Rohingya in Australia’s detention centres offered a deal with the devil

Just when you might have thought that Australia’s refugee policy couldn’t get any worse, immigration minister Peter Dutton’s response to the Rohingya crisis proves that there is no limit to the government’s barbarism.

Rohingya are denied citizenship in Myanmar, and the regime accuses them of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They’ve been persecuted for a long time, but recently their situation has become a lot worse.

Horrific incursions by the Myanmar military into northern Rakhine state, a Rohingya-majority area of the country, have resulted in more than 400,000 Rohingya being forced to flee across the border into Bangladesh, joining almost half a million who fled earlier pogroms.

Villages have been burned, suspected opponents of the regime have been assassinated, and perhaps 3,000 people have been killed.

French president Macron and the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal have called what is happening genocide. The United Nations describes the current situation as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing, and asked the Myanmar government to stop all current military operations and all discrimination against Rohingya people. Predictably, it refused. An eyewitness to the atrocities told the Guardian:

“The soldiers used rocket-propelled grenades, and they set fire to the houses with matches. Once they had gone past, I went back. All the houses were burned. In the road, I saw a dead man I recognised called Abu Shama. He had been shot in the chest. He was 85.”

This eyewitness also found the singed and decapitated corpse of his grandmother. “Her name was Rukeya Banu. She was 75. When I returned to the jungle, I described the whole incident to the rest. They burst into tears. We walked for three days.”

A humane response to these atrocities would be to find a way to help the displaced and those still under siege. But Dutton and the Australian Border Force are trying to induce Rohingya refugees locked up on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, to return to Myanmar. One detainee said that he was offered $25,000 to return. Foreign minister Julie Bishop said, “Australia wants them to return to their country if possible”.

The Manus Island concentration camp has long been a sick experiment in physical and mental torture. Refugees there experience alternating terrors – long stretches of extreme isolation, then anxiety about meetings with the cruel Border Force officials.

At unpredictable times, this cycle of anxiety and isolation is punctuated by sharp moments of fear – on many occasions, refugees have been attacked by locals and guards.

Worse even than the mainland detention centres of the last decade, which were described as “factories for producing mental illness”, the concentration camp on Manus has been so cruel that some Rohingya refugees have decided they are safer taking Dutton’s barbaric deal.

This is not someone voluntarily deciding that they will risk their life re-entering Myanmar in order to protect family or friends. It’s the result of cold, calculated, long term torture by the Australian state.

By trying to force the refugees to return, Peter Dutton and every senior Border Force official responsible for this situation are acting as willing accomplices to the genocide taking place in Myanmar.