BY SEAN HEALY
A mass break-out by 700 asylum seekers imprisoned in three separate detention centres in South Australia and Western Australia has left federal immigration minister Philip Ruddock desperate to salvage his government's widely discredited anti-refugee policy.
The break-outs began at the Woomera detention centre in the South Australian desert at midnight on June 7, when 200 asylum seekers, mainly from Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed over a boundary fence and marched 5 kilometres into the centre of the town. The break-out had followed three days of protests inside the camp.
The initial group were joined the next day by two other groups of escapees from the centre, one of 70 people, the other of 250.
Eyewitnesses say that the protesting asylum seekers were noisy but peaceful; several apologised to local residents for the disruption. They gathered on the main street of the town demanding to know why their applications for protection visas have been delayed. Many of the asylum seekers in Woomera have been there since before Christmas.
The asylum seekers were also incensed at conditions within the camp and mistreatment by camp administrator Australasian Corrections Management. Several angrily showed bruises given them by security guards.
People who have visited the camp have described conditions inside as primitive and appalling. The centre has few amenities and several escapees said that they had not been allowed access to television, newspapers or radio. The camp has only one telephone, which requires a phone card to use; many of the detainees can't afford the call costs.
We are cut off from the world, one asylum seeker told the Sydney Morning Herald.
On June 9, 250 asylum seekers broke out of the Curtin detention centre, 50 kilometres from Derby in far north Western Australia, and another 100 escaped from the detention centre at Port Hedland, also in WA.
Conditions in Curtin are, if anything, worse than at Woomera, Green Left Weekly's sources state. The centre's manager has taken a far more hard-line stance towards the asylum seekers and there have been reports of beatings and mistreatment.
The Port Hedland escapees were quickly forced back into the camp, but those from Curtin began to march on the town before being stopped by a police road block, where they held a long sit-in.
The Woomera escapees camped out in the town's main street demanding a meeting with Ruddock, who instead sent Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs first assistant secretary Peter Vardos. Department officials initially said they would not negotiate until all the asylum seekers had returned to the camp.
The asylum seekers occupied the centre of Woomera, including through nights when the temperature plummeted towards freezing, until they were given assurances that the processing of their applications would be speeded up and they would suffer no repercussions for their action.
By June 13, all the escapees had returned to the three detention centres. Green Left Weekly's sources in Derby said, however, that a group of asylum seekers at Curtin has threatened a mass suicide; it is the second such threat within three weeks.
Major embarrassment
The break-out is a major embarrassment for the government, which has gone to considerable lengths to keep its detention of asylum seekers out of the public eye. The Woomera, Curtin and Port Hedland camps were all commissioned with their isolation from major populations centres in mind.Australia is the only Western country to mandatorily detain asylum seekers pending the full hearing of their cases. Other developed capitalist countries keep asylum seekers only until their identities are established and then release them into the general population.
Refugee Council of Australia president David Bitel said the break-out should force a rethink of the whole mandatory detention policy. These are the actions of desperate people who, having fled persecution in their own countries, suffer further hardship in Australia, he said. We cannot continue to impose these draconian policies on people seeking asylum and not face the consequences.
Ruddock is determined to do just that, however, and has launched a review of all security measures at the camps with a view to greatly increasing them. While he has promised that there won't be reprisals, he has reaffirmed that all escapees will still need to undergo a character check. The character check has in the past been strictly applied in line with ministerial directives to department staff to do no favours for asylum seekers.
Criminal charges may also be laid against escapees accused of assaulting security guards and designated ring leaders.
Ruddock defended delays in the visa application process as being a result of the larger number of people entering the country illegally. He also attempted to claim that the asylum seekers presented a health and criminal risk, and that their applications were being held up in order to check for tuberculosis and other infectious diseases and for security clearances.
Rejecting this argument, the Australian Democrats' immigration spokesperson, Senator Andrew Bartlett, said: To justify the policy of mandatory detention â which few Western or European countries do â the minister has vilified these people, falsely portraying them all as criminals who bring the threat of disease and as a burden on taxpayers.
In a June 14 media release, Bartlett said it was time for Ruddock to stop blaming everyone else and accept that the government's practice of compulsorily locking-up every asylum seeker is unnecessary, inhumane, expensive and socially divisive.
Ruddock said the processing of asylum seekers' applications was further delayed by many asylum seekers having destroyed their travel documents. Refugee advocates point out, however, that travel documents are frequently destroyed so as to prevent immediate deportation and that departmental procedures are designed to be as slow, cumbersome and demoralising as possible, in an effort to deter those fleeing persecution from finding sanctuary here.
Ninety per cent of those at Woomera and Curtin are expected to be officially deemed refugees; most would have been granted protection visas already were it not for deliberate departmental delays.
The ALP's immigration spokesperson, Con Sciacca, has joined with the Democrats in calling for application procedures to be reviewed and sped up. If implemented, this might address escapees' anger at being denied information about the status of their cases. But it would not address their main concern: imprisonment in detention centres and isolation from the general population, after having already suffered so much.
Freedom
The only real solution is to implement, unconditionally and immediately, the one word policy written on the escapees' banners: Freedom.This demand was endorsed by Democratic Socialist Party national secretary John Percy. In a media statement issued on June 8, Percy said the Howard government was implementing Pauline Hanson's policy on refugees, and announced that the DSP would draw attention to Australia's racist immigration laws during the Sydney Olympic Games.
Any person with an ounce of human decency would have been revolted by the television images of the innocent men, women and children who have been forced to break out of the remote detention centre at Woomera to make their desperate appeal for freedom, Percy said.
These people, who have fled horrific plights in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, should be treated with kindness and understanding instead of being locked up in Ruddock's desert concentration camps.
In its media release, the DSP called on all Australians who support democracy and human rights to offer sanctuary to any asylum seeker who escapes from the government's detention centres. Justifying the socialists' call for civil disobedience, Percy, a veteran of the movement against the Vietnam War, said: When injustice become law, resistance becomes duty.