BY TONY ILTIS
MELBOURNE — At a May 16 "people's inquiry" into the immigration detention centres held at the Inner West Migrant Resource Centre in Footscray, a panel of health workers formerly employed at the Woomera detention centre spoke out their experiences in what they all as a brutal system.
The meeting, which was attended by 50 people, was organised by the Western Suburbs Refugee Action Collective (RAC-West). As well as panel of speakers on Woomera, local refugees' rights activist Pamela Curr of the Australian Greens described conditions at the Maribyrnong detention centre.
Introducing the panel, RAC-West convener Jody Betzien said the aim of the meeting was to break through the government's lies.
Barbara Rogalla, a nurse who has become well known as a whistle-blower and refugees' rights activist, gave examples of how detained refugees were denied medical care and their children had been denied schooling."Everyone in contact with the detainees and staff, becomes brutalised."
Wayne Lynch, who spent seven months working at Woomera as a counsellor and nurse, illustrated the brutality of the centre with the story of an Iraqi engineer. Driven to despair by 12 months in the centre and his inability to find a safe haven for his family, the centre's management punished him with isolation, forced medication and deprivation of cigarettes. When he became sick, suffering weight loss induced by depression, immigration department (DIMIA) officials overrode the assessment of health workers that he needed hospitalisation, and instead offered him the choice of remaining in the detention or immediate deportation. He chose deportation.
Lynch said that this detainee had a 90% chance of having his asylum claim accepted but had been held in detention for months awaiting a security clearance document. Just before the man was deported, Lynch found out that the document had been sitting in a DIMIA office.
Psychiatric nurse Dr Glenda Kouthoulis and psychologists Lyn Bender and Terry Zeeher described from how the regime at Woomera destroyed detainees' will to live. Kouthoulis was working at Woomera during the hunger strikes earlier this year.
Bender said that while the Australian detention centres were not Auschwitz-type death camps, they were comparable to the Jewish ghettos set up earlier in the Nazi Holocaust. She said that while the self-harm by the imprisoned refugees was behaviour resulting from despair, the hunger-strikes also involved solidarity, care and togetherness. Bender described the hunger striking refugees as "risking life for freedom".
All panellists reported that protests against the treatment of the detainees by solidarity activists gave the refugees desperately needed hope. According to Lynch, such protests "help to convince refugees that there's more to Australia than what they experience in detention".
From Green Left Weekly, May 22, 2002.
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