Human Cargo (21 page)

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SHAYAN’S
AND MORTEZA’S
stories had stirred the medical profession to anger. And though the government remained obdurate, even choosing not to publicize its few concessions, something else had in fact happened. Of all the responses to the refugee predicament in the world, this is one of the most remarkable and certainly the most heartening. Ordinary Australians, people who had tacitly accepted the fact that asylum seekers—the “illegals” and “queue jumpers”—could be locked up indefinitely in detention camps in the desert, could not quite stomach the idea of children losing the will to live. It shook their image of Australia as an essentially humane place, challenged the cherished notion of “fair go,” decency, which is deeply rooted in the national psyche. The publicity surrounding Shayan and Morteza, brief and contested though it was, made clear something that had not been perceived before: that Australia’s camps were not the model centers described by Howard and Ruddock, but grim and terrifying places in which people were going mad.

The backlash started slowly. It has not grown to any overwhelming size, but it is evidence, to use Michael Ignatieff’s phrase, of the “expanding moral imagination” of our times. It started among writers, lawyers, actors, academics, and in small pockets of the churches, with nuns and lay sisters and Jesuit priests, inspired by the reports put out by Dr. Zachary Steel and his colleagues and by the growing body of critical evidence emerging from research carried out by the UN, by UNHCR, by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. It spread through cities, into towns and villages, into the outback, a surge of moral indignation carried by telephone and e-mail. It drew in veterans of the old Aborigine rights campaigns,
and prominent barristers including Julian Burnside, a Melbourne QC, who began to question the legality of each and every process, and younger advocates, such as Deslie Billich, who helps run a public interest law firm in Adelaide for the refugees. It prompted the birth of a now prominent human rights group, Chilout, campaigning on behalf of the imprisoned children. It took in novelists and poets, including Thomas Kenneally, Linda Jaivin, Arnold Zable, Eva Sallis, and Peter Carey, who produced fiction and plays, and journalists and commentators, such as David Marr and Robert Manne, who wrote essays and books; it became fringe and street theater; it provoked articles and poems and films. The Howard government called these activists the “elites,” or the “Chardonnay liberals.”

In Port Augusta, a Catholic churchwoman called Penny Kelly was in church on October 18, 2002, when the children in the congregation prayed for the families of asylum seekers being transferred from Woomera to Baxter. She was disheartened to note the hostile reaction of the townspeople, who either wanted the refugees sent back as quickly as possible, or pretended that nothing was happening. That Thursday, she went out to the new camp, taking with her a cake and some cookies that she had baked. She had never really been able to understand how ordinary Germans, living around concentration camps during the Third Reich, maintained that they knew nothing about them, but now she began to understand. Her neighbors concentrated on other things. Friends, however, eventually listened to her stories and took to accompanying her on her weekly visits to Baxter, and when she told her husband, who works for the Port Augusta prison, that the detainees had too few men visitors, he started going too, driving out to the camp in the desert, taking with him nuts and cookies, but really going in order to talk. Among these very different people, the visitors and the visited, country Australians and lawyers, doctors, teachers, goldsmiths, students, housewives from Iran and Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan, real friendships began to grow. In the visitors’ room, there is much laughter and affection. People celebrate one another’s birthdays and remember, with amusement, the day someone brought in an enormous
fish, so big that it would not fit on the X-ray machine through which everything must be checked, so that eventually it came in as a visitor instead. Like Sister Claudette, Penny Kelly feels her life to have been changed by her weekly involvement with an issue that for her raises huge moral questions. But she is also saddened. “I grew up proud of being Australian. Though I was aware of how badly we had behaved towards the Aborigines, I still felt we were basically a good country. I am no longer proud. I feel there is a hole inside me, like an ulcer. I think of the horrible things we are doing to these people. Australia will look back on this as a black day.”

Around the time Penny Kelly was beginning to hear about Woomera, in the mountains not far from Sydney three women friends were watching television footage of the
Tampa
. Two of them, Susan Varga and Ann Coombs, were writers. “We felt depressed. This was something different, something that seemed to have gone too far,” says Susan Varga. They called a public meeting in their town of Bowral and worked the streets with petitions and posters. Five hundred people turned up. Television covered the meeting. The next day, e-mails started arriving, many from Australians who had never protested against anything before. What was happening to the asylum seekers, they wrote, was not “fair.” It was counter to everything that Australia was about.

For a while, Susan and Ann kept on with their writing. More e-mails poured in. They put their work to one side, gave up their lives to founding what they have called Rural Australians for Refugees, drawing up a ten-point plan calling on the Australian government to overturn its current policies, undo the Pacific Solution, and return to a more moral past. “It grew,” says Susan, “like Topsy.” By the spring of 2004, there were seventy-one groups across the country, doing whatever seemed most useful locally: writing letters, collecting money, drawing up petitions. A pharmacist called Elaine Smith has turned all her free time over to keeping in touch with the detainees on Nauru, updating her Web site with every legal move. It was Elaine Smith who broadcast information about a hunger strike
on Nauru in December 2003, when four detainees, goaded beyond endurance by their endless indefinite sentence, sewed up their lips. In the years of its existence, no outsider has been allowed to visit the Nauru facility. What is known about it comes from relations in Australia, who talk from time to time to the detainees, some of them wives and children who followed their husbands to Indonesia only to find themselves ensnared by the Pacific Solution, or from the occasional illicit reporter, like Kate Durham, an artist in Melbourne who is married to Julian Burnside and went in without permission. Others, nearer the “front line” of the detention centers, visit prisoners. Others again invite those released into the community to stay with them. All over Australia, farmers have offered jobs to those on temporary protection visas. The mayor of Young has championed a group of Afghans to work in the town’s slaughterhouses.

Like all other ventures concerning the asylum seekers, the Rural Australians for Refugees has built upon its own success. This is the second most noticeable aspect of Australia’s moral crusade: it was not the television images of Iranian children being maltreated that alone caught the country’s imagination. It was the fact that ordinary Australians began to meet the asylum seekers face-to-face. More than 9,000 refugees are now out in the community. They all have stories to tell. As the Australians, who knew about them only from their demonized images, have discovered, they are neither scroungers nor exploitative, but anxious, troubled men, women, and children who have fled torture, persecution, and possible death, endured horrific journeys, lost everything they once possessed, only to spend months and even years in an Australian camp. As they have made friends and told their stories, so the absurdity and cruelty of their treatment have come to inspire and impress Australians, particularly as their visas are so punishing—the temporary visas do not allow for a permanent solution, nor for being reunited with families, so even those who have been released live in endless uncertainty—and even as so many prove hardworking and capable. What possible threat are such people to Australia’s security? Why keep punishing them?
Some of those on TPVs are now approaching the moment when they will have to apply for a second visa for another three years. Few of their new friends and supporters are likely to take kindly to their possible redetention or deportation.

Australia has no Bill of Rights. Even if, at the time of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it recoiled at the idea of letting people enter another country without invitation, it did sign the 1951 Convention. What bothers Father Brennan, a Jesuit priest, lawyer, and author of a book on refugees,
Tampering with Asylum
, is not merely that Australia is in breach of several conventions that it has signed and ratified—the treatment of the asylum seekers violates several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention for the Rights of the Child, the Statute of Rome, and the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights—but that it is becoming so hard to justify a policy that is so discriminatory and inhumane. Were every Western democracy to follow Australia’s model and introduce indefinite mandatory detention—indefinitely locking up asylum seekers who have committed no crimes as recognized under international law—the very meaning of the Refugee Convention would be forgotten.

What is more, Australia, unlike Europe, is not trying to deal with the arrival of tens of thousands of economic migrants, who need, if the Refugee Convention is to be upheld, to be sorted out from the true asylum seekers. On the contrary, those who took to the boats in Indonesia did so out of genuine need. Up to 90 percent of unauthorized arrivals, like Morteza and Shayan, have, after years in detention, been found to be true refugees after all. Nor has a single terrorist ever been known to enter the country on a leaky boat. As Robert Manne puts it, the country is being mobilized by a specter. With no new arrivals, it has become a policy about no one. It is an immense sledgehammer, to crack a very small nut.

Since the frenetic days of the
Tampa
, the mood of the immigration authorities has remained defiant, with much talk of teaching smugglers that Australia is not a soft touch. Fewer children remain
in detention. Of Nauru’s detained, who at the peak numbered 1,546, all but 284 have left. Most of those remaining are Afghans, and Australia has signed a $22.5 million deal to extend detention on Nauru at least until June 2005. Across the whole of Australia, 1,097 boat people are still in detention, either awaiting final decisions, or because their countries refuse to take them back, or because they have been turned down but know that if they went home they would face persecution, and so decide to wait and hope something may change. Just one man, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian called Aladdin Sisalem, remains on Manus Island, costing Australia a reported $23,000 a day. How, asks Father Brennan—veteran of earlier campaigns to secure rights for Aboriginals—can Australia maintain a policy that demonizes a small number of innocent people, and treats them with such brutality, if not in the spirit of punishment and deterrence that it so vehemently denies? A system that risks the sanity of children, he argues, makes a nonsense of the family values that Australia so prizes. What alarms him, as it alarms Steel and others, is that Australia, having proved that it can get away with anything when it comes to asylum seekers, may well prove a model for countries now trying and failing to come to terms with these problems, and that far from publicizing what it does well—the resettlement of refugees—as an inspiration to others, it is instead exporting all that is most shameful. Australia has seen four waves of boat arrivals over the years; there are, argues Father Brennan, bound to be others, as new Talibans or Saddam Husseins drive more refugees into exile by their atrocities: now is the time to put in place policies that, while securing Australia’s borders, are also humane and decent.

For what the Pacific Solution has done to Australia itself, he adds, is to divide the country more savagely even than the battles for indigenous recognition and rights, making the Liberal party more conservative, the Labor party more fractured, and battering those Australians who have long supported human rights and multicultur-alism. “Howard sang a song until the people believed him,” says Robert Manne. “It was a horrible song, and it allowed hateful things
to happen in a democracy in a way that no one would ever have believed Australia would allow.” Far from expanding the world’s moral imagination, as Father Brennan sees it, Australia, under Howard and the Liberals, has shrunk it.

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BEFORE LEAVING AUSTRALIA,
I went to visit Villawood, Sydney’s detention center, about which Thomas Kenneally wrote so bitterly in
The Tyrant’s Novel
Many of Villawood’s detainees are overstayers, and it is here that they wait while their futures are determined. But it was also the camp where Shayan spent the last wretched months of his incarceration, and where Morteza sewed up his lips and later drank a bottle of shampoo.

The camp is in a suburb, a green, quiet area of calm streets and pleasant gardens; like most of the detention centers, it is somehow hidden away, cleverly concealed behind trees and virtually unmarked. By the beginning of visiting hours, people were making their way in ones and twos up a dirt road through the first set of gates, to join a queue inside the first wall of razor wire, to be searched, screened, and stamped with an ink that shows up under ultraviolet light. Inside the compound is a grassy area, perhaps an acre in size, with plastic chairs and tables and a jungle gym for children.

It was Behnam’s birthday, the third he has spent in detention. He was eighteen. His family is Mandaean and their story is similar to those of most boat people. They found a smuggler in Indonesia, endured a harsh sea trip, were subjected to a slow process of interview and rejection, only then to be moved from camp to camp. Behnam’s life is made tolerable by the fact that both he and his younger brother and sister attend school outside the camp, where all three are doing well. His mother is a purposeful, strong, outgoing woman. It is clear that she has played an enormous part in keeping the family together. On his eighteenth birthday, Behnam looked well.