Nauru
Lady Mondegreen alerted me to this horrific story by Martin McKenzie-Murray –
Nazanin left the Nauru refugee camp one morning on a day pass, happy to be visiting some friends who had been settled on the island – she and her family had been in detention for 26 months. “She used a bus, and I called a friend and he said she was there,” Dabal tells me. “My sister was happy to leave this camp for a day.”
She never returned. At 6 o’clock that evening, Dabal and his mother reported her absence to security guards. Something wasn’t right. In response, the guards floated theories of missed buses or an innocent loss of time, benign explanations for what the family felt was a sinister disappearance. By 7pm, several hours past Nazanin’s curfew, the camp authorities began to wonder, too. “They realise it was bigger than the things they thought,” Dabal says.
Police found her at 9 pm, beaten and disoriented.
Much of the reporting of Nauru focuses on the camps, or regional processing centres. But there is another reality lived outside it, once refugees are settled. For many months now, hostility towards refugees has grown among Nauruans. Local resentment about the 2013 riots has metastasised, mixed with anxieties about employment and culture. Many settled refugees have been assaulted, and there are frequent threats to storm the camps themselves.
In other words refugees are sitting ducks, imprisoned on a small island where the locals hate them. Women are placed in isolated locations, without proper locks on the doors. The private company the Australian government pays to house the refugees says there’s no problem.
It’s unusual that they haven’t encountered any allegations of rape or sexual assault, because there are many. Such as the story of Beth, a young refugee who was released into the Nauruan community in May. Allegedly Beth, whose name I have changed, was sitting on the beach with some other women when local men gave her a drink. Beth began to feel woozy, before being dragged into bushes by two or three men and raped. They then poured fuel on her and set her alight.
She had an abortion, then she tried to kill herself.
There are others.
McKenzie-Murray indicts the refugee camp system:
We have built camps in our name that house damaged children, yet denude privacy and employ guards without background checks. Camps that encourage abuse, intimidation and the hypersexualisation of children. Camps that cannot provide nominal release dates to its subjects, creating purgatories. Camps that repel journalists with exaggerated visa fees, and punish detainees who speak to them distantly.
On Nauru, aid workers have been traumatised, discredited, sacked without explanation and had their exoneration ignored. We have criminalised their disclosure of child abuse. Have, in fact, created a distant exclusion zone for mandatory reporting; a black site whose governing legislation is a repudiation of our own laws. “If I see child abuse in Australia and I don’t report it, I can get into enormous trouble,” David Isaacs, a paediatrician, said last week. “If I see child abuse on Nauru and I do report it, I might go to prison for two years.”
Everything Tony Abbott is doing to the migrants seems to have the goal of proving that a) they’ll never reach Australia, and b) if they do make it to land they’ll be so miserable they’ll tell their relatives to stay home.
He has a lot of popular support in Australia for “stopping the boats.” Not said out loud so much, but the guy is slick as snot. He knows what he’s doing.
As to what he should be doing in an ethical universe, the short term humanitarian answer is obvious. You. Do. Not. Treat. People. That. Way.
Longer term, though, it’s a harder question. The Europeans decided to start rescuing migrants closer to Libyan shores after some horrific mutli-thousand drownings. Which is good. But the smugglers’ response seems to be to push people out to sea in almost-cardboard boxes. Because what-the-hell, the boats only have to go a few miles offshore and if everybody drowns it was the Europeans fault for not picking them up fast enough.
What do you do? Desperate people + inhuman smugglers + richer people with some sense of ethics = blackmailing people using their ethics against them.
That aspect of it infuriates me, as I suspect it does lots of Europeans. Some of us react by refusing to take it out on the migrants. Others are less worried about the splash damage from the anger.
The Aussies would have the same situation if they moved to more humane tactics. The Far Eastern traffickers are just as bad as the rest of their ilk. And, as someone who was born in Australia and has been there many times (don’t live there now), I can tell you how a majority of Australians will react to the situation. With a giant F U. So what do you do? Without international cooperation, how do you as one country treat migrants well without giving the smugglers a pure-profit business model?
Because the only real solution is a world without forever wars and with economic justice. The solution has to be international. Instead, the richer people try to keep their patch safe, which is not going to work and which is going to have lots of Tony Abbotts along the way.
tl;dr: I have no idea what would work in the real world.
It’s certainly not the end of it. Nauru is the most recent case of this steady descent into I don’t know what to call it, but Manus Island is no better, the situation for those “freed” into the community in PNG is no better, and the stories over the years from the onsure detention centres are no better. And they’ve been around since Labor introduced them in 1992!
I wrote about other abuse and our national blindspot last year, after there was a murder on Manus.
https://medium.com/@DavidMaddock1/the-denial-of-australia-s-moral-disintegration-4b026f100d54
Is this moral disintegration happening everywhere? Canada is no different, as the left struggles to win an election against a Conservative Party that has no morality or ethics at all. In the US, Donald Trump leads the Republican nomination race. He leads but let’s be fair, his competitors aren’t much better than he is. In the UK, the Conservative government is busy dismantling the NHS and promises the repeal of human rights legislation.
WTF is happening in the world?
This is horrifying stuff and has been going on in one form or another since John Howard’s government was elected. The Tampa affair in 2001 is the beginning. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair )
Labor is a LITTLE better than the Libs – they have at least resettled SOME people and have not engaged in piracy, torture or refoulment. But not a lot better. Manus was their idea, though the implementation with private sector security with Libs.
It’s Australia’s great shame and all my friends are cheering on Julian Burnside’s attempt to get this crime to the Hague, and supporting refugees where we can.
SamBarge, I really fear it is happening. As far as Nauru and PNG goes this was always going to end in tears. It represents nothing other than short term political expediency. Offering impoverished third parties money and implied favours at a later date to take on a problem that Australia wanted to avoid and the third party was not actually equipped to sustain and manage was shameful. The treatment of those refugees multiplies the shame further.
Having said that, Australia is not alone in dealing with this problem. The influx of large number of displaced people into the west is unprecedented since WWII I suspect. The foreign policies of the last 40-50 years are well and truly coming home to roost and frankly I think it will get worse before it gets better. Our governments will try to handle the issue ‘softly’ which will be ineffective and increase resentment at home, leading to an increase in racism and ultra-nationalism. It’s grim and people are going to get hurt.
On the plus side, we’re also seeing the rise of true left candidates, which haven’t existed in the US for a long time. But the polarization is itself alarming: “the center cannot hold”. Inequality is likely to get worse rather than better if changes don’t happen fast. As global warming ruins crops and endangers cities, people will grow more desperate and angry if we don’t have a system ready to cope with it.