The government and media have lied about the fires
It has made it seem that all are the work of asylum seekers. In fact the first reported fire at Baxter started in a locked room inaccessible to detainees. It may have been an electrical fire. Management had been warned by maintenance staff that when the wind blew, one of the air conditioners sparked.
The fire and breakout at Villawood also had nothing to do with asylum seekers. It took place in the so-called " deportees" compound. Many of these are people who have done time in jail, which can be as little as three months, and are being punished twice. Many are long-term Australian residents, people with no lives in the country they'll be deported to.
The other fires may have been started by some detainees, but we will not know unless an honest and independent enquiry is undertaken. ACM staff were also in a position to start fires, and former Curtin detainees well remember the burning of the welfare building in April 2002. Ignorance of the truth has not stopped the government from punishing all detainees, and single men in particular.
What we do know is that Australia's detention centres are "hell holes" in the words of Malcolm Fraser. More than a dozen human rights, UN and parliamentary reports have condemned them. But as the respected British Guardian newspaper recently wrote, "even the most scathing of official reports is now met with bored indifference." Such a system drives people to protest and self-harm. It's mandatory detention that is the crime here.
Mandatory detention: a system of collective punishment
The crisis in Australia's detention centres cannot be understood without realising that their primary purpose is not to process claims for refugee status, but to collectively criminalise, scapegoat and punish all those who have dared come to our shores without "authorisation", in order to deter others from following.
Detention also encourages ordinary Australians to fear and hate Asian and Muslim people. Refugees are blamed for unemployment. A few thousand people in boats are made to seem a greater threat than the wrecking of our health system or the privatising of Telstra. The brutal treatment of asylum seekers makes people more ready to accept ruthless treatment of Aboriginal people or troublesome trade unionists.
As boats have stopped coming, the emphasis has shifted towards pressuring existing asylum seekers and refugees into "voluntary repatriation" For this the detention centres are as an essential part of the same dreadful system as Temporary Protection Visas and the Pacific Solution.
So the detention system is designed to be cruel. The incredible psychological damage suffered in detention is not an unfortunate by-product but a necessary part of the business of collective punishment deterrence and repatriation. So also is the refusal of proper medical attention, which has seen one man go 16 days without treatment for a broken leg; another put in an isolation cell simply because he has seizures.
The new Baxter detention centre, where the New Year crisis began, represents the low point of this appalling system. It is Australia's newest detention centre, built at a cost of $40 million on an Air Force base near Port Augusta, 400km north of Adelaide. It is surrounded by a 9000 volt electric fence. In the brainless jargon of DIMIA, this is " an energised fence". It is a maximum security prison, which can be easily seen from 15 kilometres away. At night time, it is brighter than Port Augusta. Below is an edited report written by a visitor in October 2002.
Baxter: A hi-tech concentration camp
"BAXTER is the worst place that I have ever been. It is much worse than Woomera.
"When we arrived to visit, we came armed with lots of snacks and goodies we hoped to share with our friends. Pistachios, almonds, Turkish delight, fruit pastes. We could not take any of these things in with us. They are security threats. We could not wear sandals, only closed in shoes.
"All of the compounds are constructed in a circular fashion. There are no outward looking windows. There are no views from the compounds, only the sky and the grass in the middle.
"There are many cameras in each compound. The only place to be out of camera range is to stay in your room, or in the toilet, so most detainees that we spoke to are now staying in their rooms.
"All gates and doors are controlled centrally from a computer. Only one door may be opened in the centre at anyone time. You can wait for 10-15 minutes for a door to open, and if one has been left open, the whole centre ceases to operate until it is closed.
"Everything is difficult for the detainees. Those who smoke have to ask a guard to light their cigarettes, and wait while electronic doors are opened. Those who wish to see their friends in other compounds, have to fill in a request form, and once a week, they are taken to a sterile area, where no-one else is, and their friend will be there, and they then have a couple of hours to interact, with the obligatory two guards helping the spontaneity."
"Food is cooked in a central kitchen by 12 detainees in black and white chef's clothes, with detainees washing the dishes and cleaning up for $1 hour — good to keep the wages bill down.
"Detainees told us it takes five days to receive medical attention, and when you do you will be told to drink lots of water and given Panadol for every ailment. One lady I spoke to had headaches and blocked sinuses for the past year and a half, coupled with a cough. One other man we met had gone blind at Curtin; he had been on a hunger strike. This man is now completely blind and needs a carer (another detainee is doing this), but still hasn't had a medical assessment. He had excellent vision when he arrived in Australia, and is only young.
"Detainees told us that every request is met by the run-around between DIMIA and ACM. One tiny woman had been trying to get her bed fixed for three weeks, only to have the responsibility shifted between ACM and DIMIA continuously. After being sneered at by an ACM guard she put a chair through a window, whereupon she had three guards ask her what she wanted. Later that day she had ten ACM guards turn up at her room and tell her she was going to have a meeting with Greg Wallis. She went with them, and they took her to the isolation block, where they removed all her jewelry and locked her up in a windowless room under the ever-present cameras for a few hours. The next day she managed a meeting. She eventually fixed the bed herself with some other detainees' help.
"Most detainees reported with frustration that if you were quiet and polite in your requests, you were just ignored. However, if you put a chair through a window, after a period in isolation you usually get what you want.
"There is no library. We took lots of Persian and Arabic books, but nowhere nearly enough for the voracious need for intellectual stimulation in there. The people we met were pharmacists, goldsmiths, engineers, teachers, electricians, doctors, many students, people who had read all of Shakespeare's works in Farsi, and were familiar with most of the Western classical traditions in literature and music, boys from Afghanistan who want to go to school, to contribute to Australia; children who love maths, physics, and chemistry and can't wait to go to university .Children immersed in the humanities are surrounded by guards with a culture of distrust and suspicion. Guards are used to the prison system, not a seven month old baby who was born in detention, not an old blind man, not a 16 year old in a wheel chair, not a 60 year old grandmother who wants to hug them.
"The rules increased every day that we visited. Only four people to visit at one time; a cello was allowed, but no cello case, recorder must be kept in the office; no diaries allowed in. Detainees could not bring their family photos to show to us, or even some chocolate to share.
"When you first arrive, the gate is opened for you by someone who records your number plate and name and wants to know the purpose of your visit. Then you park your car and the cameras are trained on you. You then go to a steel gate, press a buzzer and someone answers like it is a telephone, and you state your business. After an arbitrary period of time (up to 10 minutes) a green light will come on and you may open the door, which you must shut behind you. You are then in a metal cage about 5 metres long, with two cameras in it, with a steel door on either end and a roof overhead. You walk the length of the cage and press the next buzzer and wait again (only three people are allowed to be " processed" at once in the office. Processing may take three quarters of an hour or longer, so you wait in the cage to be let in).
After you make it through the next door you are then in Reception area. You then fill out forms, show your ID, and hand all gifts into property. After the usual checks you are then moved to the visitor centre (visiting hours are 8am - 11am and 1pm - 4pm). You go through more doors and then sign in to the visitor centre, where you are given a wrist band, and an invisible stamp (I'm sure mine was Pooh bear, but the guard would not be drawn on this serious subject). Then they go and get your friends, which may take half an hour or an hour more. Detainees are driven by van to the visitor centre, even though they would rather walk.
"We were told there is " trouble" every night in the single men's compounds. A female guard we met outside the centre said she had just been sacked because she would not hit detainees with a baton. One woman I met knits a jumper, then unravels it and knits it again to keep herself occupied.
"This place seems to be designed for creating maximum psychological distress in the detainees and perhaps the guards, too, and I suspect this will lead to disastrous results. Having grown middle eastern men weeping in my arms was almost unbearable; knowing that they are still there sickens me utterly. Some detainees think that they are going to die in detention and worry about the fate of their children who are there with them."
Sara Saint-Saens, Mullumbimby
Lessons from Victoria
Jim Kennan was Attorney-General and Minister for Corrections in Victoria's Cain Labor government in the 19805. He was Minister when inmates of the new, hi-tech, maximum security prison, Jika Jika, burned it down.
In an article in The Age, 9 January 2003, he wrote that "although the [Jika Jika] building was initially hailed as a technological breakthrough, its dehumanising impact on staff and prisoners rapidly became apparent," and this was the cause of the fire.
Kennan closed the jail immediately. In his article he calls for the closure of all the remote detention centres and the release of asylum seekers into the community after a limited period of detention.
What happened over New Year?
There were five fires at the Baxter detention centre over the Xmas-New Year period. The first, largely unreported, was before Xmas and in the isolation block, and was caused by an electrical fault. The second occurred just after midnight on Friday 27 December. It started in a locked room in Red 1, a single men's compound. It was not a large fire. ACM staff attempted to put it out, but didn't seem to be able to use the equipment in the centre of the compound, such as fire hoses.
The third fire also started in empty rooms in Red 1 just after midnight on Sunday 29 December. Six or seven rooms were affected. The fire brigade took half an hour to arrive, because they couldn't get through the front gates of the detention centre due to the centralised security system. The single men in Red 1 were then moved to the empty Red 2 compound.
When the federal government was building Baxter, they had repeatedly refused permission for the SA Fire Brigade to inspect the site for fire safety. In the end they relented, after it was built, because the SA Brigade threatened that they might choose not to attend fires at the centre. Baxter was built with no serious concern for fire safety.
The fourth fire, on the afternoon of Sunday 29th, was a small fire in the mess of the other single men's compound, White 2, and was quickly extinguished. This fire happened after detainees had heard of newspaper reports wrongly blaming them for the first fire, creating a mood
of despair. Detainees in all centres were also enraged by the "feature" in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 17 December which described them as living in 5-star luxury, comments now repeated in the Sunday Telegraph of 29 December.
The fifth, and most damaging fire at Baxter, also started on the afternoon of 29 December, in Red 2 compound. This fire went all round the accommodation block very rapidly. Despite the size of the fire, none of the 56 detainees were evacuated. The White compound was also full of thick, dirty smoke, and the detainees asked to be evacuated because they couldn't breath. They went to the electronic gate of the
compound, but ACM guards refused to evacuate them so they broke the bottom of the gate to get away from the smoke, where they were confronted by a CERT team - the ACM riot squad. In the two family compounds people were suffering from the smoke, but they were not evacuated either. The single men in Red 2, where the fire was, were kept in their compound, with the accommodation burned out, sitting on
the grass in the middle of the blazing sun through the rest of the 29th, all night, all day 30th, and into the night of the 30th. The men were ultimately moved to Red 3 compound. We don't know what happened then because communication with the outside world was cut by DIMIA.
After the fires: repression in Baxter
On New Year's Eve, every detainee in all detention centres received a letter from the Department of Immigration (DIMIA)., which warned that no humanitarian cases would be considered by the minister until order had been restored, and that those whose applications had been rejected, might as well agree to return to their homeland.
In Baxter, the letter was given to the single men in White 2 as they came out of the mess in the early evening. Men who had given up all hope, and signed letters saying they would go back (to Afghanistan, for instance), decided to go and pack their bags. All the others joined them, got their belongings and went to the ACM office, saying "We're ready; send us back to our countries." ACM officials told them to "piss off'.
A CERT riot team then arrived, fully kitted with helmets, shields and batons. Four had tear gas cylinders on their backs. The men were told to go back to their rooms immediately. They protested, saying that they had a right to move around their compound. They started peacefully chanting: "We want freedom" .
A few minutes later, they were tear gassed. The men didn't move. Half an hour later, they were still sitting or lying on the ground. After another warning the four gave themselves up, and were put into isolation. The men went to their rooms suffering the effects of tear gas. Some still have difficulty passing urine.
A few days later, White 2 men were dragged out of their beds, wearing only shorts, or nothing, handcuffed. One by one they were strip searched and moved to White 1. Those left till last sat in the sun from 8.3O am till 3 pm. An ACM employee was horrified at this treatment. Contractors were hired to strip everything from the compound they were being moved to, including mirrors, beds, cupboards and other fixtures - everything.
The single men were all being punished, without charge, without evidence and without proof of any wrongdoing.
Port Hedland
The Port Hedland fire began at 11 pm on 29 December, and burned until 7 am the next day. The fire was started in Juliet block, the high security isolation section which is being refurbished. The fire truck was also destroyed, presumably in an attempt to make sure the isolation section was thoroughly destroyed. There are suggestions that the isolation block was destroyed because detainees feared being put in it, and all knew how brutal and devastating it was.
Just as with Baxter, the Port Hedland centre was run with no serious concern for fire safety. An official investigation, ordered by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission's senior deputy president, Brian Lacy, found that fire extinguishers were missing from accommodation blocks, fire hoses were used to water gardens and staff training was inadequate. The investigation found that the local fire brigade would not answer a call to the accommodation zone.
After the fire, at 4 am on Monday 30th, 70-100 ACM and Federal Police arrived. Everyone was handcuffed until 3 the following afternoon. All rooms were searched a number of times without independent witnesses. Guards were specifically looking for mobile phones.
On New Year' s Eve, the second shift of federal police, around 24 officers, arrived around midnight, alcohol on their breath, bashed doors with their sticks, woke everyone up, harassed people, went into their rooms with boots on, offending all Muslims, and kicked shoes all over the place. When the detainees protested, they were told: "You're in Australia now. This is not a Muslim country." When asked why they were doing it, they answered: "Because we can. It's our job."
Repression in Woomera
According to a former guard at Woomera, teargas was used on forty Woomera residents on New Year's Eve because they refused to go to Oscar compound. The following day they were left sitting in the full desert sun for over 12 hours without so much as a drink of water, while handcuffed.
Also - reportedly on New Year's eve - all men were strip searched. This was not limited to those who may have been identified as suspected 'troublemakers' or ringleaders or those suspected of starting the fire at the Woomera centre. Those men who hesitated or refused, for normal hesitancy, privacy or religious reasons, were simply left standing until they complied.
Since the crackdown residents are no longer allowed to consume meals in their own rooms.
Off to prison, without charge
After the fires, some forty detainees were arrested and put into state prisons in NSW, W A and SA. Most were never charged. As immigration detainees, the prisoners had no right to see a lawyer. As recently as last October, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission declared this practice a breach of human rights. Last year an African man suffered serious brain damage when pack-raped in jail while an immigration detainee.
Questions about the detention centre crisis
Haven't the detainees applications for refugee status all been rejected?
No. There are many detainees who are still appealing against rejection, as is their right. This is necessary because the refugee determination system is incredibly unfair. Official figures show that in 2001-02, the Refugee Review Tribunal set aside 62 % of all Afghan decisions appealed and 87% of all Iraqi decisions appealed.
Hundreds of people suffered the trauma of rejection, and fear of being sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan, and then had to endure many months of cruel detention, all because the department deliberately got it wrong. Here is what South Australian Labor MP, Kris Hanna, has to say. She is Secretary to the Board of the Refugee Advocacy Service of SA.
"In many cases they have been 'convicted' on misinterpretations of what they said in interviews - this has happened where the interpreter is not of their dialect or their first language.
"Secondly, they are denied legal representation at the early stages of the decision making process.
"Thirdly some members of the Refugee Review Tribunal have made decisions which fly in the face of the evidence. The tribunal decisions are, however, subject only to the most limited kind of appeal so that the Federal Court cannot even overturn a blatantly wrong finding of fact. A law which both Labor and Liberal parties approved.
"These unfair aspects of the refugee determination process would be rightly deplored in our community if they applied to Australians charged with criminal offences. Imagine getting a speeding ticket for a time when you car was in the driveway, and being told there is no effective appeal.
"Other detainees have grimly accepted the decision to reject their claims, yet will not voluntarily return to places of fear in their homelands.
"Still others have volunteered to return, yet they languish indefinitely. For many there is no feasible return home.
"The lawyers' presence in the camps has generally had a settling effect Our work is to protect human rights in English and Australian Law".
How can you justify the destruction of millions of dollars of government property?
The real crime is not the damage done to buildings, but the damage done to thousands of people's lives.
When you persecute people, they will rebel. The world would be a worse place if they didn't.
People genuinely concerned about the cost to taxpayers have far more to worry about than the fires.
The fires are said to have caused $8 million worth of damage. The 2002 Budget revealed that the government was spending $2,870 million over five years to persecute asylum seekers. The new Baxter detention centre is a human rights crime in itself. It cost $40 million and should be scrapped now. $219 million is being spent on a new detention centre on Christmas Island. The operation to repel asylum-seekers, introduced in haste after the arrival of the Tampa at the end of August, cost $328 million last year.
Mainland detention and processing costs about $200 million a year, with another $200 million spent on offshore detention. And the Department of Immigration spent a whopping $71.4 million on consultants last year, nearly ten times as much as the fires are said to have cost. Almost all this money is wasted, because it is used to persecute, not help people.
In 1996, the Howard government scrapped the Commonwealth dental scheme, which looked after the teeth of poor people. It said it couldn't afford the $100 million cost. But it had no trouble finding ten times that amount to persecute refugees.
Isn't there a better way to do things?
In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of boat people came to Australia from Vietnam and other countries. When they arrived, they were put in hostels like Villawood and Maribyrnong. These were open migrant hostels and asylum seekers could come and go freely until they could support themselves. There was no razor wire. That was a good system. It helped the refugees, who were treated with respect, and it enriched Australian society. It' s what we should go back to. |
