A letter to Europeans regarding refugees

From Australia, we watch with a sense of horror and foreboding the situation in Europe regarding refugees. There will be still more horrors if your governments proceed on the path blazed by our governments.

Australia is a world leader in the torture of asylum seekers. In January, a report in the Sydney Morning Herald noted of leaked Immigration Department files: “Asylum seekers have swallowed insect repellent, bashed their heads on walls and doused their bodies with boiling water in a culture of self-harm in Australian detention centres that appears to have reached crisis point”.

This is just a sample of the horrors that refugees here face.

There are some lessons about the logic of “border protection” as it has played out in this country.

Asylum seekers have swallowed insect repellent, bashed their heads on walls and doused their bodies with boiling water in a culture of self-harm in Australian detention centres.

The Keating Labor government in 1992 introduced a policy of mandatory detention of those arriving in Australia without a valid visa. It was a small beginning that had far-reaching consequences. By 1994, it allowed for the compulsory and indefinite locking up of all refugees who arrived by boat – a total of a little more than 700 people in the five years from 1989. The first of what would be many remote detention centres was opened at Port Hedland in Western Australia.

Many were imprisoned in what had once been the Villawood Migrant Reception Centre in suburban Sydney, where postwar migrants had been accommodated. But now there was no reception, no welcome to a new home – just a double cyclone wire fence. At early protests in support of the mostly Cambodian refugees inside, the two fences were only a couple of metres apart, and we could talk across that no-man’s-land.

Very early on we heard that the Cambodians, whose cuisine does not use lamb, were being fed every kind of scraggly lamb/hogget/mutton cast-off the detention centre kitchen could come up with. A small thing, but a sign of what was to come – later, Muslims would be served pork.

“Out of sight, out of mind” increasingly became the order of the day. The suburban detention centres remained open, a normalised horror within sight of quiet suburban houses in the city of the 2000 Olympics. But the size of the fences increased, razor wire went up to emphasise how dangerous the inmates were to the rest of us, and the distance between the inner and outer fences increased so that protesters at the camps could hardly see and certainly not speak to those inside.

The dehumanisation proceeded apace. Solitary confinement was introduced and the media were restricted from entering. An Iranian refugee child, Shayan Bedraie, was so traumatised by detention in Villawood that, after vigorous protests by other refugees, his situation became public knowledge in 2001. Interviewed about the case, Liberal Party immigration minister Philip Ruddock repeatedly referred to Shayan as “it” – “I understand it receives food and liquids”, “We are working at getting the child into an environment in which its condition can be managed”.

Once the logic of border protection was established, a range of other consequences followed. The Liberal government in 2001 enacted the “Pacific Solution”. Thousands of Australian islands were excised from the migration zone, the military was engaged to intercept boats carrying asylum seekers, and concentration camps were set up in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. More detention centres in far-flung desert regions were also set up, where the persecution was further removed from scrutiny.

The wall of silence not only hid all sorts of gross human rights abuses but also created them. Suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm became frequent among inmates. People sewed their lips together, they threw themselves from rooftops, they cut themselves with razor blades and drank shampoo.

A mentally ill permanent resident, Cornelia Rau, was locked up in Baxter detention centre in the South Australian desert for five months in 2005. The same year, Australian citizen Vivian Solon was deported to the Philippines. Her right to be here was revoked purely because of her Asian appearance. Her story that she had lost her passport was not believed. Instead, she was deemed to be an “illegal”.

Increasingly, refugees have become assessed in “national security” terms. In 2012, the Labor government introduced something truly Orwellian. The entire Australian land mass was excised from the Australian migration zone. The reason was simple. It was to make sure that even asylum seekers who managed to reach the mainland would not be granted the right to claim refugee protection.

We now have, courtesy of the latest Liberal government, a transformation of the immigration bureaucracy. Along with its new name, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, came an even greater level of secrecy and a new security agency, the Australian Border Force, whose armed officers have an expanded range of powers to detain and spy on people.

A second lesson is that our experience has shown there is no hope that bourgeois opinion will hold the line against any of this. Trying to win over respectable opinion by limiting our demands played into the hands of the government. Whether it was the demonisation of “people smugglers” or making concessions to Islamophobia by accepting periods of detention as “necessary” so that people can have security checks – every concession helped normalise the situation and allowed further grotesque violations of human rights.

The final lesson is more hopeful. Despite the appalling situation, we can claim some minor battles, even if we haven’t won the war.

Refugees have protested, rioted, trashed compounds and broken out. Their defiance spurred on a campaign to fight for their freedom. The Pacific Solution was quietly wound up in 2007 by the Labor government, even if in a despicable bid for re-election it reintroduced it in a more vicious form after a media and Liberal Party campaign to whip up ever greater hysteria about asylum seeker arrivals.

Racist attitudes are not automatic; they have to be generated and they also can be fought. Through years of campaigning, we have made some small dents at times. Those who think boats carrying asylum seekers should be “turned back” fell from 62 percent to 51 percent between 2001 and 2010, while those disagreeing rose from 20 percent to almost 30 percent.

That’s not earth-shattering, but it is something. When refugees in Villawood detention centre burnt down sections of their vile prison in 2011, they reclaimed some of their stolen humanity and dignity.

Such protests, and the support of activists outside the detention centres, are the only way that any improvements have been won, such as the closure of some of the most notorious concentration camps after protests and riots by refugees locked up there.