Aaron Benedek
& Susan Mullan, Sydney
At very short notice, 20 refugee supporters, including Merlin Luck from Channel Ten's Big Brother program, rallied on July 14 to protest the forced transfers of asylum seekers from Sydney's Villawood detention centre to the Baxter centre in the South Australian desert.
The protesters had responded to phone calls from Villawood detainees who reported that asylum seeker families feared being forcibly transferred from Villawood to Baxter.
A week earlier, the immigration department had distributed brochures to Villawood detainees highlighting the features of the Port Augusta housing project, which women and their children detained in Baxter have the option of relocating to.
Two men, one from Afghanistan and one from Pakistan, were moved to Baxter on July 12. At 12.30pm on July 14, four families were loaded into five white mini-vans, which left the Villawood centre in convoy.
The immigration minister Amanda Vanstone insisted that they had been moved voluntarily, but fellow detainees insist that they were pressured. Amir Mesrinejad, an Iranian asylum seeker who has been detained at Villawood for four years, told AAP that guard numbers at the centre had been increased. Twelve officers usually patrolled the centre at any one time, but that morning there were more than 50 officers by 9am, Mesrinejad said, focusing on areas housing family groups.
Luck commented to Green Left Weekly: "If they need 60 extra guards, maybe the transfers aren't as voluntary as Amanda Vanstone is making out."
By the time the protesters arrived at Villawood, the four families had already been removed. Other detainees, terrified of being removed as well, had climbed with their children onto the roof of a building in the centre.
John Morris, a Socialist Alliance NSW Senate candidate who attended the protest, told GLW: "This is government hypocrisy. One day they're offering visas to Afghans on TPVs and the next they're forcibly transferring refugees to a desert concentration camp."
By moving the 17 families currently in Villawood to Baxter, the government no doubt hoped to convince some of them to relocate to the residential housing project, thus enabling it to claim that there are no children being held in detention in Australia.
In a July 14 media release, the Refugee Action Coalition's Ian Rintoul argued that "the community housing project is just an extension of the detention centre and families are being separated by the project. Residents in the community housing projects are already requesting to go back to Baxter, so at least the families can be together."
The move to Baxter will further isolate asylum seekers families from legal support and cut them off from the wide network of regular visitors and friends.
At a Federal Court hearing in Melbourne on July 15, the immigration department gave an undertaking that the 13 remaining families would not be transferred from the Villawood detention centre without first being informed of the immigration department's proposal to do so, and that their responses would then be taken into account.
From Green Left Weekly, July 21, 2004.
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