The country’s contentious policy for asylum-seekers may face reform as the public learns more about the offshore detentions.
PERTH, AUSTRALIA – WHEN Iranian-Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani received the Victorian Prize in January, he did more than receive Australia’s highest honor in literature. Unable to attend because of his internment at a detention center on Papua New Guinea, the award to Boochani renewed international attention on Australia’s policies for people seeking asylum.
Boochani’s prize-winning book, “No Friends but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison,” details his experiences at the remote Pacific camp on Manus Island, a territory belonging to Papua New Guinea and where he has been held since 2013. He typed out the book in his mobile phone in Farsi, and used the What’sApp messaging platform to transmit a chapter at a time to a translator in Australia.
Australia has taken a hard line on asylum-seekers who arrive by boat, settling them offshore on Manus and on the Micronesian island nation of Nauru, vowing they will never enter Australia. Canberra runs these and five other on-shore detention centers for refugees who arrive by other means.
The policies, in place since 2001 and supported by various Australian administrations, have drawn international criticism from nonpartisan human rights organizations and even the U.N. The refugees often languish for years under deplorable conditions: Amnesty International reported that about 1,200 men, women and children who sought refuge in Australia were transferred by force to Nauru and suffered “severe abuse, inhuman treatment and neglect.”
But sentiment in Australia today appears to be shifting, largely because the public is beginning to learn about the conditions on Manus and Nauru. Previously, the operations were “shrouded in secrecy,” says Joyce Chia, director of policy at the Refugee Council of Australia.
Public opinion helped push lawmakers in Parliament to pass a bill allowing refugees in the camps to come to Australia for medical care. But the government led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison steadfastly defends the offshore detentions and is vowing to block onshore medical care for detainees.
Morrison is leader of the country’s Liberal Party, which despite its name is a center-right leaning party. As federal elections approach later this year, critics say Morrison is playing on public anxiety about refugees to preserve the country’s practices.
“The Liberals know that they are almost certain to lose the next election, so they are trying to divide people on the basis of race and religion, says Sen. Nick McKim (Tasmania) of the Australian Greens Party.
Earlier Policies Give Way to the ‘Pacific Solution’
Today’s policies contrast to when Malcolm Fraser was prime minister, from 1975 to 1983. Fraser, who also was leader of the Liberal Party, allowed tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
“There was great support for what the Fraser government did,” says Greg Barns, an attorney and spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance and who represents some of the refugees on Manus. “We had been in the Vietnam War and helped create that wreckage, and we were now doing the right thing.”
Australia’s current policy started with Prime Minister John Howard in 2001 when he denied entry to the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, a vessel that was carrying 438 refugees from Indonesia who were rescued from sea. The refugees were forcibly transferred to Nauru.
Howard then created the “Pacific Solution,” a policy that uses Nauru and Manus as offshore detention centers. The government justified its policy as being a deterrent for people entering Australia by boat. Subsequent administrations have said their policies aim to prevent people from risking their lives at sea.
In 2008, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the center-left Labor Party suspended the Pacific Solution policy. But by 2012 his Labor Party successor, Prime Minister Julia Gillard, announced under growing political pressure from the Liberals that the Manus and Nauru facilities would reopen.
Currently 1,200 men are being detained at Australian-run offshore detention camps. Women and children who were detained on Nauru have been transported to Australia due to a public outcry. In total, 3,172 refugees have been held at the facilities since they reopened.
Critics of the policy say the practice is tied to a deeper public concern about refugees who arrive by boat, a worry that politicians can exploit.
“There’s a sense of insecurity in Australia about being an island nation, and from time to time in this country’s history, politicians stroke the xenophobic underbelly of this country,” Barns says. “It’s been a very successful political formula that’s been adopted by both major parties.”
Australia’s Refugee Council has been advocating for the end of offshore processing and for asylum seekers to be brought to Australia as required under the U.N. Refugee Convention of 1951, Chia says. “What we’re hearing from people on the ground is that this is the worst situation they have ever seen. We have never seen this level of anguish.”
New Medivac Bill Brings Hope
In February, Parliament passed legislation giving refugees on Nauru and Manus the right to medical treatment and to be transported to Australia for care. The legislation was seen as a defeat for the ruling Liberal Party, since the Labor Party and the Greens Party joined forces to pass the bill.
The legislation came in response to an acute medical crisis in Australia’s offshore detention centers, where, as the Guardian has reported, 12 people have died in the past five years. Numerous other incidents include suicide and self-harm, including from children as young as 7, according to Australia’s Refugee Council.
Under the current system, the minister of immigration has the final decision on whether a medical transfer will take place. This has meant that people needing urgent medical assistance have severely deteriorated or even died as a result of delays, according to Australia’s Refugee Council.
The Medivac bill gives doctors more power to recommend transfers of sick refugees confined to Manus and Nauru. The bill is limited to the 1,200 asylum seekers who are already on the two islands.
“Parliament’s support for the bill was a major step forward after decades of cruelty from the Liberal and Labor parties,” says McKim, the Green Party senator from Tasmania.
Prime Minister Morrison, however, says the bill will encourage people to unsafely try to reach Australia by boat. He says his government will reopen a detention center on Christmas Island and ship refugees there for medical treatment, vowing that they would not reach Australian shores.
Morrison and his cabinet have steadfastly defended the offshore detention policy. When New Zealand agreed to take the refugees, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the government would not transfer asylum seekers to that country, because “people smugglers are marketing New Zealand as a destination as a backdoor for Australia.”
The Australian Human Rights Commission, a body operating independently from the government, found that prolonged detention on Nauru has had negative effects on the mental and emotional health and development of children. Many of the children have presented with post-traumatic stress disorder, and some of them even became “catatonic” due to prolonged stress and uncertainty about their futures, says the Refugee Council’s Chia.
“There are children who have been scarred forever, and many of them will never recover.”
The Lost Children of Nauru
Save the Children, an international organization that promotes children’s rights and provides support for children in developing countries, was running classes at the camp. But the government cancelled the contract and said the children should go to local schools. Critics say that policy set in faraway Canberra doesn’t recognize the reality refugees face on the ground, where they are considered pariahs on Nauru, activists say.
“The children from Nauru are the most distressed children I have ever met in 20 years,” says Pamela Curr, an advocate with Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. Curr has worked with many of the families on Nauru, both on the island and when they were settled in Australia temporarily following protests about the children being held.
“There was a little boy and his sister who had been on Nauru for five years, and they hadn’t been to school while they were there because their parents were too afraid of them being attacked,” she says. “Now that they’re in Australia, they’re going to school for the first time in their lives.”
In April 2016, Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ruled that the detention of men on Manus Island was unlawful because it amounted to false imprisonment, and the court ordered the center be closed. The detention center was closed in late 2017, and men were pushed to an open facility run by a government contractor, a move now under scrutiny.
Boochani and about 600 other refugees remained in the camp because they had nowhere else to go. They were left with no legal status and, according to the Refugee Council, were seen as a threat to the residents of the island and were attacked and beaten.
In February the government announced the last child refugees on Nauru would soon be sent to the U.S., ending the practice of detaining children.
“I think you’re going to find a shift under a Labor government, not because they’ve suddenly become compassionate toward refugees, but because Manus and Nauru are problematic for Australia’s international relations, certainly problematic in the region, and I think that Labor will seek a solution that enables those centers to be closed and people to be resettled,” Barns says.
There are still 550 men on Manus. Most are from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. There have been a number of self-harm attempts, deaths, and many will suffer long-term mental and physical health conditions as a result of the mistreatment that occurred there, according to the Refugee Council.
“The original sin is that there was never any plan,” Chia says. “This was all entirely for political purpose. It happened very quickly for political reasons, and at no point did anyone consider that we would be in a situation where no other country would take these people.”