Human Cargo (17 page)

Two years ago, after an absence of fifteen years, Sister Claudette came back to Port Augusta. A detention center for asylum seekers was being built not far from the town, between the desert and the red streaky mountains, made out of “dongas,” prefabricated huts designed for miners, shipped into nearby Port Pirie from West Australia and set down in rectangular blocks among the eucalyptus
trees. The new camp was to take detainees from a troubled and much hated center called Woomera, about an hour’s drive into the desert, which was to close down after a violent history of riots, suicide attempts, and arson.

Why the authorities decided to call the new camp Baxter, Sister Claudette is not entirely sure. The name might refer to Sir John Philip Baxter, chairman of Australia’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1957 to 1972, for this was the area where the British and Australians jointly tested atomic rockets and missiles in the 1940s and 1950s. The explanation she believes likelier is that the camp is named after a man who once owned the land on which it stands, a settler remembered widely for the harshness with which he treated the Aborigines who inhabited it. Nor was Sister Claudette quite certain, the morning she took me with her to Baxter, to be tagged, searched, moved from one locked compartment into another, stamped with fluorescent identification marks, and then ushered through seven sets of security doors, how many detainees Baxter held. The numbers change from day to day and the authorities can be evasive about exact figures.

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IN MARCH
2004, almost forty years after my first and only previous visit, I went back to Australia, landing in Adelaide and going straight to Port Augusta, wanting to see what Australia’s detention policy was actually like. Sister Claudette told me that in a month for which she had managed to get figures there had been 199 detainees, one of them a Kashmiri who had spent over seven years in detention; most were young men, from Afghanistan and Iraq, though there were also a small number of families with their children. Once I was inside the camp, she said, I would have no view of the outside world other than the sky above, the camp having been designed to let no one see either in or out. That, she said, as we emptied our pockets and stowed our possessions, was what she always remembered about Baxter, the enclosed dongas and the blue sky, along with the noise, the endless sound of whining and clanging metal, as
the many gates and doors opened and closed, loud and harsh in the desert silence.

It was Salem who told me most about what it is to be a detainee in Baxter. Salem is half Iraqi, half Iranian, a geologist, a small, thin, worried man in his early fifties who looks considerably older, with thinning lifeless brown hair and very bad teeth. His wife, Emam, is thirty-eight and she, too, looks older, under her neat brown scarf and brown cotton gown. They come from southern Iran and they are Sabian Mandaeans, vegetarians and pacifists, followers of St. John the Baptist. Their Christian sect is neither recognized nor tolerated in Iran, and the difficulty is made worse in their case by Salem’s mixed parentage. Salem was at Teheran University when the Shah was overthrown and the universities closed; only in 1980, lying about his religion, was he able to complete his degree in geology. Forbidden to apply for full citizenship in Iran during the long war with Iraq, and unable to find geological work as a foreigner, he met and married Emam and worked with his father as a goldsmith. The couple had three boys, Masoud, Majid, and Youhana, and Salem paid $800 every year in bribes to keep the family’s papers in order. But the day came, early in 2000, when Salem was informed that he would no longer be entitled to a work permit or to a visa to stay in Iran. He was ordered to leave the country and to move to Iraq, though Iraq under Saddam Hussein was known not to welcome Mandaeans, and in any case would not accept either Emam or the boys. They were now a family without a country.

Salem knew people who had already been forced into exile. In the goldsmith’s shop, he had heard stories of people-smugglers and of foreign countries prepared to give refuge to the persecuted. Most of all, he wanted a Christian, not a Muslim country. A friend who had fled sent him the telephone number of a smuggler in Indonesia, who was known to have transported other Mandaeans to new lives in Canada and the United States. Fearful of the journey and unwilling to leave relations behind, Salem delayed his departure despite the order to leave. Then, one morning at around ten o’clock, he received a call from his sons’ school to say that Masoud had been
gravely hurt in one eye after a fight with a group of Muslim boys, and when it took him until four that afternoon to find a doctor willing to treat an injured Mandaean half-Iraqi child, he knew he could delay no longer. He had been saving a little gold. He sold it all, together with his business, his car, and his furniture; he had no house to sell, being forbidden, as a half Iraqi, to own property. Following the instructions he received from Indonesia, he bought tickets on a plane from Teheran to Malaysia, for which no visas were needed. From there, after a month spent waiting anxiously in a hotel, the family was told to fly on to Bali. In Bali, where Salem handed over $7,000 in cash to the smuggler arranging their journey, they waited another month before being taken by boat to Indonesia, and then on again by car to a deserted beach. Their destination, they were now told, was Australia, a country good to refugees. They had three suitcases and two bags with them, their only possessions. They stared out across the sea and thought it looked very dangerous. “We feared,” says Salem, “that we would die.”

There were 126 people on board the frail wooden boat that came to collect them that night after dark fell. It was soon too rough to eat the rice, eggplants, and tomatoes that Emam had prepared, and in any case most of the passengers, who had never seen the sea and could not swim, were being sick. “Sometimes,” says Salem, “we were sure that we would capsize. We prayed. Some of the young men on the boat fought over the drinking water, because there wasn’t enough. We had brought with us some water of our own, and a little honey and biscuits, and this is what we fed to the boys.” Among the 126 passengers were thirty young children, including Salem and Emam’s boys.

The asylum seekers, most of them Iraqi, Iranian, or Afghan, had been told that the boat would take them to Ashmore Reef, a fair way from Australia’s northern coast. Before they reached it, an Australian naval patrol spotted them and, judging their boat to be close to sinking, towed it into shore. Salem and his family were taken to a hostel, given rice and fish, then put onto a boat for Darwin, where they stayed for a week, waiting. At two o’clock one morning, they
were woken and taken to a plane. They found themselves in Adelaide, where a coach waited to drive them to the recently opened camp at Woomera. And there, for many months, they remained, confused, uncertain about their fate, questioned from time to time by immigration officials, spending each day trying to keep the boys cheerful and healthy while around them there was constant violence between detainees and guards. They witnessed fires, self-mutilation, suicide attempts.

In October 2002, the family was moved to Baxter, shortly after it opened. They had by now learned that they had failed, after their first interviews and without a lawyer, in their first application for asylum. In December, detainees in one of the dongas lit a fire, causing $2 million worth of damage. There followed a rash of fires in Woomera and the camps at Port Hedland, Villawood, and on Christmas Island, causing the authorities to clamp down further on the freedom of the refugees. The boys were now aged six, twelve, and fourteen. They had been behind razor wire for almost a year. In keeping with a slight softening in attitude toward children in detention—and perhaps in response to the growing public opposition to the policy—Salem and Emam were asked whether they would prefer that the boys and their mother live in a guarded compound within Port Augusta, where they could eat home-cooked food and the children could attend the local school, though under guard. With misgivings, hating the separation that this would entail, they accepted. Emam and the children were moved to a house in the town, and Salem was told that he might make two visits to his family each week, also under guard. His sons are now eating again, Salem says, which they would not while in Baxter, and they do not cry, as they did in Woomera. But he worries about them growing up without a father. Alone in Baxter, he spends the days asleep; sometimes he reads the newspaper and sometimes he smokes a cigarette. “I am a geologist,” he says. “What is there for me to do?”

Salem, Emam, and the three boys have now been turned down definitively by the Australian immigration authorities. The “discrimination” suffered by the Mandeans in Iran is not deemed to
amount to persecution. They have been told that, as Salem is half Iraqi, and Iraq has now been liberated from Saddam Hussein, they may safely go to Iraq. The Refugee Review Tribunal, which hears appeals, has also turned them down. All that is now left is a last appeal to the High Court, and then to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Amanda Vanstone, personally, under what is known as Section 417. If refused, the family has just two choices: to remain indefinitely in an Australian detention center, or to return either to Iran, which would accept Emain and the boys but not Salem, or to Iraq, where only Salem has the right to live. Neither Iran nor (even now) Iraq looks favorably on the Mandaeans. “They have held us in prison now for a very long time,” says Salem, holding on to my arm tightly so that I will understand what he is saying to me. Emam, who has been allowed to come out to Baxter that day, speaks little English; she nods and smiles. “What have we done? Ordinary criminals do not live as we do, abandoned, not knowing whether we will ever be free. As Mandaeans, we need every year to be baptized. In three years, this has not once been allowed to happen. Sometimes I think that I will kill myself, but I cannot speak to my wife about this. I am an honest man. I should not be in prison.”

When I left, back through the series of locked compartments and security checks, through the double rows of fencing and wire, and out into the yellow desert landscape, I could see Salem waving gently to me until I passed through the metal gate that cuts off all view in or out of the outside world. Driving back into Port Augusta with Sister Claudette, we passed a minibus driven by a guard from Baxter, with another guard on board. In the backseat sat Emam, being taken “home” to the guarded hostel and her sons.

Salem and his family are not without friends. Sister Augusta is only one of a group of local people, schoolteachers, pastors, librarians, farmers, who now take an interest in Baxter’s unhappy inmates. In October 2003, Sister Claudette told me, there were 4,000 visits to Baxter. Some of the visitors were people like herself who went out to the camp several times, and others were strangers who drove many
miles across the desert to register their protest at Australia’s refugee policy and to offer their support to the interned people. They do not often have a language in common with the asylum seekers, hut they bake cakes and cookies and bring nuts and olives, and they sit together companionably under the eucalyptus or, when temperatures make the desert unbearable, they retreat into a portacabin with air-conditioning and crowd around small gray plastic tables with plastic mugs and plates. There is nothing sharp in Baxter, no glass or metal or pottery: violence has caused too much damage in the past. When Sister Claudette asked Salem not long ago what he would do first if he was released, he thought for a long time and then said that he would like to eat a meal on a porcelain plate with metal knives and forks.

Two days after my visit to Baxter, I read in the newspaper that the camp had been closed briefly to strangers. A young detainee, showing signs of disturbance and suicidal behavior, threatened with solitary confinement, had climbed onto the roof of the compound. The other detainees, in sympathy, had taken over the compound and barricaded themselves in. Fifty guards, in full riot gear, had forced the gate.

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IT WAS UNDER
Paul Keating’s Labor government, in 1992, that Australia passed laws to lock up unauthorized arrivals in remote holding camps and keep them there as long as it took to process their applications for asylum, but the harsh full sweep of Australia’s refugee policy crystallized only much later, in the wake of a series of specific events. Had these events happened at different moments, or at a different time in the political calendar, or even not so fast one upon the other, it is possible that Australia’s ways of dealing with refugees might well have remained similar to those in place throughout the West, a little tougher perhaps, but just as piecemeal, contradictory, and unpredictable. As it was, the events were so dramatic, and so political, that within weeks Canberra had created a tight, clear, new, and radical asylum policy. And it is this model that
is now being looked at enviously by Western governments, including the United Kingdom, for which the issue of refugees and asylum has become equally politically alarming.

It came about like this. Australia needs and welcomes immigrants. It needed them after World War II, to work in the mines and on the land. In the 1950s, there was a poster showing a kangaroo perched on a map of Australia, hauling toward it a boat with a beaming family on board. “Bring out a Briton,” read the caption, “room for millions more.” And Australia still needs migrants today, to feed its prosperous economy and to boost an aging Australian population now standing at around 20 million people. More than 6 million people have come to Australia as new settlers since World War II. Since the 1970s, multiculturalism has been a pivotal plank of Australia’s self-image. Today, one-quarter of the population is born abroad. Australia has what it calls a nondiscriminatory immigration policy, which means in theory at least that anyone from any country can apply to enter, regardless of religion or race, providing they meet Australia’s rules about good character and health. In the last ten years or so, government and opposition have tended to take a common line on immigration; in 2002, a new migration program was put in place, to last four years, allowing between 100,000 and 110,000 migrants per year, of whom 12,000 would be humanitarian or refugee entrants; another 99,000 people could enter on temporary visas for work or business. When it comes to official resettlement, Australia is generous: of the twenty-one countries that resettle through UNHCR, it takes the most people per capita— 620,000 refugees over the last half century—but it should also be noted that in absolute terms Australia is only thirty-eighth in number of refugees received. Australia has one of the world’s most sophisticated electronic entry processing systems with a computer database of those it wishes to exclude.