Letters from behind the wire
The Melbourne Age Date: September 27 2002
The scandal of the asylum seekers will haunt Australians for decades.
Early this year, with my wife Kate Durham, I started a campaign to encourage people to write letters to asylum seekers in detention centres. The idea worked. Now thousands of Australians are writing to detainees.
We started getting replies. The replies are probably the best way of understanding what is going on in these places and what consequences they have.
This was written in March in Port Hedland: "Thank you very much for your letter you sent to me... I was thinking all Australians are heartless and racist but I am now thinking positive that there is people who cares to think about me. I'm 17 years old. I came in Australia when I'm 16. On June 23 I will turn 18. I have been in this centre for 22 months, almost two years, without any contact or hearing from my family. I know that you can't do anything but by just writing to me gives me hope."
And this was written in May in Maribyrnong: "I'm thankful for your support and sympathy to give us hope and fresh spirits. Days and nights are very boring and we waste our time and our lives. We miss our spirits and only our bodies move without any spirit. With the best wishes to all people who struggle for human rights. They know human is human."
And this was written in Port Hedland in February: "I saw this government what they say to people about us. They told us this people is criminal and terrorist. Boat people is not normal people. But we are just human like other people. In my country I was a wrestler and very famous and going to every country. But now I lost everything from my life. I lost my love, my life and I think if I stay in here maybe I will lose my mind. From two week ago I decided to go back to my land. Actually I don't know what happened to me in Iran but I just know to die in my country much better than to die in detention center."
This man left Australia voluntarily two weeks after that letter was written. He was arrested at the airport in Iran when he arrived. He has not been heard of since.
In the desert camps it is necessary to queue to get a bar of soap if you want to have a shower. Reportedly, it is common to get to the head of the queue and be told to come back in half an hour and get the soap then. In the first year-and-a-half of Woomera's operation there were two working toilets for 700 people and even now (except when the UN is visiting) the toilets are splattered with blood from suicide attempts or self-mutilations. If a woman has her period she must write out an application form for sanitary pads and hand it to the nurse. She will then be given one pack. If she needs more she has to fill in another form and explain why she used more than one pack.
In Woomera, earlier this year, a friend of mine saw a 12-year-old girl walking around wearing a nappy. It is a common sight in the desert camps. My friend was told that the distress has made the child incontinent.
It has been observed frequently in the desert camps that children regress by years in their behaviour, so that children of four or five regress to bed-wetting every night. Even young adolescents are incontinent.
This is what we are doing to people; people who are innocent and who come here asking for our compassion and our help. It is a humanitarian catastrophe from which the government makes political capital; a humanitarian catastrophe that most Australians are prepared to ignore.
This was written in Maribyrnong in February: "Today I had two visitors who came to my visit for the first time. One of them was journalist another was a girl 25 years old. They had not any information about detention centres and couldn't believe and the girl was crying after we talked to her. But I believe we don't must look at our situation like sentimental people and you must look very deeply to these circumstances so that what we are eating and that we have a lot of suffering are on the second level and firstly you must see why the people are coming here and why we are staying a long time in detention. I don't must be sensitive and don't must cry because the cry make happy the enemy and finally I write for you difference between camp and zoo. In the zoo the human care for animals. In detention centre the animals care for humans."
Is it possible to do any worse by these people? As a matter of fact, the government has a way to add salt to the wound. After the damage that is inflicted on these people, when they are released from detention they get a bill for the cost of being held. I have one example in which the man is told the conditions of his release are that he must not work and he must make immediate arrangements to pay the sum of $214,000 for his stay in Port Hedland and Woomera. The going rate is about $120 to $140 per day per person. We do it, presumably, to make them feel even more hopeless than we made them feel in their months or years of detention.
I find this letter profoundly moving and disturbing. It was written in February of this year in Port Hedland: "I want to thank you for writing a letter. It is the first letter I have. I need to write someone outside because I don't have anyone outside I need to write some letter because I forget everything in these two years in detention. I am very happy this time because I see some good Australians support us. Please Catherine, we need freedom like every human. I have two years and I don't hear anything about my family in my country. Dear Catherine, I am very happy to write for you because it is the first time I write one letter. Please don't forget us - we are humans."
Where has this country got to that, in a time of great prosperity, we can take a tiny fragment of damaged humanity and drive them to the point that they need to remind us - ever so gently and politely - that they, too, are humans?
This is a scandal which will haunt us for decades. The human misery we have inflicted on thousands who have arrived looking for help is incalculable. Our complete abdication of moral responsibility - leave aside legal responsibility - is reprehensible beyond words. It is quite clear that, as a country, we have learnt nothing at all from the stolen generation. And whereas many people did not know of the stolen generation until years afterwards, in Australia today we do know what is happening. Knowing what we are doing to refugees, we voted back a government on a promise to be even harsher. How anyone can justify such treatment of innocent human beings is a matter we must all wrestle with.
Be assured that in 20 years' time your children or your grandchildren will ask: "What did you do to try and change this?" And if you do not have a good answer, you will show yourself to be complicit in the great crime of 21st century Australia.
This is an edited extract of the Deakin University Law School Oration given by Julian Burnside, QC, last night.