Another life claimed by Labor's refugee torture regime

Fifty-three-year-old Tamil asylum seeker Uthayakaran Periyathamby died in his sleep on 16 July. Officially, the cause of death is unknown. Yet to those who gathered for his funeral in Melbourne’s south-east on 25 July, it was clear this was another life claimed by Australia’s depraved anti-refugee policies.

There was sorrow as his closest relatives wept over the body. But in a hall filled with members of Melbourne’s refugee community, there was also anger. Even one of the Hindu priests presiding over the funeral gave a speech in which he tearfully condemned Australia as “an open jail for Tamil refugees”.

Uthayakaran, or Uthayan as he was known, fled the Sri Lankan government’s genocide of the Tamil minority and came to Australia by boat in August 2012. He was one of the first people sent to Manus Island after the Gillard Labor government restarted the policy of offshore detention, which led to a decade of abuse and torture for thousands of refugees. Released into the community in 2013, he was denied permanent protection by Tony Abbott’s Liberal government, which had implemented a bureaucratic system to “fast track” asylum applications (by making it faster and easier for the government to reject them).

Uthayan spent the rest of his life in limbo on a short-term bridging visa, faced with the threat of deportation each time it was up for renewal. He had no access to Medicare, nor the right to work legally. He was forced to survive on the kindness of those in the community, or by working cash-in-hand jobs for employers who were only too happy to exploit his situation.

When he fled Sri Lanka, his wife and children remained there, expecting to follow him once he had found safe refuge. Instead, Australia refused them the chance to reunite, and now his family will never see him again.

We won’t ever know exactly how Uthayan died. But we know what killed him.

“He wasn’t like an ordinary person, mentally”, said Moganathas Nagarasa, a refugee activist and friend of Uthayan, after the casket had been taken away. “He was tortured. He didn’t have good contact with his family. Mentally, it’s something like madness, because of his visa issues. He shared it with his friends ... he was thinking about that all the time.

“If he had a visa, his family could be here. He became an alcoholic, and finally it ends up like this.”

The priest didn’t mince words: “I can’t accept people dying without explanation. These are murders, not natural deaths. This country is responsible for his death”.

As someone the Australian government branded an undesirable, Uthayan’s death won’t attract attention from politicians or the mainstream press. There have been no studies or investigations into the deaths of those subjected to the onerous conditions of bridging visas, so we don’t know how many refugees have died in similar circumstances.

Yet Uthayan’s experience of life in Australia is one shared by thousands of asylum seekers. “We have 10,000 people suffering the same as Uthayan”, said Nagarasa. “Even me too, I’m on a bridging visa. I can’t sleep—my mind is awake even though my body is getting weak. I keep thinking about something, and something, and something. I don’t know how it’s going to end up.”

Tamil Refugee Council founder Aran Mylvaganam says that, for activists and the community, the link is clear between refugee deaths and the hopeless circumstances asylum seekers are placed in: “Under the Liberals, every fortnight you would hear of refugees dying. The change in government gave people a bit of hope and made a difference. The deaths stopped for a while. Uthayan is a sign that people are losing hope again under Labor”.

When Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party came to power in 2022, one of the new government’s first acts was to grant permanent protection to the family of Tamil refugees Priya and Nades, who had been fighting their deportation with the support of a nationwide activist campaign for several years. Labor went on to grant permanent residency to the 19,000 refugees who were living in Australia on temporary protection visas. That decision excluded an estimated 12,000 people on bridging visas who had been denied refugee status by previous governments. Still, after a decade of rule by the Liberal Party and figures such as Scott Morrison, who notoriously kept a trophy celebrating his record stopping refugees in boats, it’s understandable if there was some optimism that Labor would do more.

Labor made it clear, however, that they intended to act no differently than the Liberals when it came to “border security”. Even before they ran the country, Labor MPs consistently voted en bloc with the Coalition government to extend and reinforce the regime of offshore detention and boat turn-backs known as Operation Sovereign Borders.

Now that they’re in charge, they’ve gone even further by attempting to introduce new laws that would lay criminal charges against anyone who resists their own deportation (like Priya and Nades). When the legality of the indefinite detention of asylum seekers came under question in a series of recent High Court cases, Labor rushed to participate in the storm of anti-refugee racism, cooking up a swathe of draconian measures that would make unbearable the life of anyone released from detention.

After two and a half years, many refugees are realising that this government has no intention of carrying out further acts of mercy, and some want to fight back. Mylvaganam explains that some refugee families prefer to stay silent when a relative dies, fearing detention or deportation if they speak out. In contrast, Uthayan’s funeral was an open attempt to shine a light on the brutality of the Australian government, as well as a call to action.

One speaker was Rathi Barthlote—an activist from the group Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality—who played a leading role in setting up a protest camp outside the office of Labor Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil, inspired by the student encampments for Palestine. (On 28 July O’Neil was shifted from the home affairs portfolio to housing, and the protest camp moved to the front of the Department of Home Affairs in Docklands.) Barthlote stood by Uthayan’s casket and argued that remembrance isn’t enough: “Australia’s government and its refugee policies are responsible for Uthayan’s death ... Justice for his death means you should be involved in fighting for refugee rights. That’s the way you remember him”.

Two refugee-led protest camps are, at time of publishing, under way. One is in Melbourne outside the Department of Home Affairs, 808 Bourke St, Docklands, and one in Sydney outside the office of newly appointed Minister for Home Affairs and Immigration Tony Burke at 1 Broadway, Punchbowl. Some quotations in this article were paraphrased from the original Tamil with the help of an interpreter.