Deborah wrote:
>(perhaps rc-am should come out of the closet a little and explain their
position on refugee camps in Australia, rather than just posting Irish
newspaper columns with inflammatory letters to the editor attached...)<
Eh? First, I assumed that listers are quite familiar with my position on refugee camps, as well as borders, having posted numerous times on the issue, and at length. I think they're prison camps and they're the most excessive aspect of racism in Australia today. This is the only instance in Australian law which dictates imprisonment without trial, where such imprisonment is automatic, where no Australian court can review the decision to imprison or the duration of such confinement, where imprisonment is indefinite and often lengthy, and where people who are imprisoned have committed no crime or been charged with any. In the words of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSC) , "Immigration detention is an administrative sanction, that is, the deprivation of liberty other than as the result of a conviction for an offence." Recent legislation states, "Decisions under the Act [relating to detention and deportation, amongst other things, by the Department of Immigration and the Minister] are final ... and conclusive; ... and must not be challenged, appealed against, reviewed, quashed or called into question in any court." Nowhere else, not even in the NT and WA mandatory sentencing laws (of which I posted also recently) is this resolute exception from the rule of law enacted.
If you haven't been on the list long enough to read my postings on those issues, then your perceptions flow from that, not from any shyness on my part. (But ok, I'll restate, at some length, and apologies to those who have already heard this.)
Second, what precisely about the letter to the Irish paper was "inflammatory"? Racist ignorance _is_ endemic in Australia; extremist and opportunistic anti-immigrant politicians _do_ enjoy a lot of support, as evidenced by every election since 1992, some of which I discussed in an LBO article; the White Australia policy has in fact returned in migration policy; the UN has condemned the detention camps; et cetera.
You don't believe Australia has returned to the White Australia Policy? The Department of Immigration (DIMA) works from a blacklist which specifies age, sex and nationality as criterion by which a person can be determined as "at risk of overstaying their visa" and hence refused legal entry into Australia. There are 37 countries listed: Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Fiji, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mauritius, Nauru, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Samoa, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tonga, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Yugoslavia. The Blacklist goes on to specify, in some case, age and sex groupings as a "risk factor". People who seen as fulfilling the criteria on the Blacklist are denied a visa to enter Australia unless they can prove they will not overstay the duration of the visa -- a reversal of the burden of proof. DIMA insists this is not discrimination but rather a technical means of determining who is most likely to be a "risk". According to DIMA's own statistics, those from the US and the UK are the most likely to overstay their visas. Official DIMA handouts on Australian migration policy declare: "Australia has a non-discriminatory immigration policy." It does not discriminate against people because of their "ethnic origin, their gender, colour or religion." Yeah, right.
> like most governments - i guess - the Australian government will respond
to criticism from the UN only when that criticism is made explicit. Right
now they're just dodging the call.<
If we're talking about the mandatory and non-reviewable detention of asylum seekers, then the UN has made its criticisms explicit, as have other organisations.
In 1995, the UN Human Rights Committee found numerous breaches of UN Conventions, in particular that on arbitrary detention. Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Australia is a signatory, states that: "All persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals ... To deny access to any one group of people to judicial review that is afforded all others, is contrary to the spirit of equality before the law." Article 16 of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Australia is also a signatory, states: "A refugee shall have free access to the courts of law on the territory of all Contracting states."
The then-Labor Govt (which introduced the policy in 1992) ignored the report, heading instead into an election in 1996 with a strident anti-immigrant line. The subsequent Liberal-National Govt was pressed on the matter and finally responded in Dec 1997, where they simply rejected the findings, after a year of tightening the recourse of asylum seekers to appeal in the courts, information about legal rights, etc (a possibility which now no longer exists).
In May of last year, the UN Committee Against Torture found that the policies of the Australian Govt breach the Convention Against Torture. Amnesty International has released numerous reports highly critical of these policies. A 1998 report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) found similar breaches of international conventions, esp under the Conventions on the Rights of the Child, arbitrary detention, etc. In 1995, Australia was adversely cited in the US State Department's report on human rights abuses for its policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, the only western country to have received that accolade. In a recent 4-Corners programme, the Human Rights Commisioner said in relation to the detention of children in the refugee prisons, "Now, I look at the quite atrocious mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory -- quite atrocious laws, but I have to say that they are positively benign compared to what the Commonwealth is doing under its own laws [of mandatory and non-reviewable detention of asylum seekers] in relation to these [the refugee] children."
Most of the Australian public is in denial, manipulated this way and that to enjoy the spectacle of harsh treatment of asylum seekers, much like I suspect white South Africans were in blissful denial -- a parallel which is easily indicated by way of Govt responses of 'we don't want foreigners telling us what to do'. The constant invoking of "pull factors" -- which is a bizzare kind of flattery -- as the explanation for movement, and the resolute success of that particular discourse in Australia, is another reason why 'foreigners', for whom such flattery is not effective, is a very good reason why (as in the case of SA Apartheid laws) 'foreigners' can sometimes see with more clarity what many Australians of good conscience spend time finding excuses for, and other simply embrace and enjoy.
> Most of Australia's current influx of asylum seekers are - it is
reported - Iranians, Iraqis, and Afghans.<
The major source-countries of asylum seekers who arrived in Australia sans papier in 1998/99 were China (584), Iraq (447), Malaysia (277), South Korea (159), Turkey (151) and Afghanistan (149). Since then, there have been increases in the proportion of asylum seekers from Iraq (partly as Jordan has begun to deport people back there, and partly as a result of the closure of the ostensibly legal channels -- eg., the UNHCR office in Islamabad which processes refugee apps is under investigation for taking bribes and has been closed.) Thousands of Iraqi refugees have been living in squalid camps in Pakistan, Jordan and Iran for the last four years, many of these facing deportation to Iraq in the last year, many of these already deported.
> The Afghans are being treated on the whole as genuinely at risk. <
Is that so? The Govt only released them after it rushed through legislation which means that they will only be allowed to stay in Australia for three years, will not be entitled to welfare or Medicare, and will not be able to send for their families -- they now, the Govt hopes, form the necessarily immiserated pool of fruitpickers prepared to slave for subsistence incomes, esp since many are being sent to rural Australia after release, like a recent group of Iraqi refugees. The legislation was made retrospective, which sparked one of the more awful hunger strikes in a camp in years, with this particular group sewing their lips together in a gruesome attempt to deter force-feedings which are common practice and sanctioned by DIMA. The Minister for Immigration responded with the by-now routine response to suffering of 'if they come here illegally they should expect to be treated badly. This should serve as an example to other potential asylum seekers not to come to Australia.' That sadistic enjoyment, and the extent to which it works, is another reason why criticism can come from 'foreigners' in a way it has not been possible domestically.
> Reports from residents of islands where these people have landed say
things like 'well i saw them getting of their boats with their Gucci
sunglasses and their Luis Vuitton luggage'. This kind of thing makes
people rather skeptical. The amount of money spent by 'refugees' flying
from Iraq to Indonesia and then catching a boat to Australia has also been
highlighted.<
Whatever. First, no one has ever explained to my satisfaction why refugees have to be poor before they can be considered 'genuine' under the provisions of the UN definition of refugee as someone who is fleeing persecution, torture, possible death, and nor has anyone convinced me that such a presumption is not racist. This was precisely the response of countries which initially refused to take in Jewish refugees from Germany -- they're "rich" appparently, so switch off the empathy meter. Second, the UN Conventions do not recongise fleeing immiseration and starvation as grounds for refugee status, and nor have successive Australian govts, who derogate the poor as 'economic refugees' -- a neat system of enclosures that esp Australians who have some memory or feeling for the British enclosure system should be responsive to, but aren't. So, asylum seekers are damned in either case.
The Govt and media (esp the Age) also present arrivals of asylum seekers without papers as a "flood", a term which they pretended not so long ago was unacceptable slipping out of Hanson's mouth. The Department of Immigration likes to release figures to the media that give the impression of a massive increase in numbers of "boat people". DIMA press releases this year have routinely compared figures for 1997/98 (157) and 1998/99 (926). A cursory glance at the figures indicates something quite different: 1,071 arrivals by boat in 1994/95, dropping down to 552 in 1995/96, 365 in 1996/97, 157 in 1997/98, and then to 926 in 1998/99.
Increases since have been directly a result of the changing conditions of Iraqi and Afghani asylum seekers, to which the Govt (and Opposition) prefer to respond with the flattery of "pull factors". I've no doubt listers from Europe and the US will find such numbers incredibly small by comparison, and wonder what all the fuss is about.
> The conditions of refugee camps/detention centres are not hideous. They
are very basic, but they are not tents and trench toilets. <
This is untrue. The refugee prison in Darwin is tents (but perhaps not trench toilets, though where was that mentioned?); the Curtin 'detention centre', which is in the desert, is tents; asylum seekers have been imprisoned in the Christmas Island sports hall, sleeping on the floor, during the wet season, when it continually flooded causing diarea outbreaks... Chemical and physical restraints are common practice in all the refugee prisons, as is isolation of new arrivals, and the in practice incommunicado detention of the vast majority of asylum seekers.
Neither the Minister nor the DIMA are under any obligation to provide visa application forms, inform people of the need to fill out applications forms, inform them of the need to make a specifically-worded request for asylum, or to provide information on the right to apply for refugee status unless the person makes a definite request for such material and assistance. For instance, in 1995 DIMA decided that because a group of boat arrivals from Vietnam did not use the requisite 'trigger' words to request asylum, there was no grounds for asylum. Section 256 of the Migration Act states that DIMA does not have to inform a detainee of his/her legal rights.
> The detention centres are buildings, have beds, latrines, regular meals,
and are staffed with doctors, counsellors, and case advisors.<
How comfortable. Here's another excerpt from the transcripts of a 4-Corners programme on the Villawood prison in Sydney. Kevin O'Sullivan worked as a psychiatrist in Villawood, Chris Masters is the reporter. (I'd also suggest reading the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report on the use of physical and chemical restraints, esp on conditions at the Perth and Curtin prisons, which is available on the web.)
FORMER DETAINEE: I think we were in prison. I can't say another thing. We were in prison. It's a prison. ELSDIJA EISSA, ESCAPEE: Two years just in the centre in a small place, like the animal in the zoo, you know, and why I'm here, I'm asking myself all the time. NASER ZUWAY, FORMER DETAINEE: He said to me, "You are animal, we will deal with you like animal." He doesn't have to say that. If he has a job, he just do his job. He doesn't have to say to me, "You are an animal," or "We deal with you like animal," or "We deport you." CHRIS MASTERS: The centre also has an isolation compound. Families and children stay in the more open Stage 2 area. Detainees who are seen as higher security risks are confined to Stage 1. KEVIN O'SULLIVAN: Stage 1 in contrast to Stage 2 has very little open space. It's a very cramped environment. It's surrounded by a fence of razor wire which I found rather disturbing. CHRIS MASTERS: These 1997 images from the Department's own stock footage bear little resemblance to images that emerged this year from Stage 1. NASER ZUWAY: They put me, the first time, one week in Stage 1 -- really, I got shocked when I saw myself in Stage 1. The first night I didn't sleep -- just I think, "Why they put me here?" I'm in the jail or the detention centre? P.A. ANNOUNCEMENT: Attention all detainees. It's muster time. Come to muster with your I.D. please. CHRIS MASTERS: People inside and out of Villawood complain of how the phone rings out constantly. There are headcounts day and night that detainees must attend. KEVIN O'SULLIVAN: It's most intrusive. It's also quite humiliating having to present yourself and say, "Yes, sir, I'm here." NASER ZUWAY: There is a good officer from the ACM and understand, I think -- he didn't care about this thing -- but there is some of them, they make our lives hard. CHRIS MASTERS: This woman, pregnant and bleeding, had trouble attending. FORMER DETAINEE: I feel that it's like torture. They used to come every day -- every day, "Come to muster, come to muster." CHRIS MASTERS: She complains she begged for proper medical attention but was kept in the centre for two weeks before being allowed to a hospital where it was discovered she had miscarried. FORMER DETAINEE: When the nurse come, I explain to her that I am pregnant, I am bleeding, I can't eat and I have this back pain. I can't sleep. It doesn't matter. I was crying -- I told her, "Look at myself. "I am dying. I need some attention." And she go -- She didn't do anything for me.
> People have said that locating these people 'in the desert' is unfair.
It's true, detention centres are usually located in isolated areas. This
means that armed security is, in general, quite unnecessary. If people
walked out of the detention center in the Woomera desert, they'd probably
die before they got to the next town.<
mmm... Interesting choice that: death or incarceration without even having been sentenced for any crime -- not even the US's death penalty laws remove sentencing, charging, court procedure, etc before it sends people to their deaths, and few countries will openly embrace the use of the possibility of death as a means for ensuring incarceration. I wonder how many Conventions that breaches. And I wonder what it is about Australian politics that has made someone so flip about the prospect of anyone being confronted with such a 'choice'. The refugee prisons are also isolated because it makes scrutiny and legal representation almost impossible to sustain.
> If the Irish newspapers want to claim that Australia has taken the wrong
approach to managing a sudden increase (from late last year to now) in the
illegal immigrant population<
There is no "illegal immigrant problem" for Australia in the way you seem to imagine. There has been a momentary increase as a direct result of a) the situation of Iraqi refugees in the camps of Jordan, Islamabad, etc; b) the increasingly awful situation in Afghanistan; and in particular c) a global restriction on available legal channels -- all of which means that the "illegality" of asylum seekers (which really just means that they arrive in Australia without a visa from the Australian Govt) is a function of the restriction of legal means of seeking asylum. The Australian Govt just announced an indefinite freeze on all asylum applications, which means that from that moment on, all attempts to gain asylum are by definition illegal. The line is arbitrary, and not something to pretend merits any serious repetition as an index of the legitimacy or otherwise of claims for asylum.
> Illegal immigration to Australia is highly planned, organised at a
numbers of co-ordinated arrival and departure points, and is actually
quite expensive (therefore it might be argued that many of the Chines/Iraq
refugees come from the more well-off classes in those nations
respectively). <
Again with the "well-heeled refugees"? I'd support changing the definition of refugee to include those fleeing poverty and starvation -- which is precisely the reasons why the vast bulk of claims for asylum from China in particular are not granted. Unless someone actively supports that, peddling unsubstantiated myths about "well-off classes" seems to me to be simply an attempt to make anti-immigrant politics acceptable to leftist sensibilities (if not politics), whilst pretending it's something else. In any event, the difficulty of the passage and travel explains the rather negligible numbers of arrivals compared to the EU and US, not the financial resources of refugees, which is irrelevant in any case.
Moreover, the Govt and Opposition like to peddle stories about "people-smugglers" (mostly poor Indonesian fishers really who face years and prison and the burning of their boats if they're caught), but no attention has been paid to the legal profits made from the policing of borders and refugee imprisonment. Nor does the Minister recognise that increasing restrictions around the world and in Australia are responsible for the creation and fostering of illegal modes of entry and passage. The refugee prisons are privately-contracted to a subsidiary of the US corp Wackenhut; deportation is privately-contracted; in June, 1999, the Prime Minister announced the expenditure of an _additional_ $124 million to be spent on the detection and deterrence of asylum seekers, much of which would presumably go to privately sub-contracted corporations. These incarceration and border control industries are never the subject of dismay. Wonder why that is?
> what methods do the newspaper reporters and outraged Irish citizens
propose as alternative measures to the ones that are currently being
deployed by Australia? <
For me, the answer is simple: open borders. I'm an Australian citizen, and I'm outraged -- does that make a difference; are the criticisms of 'foreigners' somehow not worth listening to or taking seriously? People do not move for no reason; and border controls merely allow the state to adjudicate on those reasons, usually by way of declaring certain reasons illegitimate: fleeing conscription in the case of the wars in Yugoslavia, fleeing impoverishment and population control policies in China... As Hathaway (The Law of Refugee Status, 1991) argues, "most Third World refugees remain de facto excluded, as their flight is more often prompted by natural disaster, war, or broadly based political and economic turmoil than by 'persecution,' at least as that term is understood in the Western context." 1995 legislation states, "the fertility control policy of a government is to be disregarded in determining whether a person is a member of a particular social group." The Refugee Review Tribunal has, in one instance, ruled that, "In this tribunal's opinion, a victim of forced sterilisation is similar to a torture victim in that the persecutory act has already occurred and unless there is a real chance it will recur, the claim that the former act constitutes ongoing persecution is groundless." So, prompt deportation back to China, as well as precedent in the RRT's rulings for refusing asylum on grounds of torture.
> racism and immigration laws always go hand in hand<
Indeed they do, _always_.
> It leaves open however the way in which the West can articulate a
position in response to 'illegal' immigration into nation-states that are
globalised economies, and whose fetishisation of commodity culture seems
to be at least one factor in the production of refugee subjects.<
Again with the granting of credence to definitions of "illegality", as the site of a 'problem'?
But a few other remarks: a) Australia has since colonisation been a "globalised economy", specifically a part of British Imperial production chains in its inception; b) nation-states emerged within and have been a necessary condition of the "world market", a significant element of which were the enclosures, workouses and tollhouses of previous centuries -- and which prompted the establishment of Australia as a penal colony as transportation to the US halted; c) two-thirds of global population movements occur between third world or poor countries -- a new system of enclosures, workhouses and pass laws which is increasingly being enforced by western countries, in some cases through military intervention; d) all recent and large population movements can be traced to the emergence of the New World Order of IMF-sponsored or similar 'development', austerity, impoverishment and wars and the collapse of Cold War financing and political arrangements, and so forth -- that's crudely put, but I'll let it stand as such for now.
Finally, adopting the vocabulary of a critique of commodity fetishism in order to imply that people migrate because they are envious of the bounteous nature of first world lifestyles suggests to me the strong possibility of a slippage to one or more of three rather odious discourses: a) that of migrants stealing 'our way of life', or at least being envious of what 'we' have (for which I'd suggest reading Slavoj Zizek's work on racism and castration anxiety); b) that advanced by global apartheid multiculturalists like Pat Buchanan and Pauline Hanson, who insist that the poor are poor for reasons of 'culture', and that, given the irreconcilability of 'cultural differences', everyone should stay where they are; c) that unless, for reasons of the caprice of birth or bureaucratic whim, you happen to have this or that citizenship in a 'developed' country, you should resign yourself to a future of underdevelopment, impoverishment and a quick death, because to do otherwise would be to irritate some western notion of good, authentic, traditional 'culture' to which few in the west are subject to. Being less than a generation away from peasantry, I'd have to say I find that kind of attitude offensive and mystical at best.
If that's not a sufficient reply, I'd be happy to fill in details with examples, of which I have copious amounts.
cheers, Angela _________