BY PHIL GRIFFITHS
The rebellion at Australia's immigration detention centres was no surprise to most refugee advocates.
The government and the corporate media have lied about the cause of the fires. The first fire started at the new detention centre, Baxter, on the night of December 27 in locked room that the detainees did not have access to. Detainees knew about newspaper reports wrongly blaming them for this fire before the final, and most destructive, fire was started in one of the single men's compounds.
At Baxter frustration and anger have been building up for months.
Baxter was designed to be ultra-secure. What the government produced was something out of George Orwell's 1984. Where detainees could freely move around the different compounds at Woomera and Port Hedland, in Baxter they have to ask for written permission to visit friends.
Such a visit involves a full body search each way, as does a visit to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs office or the gym.
There are closed-circuit television cameras everywhere, monitoring everyone's movements. The detainees regard Baxter as worse than Woomera.
The most pervasive problem is boredom and anxiety. One woman knits every day, and then pulls it all undone and starts again because she has no wool. We have sent her some wool.
One of the most persistent problems is the systematic refusal by the authorities to provide timely medical care.
An asylum seeker who suffers from anxiety attacks and seizures has been repeatedly put in isolation, supposedly to stop him harming himself. He was distraught at being separated from his friends.
A man who broke his leg went 16 days without treatment for it, being given Panadol for the pain. He was only treated when he threatened damage.
The entire regime leads to constant small protests, and protests are punished with bashings or detention in the isolation compound.
One detainee told how, in isolation, some people have had their hands tied with a bracelet, been blindfolded and beaten, stripped naked and put into a room 2m by 2m, and watched by a camera.
All this is being done to people who have broken no Australian law in coming here to seek asylum. They are held in detention while their cases are "processed", but this too is an affront to their rights.
The crisis in Australia's detention centres cannot be understood without realising that their primary purpose is not to process claims for refugee status, but to collectively criminalise and punish all those who have dared come to Australian shores without "authorisation", in order to deter others from following.
Official figures show that in the 2001-02 financial year, the Refugee Review Tribunal set aside 62% of all Afghan decisions appealed and 87% of all Iraqi decisions appealed.
Hundreds of genuine Iraqi refugees had to go through the anxiety and trauma of being rejected by the department and threatened with deportation before getting a positive decision, many months later.
The detention system is designed to be cruel. The incredible psychological damage suffered in detention is not an unfortunate by-product, but a necessary part of the business of collective punishment, deterrence and repatriation.
So if ordinary Australians are looking for someone to blame for the fires, immigration minister Philip Ruddock and Prime Minister John Howard should be at the top of the list.
However, special mention must be made of David Penberthy and the Sydney Daily Telegraph, for their extraordinary feature on December 17, "Illegals live in five-star style", which told of DVDs and Sony Playstations for detainees, of education and training, sport and excursions, shopping and Foxtel.
Nothing so thoroughly inflamed the bitterness of detainees.
When the fires started, acting immigration minister Daryl Williams was quick to vilify asylum seekers, and hint darkly at a conspiracy by refugee advocates to encourage arson — despite the early fires almost certainly being caused by electrical faults.
Once they started, the fuse was lit on a rebellion that had been building for months.
Williams then came out warning that such criminal damage would not be tolerated by the Australian people. But a majority of the Australian population — including the parliamentary Labor Party — has been prepared to tolerate the most extraordinary abuse of human rights, just as a majority of us at various times tolerated the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the stolen generations, the white Australia policy and the Vietnam War.
A recent article in the British Guardian commented that "even the most scathing of official reports is now met with bored indifference".
Days after that article, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found that Australia had breached its human-rights obligations by transferring six uncharged asylum seekers to prison. Now we find roughly 20 uncharged asylum seekers in prison at Port Augusta and Silverwater.
Williams warned that the ringleaders faced deportation. It was a largely hollow threat. The government cannot deport people to Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan; and many from those countries who have been rejected as refugees remain stuck here, locked up.
All but one of those actually charged as a result of the fires are from Villawood detention centre, where the fire was started not among an asylum seeker compound, but in a section housing people awaiting deportation.
Refugee advocates have been lectured by the media that these fires will erode public support for refugees. There is not a shred of evidence for this — how can there be after such a short time?
What we can say is that protests by detainees so far have been a factor in alerting many ordinary Australians to the crime being committed in their name.
Thus the breakouts of 2000, the riots in 2001, the hunger strikes last year, were all followed by rising, not falling, support for refugee rights.
The new year fires reveal the utter bankruptcy of mandatory detention. It should be scrapped and the detainees released into the community.
This is what we did before 1989, when Villawood and Maribyrnong were migrant hostels, with open gates.
[Phil Griffiths is convener of the Refugee Action Committee, Canberra, and a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 15, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.