suddenly, the 15 metre razor wire. You’ve all seen it on television. The two trucks parked outside the main entrance gate with the water-cannon mounted on top. The tin dongas and the air of desolation.

I had expected something different – a kind of middle-eastern town bustling on the red Australian soil, but there was little sign of life as we drove through the gates, just guards with walkie-talkies and the searing heat haze hovering above.

The only grass or trees were around the administration block when I went there. (A lawyer friend has told me that they have now brought in instant grass and well-established trees. They have painted the dongas near the fence with murals, they are trying to make this brutal desert prison look friendly. Why? Because the emissary of the Commissioner for Refugees, Mary Robinson is coming – next month, I think.)

We were taken to the lawyer’s rooms, and those detainees we had requested to see were brought to us. Nothing prepares you for your first sight of Woomera children – the skinny children with the dark, dark circles under their eyes, young children with the tentative, withdrawing demeanor that says they’re trying to be invisible.

There is not enough to eat and they regard the food they do get as inedible. Annie Sparrow the WA doctor, now a paediatrician in the UK, said during the last hunger strike that she ate in the mess while she was there and the food was not acceptable, neither in quality nor quantity.

The detainees – children included – don’t sleep properly because they are depressed, and as any medical or psychology expert will tell you, depressed people rarely sleep well. They stay up late and fall into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes they sleep all day, but it is not the sleep of peace – merely the sleep of escape. They all tell the same story.

Annie said that she doubts whether Australian children would fare as well as the detained children there. These are not weak, pathetic children – they are children whose circumstances have take from them their childhood, these are children beaten and abused by Australian government policy.

Let me put this in context for you with one short story about a group of children. These children are called UAMs by the Department of Immigration. Unaccompanied minors. They arrive in Australia alone. When I went to Woomera I had a list of 21 of these children alone who had arrived in a particular three- month period last year. The list stated their names, date of birth, etc.

Two of these names especially caught my eye because there was no family name, just a first name and I assumed they were brother and sister. The boy was 11, the girl 15. By some miracle, because I asked to see these children, I was allowed. Normally, UAMs are off limits for everyone because the minister is their guardian, and he refuses to allow them to see even psychiatrists or psychologists or lawyers unless a lawyer is officially assigned to their case.

You may be aware of screening out. This is considered a form of quarantine in the medical sense, where those who are untainted by knowledge are kept apart from those who know what legal rights are available to them. The idea is that those who don’t know should be kept ignorant until they can be returned to the country from which they fled.

To avoid being screened out, an asylum seeker has to say the magic words. Something like: “I was subjected to convention-based persecution in my own country, I have a great fear of returning, I am seeking the protection of Australia and I want a lawyer.”

The worst stories belong to the unaccompanied children and their sadness, confusion and feelings of powerlessness shames me more than any other aspect of Australia’s detention policy. These children cry alone at night, uncomforted.

These two children above were two of five UAMs – the others were 10, 11 and 12-year-old boys. This group waited impassively in a room while I finished doing the other cases on my list, then I went to get them to bring them in. The 15-year-old has a sweet face and wears a hand-embroidered headscarf and traditional Afghani clothes. She and her 11-year-old brother are orphans. Their mother died some time ago and their father was taken by the Taliban. They believe he is dead. They had been living with their grandparents who feared for the children’s lives and their futures and decided to get the children to safety. They gave them to the people smugglers – seen by asylum seekers as saviours. The children had no idea where they were going.

When they arrived in Australia they had one interview with DIMIA. After this, each morning this girl would dress carefully, take her chair outside the donga and wait to be called for another interview like all the other people. But she and her brother were never called. They had been screened out. They hadn’t said the magic words of asylum. [Jacquie explained that people are supposed to formally ask for asylum and legal representation. New arrivals who don’t know these procedures are deliberately “screened out” and kept away from more experienced detainees who might inform them of their rights.]

These two children waited every day for almost six months, then miraculously they were back in the system. When I asked her how she was managing, she began to cry. She told how she had noone to talk to, but she was desperately worried. Her grandparents’ last words as she and her brother left were: “We will try to raise the money and follow you, so we can take care of you.”

She had heard that a boat had sunk and she was certain her grandparents had drowned. She had no way of finding out if they were still in Afghanistan as there is no way of communicating with Afghanistan at all. She sobbed and I put my arms around her – I have a daughter of the same age.

She told me that she cried often in her bed at night, and this was the first time anyone was with her who could put their arms around her and comfort her. She said I was the first person who had touched her since she had been in Australia. She didn’t know she could have access to a doctor, a nurse or a counsellor. Noone had told her.

These children are out of detention, now, in care in Adelaide, I believe. They were amongst the first five children to be released during the period of hunger strikes and lip sewing. They were locked away in the desert of Woomera for about eight months yet there is a mechanism within the Migration Act for an unaccompanied child to be got out of detention on a bridging visa. If this is possible, why are they locked up in the first place? Surely health checks can be done in a few days. Children couldn’t seriously be considered a security threat, could they? These children have been neither charged nor convicted of any crime. They have merely been sent to safety by parents who could only afford one fare. They are alone and of all asylum seekers are the ones who are in the most desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

In Port Hedland I know an 18-year-old Afghan boy. His father was taken by the Taliban and the family has never heard from him since, then his brother was taken. The Taliban do this, they come into a village and kill or kidnap. His mother and extended family sent him to Australia alone. He was 16 then and has now spent more than two years locked up. He was in Villawood but took part in a hunger strike and was sent to Port Hedland at 4 am in the morning on a chartered plane. On arrival he was locked in a solitary confinement cell with the air conditioning turned down and no blanket. He felt very cold. He told me he could only roll up tightly to try to keep warm.

He cries now and he stutters. He is desolate and has no way of contacting any of his family. He fears that he will be returned and is terrified of the consequences. He is scathing of the Australian government’s offer of money to return. He has tried to trace his mother through the Red Cross, but there is no trace to follow. He is Hazarah, an ethnic minority descended from Genghis Khan’s army and persecuted for centuries. He is huge and when he cried I put my arms around him. He cried with his head resting on my head, his body racked with sobs. He told me he still cries every night. This boy has been rejected as a refugee, but as an Afghan he cannot be returned.

I’ll use some of Father Frank Brennan’s figures from his Jesuit Lenten Seminar, 2002 to illustrate the situation for Afghans. Father Frank has just returned from Woomera. He says that there are about 150 Afghan detainees in the Woomera IRPC (Immigration Reception and Processing Centre) who have not yet received primary decisions regarding their applications for protection visas. (This is the DIMIA interview stage) Each has been in detention for more than six months, despite the fact that the government claims that the average time for determination is 15 weeks. Three or four have been waiting more than nine months for a primary decision. 151 out of 231 of the Afghani detainees are still awaiting a primary decision, while only 29% of all detainees (ie from all countries) are awaiting their primary decision.

Why? Could it because the government hopes that by not processing them and by offering a financial inducement to go back to Afghanistan, they will give up and agree to go home? It would seem that conditions favouring safe return may not be available in Afghanistan for some time yet, so it is unlikely that the government will be able to forcibly return them in the foreseeable future.[but see below] Have we forgotten that we have been party to the bombing of their country? Surely we must have some humanitarian obligations to those asylum seekers here now who fear return.

And what about child abuse – the detention regime neatly parallels the definition of child abuse as defined in state legislation. Under our system there is no regard for the right of children to grow, learn and develop in a supporting environment. Surely it is up to every one of us to take all possible steps to make sure that this systematic child abuse arising from current government policy is stopped immediately.

This child abuse issue, apart from being alive with emotion, is also very interesting. As I understand it, the Children and Young Person’s Care and Protection Act 1998 which came into effect in September 2000 states that everyone has a role to play in ensuring the safety, welfare and wellbeing of children and young people in NSW and that when any professional sees a child at risk of harm, she or he is legally required to report such concerns to DOCS. Yet every child in detention in Australia must surely be at risk. Quite simply Australia’s detention system ill treats children – detainee children are being institutionally abused by a statute.

We have mandatory reporting of child abuse by professionals and mandatory detention of children. Both are government policy – how can this be?

Under the Refugee Guardianship Act, the Minister for Immigration is the legal guardian of the unaccompanied children in detention. This means that Minister Ruddock, perpetrator of the abuse of children by the very fact that his department administers Federal legislation and locks these children up, is also their guardian.

How can this be?

He may not be personally terrifying them in the night in the persona of a guards conducting a raid, nor personally subjecting them to the horrific sights that confront them almost daily, but it is his responsibility to keep them safe and surely wilful blindness is no defence. Every day, it appears, he breaches his duty of care as their guardian.
It is not necessary to be a psychologist to see that detention is an evil for all the children incarcerated. The body of evidence must surely be indisputable.

In conclusion, I have borrowed a list of international law breaches from Chris Sidoti, National Spokesperson for the Human Rights Council of Australia. [Read them here]. . . They violate the commitments Australia has made under important international treaties and he regards them as gross violations of the most fundamental human rights. Is Australia really a mean-spirited nation, lacking compassion? Is enhanced sovereignty and border protection really worth sacrificing the human rights of all detainees. Will our detention policy be seen by future generations as shaming, an abandonment of the rule of law and something for which a future Prime Minister will be moved to say sorry?

I am now banned from entering any ACM detention centre in the country – and that is all of the centres. But there is never a day that goes by when I don’t find myself pulled up short with a kind of electric shock as I think of the abuse these children are suffering at the hands of our government policy, when I think of the wasted humanity, I think of all those young men in the prime of their lives, of the women, of all the people whose lives are thrown away behind the razor wire.

This pitiless policy diminishes us all.

Jacquie Everitt April 2002

Note: The Sydney Morning Herald of 17 May 2002 reported that Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, was in Afghanistan for meetings with interim Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and the Justice Minister, Abdul Rahim Karimi. The objective was said to be to encourage the interim government to take back asylum seekers. $10 million has been earmarked in the Budget to pay the Afghan government to take back asylum seekers. The Government has also announced it will pay Afghans in the community on temporary protection visas to return home.

Read Jacquie Everitt’s case studies of children in Woomera.