BY JULIE SMITH
SYDNEY â Despite the difficulty involved with obtaining a visa to Nauru, Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett and Democrats immigration advisor Marianne Dickie recently visited the island, where they met with detainees and witnessed firsthand the "twisting labyrinth of cruelty and faceless bureaucratic dispassion" created by the Australian government.
Speaking at a Refugee Action Coalition Forum in Sydney in mid-August, Dickie described the economic crisis on Nauru where workers, except those at the detention centre, have gone without pay for three months. She described conditions as comparable to the poorest Aboriginal communities in Australia.
No ships are unloaded, affecting supplies. There is no fresh food, no infrastructure, and water is on-and-off for six hours at a time. The blackboard in the school staff-room reads "you owe it to your children to come to school despite having not been paid for three months". Inside the camps, the conditions are only marginally better.
The setting of the main camp, run by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), is, according to Dickie, "like a moonscape, very desolate", and sits past a dump and an old mine.
"Topside" camp detains more than 300 Iraqis and Afghans and consists of air-conditioned demountables with a capacity of three people per room. The IOM is said to provide 76.83 litres of fresh water per day per detainee, but this is disputed by the detainees themselves. There is electricity 24 hours a day and the large tin shed kitchen is an improvement on the open-air eating facilities that once existed at the camp.
According to the IOM, distribution of vocational items occurs weekly, cigarettes every 14 days, toiletries monthly, clothing and phone calls quarterly and linen every six months. There are only three doctors providing care for all detainees, one is a psychiatrist.
Dickie and Bartlett interviewed a total of 23 detainees from both camps. They were greeted with a sign saying "welcome to our detention centre" and the children presented them with flowers and held signs which read "am I not like your child?"
Dickie had promised men who had wives in the camp photographs and video footage, but was prevented by camp staff from keeping that promise. She spent most of her time with the nine women who had husbands in Australia.
The women asked why they could not be with their husbands and wanted to know how long they would be detained, becoming almost hysterical when talking about their situation. Although there was an overwhelming sense of despair about them "all women and children looked surprisingly healthy", she said, "better than the Baxter detainees because they are able to leave the camp to go swimming and visit the local market. They also have communal camps.
"The children go to the [run-down] school and some have helped to repair it a little, finding computers which had been stored because no one knew what to do with them, and setting up an internet caf."
This, however, does not replace freedom and the detainees say they are dead people walking. "Tell the women of Australia we want to see our husbands and we want to see our children happy".
A visit to State House, the site of the Christmas protest, was not permitted as it was considered a security risk.
Dickie urged those present at the meeting who had voted Labor in the past to turn their back on the party which has turned its back on refugees while refugee activists called for a strong, united voice to call for an end to the "Pacific solution" and mandatory detention.
From Green Left Weekly, September 3, 2003.
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