The New – In Sad Conclusion

So now we are at war. Well, some people enjoy that sort of thing.

I will never recover the love that I had for my country. My Government dumped the rescued asylum seekers of Tampa in a human warehouse in a 3rd World Desert Island. They highjacked nearly 440 drowned human beings. They squeezed them into the Naval Ship Manoora and lied to them about their fates. They enclosed them in wire and filed them away. Away from us, away from loved ones, lawyers or journalists.

Our Government’s dull genius was to invent a lucrative growth industry for security guards, clerks and professional caretakers. When I was in Nauru they seemed more numerous than the detainees.

Mr Ruddock’s lengthy processing gave the department time to concoct spurious justifications for rejecting the asylum claims of almost every Afghan, with only a few non Pashtun exceptions.

Right now, they are threatened with another ominous “removal” within 28 days. “Where are we going?” the detainees ask. They believe it to be Afghanistan. I hope it’s Christmas Island.

They have written, humbly requesting tents and perhaps some tradesman’s tools, because they don’t have homes to go to. Or they’re too ashamed to seek out family who’d borrowed money on their behalves. Some detainees think that with a few tools they might be able to return to Iran, for paid work or slavery on Iranian building sites, where they’d been bullied and robbed before. Their letters say quietly what Mr Ruddock knows – “We will starve.”

DIMIA has sent these poor Hazara back to Afghanistan, where whole villages have new occupiers and houses new occupants, and forgotten warlords have resurfaced, and nothing and everything is changed. Afghanistan is laced with mines and cluster bombs. Our military has blown it up like biscuits.

What possible damage can the shipwrecked, worn, sad, war ravaged souls on Nauru, do to our country? There are now less than 450 detainees on Nauru and almost as many Australian Detention Centre staff. There is a similar story in Manus where there are only seven detainees.

I still see the beautiful pale flock of Afghan women in Nauru. Our Government will herd them to Kabul, while their husbands sob their hearts out on our heartless temporary protection visas in Australia? Those women’s deaths are imminent. Their children’s are a certainty.

Mohammed, Ali and my other friends have told me they would rather die than return, because they would have to murder, loot and rob, to survive.

They write that they are sorry to waste my time, and they are sorry to trouble me.

I will never forget those young Hazara men. I think of them and I think of their dignity, their subtlety. I will never forgive those who sacrificed them. These men are the YOUNG DEAD and who can claim that we haven’t killed them?

If you find my language emotive or unfounded, think of Payadar – a man with five children, returned to Afghanistan still writing to my mother, living out of doors in Kabul, despairing of any place to spend the rest of his life.

Or Mohammed Mehdi, ID No. 105, now in Kabul, he knows I’m trying to send him money and references for a job, and yet I haven’t heard from him since his last email on 27th January. In Nauru he took enormous personal risks for me and later for Sarah. Daily, he taught English, prepared letters and translations, he poured over rejection letters, critiquing their inconsistencies, errors and malign findings. It was all to cost him dearly. But if anyone was going to survive it would be him, I told myself, he was sensitive, highly intelligent, skilled and a diplomat, and yet where is he?

Here is his letter from Kabul of 27 January 2003 – Mohammed Mehdi. He says:

“The police stopped our bus in a remote desert and got us out of the bus. Checking our pockets and luggage they took all of our money. As I resisted they started beating, slapping and kicking me. Then they forced me to back into the bus and went away.

Anyhow I have go through all these hardships and difficulties here in Kabul. And at the moment I am teaching English Language at this private Educational Center which can hardly allow living from hand to mouth. I can have lesser time to study and fewer facilities to work. Kabul is very much overpopulated and everything is very much expensive making many basic things inaccessible for most of its populations. It is very much insecure as well. No one feels secure at nights at the homes and days in the streets and roads. Here is always a fear existing in every one’s life fear of rocket attacks from the mountains surrounding Kabul and fears of lootings and robberies at nights and on the days. A large number of Kabulis spend their whole nights guarding their streets and their houses.

There are gangs of armed thieves who enter the houses in groups and take away everything.

This is the situation in Kabul. The security situation in the other provinces is much worse. Not only lootings and robberies are something usual everywhere but armed groups are competing with each other to gain more controls of the cities, villages and towns. So far three representatives of the transitional administration have been refused entry in my hometown Jaghoori. It is ruled by the armed groups controlling different parts of it.”

I am proud that I assisted the documentary, I am as in awe of the BBC as I am ashamed of the ABC, this government, this opposition and this Australian media.

I knew many of the detainees on Nauru by letter and fax. My attempted sponsorship of Mohammed Mehdi enabled that and I was able to collect names, stories and news via fax and letters from Nauru.

Most of my efforts to share the information I was getting were gracelessly ignored by Australian media. These were claims of hunger, thirst, inadequate accommodation, jailings, riot, missing people and drownings.

The eloquence and pain of their letters was always commented on, but never put into print. I had received some of John Pace’s documents for Amnesty that alleged brutality, mistreatment, deprivation or the deliberate spiking of food for children with chilli or salt, humiliation, beatings and abuse, designed to get the people to leave the boats of rescue like the Tampa and to comply with their aggressive captors, our SAS, and our defence forces and submit their freedom and their fates to cruel detention in the care of the carrion feeders, the IOM and the Nauru government, intent on turning these detainees into dollars; the new Pacific Perversion. Amnesty, for their own reasons, did not release the documents they had collected, translated and studied in London. I needed to get the accounts myself, they wouldn’t be mailed to me, I had to go to Nauru myself.

Carmen Lawrence helped Spare Rooms for Refugees by launching our report “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers”, and still it sank without trace. The media were inert yet again to scandal or conscience. “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers” is based on the 60 handwritten accounts in English and Dari that I collected personally with Sarah Macdonald. They dovetail with the Amnesty accounts, the stories fit.

For over a month in the case of the Tampa group the detainees were subjected to the violence and coercive behaviour of our SAS and the Navy. When our Prime Minister praises our precious SAS and Navy, I see bullies, not heroes.

Nauru’s own people suffer from violence, alcoholism and obesity, they seemed sullen and depressed but never stupid, they know they’ve been insulted and they know there’s worse to come.

Living, whether you’re a Nauruan or an Australian requires you to have the possibility of attaining self-respect. Refugees and Asylum Seekers are being deprived of theirs, but then so are we, the quality of any life depends on our qualities of humanness and respect for others. Fragile, sad asylum seekers need more than sustenance, and so do we.

In the BBC’s documentary “The Pacific Solution” Sarah Macdonald reads from those handwritten documents, boldly stating the brutalities Nauru’s detainees claimed to have experienced. No Australian journalist would quote them, the defence forces are very popular since East Timor and the ABC told me these were mere “allegations” against the SAS, the Navy and Army. She was quite relaxed about accusing our Government’s military of the use of electric truncheons, brutality and even torture.

Back in June, Sarah Macdonald of the BBC introduced herself to me and spoke of her wish to get to Nauru, and to use my help.

While I was thinking about it, she said dryly “Your government is so corrupt it reminds me of the last days of the John Major government – the BBC is fascinated by your appalling politics.”

I liked her immediately and as I’d found out about a lengthy pacific air ticket that allowed three days transit visit to Nauru without a visa, I said “let’s go!” I had been unable to persuade any Australian journalist to get there with that ticket, when they whined about Australia’s visa restrictions.

We don’t live under an extreme conservative government, we live under an authoritarian, corrupt and ruthless government, and John Pilger, who reviewed and recommended Sarah’s BBC production, called our government extremist, and it is. Four Corners did not screen “The Pacific Solution”. They said they’d done their three asylum seeker stories.

Nauru

Nauru is a sick little country, it’s an exemplary model of unsustainability and the Pacific Perversion known as a policy is it’s perfect accompaniment. If turning detainees into dollars is going to be the new industry to emerge in this already ominous century then living well or in good conscience as Australians is an unsustainable wish. Australian kindness and fairness is eroded and vanishing like so many dusty memories. We’ve also depleted other resources, the respect of other countries, even tiny Pacific ones like Nauru that we’ve bribed and humiliated, and who now hate us for it.

The Pacific Solution is about degrading the resources of people, as much as it’s about waste, and we are wasting far more than the $500 million the Pacific Perversion is priced at over $400 per day per detainee, most of them have had two Christmases there, cruelty like this really costs.

Sick countries are always prey to parasites and we’ve supplied an army of unwitting carrion feeders, builders, security guards, APS officers, DIMIA officers, the International Organization for Migration (the IOM), electricians, telephone engineers, mechanical engineers, plumbers, psychologists, translators, doctors, DIMIA staff. These happy bottom feeders are trying to turn what should not be into a reality. And they are. They’ve constructed a Hell in a white hot baking tray. Hell should be chaos, not organised like this one. And no matter how unsustainable, the ugly project grinds on.

The Pacific Solution is terminal, but when it dies, we’ll have to keep repairing Nauru’s only source of water, a broken-down desalination plant and its electricity supply, because Nauruans share a single fate they will become environmental refugees. And they’ll be ours. Wages, even public service wages are mostly unpaid in Nauru, banks are mostly closed, Kiribatis (the workers of Nauru) are returning home after careers of 20 years in Nauru. The local Chinese are also departing, their shops are raised and they feel unsafe, and threatened.

There is no natural port or harbour to bring in goods. After four months, the Australian Government realised it must fly in supplies from Brisbane each fortnight if it wanted to keep order or staff. Petrol is siphoned from any parked cars, water is stolen, plants won’t grow, phosphate dust coats everything, telephones don’t work, electricity is rationed, sewerage seeps into the coral and flows back in from the sea.

Our money is keeping the airline in the black, it services the whole of the Pacific, when our solution vanishes, so will the airline that brings supplies, aid and the outside world.

For the moment we pay Nauru’s shipping and phone bills, its medical supplies and the many hospital bills of some of its corrupt ministers who choose our private hospitals for their superior care, and their secrecy.

The film the Pacific Solution was made by the BBC and has been screened on all of its networks, it’s been seen by millions, lauded by journalists like John Pilger, and produced a very split but interesting viewer reaction. I assisted this film because Four Corners asked me to. I believed them when they said they’d buy it from the BBC. The ABC declined the program. The nervous producers told me they’d done “three asylum seeker stories”.

So, now, at last we are at war. Mr Howard has become remarkably sanguine, and is newly prepared to accept the Iraqi refugees this new and improved Gulf War will generate. And what sort of refugees will these be? They’ll be Saddam’s unemployed secret police or members of his republican guard. We’ll welcome them and toss them into the midst of the already wrecked temporarily protected Iraqis they used to enjoy persecuting. It’s grotesque.

Last night we sat with Iraqis who’d spent seven years in Saudi Arabian refugee camps – abandoned there because they’d had the blind faith to believe the blandishments of George Bush Senior. They’d taken part in the uprising against Saddam that America said would be in their interests to provoke.

In their company, we met a more recent refugee, his temporary protection visa has nearly expired, but his wife and children languish in Nauru. He hasn’t seen them in seven years.

We helped Bronwyn Adcock get into Nauru in January for SBS. She’s still in shock from what she learned there. She feels she failed because her story didn’t unsettle anyone. She used the same trick of travelling as a transit passenger to get into Nauru, legally but briefly. Since our visits, that loophole has been closed, as we learned to our cost last week when a group of lawyers, translators and doctors were turned back from Nauru, unable to use the only useful but valid parts of their tickets to enter Nauru. We’d subsidised this further failure. I feel as crumpled as the hundreds of Nauru letters that I’ve received and filed over 18 months. I feel that I’ve never worked so hard for so little success.

Many of the sufferers of Nauru’s camps were the best and brightest of their former homes. Like all refugees they could have revivified and enriched our country and sent direct aid, hope and aspiration to their loved ones left behind. Those same loved ones who sacrificed all to get their young out of perpetual trouble. Out into a fair and democratic world, the “free world” as George Bush calls it or “Tomorrowland” as Walt Disney did before him, only to find that freedom and tomorrow belong only to those who already have possession of them.

Nauru’s own people suffer from violence, alcoholism and obesity, they seemed sullen and depressed but never stupid, they know they’ve been insulted and they know there’s worse to come.

Living, whether you’re a Nauruan or an Australian requires you to have the possibility of attaining self-respect. Refugees and Asylum Seekers are being deprived of theirs, but then so are we, the quality of any life depends on our qualities of humanness and respect for others.

Fragile, sad asylum seekers, need more than sustenance, and so do we.

Speech Of MLC’s Friends Of The Arts Association

At the end of my post-graduate at the VCA, I felt that fine art was removed and irrelevant to the wider world. In the West, fine art had managed to elevate itself to its own irrelevant pinnacle of thought, it had so many clouds around it, few could really assess what it was.

Fine art had become a lonely island or monastery, it had nothing to do with the world of work or society. If it had jokes they were dull portentous ones. Art rebuffed its audience, while also demanding better and bigger spaces for more and more unlovely objects. 

Young artists were becoming more adrift, they spoke a jargon, instead of the English we share, and rarely made anything visually stimulating, let alone beautiful. Artists were becoming more fenced in by curators and critics, so almost by way of protest, I bolted into the world of fashion and decorative arts. 

This was a highly heretical act, particularly for a girl. (We are speaking, it astonishes me of the late 70’s.) Female artists were doing all they could to deny their girliness. The word “decoration” was always prefaced by the word “mere” and you were damned if you were “decorative”

I resented the anti-female inference. I was going to dump all of my large and sombre canvases and devote myself in all seriousness to frivolity and silliness to make my point.

I have always to make a point, I want to make art, but it must be saying something. I want a discussion or a conversation with the audience even a rowdy or witty one. I don’t want to be enigmatic, I don’t want intellectual respect, I don’t want to be in a Biennale. 

Klaus Oldenburg had a manifesto for artists that read “I am for an art that does more than sit on its arse in a museum”. “Yeah, baby!” I thought and I still do. I moved into my “smart art” phase. I would make art that earned its living. I ran a very unbusinessy jewellery business that travelled globally. My logic at the time was that art could permeate fashion. Fashion could become more provocative and thoughtful and that art could get down off its high horse and test itself in the cruel world of the crass, if not mass, market. Fashion is a ruthless skills test. It takes no prisoners and it forces you to work against habits or even your own style.

With friends we set up the Fashion Design Council. We staged enormous fashion parades and events. My jewellery started to become copied and by the late 80’s the parades and even my most outrageous jewellery had become orthodox, I was now bored. But still searching for the elusive niche that would suit my worldview, allow me to make works of joy and usefulness and support me financially. I was by now doing a lot of commercial interiors and restaurants and nightclubs. I did a little costume design for theatre and ballet, but above all I was interested in illustration and cartooning.

I had two interesting opportunities in Japan and New York. My exhibitions were sponsored by Seibu stores and I had a strange and too obsequious agent in Tokyo. I should have been set. I won an award in New York and ‘Time’ magazine offered to help me if I re-located.

Again, I found something wrong with pursuing a career rather my real interests. I am still in many ways 16 years old and I found the Japanese and Americans very grown-up, frightening about work. I suddenly felt very timid and Australian. I liked my peers here, I know our politics. I had a weekly cartoon. I was happy.

The idea of the book “Trust Lust and Chaos and Cruelty” was a sophisticated form of reversal or regression. The drawings of girls and their expectant boyfriends came from my past, my girlhood, and would never have been accepted at art school, I was expected to grow out of any sort of romanticism.

But, if you look closely, these pictures, especially with the help of their captions, are sly and far from romantic. The characters are slightly, disturbingly, under-age. The setting is always the same. The couch is in reality and in effect a stage for the little dramas I depict. Like Victorian tableau, these drawings are saying that all romances start and end on couches. The couch itself is a rather seductive and female form and it plays an expressive part in my little stories. The stories, like fairytales, can be deceptive, there is malice here and of course the drawings play on our contemporary uncertainties about relationships and love. Illustration is a dying art in Australia, and one of the most important, but I don’t want to talk about, it’s too painful and there’s too much to say.

In the year 2001 I’d had an exhibition at Gabrielle Pizzi’s and launched this book and was planning to take the book again to Ray Hughes, my gallery in Sydney, when my husband became involved in the Tampa case, which changed all my plans. I sat in court wondering what the lawyers had to do with it, when what was happening was that 438 asylum seekers were nearly drowned. Australia didn’t want them. They would be shipped to Nauru and that would be an end to it, but it wasn’t for me. I set up Spare Rooms for Refugees, a web-based register of people willing to give accommodation to refugees released from detention centres. And I attempted to sponsor a young Afghan man I saw on television who was stuck like now 1600 others plucked from the sea and packed off into Australia’s new tip, Nauru. 

Through bluffing and a dogged persistence I got the names and ID numbers of everyone there and my husband started offering the names in small groups to letter writers all over Australia. They have formed friendships which I know have saved lives, others have been lost to us. About 1100 were returned to Afghanistan after two years of misery on that benighted island. 

“Activism”, as it’s now called, of this kind cannot be done in one’s spare time. The descent into these and other lives destroyed by detention has been shattering. I would say that I suffered two entire years of grief. New stories of agony, injustice, malice, daily deception, violence and cruelty have been our regular conversation for three years. I am more calloused now. This is a callous country after all.

Four Corners asked me to help them with a co-production, a documentary on the “Pacific Solution” with the BBC. I knew a legal but long way into Nauru which was refusing all visitors especially journalists. We went, we filmed secretly in the camp and all over the island. The film has been on every affiliate of the BBC’s worldwide network. John Pilger wrote that it was a wonderful film. The only country that hasn’t shown it is this. The young man I tried to sponsor was rejected and has returned to Afghanistan. I was arrested and lied to. We’ve all been lied to ever since, even by the most benign of entities such as the ABC.

I am still shocked by it, still hurt and out of love with my country. It’s three years since I’ve made any work. However, my Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi reminded me that in spite of all that I was to remember that I am still an artist, and she said that it was time to make a show. I hate the idea of catharsis as art or as therapy. My work had always tried to be an amusing bridge between my indulgence of my need to make things and to justify those things’ lack of function. 

If I had to make “art” again, what could I make with conviction? I decided I would try to paint the unknown faces of the victims of the SEIV X, the mainly 353 women and children who drowned, mysteriously unaided by the Australian authorities who were aware of their departure on “a dangerously overloaded boat”, but didn’t search for them. And the “children overboard affair” where again faces, facts and the true stories have been largely erased.

Perhaps, I thought an artist might again have a clear function, to visualise, represent, illustrate and stir the dried beds of the collective imaginations of people who have been untouched by these tragedies. 

Artists like Gericault with the “Raft of the Medusa” came to mind? Artists painted epics, because without imagery many stories don’t cohere in the mind. Without photographs, we are lost, we no longer seem to have the visual mental ability to imagine events in our minds, and our government knows that. Asylum seekers are the least photographed and least spoken to people in Australia today. 

Families like the Bakhtiari’s and the Kadem’s who’ve spoken up about violence, lying and bureaucratic torment pay a huge price. No-one speaks. As for me, I’m using oil paints for the first time in 25 years, it’s a romantic medium because I wanted to treat my subjects tenderly, not harshly, angrily or grotesquely say – like Peter Booth.

It’s hard to paint drowning or dead people sweetly. It’s harder to paint them in those glorious holiday waters of the Pacific. I wanted to paint them like the tiny islands like Nauru that I’d flown over or visited, little faces upturned in the water. Could I paint 353? The oil and diesel that choked them. It’s not until you try that you realise how many people that number represents. But my pictures are an effort to keep account, to keep testimony. I’m not sure if it’s art or illustration, I’m out of my depth actually, I’m not even sure if it’s kitsch or worthwhile.

I do know that I don’t resent the three years I haven’t been working as an artist. When I do hang this work in Gabrielle Pizzi’s gallery in November, I’ll know if it works or not. In either case it will be my personal acknowledgment of decent people locked in camps, returned people of Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq whose experiences here left no trace on this increasingly crude country, a country that speaks of excellence and “best practice” in all things bar human rights.

I’ve been absent without leave from art for three years, it’s not significant, except to me. I wouldn’t charge anything. Despite the despair I’ve felt, I’ve emerged with a sense of myself that I would never achieve from art alone. Even though I prefer to think modestly of myself, refugees have offered me a way of completing myself, of doing genuinely good things. My art on the other hand will do nothing for them, but my care of them has helped. It’s been an honour to be entrusted with their stories and their friendship. They have freed me from the struggle I spoke of at the start of this piece, my lack of usefulness and agency which is the lot of an artist.

I didn’t save the young man I began writing to in 2001, he was packed off back to Kabul. By way of compensation, we have an Afghani boy studying nursing who has lived with us since February, he’s helped us to understand the problems of refugees more deeply, we help him if not hundreds, having him with us is consoling and we’d hate him to leave.

I’m glad you’re interested in art, and where it’s at, but in the next 10 years as artists or as citizens, take an interest in politics, design and draw yourselves as whole people, nourish your mind and your moral values.

This lovely school is a little like art, it’s an invented object and is also like an island or a monastery set a little apart from the world. Parents send you here because they care for you, but remember as art should, there’s a world out there and it needs your attention, be an artist by all means, but be mindful, be moral.

Speech For The Southern Women’s Association

So now we are at war. Well, some people enjoy that sort of thing.

I will never recover the love that I had for my country. My Government dumped the rescued asylum seekers of Tampa in a human warehouse in a 3rd World Desert Island. They highjacked nearly 440 drowned human beings. They squeezed them into the Naval Ship Manoora and lied to them about their fates. They enclosed them in wire and filed them away. Away from us, away from loved ones, lawyers or journalists.

Our Government’s dull genius was to invent a lucrative growth industry for security guards, clerks and professional caretakers. When I was in Nauru they seemed more numerous than the detainees.

Mr Ruddock’s lengthy processing gave the department time to concoct spurious justifications for rejecting the asylum claims of almost every Afghan, with only a few non Pashtun exceptions.

Right now, they are threatened with non-voluntary “removal”.

They have written, humbly requesting tents and perhaps some tradesman’s tools, because they don’t have homes to go to. Or they’re too ashamed to seek out family who’d borrowed money on their behalves. Some detainees think that with a few tools they might be able to return to Iran, for paid work or slavery on Iranian building sites, where they’d been bullied and robbed before. Their letters say quietly what Mr Ruddock knows – “We will starve.”

DIMIA has sent these poor Hazara back to Afghanistan, where whole villages have new occupiers and houses new occupants, and forgotten warlords have resurfaced, and nothing and everything is changed. Afghanistan is laced with mines and cluster bombs. Our military has blown it up like biscuits.

What possible damage can the shipwrecked, worn, sad, war ravaged souls on Nauru, do to our country? There are now less than 450 detainees on Nauru and almost as many Australian Detention Centre staff. There is a similar story in Manus where there are only seven detainees.

I still see the beautiful pale flock of Afghan women in Nauru. Our Government will herd them to Kabul, while their husbands sob their hearts out on our heartless temporary protection visas in Australia? Those women’s deaths are imminent. Their children’s are a certainty.

Mohammed, Ali and my other friends have told me they would rather die than return, because they would have to murder, loot and rob, to survive.

They write that they are sorry to waste my time, and they are sorry to trouble me.

I will never forget those young Hazara men. I think of them and I think of their dignity, their subtlety. I will never forgive those who sacrificed them. These men are the YOUNG DEAD and who can claim that we haven’t killed them?

If you find my language emotive or unfounded, think of Payadar – a man with five children, returned to Afghanistan still writing to my mother, living out of doors in Kabul, despairing of any place to spend the rest of his life.

Or Mohammed Mehdi, ID No. 105, now in Kabul, he knows I’m trying to send him money and references for a job, and yet I haven’t heard from him since his last email on 27th January. In Nauru he took enormous personal risks for me and later for Sarah. Daily, he taught English, prepared letters and translations, he poured over rejection letters, critiquing their inconsistencies, errors and malign findings. It was all to cost him dearly. But if anyone was going to survive it would be him, I told myself, he was sensitive, highly intelligent, skilled and a diplomat, and yet where is he?

Here is his letter from Kabul of 27 January 2003 – Mohammed Mehdi. He says:

“The police stopped our bus in a remote desert and got us out of the bus. Checking our pockets and luggage they took all of our money. As I resisted they started beating, slapping and kicking me. Then they forced me to back into the bus and went away.

Anyhow I have go through all these hardships and difficulties here in Kabul. And at the moment I am teaching English Language at this private Educational Center which can hardly allow living from hand to mouth. I can have lesser time to study and fewer facilities to work. Kabul is very much overpopulated and everything is very much expensive making many basic things inaccessible for most of its populations. It is very much insecure as well. No one feels secure at nights at the homes and days in the streets and roads. Here is always a fear existing in every one’s life fear of rocket attacks from the mountains surrounding Kabul and fears of lootings and robberies at nights and on the days. A large number of Kabulis spend their whole nights guarding their streets and their houses.

There are gangs of armed thieves who enter the houses in groups and take away everything.

This is the situation in Kabul. The security situation in the other provinces is much worse. Not only lootings and robberies are something usual everywhere but armed groups are competing with each other to gain more controls of the cities, villages and towns. So far three representatives of the transitional administration have been refused entry in my hometown Jaghoori. It is ruled by the armed groups controlling different parts of it.”

I am proud that I assisted the documentary, I am as in awe of the BBC as I am ashamed of the ABC, this government, this opposition and this Australian media.

I knew many of the detainees on Nauru by letter and fax. My attempted sponsorship of Mohammed Mehdi enabled that and I was able to collect names, stories and news via fax and letters from Nauru.

Most of my efforts to share the information I was getting were gracelessly ignored by Australian media. These were claims of hunger, thirst, inadequate accommodation, jailings, riot, missing people and drownings.

The eloquence and pain of their letters was always commented on, but never put into print. I had received some of John Pace’s documents for Amnesty that alleged brutality, mistreatment, deprivation or the deliberate spiking of food for children with chilli or salt, humiliation, beatings and abuse, designed to get the people to leave the boats of rescue like the Tampa and to comply with their aggressive captors, our SAS, and our defence forces and submit their freedom and their fates to cruel detention in the care of the carrion feeders, the IOM and the Nauru government, intent on turning these detainees into dollars; the new Pacific Perversion. Amnesty, for their own reasons, did not release the documents they had collected, translated and studied in London. I needed to get the accounts myself, they wouldn’t be mailed to me, I had to go to Nauru myself.

Carmen Lawrence helped Spare Rooms for Refugees by launching our report “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers”, and still it sank without trace. The media were inert yet again to scandal or conscience. “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers” is based on the 60 handwritten accounts in English and Dari that I collected personally with Sarah Macdonald. They dovetail with the Amnesty accounts, the stories fit.

For over a month in the case of the Tampa group the detainees were subjected to the violence and coercive behaviour of our SAS and the Navy. When our Prime Minister praises our precious SAS and Navy, I see bullies, not heroes.

Nauru’s own people suffer from violence, alcoholism and obesity, they seemed sullen and depressed but never stupid, they know they’ve been insulted and they know there’s worse to come.

Living, whether you’re a Nauruan or an Australian requires you to have the possibility of attaining self-respect. Refugees and Asylum Seekers are being deprived of theirs, but then so are we, the quality of any life depends on our qualities of humanness and respect for others. Fragile, sad asylum seekers need more than sustenance, and so do we.

In the BBC’s documentary “The Pacific Solution” Sarah Macdonald reads from those handwritten documents, boldly stating the brutalities Nauru’s detainees claimed to have experienced. No Australian journalist would quote them, the defence forces are very popular since East Timor and the ABC told me these were mere “allegations” against the SAS, the Navy and Army. She was quite relaxed about accusing our Government’s military of the use of electric truncheons, brutality and even torture.

Back in June, Sarah Macdonald of the BBC introduced herself to me and spoke of her wish to get to Nauru, and to use my help.

While I was thinking about it, she said dryly “Your government is so corrupt it reminds me of the last days of the John Major government – the BBC is fascinated by your appalling politics.”

I liked her immediately and as I’d found out about a lengthy pacific air ticket that allowed three days transit visit to Nauru without a visa, I said “let’s go!” I had been unable to persuade any Australian journalist to get there with that ticket, when they whined about Australia’s visa restrictions.

We don’t live under an extreme conservative government, we live under an authoritarian, corrupt and ruthless government, and John Pilger, who reviewed and recommended Sarah’s BBC production, called our government extremist, and it is. Four Corners did not screen “The Pacific Solution”. They said they’d done their three asylum seeker stories.

Nauru

Nauru is a sick little country, it’s an exemplary model of unsustainability and the Pacific Perversion known as a policy is it’s perfect accompaniment. If turning detainees into dollars is going to be the new industry to emerge in this already ominous century then living well or in good conscience as Australians is an unsustainable wish. Australian kindness and fairness is eroded and vanishing like so many dusty memories. We’ve also depleted other resources, the respect of other countries, even tiny Pacific ones like Nauru that we’ve bribed and humiliated, and who now hate us for it.

The Pacific Solution is about degrading the resources of people, as much as it’s about waste, and we are wasting far more than the $500 million the Pacific Perversion is priced at over $400 per day per detainee, most of them have had two Christmases there, cruelty like this really costs.

Sick countries are always prey to parasites and we’ve supplied an army of unwitting carrion feeders, builders, security guards, APS officers, DIMIA officers, the International Organization for Migration (the IOM), electricians, telephone engineers, mechanical engineers, plumbers, psychologists, translators, doctors, DIMIA staff. These happy bottom feeders are trying to turn what should not be into a reality. And they are. They’ve constructed a Hell in a white hot baking tray. Hell should be chaos, not organised like this one. And no matter how unsustainable, the ugly project grinds on.

The Pacific Solution is terminal, but when it dies, we’ll have to keep repairing Nauru’s only source of water, a broken-down desalination plant and its electricity supply, because Nauruans share a single fate they will become environmental refugees. And they’ll be ours. Wages, even public service wages are mostly unpaid in Nauru, banks are mostly closed, Kiribatis (the workers of Nauru) are returning home after careers of 20 years in Nauru. The local Chinese are also departing, their shops are raised and they feel unsafe, and threatened.

There is no natural port or harbour to bring in goods. After four months, the Australian Government realised it must fly in supplies from Brisbane each fortnight if it wanted to keep order or staff. Petrol is siphoned from any parked cars, water is stolen, plants won’t grow, phosphate dust coats everything, telephones don’t work, electricity is rationed, sewerage seeps into the coral and flows back in from the sea.

Our money is keeping the airline in the black, it services the whole of the Pacific, when our solution vanishes, so will the airline that brings supplies, aid and the outside world.

For the moment we pay Nauru’s shipping and phone bills, its medical supplies and the many hospital bills of some of its corrupt ministers who choose our private hospitals for their superior care, and their secrecy.

The film the Pacific Solution was made by the BBC and has been screened on all of its networks, it’s been seen by millions, lauded by journalists like John Pilger, and produced a very split but interesting viewer reaction. I assisted this film because Four Corners asked me to. I believed them when they said they’d buy it from the BBC. The ABC declined the program. The nervous producers told me they’d done “three asylum seeker stories”.

So, now, at last we are at war. Mr Howard has become remarkably sanguine, and is newly prepared to accept the Iraqi refugees this new and improved Gulf War will generate. And what sort of refugees will these be? They’ll be Saddam’s unemployed secret police or members of his republican guard. We’ll welcome them and toss them into the midst of the already wrecked temporarily protected Iraqis they used to enjoy persecuting. It’s grotesque.

Last night we sat with Iraqis who’d spent seven years in Saudi Arabian refugee camps – abandoned there because they’d had the blind faith to believe the blandishments of George Bush Senior. They’d taken part in the uprising against Saddam that America said would be in their interests to provoke.

In their company, we met a more recent refugee, his temporary protection visa has nearly expired, but his wife and children languish in Nauru. He hasn’t seen them in seven years.

We helped Bronwyn Adcock get into Nauru in January for SBS. She’s still in shock from what she learned there. She feels she failed because her story didn’t unsettle anyone. She used the same trick of travelling as a transit passenger to get into Nauru, legally but briefly. Since our visits, that loophole has been closed, as we learned to our cost last week when a group of lawyers, translators and doctors were turned back from Nauru, unable to use the only useful but valid parts of their tickets to enter Nauru. We’d subsidised this further failure. I feel as crumpled as the hundreds of Nauru letters that I’ve received and filed over 18 months. I feel that I’ve never worked so hard for so little success.

Many of the sufferers of Nauru’s camps were the best and brightest of their former homes. Like all refugees they could have revivified and enriched our country and sent direct aid, hope and aspiration to their loved ones left behind. Those same loved ones who sacrificed all to get their young out of perpetual trouble. Out into a fair and democratic world, the “free world” as George Bush calls it or “Tomorrowland” as Walt Disney did before him, only to find that freedom and tomorrow belong only to those who already have possession of them.

Nauru’s own people suffer from violence, alcoholism and obesity, they seemed sullen and depressed but never stupid, they know they’ve been insulted and they know there’s worse to come.

Living, whether you’re a Nauruan or an Australian requires you to have the possibility of attaining self-respect. Refugees and Asylum Seekers are being deprived of theirs, but then so are we, the quality of any life depends on our qualities of humanness and respect for others.

Fragile, sad asylum seekers, need more than sustenance, and so do we.

Schizophrenic Saturday

Friday had been a brilliant day for our purposes, we were reeling. The place was so porous, people told us so much both wittingly and unwittingly. We’d had a few hours at the Topside Camp. I had met Mohammed. It was our first face to face meeting.

We’d been told the stories of the maltreatment of each boatload at the hands of the Australian Defence Forces. The stories were abundant. I said please write tonight. I’ll never get to speak to you all. These were the stories at last – that Amnesty had – but had remained silent about. The stories that I had hints of through eight months of writing letters in Australia, bits of the stories, they were impossible to piece together but they were what drove me to come here. I knew that there was absolutely no trust from these people with any of the staff, Australian, Afghan, American – none.

With Chubb Security only a few metres away we filmed and I gave them my camera for overnight photo taking. All was well! They said they’d never loaded a film, I had to teach them. They were quick learners.

Until – The following day. Instead of being met by a couple of the staff we were met by Australia’s Consul-General and Cy Winter, the head of the IOM operation there (the camp manager). He must have baulked when Sarah had asked to take a few photos, and my list of names had people who’d lost family members. His suspicions were aroused. Wham! We were hit with every threat they could invent.

Cy said he wasn’t going to have me come here and stir things up. He was attempting to start excursions for detainees around Nauru, and things were sensitive. I said “How could I spoil that?” He threatened me with nonsense about Nauru people objecting to my interference. I said they have not objected to my visit. They are objecting to you obstructing my visit nor the detainees.

Then all of a sudden, my visa became the issue, I’d misused my visa. I had another “purpose”. Sarah said we don’t have visas, we’re here in transit. They couldn’t be told that. I said I’m here to visit, which is what I said on my immigration card – what else am I doing? I’m visiting friends actually, not you. My friends in detention. He, Cy would personally call the Nauruan Police, because they’d be very angry with me and they’d put me in jail and Nauruan jail was unpredictable, scary, and who knows when I’d get out, so there. It was childish.

“Well, I said, to the Consul-General you’d help me wouldn’t you?” “Oh yes” he was having a hard time. He didn’t enjoy threatening us. But Cy Winter did. He said “You don’t know what you’re getting into.” That I’d come along on my “stupid” own, I was an “amateur, an absolute amateur”, “no-one from nowhere”, not from an NGO or any organisation, hoist up on my “stupid little white horse” that I knew absolutely nothing – and so it went on. He was like a bent head-prefect.

I argued. I said I wanted to take photos of family members whose husbands hadn’t seen wives or kids for 2 ½ years, they’d been separated, the husbands are wrecks, the wives are wrecks. “There is a husband with a son who is so sick, with heart problems, leg problems. No wife, no brothers and sisters, that all of their lives are almost unendurable. For them, what they craved was a photo of them.”

I wanted photos too. Faces, to show Australians, these are the people we’re tormenting. I began to cry. Cy Winter continued that he’d be delighted to jail me, if I took one photo. I asked “Why does this worry you, when you’ve invited journalists here?” He roared at me. “That’s a lie, who told you that?” “Russell Skelton, at the Age newspaper.” He expostulated, he blew up, he blazed red, all for the benefit of the Consul-General, I suspected. “I have never invited journalists here, I’m doing serious work here and I’m not having it disrupted by etc. etc.” Later, I checked, “yes he invited me”, said Russell Skelton – “I’ve got him on tape – twice.”

Cy and the Consul-General continued to tell me that I could be breaching my visa, that Nauru would take a dim view of me, I could get “stuck” in jail, so I said to the Consul-General “But, you’d get me out, wouldn’t you?” “Yes, yes, but it can be difficult, THEY can be unpredictable you know ….” They’d seen it happen, people had been held etc. I said I want to visit again today. I have money, goods, clothes, letters and toys to give to people there and they have a right to see me, they’ve written me letters. I wanted the letters and I expected that I be allowed to pick them up.

“Okay, you can have one hour in each camp, you’re going to be escorted by these guys, you are taking up their unpaid time off, and then that’s it.” I said “No, the Afghan ladies want to talk to me, so do the Iraqis” etc. “You’re not here to have meetings” he sneered, and the diatribe recommenced.

I was actually too bored to be distracted into launching into a real debate. I was by now scared too, they’d been successful there. “Okay”, I said. We went to Statehouse, the Iraqi camp, and were assailed by fretful Iraqis at the gates. “Help us, they tried to kill us” etc. “You mean the ADF?” I asked. “They hurt us they beat us.” “But”, I said, you told Amnesty to keep the stories quiet.” “No” they remonstrated. “Well, I was told otherwise. Please write it down, give it to me and I’ll come back tomorrow and get your letters, they won’t let me stay.” They wanted to tell me about the SAS and the Manoora the Australian Navy ship and the degradations they had had meted out on those 23 days on board.

The Iraqi men at the gate had the wild look of people who were experiencing shock. They were restless, moving, ceaselessly talking. I was prevented from talking to them. I was led into a room, Sarah stayed in the other, about five women and one man from my list were produced. I spoke to them through the translator, I gave them their husband’s money, letters, news. Each woman cried, asked me when this would end.

They were young, pretty, polite and defenceless. I should have asked what they wanted me to tell people in Australia? But I didn’t dare. The translators were kind but the hour was over …

On to Topside Camp. We were now greeted by Cy Winter himself. IOM Chief, this time with a smile I didn’t trust. “You want to see what we do here? You want a tour of the camp?” I didn’t want to sacrifice my hour with Mohammed and the others for his tour, which would be managed, that was clear. I didn’t want to be forced to like him, that’s what he did to everyone else. He was issuing new edicts, “C’mon you want your visit. I’m giving it to you!” Was this generous? It was delivered in a truculent, challenging way. “But you have to bring your money with you, you’re going to buy some art. We’ve got an art show, the asylum seekers do a lot of craft and art here, we help them etc.” The PR was flowing now, no threats at all, just honey.

Cy Winter, the ruler of this camp, the Ruler of the Menen Hotel/Palace, where all the workers in this asylum seeker industry worked and hid out, detached from the pain of the place. It was a thriving business, there were more workers, administrators, translators, Chubb Security, psychiatrists, builders, carpenters, technicians, electricians, UNHCR, psychologists, doctors, teachers, cooks, DIMIA staff, APS staff and more, enough to run a country. I could not help but see them as carrion feeders, they were numerous, like parasites in spite of any good intentions they had or told themselves they had.

The camps are a country within a country. Nauru itself did not count to anybody. This new white population were defensive about their work. It was lucrative, builders and other staff told us they earned in excess of $5,000 a week, with perks. The staff is rotated, they are liberal with trips back home to Australia or other countries of origin. There must in excess of 1500 workers to 1500 detainees. They had strict contracts that forbade discussion of Nauru to anyone, and yet they were telling us appalling stories.

These people, well intentioned as they might have set out to be, were now the colonisers of Nauru. The IOM who had run refugee camps of 50,000 and more, were now running prisons on a desert island. And the last thing they wanted to do was recognise that.

Cy Winter lives high above everyone else. He’s American, his living quarters are high up in the hotel. He’s high anyway: about seven feet tall, lean, tanned, almost good-looking with clear, cold eyes. With long hair he would look Christ-like. The thought must have occurred to him. His behaviour to his staff appeared beneficent, but it wasn’t hard to find the condescension and the arrogance at the base of it. His height and his nationality could perhaps be blamed for that. He was a benevolent dictator, spreading largesse that cost him nothing. It was Australia’s.

So here I was in Topside Camp, getting an invitation through bared teeth to view exactly what I wanted to see. I said “No” at least three times. I said I’d seen camps before, which was a lie. I visit Maribyrnong detention centre regularly but only the visitors’ area. But as before, he wouldn’t hear anyone else’s view and he was ordering Mohammed to lead us around. He might as well have had a leash. “Not in there, Mohammed” he’d bark. But we saw, we certainly saw.

The long houses, plastic-sided, closely bedded dormitories that were just structures with roofs, every third bed had a wasted man lying in it, they had no air-conditioning and looked like Changi in plastic. The steel dormitories looked like converted containers, and were very cramped. Three to a cell, I don’t know how they breathed in there. Nowhere at all to be private, except perhaps the toilet block, but the indescribable smell would prevent any lingering there. I couldn’t make myself look in there. Cy’s face was truculent and wary: this was clearly a part he was not happy to show off or discuss. I’d seen photos anyway.

The toilets are off the scale for filthiness, because there is so little water to clean them with, let alone flush, waste is hard to remove. They were advised to install ground toilets, but useless Western flush toilets instead were ordered, a mistake that is, I am told, made in every Australian aid project.

In one sense it was quite a comical visit. Seven foot, Messiah-like Cy Winter followed by Mohammed, followed by me in a sober grey gauzy outfit with pretty blonde Sarah and trails of Afghans of all ages thrusting letters in our hands and bags.

The entire camp is barren with no trees, hotter than is imaginable. It’s a soupy Bain Marie kind of heat. It’s no wonder that the children avoid the newly installed play area. I didn’t see it in use once in my three visits: a child would simply cook. Children were hard to see, although there are some hundreds here, but it could not be safe to let them out of the family quarters.

All babies born in the camp will be stateless, not Nauruan, yet another problem those babies will have to contend with the rest of their lives. Five babies have been born since Tampa. I didn’t see them either, although I saw a baby clinic and a medical clinic. I saw a building site sized generator, without which the camp managed for about six months, which is also unimaginable. The dark, the heat, nearly 1600 people were housed in a hot, dark, unhealthy cage.

Now they have some amenities, a grotesque generator the size of a house, and the place is functional. There was building going on everywhere, more rudimentary structures were being installed but they had the eerie look of permanency. I wondered, as we were marched about, how much happier I might have been if this awful place had looked a bit more provisional, more temporary. This was becoming an efficient warehouse for people, a factory site that produced nothing at all but unhappiness in bulk, an emerging and lucrative industry nonetheless. A business with no product; and profit for some, yet loss and more loss for many.

We were hustled through the kitchen which made reasonable food, but all starchy, sweet and oily. Fruit and fresh vegetables would simply wilt there. I wondered how they had fed anyone, when they’d had four months without power, and how they cope with the still constant power outages.

We saw laundry troughs, only about eight of them. How the detainees washed their sheets, towels and long dresses was hard to say when water is scarce and soap rationed. It’s all much better than it was, I kept being told, and told. Water is rationed, I believe now they are allowed only salty brackish water for two hours daily.

We saw a sad little vegetable or herb garden. Not a tree anywhere; plants don’t really make the attempt. There isn’t really any soil in Nauru, just “pinnacles” and weedlike foliage growing around them like cobwebs. It’s growth, but not serious growth. There is also the problem of the heat. The ground all over the island is so exposed that a perpetual updraft of heated air carries away any moisture and intensifies the already burning heat; it drives off the rain-clouds, we were told.

We were stopped at a building said to be the Afghan Women’s Centre. I was a little dazzled as I entered: here to my left were the first refugee women we had seen. They were in timid little rows, staring at us, as if in fright. Their shawls and head coverings were pale, and so were their faces: such unusual faces, they took my breath away. They looked like medieval Flemish paintings of saints or nuns, oval smooth faces, almond eyes, and pale, tiny delicate features like rows of pretty white mice; and so young.

The translators – UNHCR IOM, I wasn’t sure which – hovered annoyingly in this very crowded hot, hot space. Here was an exhibition of art and craft the detainees had produced. I was astonished by the sewing these women had done, it was beautiful, and in glorious colours. I passed biro drawings of Tampa, decorative calligraphy of poems that pleaded for freedom, for wings, for rescue. Craftwork of great skill and odd aesthetics; paintings mostly done by Iraqis, primitive in style, but each was a protest, a reliving and retelling of boats on fire, of Australian soldiers, of prison. These paintings were neither attractive nor picturesque.

Some Iraqi men collared me, pleading with me to help them. “How long” would they be there? They seemed to look right through me. They knew I had no answer.

I wanted the paintings, I said changing the subject. “Which” they asked? All of them. I’d like to exhibit them all in Sydney and Melbourne. May be auction them. I didn’t know, I wanted to sort it out later. I lost my nerve. I knew that my husband, Burnside, would say “Yes, I’ll have all of them.” I would have loved the effect of that, but I wasn’t here for effects, I was really anxious that I had very little time left, and whilst everyone was slipping me letters, I’d spoken so little to Mohammed who looked resigned as if his life’s work was standing out of people’s way, if he wasn’t assisting them. It hurt me to see this.

I had to get out. I’d bought a few little wonderful things but I again was face to face with the ubiquitous Cy Winter. He was now offering us luxurious bottled water (detainees do not get this, unless there is a shortage) but the food I was given was authentically theirs, detention food. I wouldn’t have been proud of it – sweet, grease with salt.

We found a spot in the shade of some buildings, they gave me my camera back with films. They said with great gravity “You told us you don’t have time, that we should not be polite. We have taken some impolite photos” – their eyes were downcast. I guessed these were of the fetid toilets “better to look after them than smell them I thought” but their delicacy struck me. Even this foul place had not made crude or harsh. I explained that we may not see them again, that the IOM was not happy with us. They knew … There was little point talking, nothing surprised or angered them it seemed, they had no expectations. It was all over, these were young men, dying. Dying of hope and hope disappointed. They were truly gentlemen.

Back at our hotel whilst considering seriously the selection of clothes for the two “parties” we’d been invited to, I was disturbed by Warwick, one of the many $5000 a week Australian tradesmen in our hotel. Warwick was chasing his mates around the hotel with plastic replica guns. As a pretext to get into conversation, I told him that he’d scared me. He was ex-army, he hated asylum seekers. He was prime Aussie bigot, the job suited him perfectly but he was also a boasting fool, so he told me far more than he should have. Even he had guilt and misgivings about what was happening at the camp, and what it all cost Australia, which he said had a “great lifestyle”.

We met another camp employee who wanted a lift to the party, when we got downstairs. On the way there he told us how much he regretted his job. He was nice, this place troubled him. He was attached to a little Iraqi boy, about his son’s age. He told us lots and he was smart, he said he was convinced we were journalists, which I at least could deny. He didn’t care anymore. This would be his last stint in Nauru, he’d seen too much. He was probably the nicest Aussie we met on Nauru.

We entered the party area – outdoor patio, with barbeque and a groaning board of countless salads, a giant blue birthday cake, crates of booze. It felt like an average sized wedding – about 150 people. The catering was for twice that.

We were seeing firsthand how the IOM kept itself: in conspicuous style. So conspicuous that the Nauruans also noticed and resented it. The island has anti-IOM graffiti dotted around. They maintained that they were excluded from the parties and from employment. The only Nauruans at the party were pre-pubescent and teenage dancers, shyly displaying island dancing techniques to over-amplified music. Security men, in stubbies and leis and flower wreaths, watched without appreciation. It was repeated every fortnight: the same party, the same dancing girls, the same Fosters hangovers.

Sarah was taping away with her secret camera. We worked separately, talking to as many people as we could.

Cy Winter, the king himself, was now my host. Why? Why doesn’t he ask us to leave? In contrast to the afternoon just ended, he condescended to talk to us without insults or threats. What he told me was interesting to me: it betrayed his perfect ignorance of Australia, his lack of curiosity. He made platitudes about Nauruans, not one of whom was invited to his dreary bacchanal – I noticed. He was just dull after all.

I moved away from him, leaving him to Sarah. He and the head of Chubb Security were wearing large black earpieces that connected them to the camps. It looked freakish: it was as if they were connected electronically to some organism; it meant that they did their “management” at all hours, and it underscored the Orwellian madness of that.

The party was excellent for information gathering, the “guests” were getting drunker. Anyone seemed to be there, as long as they were white.

The Australian Consul-General chatted with me as if to atone for that morning’s threats. He was kind; he’d been a refugee himself, much earlier in life. He was clearly uncomfortable in this outpost of incivility. Like everyone else Sarah and I were bored.

We had another party to go to. Nauruans had invited us to the “Bondi Club”, their local loud Saturday night venue. It was an enormous dance bar in a rundown tin shed. It wasn’t long before we danced badly with the locals.

But later I was standing in the car-park talking (away from the noise) when a group of Australian builders and “tradies” drove up. They, like everyone, had tough land-rover type vehicles. A drunken Nauruan stepped towards one of the vehicles and punched his fist through the windscreen of the car. The Aussie driver blinked, shattered glass all over him. He looked startled for a moment, but not surprised. The Nauruan shouted “I hate all whites!” Some of the locals tried to talk him away from the scene … he wasn’t finished, he’d just started. By now, the Australians who’d just arrived were saying “It happens every Saturday night. It’s home time”. They advised us to leave. As an imperialist Australian, I knew I wasn’t wanted. Being ashamed of my nationality was a new experience.

Report Of Trade – Topside

At the beginning we would like to thank Amnesty International for taking the lead in allowing us, and freely, to express our main sorrow and pain. This pain which rendered us to leave our homeland to cross thousands of metres and into paying thousands of dollars.

Following, all what had happened with us, in such report of which you will read:

First: General remarks about the Indonesian boat Achina.
Second: Headlines about what had happened in the Manoora.
Third: Remarks about our current condition in the camp.

First: General Remarks about the Achina

1. In seeking better future and in saving our families from the pain and getting them into the freedom with no differences in wherever, we went on the boat Achina which took off in the sunrise of Friday, 31st of August 2001, 5.00 am. The Achina is a small ship for 50 passengers; we were 230 persons on board.

2. There was food, water and fuel supply enough for 10 days as the trip was supposed to take duration of five days.

3. The boat entered in to the Australian territorial water on September 7th

4. Some military men on a boat which belongs to the Manoora stopped us, prevented the Achina to further on its way, they used a whistle. We stopped from the noon and waited until the next day in the mid of the high storms which were hitting our boat. The people in the military boat promised to provide us with food supply and then to load us to one of the Australian areas. They gave us some medicine, water and sheets and 25KOM uncooked rice.

Second: what happened in the Manoora

On the sunrise of Saturday September 10th 2001, the ship Manoora came by and many Australian military people went into our boat. They arranged for us to move to the Manoora through slightly using the force. They had two of us and got us transferred after being searched. They searched all men and women on board and even children, searched the bags. Then they gave us numbers 500 and we did not know on what basis we were given these numbers. 20 days later, we saw the Australian flag on the boat, and knew that asylums from Afghanistan are present on board, we were followed then. The Australian at the beginning told us that the boat is heading to Darwin, then a small interrogation will take place on board. Furthermore, the Australian headed by their boss asked us consistently to that we were treated in a very kind way when we were taken from Achina to the Manoora. We slept in more like corridors, 15-16 metres length, and 6-7 metres width. There were 250 tiny beds, four floors, 14 persons had to sleep on the floor.

Food: food supply was not enough at all, bad quality, some of the food supplies were. They way they used to distribute food for us was very humiliating. Whenever someone mentions that he dropped his food and needs more, they never trust him.

They’re no care in the quality of food supplied and especially for those who are sick and need special food. They did not pay attention to the Manoora doctor advises to pay attention for the special, sick people.

Reduction of the fruits and bed, there was not enough of them originally.

Hot pepper was added to the food that nobody could tolerate it. Some people got infections and allergy in their lips because of that. Despite our begging for the Australian to lesson the amount of the pepper, none paid attention to that.

We were supplied by mineral water and as the amount decreased, they started to provide us with filtered water and it had a very strange color.

Health: almost everybody’s health conditions deteriorated and especially people with sickness as blood pressure and diabetic. No medicines were provided these people and especially when we had serious sick cases as heart and likewise. There were no regular follow-ups on health cases.

Some dangerous diseases started to spread as the Malaria, hepatitis and skin diseases. The skin diseases were spreading a lot that there used to be on day special for treating such cases.

Children got diarrhoa, which would, treating through drinking water, as the doctor mentioned.

When somebody has a health problem, the doctor would take very long time to show up and the security guards used to remain silent watching the person suffering of pain.

Children: we had on board around 10 kids under 2 years old, 35 kids between 2-10 years old and around 40 kids between 10-15 years old. They were not given the minimum of what they should have had very few got games which raised problems on boat and jealousy between kid.

Baby diapers: at the beginning, we were supplied by a sufficient number of baby diapers but as day passed the amount reduced as each baby had one only unless the mother of the baby goes to the person in charge, take out her baby old diaper, to show it is very dirty so she can get a second one.

Milk: babies and kids were not given milk unless parents beg them for some. Only three times the kid was allowed to have milk, not more than that. Having in mind that mothers were not able to feed their children at all.

We used to see the always on board but never given some for our kids.

We did not take notice that our clothes were taken to the island, we had no clothes and some of us used to remain with no cloth when he washes his own ones until they are dry.

The psychological aspect: we had lots of lies and fake promises and manipulation until the last minute when we were forced to come out through brutal and inhumane way. IOM and the Nauruan government had full notice that we were manipulated as well as they used to come to the ship from time to time. We were isolated from the world for the period of one month, we asked for a lawyer or a journalist in defend our rights but it was in vain. We had none to listen to us, just one phrase which we used to hear “you will find everything in Nauru”. They tried to ruin our image, to look like a, how would we be pirates if we were prisoners in this ship. How would we be pirates and we do not have weapons even, we have children, we wonder who are pirates when we were on board of a military boat “Manoora”.

Furthermore, they used with us inhumane means such as:

Disconnection of the air-condition and as such the down desk of the boat will turn in short time to be very hot to the extent that some people would faint. When we ask the people in charge, they would mention that the engine does not work … then the engine works suddenly.

There used to be a very bad smell coming through the air-condition.

There used to be flood of water in the rest rooms.

They used to take photos for negative situations only, an example when they used to have photos for the rest room while it was not clean. They used to take photos for people while they were sleeping, those who were covered, they used to take the cover and photocopy them. Page 6 missing.

In one of these days, and before having our breakfast, and following our consistent refusal to be disembarked from the Manoora, some Australians approached us and said that a film on Nauru island will be now demonstrated before you and that the captain will have a word with you all. Then, a film about the camp was shown to us and for the period of 50 seconds only and when the movie finished the captain told us “It is my boat and I decide who stays and who gets out”.

Disembarkation from the Manoora

• There was a big desire of the IOM (somebody called Mark), crew and the captain to get us out of the boat. They asked us several times, using good words to get us out of the boat, they mentioned many times that they would never use force and that the government of Nauru would never allow anybody to be on her land by force. We did not want to get in to the Nauru for more than one reason.

• We were caught in the Australian territorial water.

• We got on top of the Manoora on 8th of October 2001.

• We have never heard through any means (TV, Media … etc) that Australia would ban illegal immigrants to its land and would send them to Nauru.

• We were told by the Australians that we are on board of an Australian ship and that we were heading to Darwin.

• Lots of pressure was practiced against us, asking us to get in and mostly that “we would not stay in Nauru more than week-10days including the appeal stage.” We were told this way on daily basis.

• Then, a person from the IOM came and his name is RONY, most of us knew him from Indonesia, and following few trials, 13 people agreed to be disembarked and then more pressure was practiced.

• Then they asked us to choose six people as a delegation and they had theirs from the Australian government and we chose six including one woman. During the first session, the six people heard nothing but one phrase “get down to Nauru”. When our people ask questions no answers at all.

• It went out this way, then the Australian asked the asylums to divide them into groups, each of 25 persons thinking that the six people influenced the others to remain in the boat. When the first 25 persons declared their wish not to get down, the Australian were convinced that it is indeed the wish to the whole group and that the six people did not influence them at all.

• Following that, the six people went for the second session of discussion, this time they were taken to a different place than they used to meet usually. This time, the captain came with an Arabic Interpreter (a spy) and read the following paper for the six people: “you should understand what I say: you should leave the boat quickly”. And then suddenly, 30 soldiers walked in and each of the six persons were held by two soldiers and were taken by force to a small boat and then to the island. When these people reached to the island, they were not allowed to see the media, the people started to yell, to resist, no answers at all, such attitude by the government was not expected at all.

• Then they were taken by bus to the camp, they did a strike until the evening with no response, and Nauruans noticed this and even the media. This time a person from the UNHCR interfered in a brave way.

• Then the same Arabic interpreter came in and said that the captain needs another six people for delegation and the same thing happened in a more brutal way. The soldiers were ruthless and the following happened:

• Breaking of somebody right hand.

• Another person was beaten strongly at his breast, he was already sick.

• Another person was beaten and got very sick and had to be transferred to the hospital.

• There are certified medical reports for the a/m three cases.

• None of the others knew about this issue and about what happened with the two six groups in whatsoever. Then the captain came in, the interpreter and another 20-armed persons, three photographers and the captain read for us the following “your friends are safely in Nauru”. Then suddenly some of the asylums got very mad and screamed, then the place was locked on us, and three of us asked the captain to further on and he said “your family, friends are safe in Nauru, they walked down with their own will, do not worry about them and they ask you to do the same”. We knew then that something wrong had happened with our people.

• In the next day, two people came in from the Australian and Nauruan Governments; they tried to tell us that Nauru does not get people in by force. Then they interviewed some people, among them women quickly but then they were taken the same way, among them was a kid of 4 years old and another 14 years old girl who were in the rest room.

• Following the third kidnapping they read the following paper on us: “that 10 people got in to the island and that was not kidnapping”. The next day, 20-armed soldiers walked in with pipelines and sticks and force others to walk down. The following day, delegates from the Nauruan government came up top the boat and mentioned that they want to talk, suddenly another 20 soldiers walked us to get down and to remain calm.

Remarks about the topside camp:

• IOM, Australian government and UNHCR work together here, they are serious, they provide us with food and water and medication. However, certain issues are missing:

• IOM, works hard to keep us smiling however there is injustice in distributing items.

• They prefer the Afghan on Iraqis.

• Lack of all needed items.

• We are not provided by clothes.

• Lack of doctors, no accurate medication, which led a woman to lose her sight due to this.

• Lack of medicine.

UNHCR:

While we were on Manoora, we were informed that UNHCR will make interviews with us and that the maximum it would take was 10-12 weeks including appeal stage. They told us that sufficient stuff from UNHCR will be present there, all that was in vain, there are no enough officers for interviews.

By the name of god,

All respect for you’re esteemed organization,

We present this report on behalf of 13 persons whom were the first to be disembarked from the boat. We went out of Indonesia on 31st of August 2001, in a small woody fishing boat and not valid for sailing and we had to be in a very bad condition for the period of 10 days until we got into the Australian water and we saw a plane around, we felt happened then an Australian boat came in and picked us up and they told us that we have to go back to Indonesia, we did not know what to do. We were detained in this heat until we were informed that we would be transferred to the Manoora and then when we arrived to Nauru, we were told to get down and apply for the UNHCR, we were the first to get down and with no problems because we trust the international opinion.

We hereby plea for your help.

Thank you.

Haider Taleb
Mustafa Hussain
Mya Sabeih
Nibras Saleem
UM Yasser and Family
um Ammer and Family.

Translation From Statement

Dari into English

State House Nauru

In the name of God

“Human beings are like organs of one body,

In creation they have generated from one precious man

If one organ in body develop pain

The rest of organs suffer from that pain

You who are free from pain whiles others suffer

You should call yourself from mankind family”

To the respected authorities of Amnesty International organization.

First of all we greet you and wish you success in reviving the rights of human being and asylum seekers of Afghanistan.

We are 132 individuals. There are 22 children, 18 women, and 92 men among us. We have come to Australia as a result of 23 years of bloody fighting for the following reasons:

1. Hazaras were in danger on grounds of race and ethnic group in Afghanistan

2. Hazaras were in danger on grounds of sect, being Shia, in Afghanistan.

3. Hazaras, Tajeks and Usbeks suffered on basis of being minority group in Afghanistan

4. Hazaras were suffering from lack of human rights in Afghanistan

5. Hazaras were suffering on grounds of language, regional, race and religion discrimination.

So, we have come via a treacherous journey and left all our belongings behind in Afghanistan. There are people among us who made several failed attempts to come. Because their boats broke or drowned, however with the mercy of Allah they were saved.

We 132 people, including women, maimed and disabled of war and children as small as 4 months escaped by a small boat. We travelled 10 days in dangerous sea. We encountered very dangerous storms. Ultimately, our boat at around 400 am stuck in Ashmore Rive waters and landed on one side. Many of the people stepped out of the boat. The captain indicated that we were in Ashmore and we should get off the boat. It was dangerous to be in the boat. Men walked through water up to their waist. It was around 0700 am that we saw Australian soldiers approaching us. The women and children were crying for help. The Australian army said that they would help us and take us to Australia.

They placed us on another wooden boat. The boat was small and unsuitable. For about 14 days we were wondering on the Ashmore Rive waters. There was limited food and medication. During this 14 days we were running out of food. And one apple would be divided in 8 pieces for 8 people. We were eating expired date food. We were having raw rice. Some of women and children and men got ill. Some people fainted. We were suffering from burning sun during the day and from freezing cold in the nighttime. We could not sleep at night because of cold. There was not enough room. After 14 days, we got on another boat called L50. The boat was taking as to a never-ending journey toward the east and west for 13 or 14 days without a specific destination. There were women, men and children placed in a small salon. There we were treated like a criminal or prisoner.

There we were suffering from luck of fresh air. In 24 hours we were not allowed to go outside and take at least a few hours of fresh air. They told us to clean the ship’s toilet and general cleaning. They ordered us to sweep and clean the ship.

The soldiers in the ship were insulting us dirty words such as “You donkey” “You Monkey” “Fuck you”.

There was not sufficient food. We were begging for bread. Our begging was rejected. Majority of women, pregnant women and children got sick. The doctor kept saying, “have more water”. They were offering the yellow, smelly water. There was some good water but we were not allowed to have access to. We were suffering from luck of shower and bath. Every one was allowed to have only 4 minutes to wash his body. People would come out of bath dirty because of this.

After 14 days they told us they would take us to a country called Nauru. We did not know where that was. We felt we lost everything. We protested. We went on hunger strike peacefully. Some of us were trying to kill themselves because of psychological problems but were rescued. The soldiers were mistreating us and insulting us. After 23 days in the sea we were brought up to Nauru Camp.

We found out that they had made false promises about Nauru. They had said Nauru was a good tourism country with all the resources.

We are in Nauru like prisoners. We can not go out of the camp. We suffer from hot climate and mosquitoes. We can not telephone to know about our relatives and friends.

We all are suffering from psychological, physical, skin, and infectious diseases.

Now that America and other countries are destroying Afghanistan by rockets and bombs. We are concerned about our women, parents, brothers, sisters and children life. We are living under appalling condition. We have developed skin diseases. There are lots of dust and dirt in the camp. We don’t have water to wash or clean ourselves. There are limited resources to keep us occupies such as sport, children education and younger. The Television in the camp does not show the news of Afghanistan and mainly Japanese and Chinese programs.

Like a slave we don’t know what is happening to our future. Everyone we ask about our position we reply is that he/she does not know. We are being given the old clothing of Nauru people.

When we were in Ashmore the Australian authorities of ship L50 told us that they would take us to Darwin or Sydney. They stated that they picked us from International waters not from Australian waters. They were lying and now we know they were deceitful.

Respected Human and mankind loving body. Don’t you agree with us that what they have done to us is against the norms and policies of refugees and convention? Which country does treat the refugees like this?

As far as we know the High Commission of Human Rights in Geneva and the protectors of human rights and civilized countries do not allow countries to treat refugees like this.

We had heard that the government and nation of Australia is a civilized, humanitarian and mankind loving country. That was the main reason that we through a trescherous journey.

We request from the Australian government to treat us like asylum seekers. It means to safe us from Nauru prison. As a result of this action millions of hearts of human loving peoples around the world become happy.

We our suffering and problems in Nauru camp can only be tolerated for a short time. However, if we were not considered for settlement to Australia or we would remain in a state of uncertainty. This would cause us psychological and physical illnesses. The consequences of incidents causing as a result of these sickness will fall on the shoulders of who play in the life hundreds of innocent women, men and children.

It is important to note that here are many war maimed and disabled people. These people who lost parts of their body and became useless.

We request from you Amnesty International delegate, to release us from these torturing and dangerous conditions. We urge you to convey our load cry our oppressed voice to humanitarian individuals and human rights loving governments.

Further, one of the asylum seeker among us became physically disabled in the L50 ship and the doctor has not given him a suitable answer.

We all thank you from the bottom of our heart for your efforts for us and we thank the Australian government to take positive steps concerning our further. We congratulate the Australian government for their new election success.

We hope the Australian government safe us from Nauru hell.

With many thanks

From 132, men, women, and children

The signatories

Translation by M. Sharif Amin, NAATI accredited interpreter and Translator

Ph: 61+2 97499078, fax: 61+ 96431199, email: sharifamin@mail.com

Profit And Loss In The Pacific

Profit And Loss In The Pacific – A Speech At the Steps Of The Library

A Statement by Kate Durham

Detention letters from Nauru surround me like piles of crumpled leaves, I preserve them as if they’re already the last remains or relics of the mostly Hazara faces I met in Nauru, a place I’ll never forget. The new letters tell me of their bewilderment at the deceits and distortions played upon them in their interviews, in the last rounds, of the last appeals they may ever make.

They speak of intolerance and incompetence of their interpreters. If a case was complex and they all are, an interpreter might shut them up or advise them to pretend they were Tajik. These Hazara have been told to prepare their returns to Afghanistan. They’ve been told they have 28 days from the last day of notice of rejection. They will be returned, willing or not. In strangely quiet tones, they tell me they will starve. Some will be killed in Kabul, others won’t dare to venture further. Outlying areas are it’s said, even more unstable than in the era of the Taliban.

Many sold all they had, and borrowed more, in order to get here. They have nothing. They cannot now repay their loans. Shame alone would prevent them from returning to their districts. Why return anyway their lands are sold or occupied by their enemies? Their families are scattered like poppy seeds. Some Hazara on Nauru are well known and wanted by warlords who have authority in the current government.   Their dismay at not being permitted to present these stories underlines the slow reluctant extinguishment of trust and belief in us, a civilized country.

Some letters have modest, embarrassed requests. Can Australia give us some tents? Some of us had trades, would tailors’ or bricklayers’ tools be too much to ask for? Many have worked in Iran, often for months without pay on building sites. Perhaps, as slaves, they’ve been slaves before, they might survive. Warlords and Pashtoons are still making gifts of the Hazara women though. Young mothers with children, illiterate innumerate and frightened. There are no exceptions, no one will be saved.

I get Nauru postmarked letters every week from the damned [people]. They are damned by their neediness and by our government’s termination of what few legal remedies they had left. Their loss is this government’s gain.

Some of Nauru’s inmates have already lost their minds, some still hallucinate that they are still on the sea, the sea in some cases is the cemetery of their loved ones. Return means nothing to them. Return, even to sanity would be unwise.

My bitterness increases as I read doctor’s orders given to a young Iraqi mother, requesting laser surgery [by a date] no later than December 2001 for her eyes. She is now blind. I read doctor’s orders for heart surgery for a little boy with a terminal condition, untreated, all untreated.

I believe the damned and the rejected will be sent to Christmas Island. I don’t believe the government will send them to Iraq or Afghanistan, not for some time, at least, which makes their threats an even more cruel disgrace.

Pacific Perversion and Turning Detainees into Dollars

Landing in Nauru with a secret camera and a suitcase

My recent adventure to Nauru would not have been possible if I was a journalist. It wasn’t even allowed to me as a citizen. I had tried many times, then I found a way that didn’t require a visa. By travelling to a number of Pacific countries from New Zealand I was able to visit Nauru for three days as a transit or layover visitor.

I’d been refused a visa several times but I was determined to get there and when BBC journalist Sarah Macdonald said she was trying to get in, I told her of a route, I knew of, that whilst prolonged and expensive, would enable us to visit Nauru for three days as transit or layover visitors. We started in New Zealand, and travelled the sad Pacific but we got there.

Mr Ruddock admitted to my BBC companion that Australia now runs Nauru’s Immigration Policy. Apparently we protect our sovereignty by disregarding theirs.

So it came as quite a shock for Mr Ruddock to find that a busybody Australian like me and an undercover BBC journalist got into Nauru, legally through a loophole his department had failed to seal.

I wanted to speak directly to the detainees who’d been writing to me. And I wanted to discuss and collect letters from them, which they believed were too sensitive to send in the mail. Amnesty International had a number of sensational documents and I had access to only a few of them. They claim mistreatment by our defence forces, they hinted at darker stories including deaths at sea. If there was any truth in them, I felt I should collect them in the hope that I could get their stories investigated.

I took detainees’ letters, mailed to me in Australia, inviting me to visit them in Nauru and a file of letters especially from Mohammed I had been writing to, for whom I have made an application to sponsor. I took cash from husbands lost in limbo in Australia and I took gifts, dictionaries, toys and clothes, letters from lawyers in search of survivors of sea tragedies, in which their family members had drowned.

In theory, Afghans, Iraqis and Iranians held in the Nauruan camps are legally entitled to visits. That should mean they are welcome to invite friends, lawyers or journalists. In practice, they are not, as I was about to find out.

Under sufferance I was allowed to visit a selected number of people, but not all of the people on the list I’d prepared. Nor were the various individuals and groups within the camps allowed a visit from me, even when they requested it. There were limits even to the veneer of fairness that management allowed. The management had the running of the camps finely balanced between hysteria and calm.

The running of the camps is done by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Its headquarters are in Geneva. The IOM offers deportation services to about 79 countries. It’s like a mercenary army and seems to be able to do work for governments that these governments find inconvenient or too tricky to perform legally or morally. The detainees told me they became afraid for their futures when the IOM embarked the Manoora, some of them had experienced them in Pakistan and Indonesia.

The name IOM is well-known by refugees and yet the word ‘refugee’ was not used by the IOM staff in Nauru. I was corrected if I did; I was told “they are asylum seekers”. The word ‘detention’ was also unknown there, they don’t detain. The IOM in Nauru talked like Pangloss. “It was the best of all possible worlds.”

The IOM made us a show of the kind of sinister hospitality it offers through its manager, a tall, patrician American named Cy Winter, some said he was 7 feet.

This American managed in the course of three days to schmooze us and then to threaten us with arrest and jail. He gave us a guided tour of the camp, was our host at an extravagant party complete with native dancing girls, and finally, on the last day, made good his promise of arrest, but instead of jail, he assaulted me, physically grasping my neck! His behaviour was a physical illustration of the nature of his organisation. It demonstrated the arrogance, ruthlessness and defensiveness of the IOM. He was in a sense its embodiment.

But before the “incident”, as it’s now known there, he invited Sarah and me on a guided tour of the camp, as he’d given us a good threatening a full ½ hour earlier. He’d become suspicious of us but he did not dream that Sarah was with the BBC making a documentary about the Pacific Solution, for “Correspondent”, a current affairs program.

The tour was supposed to be unrestricted, with my friend, a young Hazara man, Mohammed, leading the way. It was quite comical because it had two guides, Mohammed and the American giant leading him. It was stage managed, but it didn’t matter how Cy Winter tried to present this hell as a five star facility; it was a five star hell. Nothing prepared me for the size of the monstrous construction known as Topside Camp. It houses 775 people. At its peak, it has held over 1200. It was a town, an artificial town, as if they had work there, a purpose, something to do.

Try to imagine a temporary town compressed into what felt like an oven tray. Nauru is mostly blinding white rock, which intensifies the heat, creating more heat which repels rain clouds. Its climate is unique even at the equator. The heat of Topside Camp was magnified by the position of this site. Well away from any passing acquaintance with a sea breeze, high on “rubbish dump” road. What other name could you give the means of entry to HELL? As if art directed, the road was lined with a series of massive dumps of litter. Every third pile was alight. Nauruans just burn their rubbish, as if to add to the blight of their devastated air and environment.

The IOM runs two camps, Topside and Statehouse. Statehouse is also unfortunately sited but does appear to have a couple of trees. Statehouse has mostly Iraqis and some Iranians in it, about 350 of them. And Topside, the unfortunate Hazaras and other Afghans. Topside had no trees, no shade except for what the buildings offered. The best shade was under the few old buildings on the site. There are six babies, about 200 children, about 100 under the age of 5.

I met families who had slept and lived every day in the rough one metre space between house floor timbers and ground, for the first five months of their incarceration. I tried to imagine life there when, as well as this indignity, 1200 people had to manage without power. How did they cook, clean, find their way around? I couldn’t, what I was witnessing was bad enough. The most permanent structures seemed to be the rows of interview rooms, I shuddered to think of what tears had been shed there.

As I was escorted around the vast camp, each long house (plastic-sided dormitories), had a man lying on every third bed, collapsed from depression, boredom and heat. Men pace and walk at night, afraid to sleep, some are so delusional they think they are still at sea.

The toilet facility advertised itself by its stench long before I got to it. I wasn’t guided through the loo block – something I was grateful for – but I do have photos to attest to their abysmal standard. Water is found to clear them about once a week. Flush toilets should never have been installed. As a result, there is a catastrophe of health and hygiene problems that the WHO say may never resolve. The toilets are coated or speckled with dead and breeding insects, if you want to know, something the IOM would rather you didn’t.

It would prefer that you learned that a play area has been constructed.

On each of my three visits I looked to see if any child used it. They couldn’t, of course. In any exercise a child would turn to crisp in the open heat. Nonetheless, play equipment was installed. It stood as a testament to the IOM’s obsession with appearances and its proclivities to spending other people’s money and making mistakes, like the toilets. They are known as the “International Organisation for …-ups on Nauru.” No doubt the IOM did its ruthless best. But its best would have been to refuse to run the camp in these impossible and unlawful conditions.

As I walked the mini streets of shanty camp dwellings and ghastly crowded longhouses, I could see what the letters had been unable to describe, the boredom, the waiting and the crowding. The scarcity of food for 4 months has turned into too much starch and fat. Nauru is an island without fresh water. When working, its desalination plant can barely meet the needs of the Nauruan population of 11,000, many of whom have defected to Australia already as economic migrants, and more will follow. Australia is currently meeting the water needs of the Nauruans by constantly repairing the desalination plant, and water is rationed. The population is growing. Will Australia accept Nauru’s economic refugees fleeing water shortages? The answer is we already are.

For the detainees, the IOM ships in water from the Solomons. It’s foul tasting, I understand, but wasn’t game to sample. I didn’t want to share the chronic stomach problems of the detainees.

The IOM flies in food every 2 weeks from Brisbane. No food is produced in Nauru. The soils won’t support much more than weedy growth, and leaves get coated with the dust of the phosphate plant still lazily grinding what’s left for a disappearing world market.

Australian technicians are flown in regularly to repair Nauru’s communication systems – to make a phone call is really hard.

Could any location in the world be as unsuited to housing a temporary settlement? It requires 2 sets of guards; one inside the camp and one outside; doubling the payroll. It’s done because of tricky legal requirements that don’t apply in Australia. Nauru’s constitution is like most new ones and won’t allow imprisonment without trial. The IOM accepts security inside the camps but wants guards to be kept at the perimeter to do the occasional bits of rough stuff. Nauru’s prison constantly imprisons detainees, they are held naked (to prevent suicides) for period of up to three weeks.

Australia and the camps require the maintenance of an entire airline that services the Pacific as well as Nauru. CASSA runs Air Nauru and is at last raking in funds from its only real client, Australia.

At present, staff and skilled tradespeople must be flown in and out. They’re on high wages, tradesmen I met claimed they earned over $5,000 a week. There was no shortage of work for them. The entire infrastructure, communications, water desalination and power of the country are being constantly repaired by Australia. Petrol is being syphoned from UNHCR and IOM vehicles when they are parked, by petrol starved Nauruans. Petrol is rationed or impossible to come by. Banks are mostly not open. Nauru’s wages are not paid.

Nauru is a sick little country, and they can blame us in part for their poor health. I am speaking quite literally. Nauru’s hospital is clogged with detention centre patients. Nauruans must bring a mattress and hope the drugs they need haven’t been used on detainees from Statehouse or Topside. Exactly what was promised wouldn’t happen, does. According to Nauru’s Opposition party leaders, Nauru’s public service is working solely on detention centre matters. None of its own problems get any attention, and to question is enough to warrant dismissal.

Nauru’s law has been distorted and possibly broken by the Australian Government in an effort to evade the laws of our own country. Nauru has a modern constitution which outlaws detention without trial. But in an effort to avoid the contamination of having to host poor persecuted Muslims or Middle Easterners we have built a barricade of laws within our country and a Pacific Solution to surround it.

Mr Ruddock offers Guantanamo Bay as his favourite example of offshore detention by the U.S. By doing so he slyly ties “terrorism” to seeking asylum. Because the detainees in Guantanamo Bay are held on suspicion of terrorism, they are effectively in remand, pre trial. What suspicion can Mr Ruddock lay at the feet of the few hundred suffering in his camps on Nauru? If there was justification for the often used illegal tag, Mr Ruddock would not hesitate to use it. He’d jump at the chance to arrest “unauthorised arrivals” if he could.

We have to listen to Mr Ruddock’s boring false pieties and cautions about our sovereign rights. Mr Ruddock has effectively admitted to my BBC companion that Australia is running the Migration Policy of Nauru. He said that was to protect it from journalists. Recently the lawyers who were working on getting into Nauru have given up. They would win a case in the courts if they were permitted to go, but the result would set the detainees free in Nauru which would only hasten their deportation.

Mr Ruddock could deport them while blaming lawyers. The legal status of the Nauru asylum seekers is even more impossible than those onshore in Australia.

I have seen the refusal letters they receive. They are a few lines, ticks and crosses. For 10 months they have waited for documents which look as though they’ve been composed by kindergarten students. They are insulting.

The detainees were tricked. They were told to only speak about their objections to the Taliban, not to confuse matters or talk ancient history and rejection is their reward. They were told not to speak to anyone about the cruel treatment they received from our defence forces in their rescues and transportation to Nauru. But I have their letters now, and I’ll use them in a report to be sent to various senators and a standing committee on migration and other bodies that could possibly protest the plight of the refugees on Nauru.

The UNHCR refused to write a letter recommending my visit to Nauru. They used Mr Ruddock’s language when they told me it would be “inappropriate”.

They have hurt the refugees on Nauru, and set the cause back six months in Australia by declaring the majority Hazara group not to be refugees. The UNHCR like the IOM do their humanitarian work until the money runs out. To me they began to seem like carrion feeders, they were so numerous, so cheerful, so detached. They lived and worked in Hotel Menen, rarely, it seemed, visiting the camps. There were careers to be made and more jobs to anticipate, it all looked so promising.

Australia is providing the model, assisting a gruesome 21st century form of commerce, mandatory detention. A business that can flourish out of misery, a business that can produce no solution and no product, only more of what it started with; concentrated misery.

If I am not allowed to say that Nauru’s camps are concentration camps, I will say that they concentrate depression, they concentrate despair, they concentrate the incredible shrinking loss of power that an asylum seeker experiences.

The people I know in Nauru are in grief. They are beyond rage. Rage implodes inside them and continues to hurt them every day after every day.

In sad conclusion

All the administrators on Nauru had an excuse, or a story they told themselves, for their presence there. Some like the IOM said they wished they weren’t. So did many of the staff we met, even the toughest. But to me the point was that they were there. These people were making an unconscionable project a reality. They made a living of it. They made it possible for the government to organise this hell on earth.

Hell ought to be chaos. Countless administrators had made this hell worse through nurture. It is now orderly and well organised.

The expert professionals, the IOM, have assisted the government to make a human warehouse on a third world desert island, like a peculiar social experiment. They enclosed and filed these the most defeated and defenceless people and their stories, and calmly went about the process of destroying them bureaucratically, while preparing the excuses that would allow them to return these victims to their former horror on Afghanistan with less than they had in the first place.

DIMIA will send these poor Hazara back to a country where most of them no longer have land or ties or villages where they may be safe, or may visit. What land there is outside Kabul is laced with mines and cluster bombs. Our own military is assisting the destruction of what is left. What possible damage could these worn and sad souls do to our country? What potential in these people have we crushed? What can those beautiful Afghani white mice girls, with their babies, do in Kabul or elsewhere, while their husbands are on temporary protection visas in Australia?

Their deaths are imminent. The children’s are a certainty. Mohammed and Ali and my other friends have told me they would rather die, because to survive in Afghanistan they will have to loot, murder and rob. That is why they left. They couldn’t live with the fact that criminality was the only career they had to look forward to in Afghanistan.

Pashtuns are still killing Hazara. The Mullahs told them they could to go Paradise. The vehicle was Hazara blood. It still is.

I will never recover the love that I had for my country. I will never forget those young Hazara men. I think of them, and I think of their dignity, their subtlety. I will never forgive those who sacrificed them. These men are the YOUNG DEAD and who can claim that we haven’t killed them?

On Burning Out – House Rules & Human Rights

Melb Uni Speech 13 JULY 2003

Let’s start with a lie and a little wishful thinking. My lie takes us back to August 2001. The very, very deservedly right honourable Mr Ruddock is on the deck of the MV Tampa, clasping hands with Arne Rinnan and brimming with one of those beatific smiles we’ve come to love, while he waves his magic wand of welcome and condolence over the hundreds of hurt and broken families that have appealed to Australia in the most desperate circumstances.

Mr Ruddock is world renowned as the Minister for joy and justice, and his department is his message stick extolling the benefits that refugees bring with them as they revivify the diminishing pool of youth and skills in the countryside. “Refugees are often the best and brightest, bring them on”, he says.

Now, I’ll switch to the truth and how I got here. Almost two years ago the tiny Indonesian tub the Palappa began taking on water. It’s distraught cargo of 438 mostly Afghan families and teenage boys were making their last prayers when the Norwegian ship, the noble MV Tampa came into view and proceeded to rescue every last one of them. The sailors could not believe how many there were. My friend Mohammed Mahdi had 435 written in felt pen on his hand as they assembled on deck, three more followed, while the Pilappa broke up and sank before their very eyes.

Captain Arne Rinnan having expected only about 80 asylum seekers on such a small vessel, despaired of the condition of the people on his deck, they all got food-poisoning and defecated wherever they could, they fell in and out of consciousness, pregnant women especially. Still Mr Howard refused to send a doctor. He sent the SAS who prevented the Captain speaking to journalists or even Justice North in the court in which my husband fought the Government in the Tampa case. He won (the first round).

Our Government rewarded the Tampa Captain with the threat of charges of “people smuggling” and after about 10 burning days the worn out rescuees were disgorged with the aid of lies and threats into the lowest and most frightening equipment holds in the bowels of the vast troop ship, the Manoora. They spent another tortuous 23 days there, while the accommodation facilities of the ship went unoccupied.

The lawyer’s win in court was appealed by the Government and the grotesque new “Pacific solution” was spawned. Australia’s reputation as an honest broker of the refugees’ convention was now dismembered.

I decided on two projects to set up Spare Rooms for Refugees; a web based register of people so concerned that they would offer their spare rooms temporarily to refugees who were being unceremoniously dumped from our camps. (It works.) And that while the wire fences were being erected on Nauru, I would try to contact the detainee in an effort to sponsor refugees. I did manage to get letters in, and I contacted a migration agent and lawyer. Letters and faxes went back and forth. Mohammed Mahdi was my invaluable source. I learned of the conditions there, we gathered the names and needs of detainees, and I would bully people in Canberra on their behalves. I was now receiving bundles of letters.

The Four Corners program asked me to help the BBC’s Sarah Macdonald who was making an hour-long piece on the “Pacific Solution”. It was dismaying to hear that they regarded me as knowledgeable, the only thing I knew was about a long but legal way into Nauru.

Sarah impressed me within 15 minutes by saying dryly “the BBC is fascinated by your country’s appalling politics, it’s so corrupt, it reminds us of the last days of the John Major Government in Britain” – I liked her, immediately. We made plans and set off within two weeks, disguised as “housewives”.

I had never imagined that in June 2002 I would circumvent Nauru’s visa bans, and fly from New Zealand to Fiji, Kiribas, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Kiribas, Fiji, New Zealand and back home again, just to get three days on the ground in Nauru as a transit passenger. My adventure with this undercover BBC journalist meant that we wore secret cameras. I was to get her into the camps. I had letters, contacts, gifts, toys and confidence in Mohammed. Nothing prepared me for the size of the monstrous construction known as “Topside Camp”. Try to imagine a makeshift town compressed into what felt like a baking tray. It was still in construction, Australian workers on $5,000 a week were all over it, the generator alone was bigger than a house, and was only installed after five months. Try to imagine the dark, the lack of water and food. Stumbling to find the toilet block and finding it through smell – the humiliating unflushable toilets were disgrace enough, without the sickness they caused. At the peak of its operation 1200 people lived in that one camp, the rest, the Iraqis lived in Statehouse, about 350 of them. Nauru is mostly blinding white rock, which intensifies the heat and repels rain clouds, its climate is unique, even at the equator. In Topside a child’s playground was installed for the 200 children there, no child used it, they would be turned into crisps. But that wouldn’t interest the I.O.M., the International Organization for Migration, who ran the camp. As its manager said to a psychiatrist who was urging various reforms there “the IOM is just a whorehouse”.

Indeed, their business was how to turn detainees into dollars. The IOM live luxuriously at the Hotel Menen, rarely visiting the camps, they had two sets of security guards, Chubb inside the camps, APS outside them. They entertained themselves lavishly. We went to their weekly party complete with dancing girls, groaning smorgasbord and open bar tab. Mr Ruddock must hate their endless invoices. The Nauruans hated their princely presence.

On the Saturday night I saw a windscreen smashed with fists and cans, the drivers who were sitting there were not unsurprised (every windscreen there is smashed) and simply drove off. The Nauruan chant in the background was “I hate Australians and all whites”. Why not?

The so-called Nauruan public service works only on detention centre business.

Detainees are piled into their gaol without charge. The IOM and the Consul-General of Australia threatened us with that gaol, too, if they suspected we were violating our visa restrictions. They told us that detainees are held naked in Nauru’s prison (to prevent suicides) which was a nice touch. They did arrest me eventually, but I was unarrested when I became very irritating saying rather grandly that I was the wife of a QC, and were they aware of Article 5 of the Nauru Constitution? I was wearing a white Armani georgette dress, deliberately, I didn’t think they’d dare mess it up – and they didn’t. I was too blonde, too white and too loaded with goodie two shoe toys.

The seven foot manager of the IOM, Cy Winter, assaulted me, actually when he realised that in spite of his orders I was not gaoled. I wasn’t hurt seriously and it’s only interesting in that it indicates, what licence the IOM gives itself. It is the law in Nauru.

Nauru

Nauru is a sick little country, it’s an exemplary model of unsustainability and the Pacific Perversion known as a policy is it’s perfect accompaniment. If turning detainees into dollars is going to be the new industry to emerge in this already ominous century then living well or in good conscience as Australians is an unsustainable wish. Australian kindness and fairness is eroded and vanishing like so much phosphate money.

The Pacific Solution is about degrading the resources of people, as much as it’s about waste, and we are wasting far more than the $500 million the Pacific Perversion is priced at over $400 per day per detainee there, cruelty like this really costs. They’ve all spent two Christmases there.

Sick countries are always prey to parasites and we’ve supplied an army of them. The IOM builders, security guards, APS officers, DIMIA officers, technicians, electricians, telephone engineers, mechanical engineers, plumbers, psychologists, translators, doctors etc. These carrion feeders have turned to a reality; something that should not be. They’ve constructed a Hell in a white-hot cooker. Hell should be chaos, not organised like this one. And no matter how unsustainable, the ugly project grinds on, closing in on the recalcitrants who remain.

The Pacific Solution is terminal, but when it dies, we’ll have to keep repairing Nauru’s only source of water, a broken-down desalination plant and its electricity supply, because Nauruans share a single fate they will become environmental refugees. And they’ll be ours. Wages, even public service wages are mostly unpaid in Nauru, banks are closed, Kiribatis (the workers of Nauru) are returning home after careers of 20 years in Nauru. The local Chinese are also departing, their shops are raised and they feel unsafe, and threatened. Nauruans are sullen, sick and drunk. I would be too.

There is no natural port or harbour to bring in goods. After four months, the Australian Government realised it must fly in supplies from Brisbane each fortnight if it wanted to keep order or staff. Petrol is siphoned from any parked cars, water is shipped in from the Solomons for the detainees, if it doesn’t arrive the IOM claims that it is stolen.

Nowadays, they are granted water for only one hour per day, imagine the competition for it.

Plants won’t grow, phosphate dust coats everything, telephones don’t work, electricity is rationed, sewerage seeps into the coral and flows back in from the sea. There is only one place you can swim.

Our money is keeping the airline in the black, it services the whole of the Pacific, when our solution vanishes, so will the airline that brings supplies, aid and the outside world, to the whole region.

For the moment we pay Nauru’s shipping and phone bills, its medical supplies and the many hospital bills of some of its corrupt ministers who choose our private hospitals for their superior care, and their secrecy.

Our Government’s dull genius was to invent a lucrative 21st Century Industry: Detention Camps. It wants to franchise the idea in Europe. If I’m not allowed to call them concentration camps, I will say that they concentrate depression, grief and despair, their only achievement or product.

Nauru is so unendurable that only about 450 detainees remain. Eighty of those were awarded full refugee status over eight months ago, but languish there they must.

Some have protested and moved out of the camp to live in a disused shipping container, I think I know which one, it’s high on “rubbish dump road” the island’s informal dump, the locals burn their rubbish there as if to add to the discomfort of the already bad air.

Kabul has claimed them back, but the ex-detainees are not free to go home; the roads are dangerous again, especially for Hazara, the mountains around Kabul rain down gun-smoke and rocket fire, and rocks which are still being crushed like biscuits by Americans or warlords or returning Taliban. Who knows who or why .…?

Gangs roam Kabul streets, so gangs and night-watchers band together to protect the Kabulis from warlords and thieves, no-one sleeps.

Mohammed Mahdi, ID No. 105, has left Nauru, as has Payadar, ID No. 320 and Ali Shahedi, ID No. 166, for Kabul. “Why?” I pleaded to know. It wasn’t the lavish $2,000 gift (that was stolen from them on arrival by the police, as they knew it would be). For some it was the fact that families who’d gambled everything to save their sons were now destitute or at increased risk. Or, as it was gently explained to me, they had only one precious thing left to lose and it was their sanity.

I will never forget those young Hazara men, I think of them and I think of their dignity, their subtlety. I will never forgive those who have sacrificed them. Those men are the young dead and who can claim that we haven’t killed them? What damage could those fragile, worn, shipwrecked, war ravaged souls do to us?

I will never recover the love that I had for my country. My Government dumped people it regarded as rubbish on another country’s dump, turning it into a human warehouse on a Third World desert island. They hijacked nearly 440 near-drowned human beings and lied to them for almost two years. What burns in me still, is that Australia remains my home; my house. This Government has torched the valuables, the familiar furniture of our shared understanding of human rights and house rules, and has left us in a veneer of lies and self-deception.

Whilst I managed to help one young woman asylum seeker (she lived with us for eight months) I resent bitterly that I was prevented from helping an honest man, Mohammed Mahdi, ID No. 105.

For details about the Manoora, the Tobruk and other Australian vessels consult Spare Rooms for Refugees website, to find our report “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers” for the real horror of it or David Marr’s Dark Victory. Not a word of either has been refuted by this Government.

Nauru – Getting The Stories, Getting Arrested And Getting Out

I was trembling as our plane landed on Nauru island. Anxious, alone in my seat, trying to activate the secret camera I was wearing, attaching batteries, mechanically incompetent, afraid I would disappoint Sarah my BBC ally, by not getting on film our potentially unpleasant encounter at the Immigration desk. Our idea was that if we were denied entry beyond this point at least we’d be able to demonstrate this.

In Australia, I’d been refused a Nauru visa several times. Now we were trying to enter another way. We’d made a long, circuitous but legal trip via New Zealand and a great many Pacific Islands.

I’d caused puzzlement and was questioned at the departure desk in Fiji. “Visiting friends (during a Pacific Island tour)” I’d said. This seemed satisfactory. We’d been let on board. Now we were at our last hurdle. I noticed my bags were x-rayed. No-one else’s were.

Travelling inconspicuously to Nauru was not really possible. Tall Sarah, blonde and irresistible was drawing attention, as was her British accent. She had reached the Immigration counter a length ahead of me.

Was my hidden camera actually filming? I was dizzy with fear, heat and the outlandishness of it all. My turn. “Where are you staying in Nauru?” The critical question. No visitors get into Nauru without proof of a hotel booking. The Australian Government has block booked the two hotels until mid 2003. The result of this is no one else gets a visa. Our “conspirators” had to make bookings for us however.

Why then the official wanted to know had I given him the name of a hotel in Kiribati? I was totally flustered. “I’m not good on names ….” Actually the hotel names were similar. The Oden and the Odneai. I tried to recall which was the Nauru one. But the man behind the desk was waving me on, too hot or too bored to test me further.

My feelings of incompetence were magnified even more when we later discovered that my tense struggle with the camera hadn’t succeeded in my recording anything. I hadn’t even managed to turn it on! No one who knows me well would have found this surprising, but I was embarrassed that Sarah was getting my measure rather too fast.

We got to our hotel to find Sarah was expected, not me. “You’ll find a room won’t you” I coaxed. The Nauruan staff looked as lost as I felt.

They found one. On the fourth floor, no lift and a fairly sad beach view. Two buckets of water in the shower stall. None in the taps. The power points were dead. Then the realisation “Someone’s been sleeping in my bed!” as Baby Bear turned down the grimy, creased sheets on the two tiny beds. Then the power came on. Good, I thought – that should kill the smell from the mini-refrigerator in the corner.

I felt we ought to get to Topside Camp immediately and be seen by the detainees. Many were Afghan asylum seekers I’d been writing to. One, Mohammed Mehdi, a young Hazara man I’ve been trying to sponsor. I thought if they see I am here in Nauru they could complain to the UNHCR if I was prevented from visiting them.

[Topside and Statehouse are the names of the two camps on Nauru. I aimed to see the Iraqis and some Iranians who I believed to be imprisoned in Statehouse the next day.]

One of our “contacts” drove us to Topside. I wanted us to be left there with no transport back to the hotel. That would mean that “management” would have to deal with us one way or another.

We drove past dry expanses of white rock – “pinnacles” they call them. A few bits of limp foliage here and there, but mostly rubbish on either side. There didn’t appear to be a rubbish dump. This was a rubbish road; rubbish that smelled evil next to rubbish on fire. An interval of pinnacle rock, some sick looking foliage … another fire … another smelly stack. One dump after another all the way to the ultimate dump, Topside Camp, now the unhappy home of the Hazara, the despised indigenes of Afghanistan.

Sarah was looking apprehensive. I felt exhilarated. Sarah had a secret camera strapped to her. We’d decided camera operation wasn’t in my field! I was armed with my big white folio of letters, documents, recommendations, envelopes of cash and gifts, books and Farsi/English dictionaries.

Our “contact” drove us straight past two dazed looking APS sentries. I waved and smiled. At the next sentry box we stopped and Sarah and I got out. As the car drove off I pushed through the boom gates busily greeting and smiling. “Hello everybody! Can you tell my friend Mohammed Mehdi that I’m here? Hello! Hello! Hello!”

The guard in the sentry box was now very alert, hotly describing the scene to his walkie-talkie. The walkie-talkie must have been barking back instructions, because now the guard was trying to instruct me. “Move outside the fence, now!”

But I behaved as if this was a garden party, not a trespass. “Nice to meet you! I’ve come a long way. Do you know Mohammed Mehdi?” Tra La La! Toys and gifts spilling from our bags. Our charm was relentless.

But now a number of guards herded us back to the first sentry box we’d passed, out of sight of the detainees, small groups of whom were pushing their way past barriers further inside the camp. Good! We were attracting attention. That was what I wanted and the management apparently didn’t!

One of the guards told us a car would come to take us back to the HQ of the International Organisation for Migration where our right to visit the camps would be decided. We waited and waited in the incredible heat. Outwardly calm, we chatted to the guards. They were wary, irritated. We, ever-friendly.

Finally a 4-wheel-drive came to carry us off the site. We were surrounded by Chubb Security personnel, Australian Protective Services officers and IOM staff. As Sarah and I were driven off by our minders – the IOM staff who came with us – I could see the increasing crowd of detainees watching out for us through the barred fence.

I was pleased. My plan had worked. Now we would meet “management” at the Hotel Menen, where the IOM and all the other organisations – UNHCR, Chubb Security, DIMIA and APS lived, worked or just sat. (I couldn’t blame them for that entirely. This was not a country for work. It was far too hot.)

At the hotel we were confronted by members of the staff of IOM. The International Organisation for Migration, employed by our Government. Drawn from many nations, they were young, cheerful and numerous. (For them this was a career offering travel, adventure and professional advancement.)

Sarah and I said how delighted we were to meet them. They were cordial but stunned. Like the guards at Topside Camp they were slowly trying to formulate a plan. Flattering remarks were made about the “kindness” of our visit, even by the chief, a tall guy, American, Cy Winter.

Here, in the luxury of the hotel, which was their office, miles from the camps, in waterfront rooms with air-conditioning, it was possible to imagine they were running some other form of smart business, not detention centres.

By this time it was mid-day on Friday. A group of them said they were going swimming. Even when they left there were still so many. And more staff outside: builders, electricians, technicians, IOM drivers, UNHCR drivers ….

This hotel was a newly founded city, or the court of some corrupted castle. From then on I only ever thought of it as Menen Palace, with lofty Cy Winter as its monarch. His subjects – his associates and staff were the carrion feeders of the Pacific.

Here was my introduction to the growth industry of this new century – people detention.

Even the unskilled can make a buck if they are prepared to go to a site that is harsh and hard to get to. Nauru fits the bill, and at bargain rates. It is too poor to refuse.

The IOM, skilled and experienced in running refugee centres, are now eager entrants into the business of running detention camps. New players in a squalid field.

Manuscript

A Mr Maher and Mr Shamel Mahmoudi, were the two interpreters assigned to us by the IOM and they with a few others then took us back to Topside Camp. I had said I was confident that we wouldn’t need them as Mohammed Mehdi, the young man I was trying to sponsor into Australia had good enough English. That was accepted because they knew him too.

Almost all at once Mohammed was in front of me, and so were a swarm of others I’d been writing to. I knew them only by their letters and yet here they were. What was strange about it was how normal it felt.

Mohammed was vaguely recognisable from the television news item I’d seen the year before. He struck me as very calm, intelligent and helpful to all the people that quickly surrounded us. We were ushered into a room. Chubb Security paced up and down in front of a large window, dispersing groups of detainees, who were attempting to join our meeting. It was depressing to witness.

As we talked, Sarah was secretly filming. The large window made us very anxious about being observed by the guards. I asked the Afghanis to write down the stories of their mistreatment at sea, to write them overnight in English or in Persian Dari. I wanted the stories they weren’t prepared to put in the mail. They were too afraid. They’d been told to remain silent.

I asked them if they could take photos. They were enthusiastic. But when I gave them my stills camera, with some films I had to show them how to load film. “I can collect the letters and the camera tomorrow.” The Chubb guards outside our meeting room were starting to talk harshly to the detainees gathering around. I knew the guards wanted us to leave, and the detainees didn’t. But on balance the least provocative thing to do was to leave gracefully if we wanted to visit again tomorrow and we did. The IOM translators reappeared and ferried us back to our hotel.

Schizophrenic Saturday And Party Animals Of Two Varieties

Friday had been a brilliant day for our purposes, we were reeling. The place was so porous. People told us so much both wittingly and unwittingly. We’d had a few hours at the Topside Camp. I had met Mohammed. It was our first face to face meeting.

We’d been told of the maltreatment of each boatload at the hands of the Australian Defence Forces. So many stories. I said please write them down tonight. I’ll never get to speak to you all. At last! These were the stories I wanted – the same as those that Amnesty International had collected and translated in London.

I had read some of them but Amnesty would not release them, as they said they were held in trust. Also some detainees had been told not to speak of their mistreatment as it would affect their applications, making them appear ungrateful to Australians who had rescued them.

I think Amnesty did not want their entreaties to Mr Ruddock to suffer either, and I think it was felt that both the Australian public and the Minister would be indignant if their Defence Forces were chastised. Since East Timor the Defence Forces had earned the kind of respect they hadn’t had for a long time.

Now, these were the stories that I had had hints of through eight months of writing and receiving letters in Australia. Bits of stories that had been impossible to piece together and that had driven me to come here. I realised that there was absolutely no trust from these people in any of the staff. Australian, American, Afghan. None.

And with Chubb Security only a few metres away, we had filmed. All was going well!

Until the following day.

Instead of being met by a couple of staff members, we were met by the Australian Consul General and Cy Winter, the head of the IOM operation. He must have baulked when Sarah had asked if she could take a few photos, and the list of names I’d presented included people who had lost family members. His suspicions aroused. Wham! Now we were hit with every threat they could invent.

Cy said he wasn’t going to have me come here and stir things up. He had been attempting to start excursion tours around Nauru for the detainees. Things were very sensitive. “How could I spoil that?” I asked him. Then he threatened me with nonsense about how the Nauruan people were objecting to my interference. I said they have not objected to my visit, nor have the detainees. They are objecting to you obstructing my meetings with detainees.

Then my visa became the issue. I was accused of misuse of my visa. I had come with “another purpose”. Sarah said we don’t have visas. We’re here in transit. But I said “I’m here to visit, which is what I put on my immigration card. What else am I doing? I’m visiting my friends. My friends in detention. Not you.” Cy then said he would personally call the Nauruan Police. They’d be very angry with me and they would put me in jail and Nauruan jail was unpredictable, “scary”. Who knows when I would get out? I could get “stuck” there. It was childish. I said to the Consul General “But you’d get me out wouldn’t you?” “Yes, yes! But it can be difficult. They can be unpredictable you know ….” He’d seen it happen. People had been held, etc. etc.

The Consul General was having a hard time. He didn’t enjoy threatening us but Cy Winter did. Cy told me “You don’t know what you’re getting into”, that I’d come along on my “stupid” own. I was an “amateur, an absolute amateur”, a “no-one from nowhere”. I knew absolutely nothing. And so it went on.

I said I wanted to take photos for family members for husbands who hadn’t seen their wives or kids for two and a half years. “The husbands are wrecks. The wives are wrecks! There is a man with a son who is so sick, with heart problems, leg problems. No wife. No brothers or sisters. Their lives are almost unendurable.” All they craved was a photo.

I wanted photos too, I said. To show Australians the faces of the tormented. I began to cry. Cy Winter then proceeded to tell me that he’d be delighted to jail me if I took so much as one photo. I asked him “Why does this worry you, when you have actually invited journalists here?” He roared. “That’s a lie! Who told you that?” “Russell Skelton, from the Age newspaper!”

He expostulated. He blew up. He blazed red. All for the benefit of the Consul General I suspected. “I have never invited journalists here. I’m doing serious work here and I’m not having it disrupted ….” etc. etc. (Later I checked. “Yes, he invited me”, said Russell Skelton of “The Age”. “Twice. I’ve got him on tape.” Cy Winter had lied.)

I told him “I want to visit again today. I have money, goods, clothes, letters and toys to give to people. They have a right to see me. They have written me letters” (letters I had asked them to write) and I expected that I would be allowed to collect them.

“Okay. You can have one hour in each camp. You’re going to be escorted by these guys. You are taking up their unpaid time off, and then that’s it!”

“No” I said. The Afghani ladies want to talk to me. So do the Iraqis.” “You’re not here to hold meetings” he sneered and the diatribe recommenced.

I was actually too afraid that we were losing time to be distracted into a real debate. And I was scared now. Cy and the Consul had been successful there. “Okay” I said.

We went first to Statehouse, the Iraqi camp. Immediately we were assailed by fretful Iraqis at the gates. “Help us! They tried to kill us!” “You mean the ADF?” I asked. “They hurt us. They beat us!” “But” I said “You told Amnesty to keep those stories quiet.” “No! No!” they remonstrated. They wanted to tell me about the SAS and the Manoora and the Australian Navy ship. The degradations that had been meted out to them on those 23 days on board.

The Iraqi men had the wild look of people who are experiencing shock. They were restless, moving, ceaselessly talking. I was prevented from talking to them.

“Please write it down! I’ll come back tomorrow and get your letters. They won’t let me stay.”

I was led into a room. About five women and one man from my request list were produced. I spoke to the women through the translator. I gave them the money from their husbands, letters, news. Each woman cried. Asked me when this would end. They were young, pretty, polite and defenceless. I should have asked them what they wanted me to tell people in Australia, but I didn’t dare. The translators had been co-operative, but the hour was over …

On to Topside Camp. Here Sarah and I were greeted by the Chief, Cy Winter himself – this time with a smile I didn’t trust. “You want to see what we do here? You want a tour of the camp?” I didn’t want to sacrifice my hour with Mohammed and the others for his tour, which would be stage managed, that was clear. I didn’t want to be forced to like him, to thank him. That’s what he did to everyone else. Now he was issuing new edicts. “Come on! You want your visit! I’m giving it to you.” Was this generous? It was delivered in a truculent, challenging way. “But you have to bring your money with you” he challenged. “You’re going to buy some art. We’ve got an art show. We help the asylum seekers to do a lot of craft and art here …” and so on. The PR was flowing now. No threats at all. Just honey.

This was the ruler of the camp, the great Cy Winter, ruler of the Menen Hotel/Palace too, where all the workers in this asylum seekers industry worked and hid out, detached from the pain of the place. Here was a thriving business. There were administrators, translators, Chubb Security, psychiatrists, builders, carpenters, technicians, electricians, UNHCR, psychologists, doctors, teachers, cooks, DIMIA staff, APS staff and more. Enough to run a country. In spite of any good intentions they had, or told themselves they had, I could not help but see them as carrion feeders.

The Camps

The camps are a country within a country. The island of Nauru itself did not matter to anybody at Hotel Menen, this was a new island population defensive about its work, which was lucrative. Builders and other staff told us they earned in excess of $5,000 a week, with perks.

The staff is rotated, they are liberal with trips back home to Australia or other countries of origin. There must be in excess of 1500 workers to 1500 detainees. They had strict contracts that forbade discussion of Nauru to anyone, and yet they were telling us appalling stories.

These people, well intentioned as they might have set out to be, were now the colonisers of Nauru. The IOM who had run refugee camps of 50,000 and more in the Middle East, were now running prisons on a desert island. And the last thing they wanted to do was recognise that.

Cy Winter lives high above everyone else. His living quarters are high up in the hotel. He’s high anyway: about seven feet tall, lean, tanned, almost good-looking with clear, cold eyes. With long hair he would look Christ-like. The thought must have occurred to him. His behaviour to his staff appeared beneficent, but it wasn’t hard to find the condescension and the arrogance at the base of it. A benevolent dictator, spreading largesse that Australia pays for!

So here I was in Topside Camp, getting an invitation through bared teeth to view exactly what I had not wanted to see. I said “No” to a tour at least three times. I said I’d seen camps before (which was a lie. I visit Maribyrnong detention centre regularly but only the visitors’ area). But he wouldn’t hear anyone else’s view. He was ordering Mohammed to lead us around. He might as well have put him on a leash. “Not in there, Mohammed” he’d bark. But we saw, we certainly saw.

The long houses, plastic-sided, closely bedded dormitories that were just structures with roofs. Every third bed had a wasted man lying on it. No air-conditioning. It looked like Changi in plastic. The steel dormitories, like converted containers, were very cramped. Three to a cell, I don’t know how they breathed in there. Nowhere at all to be private, except perhaps the toilet block, but the indescribable smell would prevent any lingering there. I couldn’t make myself look. Cy’s face was truculent and wary: this was clearly a part he was not happy to show off or discuss. But I’d seen photos anyway.

The toilets are off the scale for filthiness. Because there is so little water to clean them with, let alone flush, waste is hard to remove. They had been advised to install ground toilets, but useless Western flush toilets were ordered instead, a mistake that is, I am told, made in every Australian aid project.

In one sense it was quite a comical visit. Seven foot, Messiah-like Cy Winter followed by Mohammed, followed by me in a sober grey gauzy outfit with pretty blonde Sarah and trails of Afghans of all ages thrusting letters in our hands and bags, as we went.

The entire camp is barren, hotter than is imaginable. A soupy Bain Marie kind of heat. It’s no wonder that the children avoid the newly installed play area. I didn’t see it in use once in my three visits: a child would simply cook out there. Children were rarely seen, although there were some hundreds here, but it could not be safe to let them out of the family quarters.

All babies born in the camp will be stateless, not Nauruan, yet another problem those babies will have to contend with the rest of their lives. At the time of my visit five babies have been born since Tampa. I didn’t see them either, although I saw a baby clinic and a medical clinic. I saw a building site sized generator, without which the camp had managed for about six months, unimaginable. The dark, the heat, nearly 1600 people housed in a hot, unhealthy cage. There are still constant power outages of the grotesque generator.

But now they have some amenities. The place is functional. There was building going on everywhere, more rudimentary structures were being installed. They had the eerie look of permanency. I wondered, as we were marched about, how much happier I might have been if this awful place had looked a bit more provisional, more temporary. Instead it was becoming an efficient warehouse for people, a factory that produced nothing at all but unhappiness in bulk, an emerging and lucrative industry nonetheless. A business with no product; profit for some, yet loss and more loss for many.

Next, we were hustled through the kitchen which made reasonable food, but all starchy, sweet and oily. Fruit and fresh vegetables would simply wilt there. I wondered how they had fed anyone, when they’d had four months without power.

We saw laundry troughs, only about eight of them. How the detainees washed their sheets, towels and long dresses was hard to say when water is scarce and soap rationed. It’s all much better than it was, I kept being told, and told. Water is still rationed. I believe now they are allowed only salty brackish water for two hours daily.

We saw a sad little vegetable or herb garden. Not a tree anywhere; plants don’t make the attempt. There isn’t really any soil in Nauru, just “pinnacles” with weedlike foliage growing around them like cobwebs; a few coarse palms. It’s growth, but not serious growth. The ground all over the island is so exposed that a perpetual updraft of heated air carries away any moisture and intensifies the already burning heat; it drives off the rain-clouds, we were told.

We were stopped at a building said to be the Afghan Women’s Centre. I was a little dazzled as I entered: here to my left were the first refugee women we had seen. They were in timid little rows, staring at us, as if in fright. Their shawls and head coverings were pale, and so were their faces: such unusual faces, they took my breath away. They looked like medieval Flemish paintings of saints or nuns, oval smooth faces, almond eyes, and pale, tiny delicate features, like rows of pretty white mice; and so young!

The translators – UNHCR IOM, I wasn’t sure which – hovered annoyingly in this very crowded hot, hot space. Here was an exhibition of art and craft the detainees had produced. I was astonished by the sewing these women had done, it was beautiful, and in glorious colours. I passed biro drawings of Tampa, decorative calligraphy of poems that pleaded for freedom, for wings, for rescue. Craftwork of great skill and odd aesthetics; paintings mostly done by Iraqis, primitive in style, but each was a protest, a reliving and retelling of boats on fire, of Australian soldiers, of prison. These paintings were neither attractive nor picturesque.

Some Iraqi men collared me, pleading with me to help them. How long would they be there? They seemed to look right through me. They knew I had no answer.

I wanted the paintings, I said changing the subject. “Which” they asked? All of them. I’d like to exhibit them all in Sydney and Melbourne. Maybe auction them. I didn’t know, I wanted to sort it out later. I lost my nerve. [I knew that my husband, Burnside, would say “Yes, I’ll have them all.” I would have loved the effect of that, but I wasn’t here for effects,] I was really anxious that I had very little time left, and whilst everyone was slipping me letters, I’d spoken so little to Mohammed who looked resigned as if his life’s work was to stand out of people’s way, if he wasn’t assisting them. It hurt me to see this.

I had to move on! I’d bought a few little wonderful embroideries but I was again face to face with the ubiquitous Cy Winter. He was now offering us luxurious bottled water (detainees do not get this, unless there is a serious water shortage) but the food I was given was authentically theirs, detention food – sweet, grease with salt.

At last, we found a spot in the shade of some buildings, Mohammed’s friends gave me my camera back with films. They said with great gravity “You told us you don’t have time, that we should not be polite. We have taken some impolite photos” – their eyes were downcast. I guessed these were of the fetid toilets “better to look at them than smell them I thought” but their delicacy struck me. Even this foul place had not made them crude or harsh. I explained that we may not see them again, that the IOM was not happy with us. They knew … There was little point talking, nothing surprised or angered them it seemed, they had no expectations. It was all over, these were young men, dying. Dying of hope and hope disappointed. They were truly gentlemen.

Back at our hotel whilst considering seriously the selection of clothes for the two “parties” we’d been invited to, I was disturbed by Warwick, one of the many $5000 a week Australian tradesmen in our hotel. Warwick was chasing his mates around the hotel with plastic replica guns. As a pretext to get into conversation, I told him that he’d scared me. He was ex-army, he said he hated asylum seekers. He was a prime Aussie bigot, the job suited him perfectly but he was also a boasting fool, so he told me far more than he should have yet even he had guilt and misgivings about what was happening at the camp, and what it all cost Australia, which he said had a “great lifestyle”.

When we got downstairs, we met another camp employee who wanted a lift to the party. On the way there he told us how much he regretted his job. He was nice, this place troubled him. He was attached to a little Iraqi boy, about his son’s age. He told us lots and he was smart, he said he was convinced we were journalists, which I at least could deny. He didn’t care anymore. This would be his last stint in Nauru, he’d seen too much. He was probably the nicest Aussie we met on Nauru.

We entered the party area – outdoor patio, with barbeque and a groaning board of countless salads, a giant blue birthday cake, crates of booze. Like an average sized wedding – about 150 people. The catering was for twice that.

We were seeing firsthand how the IOM kept itself: in conspicuous style. So conspicuous that the Nauruans also noticed and resented it. The island has anti-IOM graffiti dotted around. The Nauruans maintained that they were excluded from the parties and from employment. The only ones at the party were pre-pubescent and teenage girl dancers, shyly displaying island dancing techniques to over-amplified music. Security men, with stubbies and decked out in leis and flower wreaths, watched without appreciation. It was repeated every fortnight we were told, the same party, the same dancing girls, the same Fosters hangovers.

Sarah was taping away with her secret camera. We worked separately, talking to as many people as we could.

Cy Winter, the king himself, was now my host. Why? Why doesn’t he ask us to leave? In contrast to the afternoon just ended, he condescended to talk to us without insults or threats. What he told me was interesting to me: it betrayed his perfect ignorance of Australia, his lack of curiosity. He made platitudes about Nauruans, not one of whom was invited to his dreary bacchanal – I noticed. He was just dull after all.

I moved away from him, leaving him to Sarah. He and the head of Chubb Security were wearing large black phones that connected them to the camps. It looked freakish: as if they were connected electronically to some organism; they did their “management” at all hours. It underscored the Orwellian madness of it all.

The party was excellent for information gathering, the “guests” were getting drunker. Anyone seemed to be there, as long as they were white.

The Australian Consul-General chatted with me as if to atone for that morning’s threats. He was kind; he’d been a refugee himself, much earlier in life. He was clearly uncomfortable in this outpost of incivility. Like everyone else Sarah and I were bored.

We had another party to go to. Nauruans had invited us to the “Bondi Club”, their local Saturday night venue. It was an enormous loud dance bar in a rundown tin shed. It wasn’t long before we danced badly with the locals.

But later I was standing in the car-park talking (away from the noise) when a group of Australian builders and “tradies” drove up. They, like everyone, had tough land-rover type vehicles. A drunken Nauruan stepped towards one of the vehicles and punched his fist through the windscreen of the car. The Aussie driver blinked, shattered glass all over him. He looked startled for a moment, but not surprised. The Nauruan shouted “I hate all whites!” Some of the locals tried to talk him away from the scene … he wasn’t finished, he’d just started. By now, the Australians who’d just arrived were saying “It happens every Saturday night. It’s home time”. They advised us to leave. As an imperialist Australian, I knew I wasn’t wanted. Being ashamed of my nationality was a new experience.

My Arrest, My Assault And My Incredulity – If They Behave Like This To Me, How Do They Treat Their Detainees?

On Sunday, the last day of my three days, I was desperate to have a last talk with Mohammed my friend in Topside Camp. I needed him but also a representative of the Christmas Island group to clarify the damning letters that I’d received on Saturday. I’d asked the detainees to write letters, as they had so much to say (but my visits at best were going to be short and managed). These letters were much freer versions of the letters I’d received in Australia (and were why I was here).

About 50 of them had been given to me in trust, the trust they would not be persuaded they could extend to letters they posted with the IOM, UNHCR or most particularly the Australian Government’s assistance. They had no trust in anyone. It sounds immodest, but it’s worse than that, at that moment probably the only person they felt they could believe in was me.

The Afghan women so distrust anything they are told, that they won’t believe the IOM who offer them the right to phone calls to their husbands in Australia. They simply refuse, even when their husbands may not know if they’re alive or dead, because they believe somehow, any communication could “affect” their applications.

Each morning of our stay I’d managed to brew “yuppie” coffee for Sarah and me with nothing more than a large packet of Lavazza and a mosquito net. We were sipping this triumph of ingenuity when I got a worried phone call from my husband. I told him I’d be arrested if I tried to visit the detention camps again. He said they couldn’t arrest me. Under Article 5 of the Nauruan Constitution a person cannot be detained without trial but if they tried it I should demand the legal representative of my choice. He hoped I’d choose him. We chortled.

He said that he was in touch with Monsieur Joinet of the UN working group on arbitrary detention. That they’d be very disturbed by any mistreatment of me or more importantly the detainees in regard of their right to visitors.

So, now today’s project was redefined for me. I tried politely over repeated phone calls to make an appointment to see Mohammed Mehdi and perhaps another representative. Excuses were made. Calls to translators who promised they’d ring back, didn’t. Cy Winter wouldn’t take my calls at all.

My good manners exhausted, I told Sarah that I would pack my suitcase so that if I was arrested, she could get it to the airport in the morning for me. I took my toothbrush and a small pack. I sat in on her interview with the Opposition Party of Nauru and made notes. Sarah’s findings were eye-opening. Details follow this report.

After the interview at about 4.30 as we’d agreed she drove me to Topside Camp and left me there.

I didn’t want them accusing me of entrapping them on film or of making a histrionic spectacle of myself or of provoking them. As one woman alone they were less likely to dispute with me. Arrest was not my goal. Sympathy was an outside possibility.

I had 50 letters to decipher, the least I needed was a couple of hours to go through them with Mohammed. I also didn’t want to draw attention to Sarah. So far the authorities were stupid enough to assume Sarah was just a friend, and that I was, to quote Cy Winter, an interfering “nobody” with good intent but “absolutely no idea”, an ignoramus, hoist high on my “little white horse”, and probably a spoiled and clumsy do-gooder, a brat. My “non-professionalism” was used as disparagement.

Our blonde hair, our waspishness had misled them wonderfully, but if they really asked her questions, their suspicions could be raised.

Armed with four large bright clean, blow-up toys, squeaky and with bells in them, and my “official” inspector’s file of papers, we set off. I had donned a floaty white Armani dress that affected the appearance of Nurse Nightingale or a yuppie angel. I wasn’t sure. But I wanted to have the kind of dress that you wouldn’t sully or crush or mistreat easily. My clothes had to be delicate, fine things no-one would want to rough up …! Unusual logic for an activist, I admit, but clothes have always been part of my armoury, they can confuse people.

Sarah dropped me down by the main gate. We’d waved our way past the APS guards we already knew. We felt they liked us now in a fairly pitying way. As soon as I appeared, Tinkerbell with toys, cheerful asking the residents “Can you get me Mohammed Mehdi really quickly?” to the gathering crowds, the Fijian guard was confused. I was creating a minor spectacle with my coloured air-filled toys for protection. I didn’t have long and I knew it. “Please try, hurry, get me Mohammed.” “Yes, yes he knows, we’ve sent for him.” Sure enough, Mohammed came.

He beamed in his thin, worried, way. He looks like a student from anywhere, dark, almond-eyed, small featured, typically Hazara, a gentle mien, always. But he looked worried for me, and helpless. He was barked at by some Chubb security guard I hadn’t noticed before. But Chubb weren’t rude to me, although they did insist on “arresting” my toys. I had placed them inside the gate. They duly placed them outside. I thought the toys might melt in the heat, or burst. I could see that I could have played irritating games like this for quite some time, but I didn’t want to provoke a scene or a disturbance among the detainees, and they were certainly curious enough to attempt one. Even the guards might enjoy a distracting stoush, squashing a little woman in a white Armani might have been quite entertaining.

I had prepared a letter for Mohammed, because I suspected this would happen. In the letter amongst my questions, I had written a lot of reassurances that nothing would happen to me if I got arrested, and not to worry. I laughed when the APS guard tried to prevent me from passing my letter through the wire fence. I said “C’mon, c’mon, it’s just a letter.” He was embarrassed. I’d met this guard when I’d arrived three days ago. We’d chatted wanly. We’d even shared a drink at the IOM’s party at the Menen Palace.

Mian Shamel, the translator, emerged. He looked like “management” not so friendly. He was on his walkie-talkie to the IOM chief Cy Winter asking what to do. I could hear Cy’s angry voice “Get the Police, get her out of there, now … jail … security etc ….” I said “Let me speak to him and explain. I’ve been trying to speak to him all day, he hasn’t had the courtesy to ring me back.” No, they wouldn’t let me speak. I didn’t have much time left. I opened my file and showed Mohammed notes I’d made about some of the letters I’d received. “Can you tell these people I’ve read their letters, they need lawyers, I need more detail.” He was trying to memorise my notes from behind the wire. It was hopeless.

I had been weaving and ducking, smooth as butter, appearing to move in one direction and then slipping into reverse. I could see the scene as I was creating it. Then a car with two APS, one female, arrived. I didn’t relish the thought of the woman grappling with me, she obviously had a great disdain for me in my tooth-fairy outfit. She liked uniforms.

The APS officers were saying I’d broken the law. I said “No my husband wouldn’t let me do that, he’s a lawyer ….” They said I’d infringed my visa. “Not at all”, I said “I haven’t got one but I’m absolutely legal, don’t worry, the IOM don’t know about those things. My husband does.”

They must have wanted to slap me. I knew how stuck-up and spoiled I sounded, but I also knew it would protect me. “It’s Article 5, you see of the Nauruan Constitution, you can’t arrest me, my husband’s a Q.C. he’d be very difficult about this.”

I was becoming tiresome even to myself and too sad to keep the game going.

I said I’d only agree to go with them if they took me to the IOM, to Cy Winter, for a chat. As I walked to the Police vehicle I made smiling, comical gestures with my arms and legs to make the detainees laugh and relax, to show them I wasn’t afraid and that they shouldn’t feel troubled.

I won’t ever forget Mohammed’s resigned and hopeless expression. He who had done so much, been so patient, counselled desperate inmates, written their letters, translated and taught English every day since he’s been there. He’d served every interest including mine.

I might never see those noble Afghans again. Mohammed was exactly as I’d imagined when I first saw him in a news clip on television before filming on Nauru was forbidden, a rational gentle highly sensitive and intelligent person, someone who was not by nature a courageous or fearless leader. The role has been thrust on him by me and by the detainees, and every day I hope that the Australian Government won’t deport him for it. Now he has gone back.

I was not allowed to leave my joyous toys. They chimed innocently captive in the police car. Their little bells sounded like whimpered protests.

I made some remarks about the heat – I was ignored. I watched the fires in the rubbish dumps, the perpetual smoke from them was preferable to the dead smell of the heaps of filth that line the road to Topside Camp. The scene was unworldly, a moonscape with garbage.

Eventually I said “Are you security or Police?” – no answer. “Excuse me, am I officially arrested?” – no answer. I said “I don’t feel arrested. What are your powers here in Nauru?” – no answer.   They pulled in at my hotel. “No”, I said “No, the Hotel Menen …”, they didn’t speak. I don’t know if they thought I was staying there, or if they were just amused that I regarded them as a taxi service, but at least I could see I wasn’t going to jail on a darkening Sunday night. They said nothing and drove off. “No, wait” I said running after the car. “My toys ….” My toys were released also ….

I guessed Cy Winter’s room number. It would be the best room on the top storey, for the nearly 7 foot top storey man, the patrician American, who ruled and surveyed everything, from his eyrie in the Menen Palace. I climbed the stairs, arranged my pack on the ground, my toys and file in my arms and knocked. I was right. Cy Winter, the ruler, opened the door himself. His eyes bulged down at me in disbelief. They seemed to say “Why aren’t you in jail?”

I said “Hi, listen can we talk about this?” pressing slightly forward, but not close. Then his long arm did the most surprising thing. It reached out and held my neck so firmly that the heel of his palm pressed against my larynx so much that I couldn’t breathe. I bent away backwards as far as I could and then sideways to try to free myself. He yelled “It’s Sunday – GET OUT!!” and slammed his door. He’d looked so strange, as though he had thought he’d done right, and would do more.

I paused, I knocked at the door, expecting him to come out and apologise. Nothing. I wouldn’t knock again – I also am proud. I sat myself, my pack, my book of letters and my toys on the stairs next to his room and, looking out onto the only good view in Nauru, recovered myself.

But, it was getting dark. Sarah would not know where I was. It wasn’t safe to walk. There is no taxi or bus on Nauru. Fortunately, I remembered that I had the name and room number of one of the translators who’d helped me the day before. I was in luck. She was there with her husband, and very kind and welcoming. (Others arrived.)

I told her what had happened. She was astounded, and her shock was genuine. “What is happening to Cy?” She kept saying “Oh, he’s under so much intense pressure from the Government, they watch us and they want so much. It’s the money and the pressure. Money does things to people.”

I didn’t think it wise to criticise her boss endlessly. She seemed to respect him, she’d need to, to work there. I said that my impression was that he was a proud man, he ran a five star detention centre. He’d told me this camp was nothing, he’d run camps of 50,000. I’d said to him, “Yes, those were refugee camps, camps of grateful people who felt saved.” A detention camp was a different place. But he hadn’t listened, he was glib and proud of his excellent work.

I said to the translator “Cy is tall. He’s an American. I don’t think he’s realised that his attitudes have become thoroughly colonial, arrogant.” They thought about this. But I changed the subject, I wanted to know how they could work there, in hell.

The translator burst into tears. She told me how she and her husband cried at night. Stories poured out of her. It would have been unfair not to tell her to stop. She said no she’d write a book one day. I needed to phone Sarah or leave a message at my hotel. I had to leave them. I went down to the lobby to leave a message there. But I was aware I was being watched. I realised I had to return to the translators. They offered to keep me for dinner. I said they were telling me too much. I liked them, but I didn’t want to jeopardise their jobs, and I won’t publish what they said.

The translator’s husband went out for a moment. When he came back he told us he’d been collared by Cy. Cy knew that I’d been seen with them. He told me that Cy had said not to “worry”, that I was leaving. I don’t know what else he said, or if he denied assaulting me, but her husband did report that Cy had offered his wife (the translator) the day off on the following day. “Very stupid”, I thought, “bribing your staff to keep them on side.”

These two people had been so kind, yet I was anxious to leave them. They and others had told me things I cannot detail here. As with this whole story, secrecy and betrayal are difficult. One courts the other.

Eventually Sarah phoned and told me to get up to the corner quickly. She’d collect me. She had a companion, yet another person who wanted to spill their story. Guilt, we thought motivated most of it. People need bad tales told, we expunge horrors by talking about them.

Sarah, her companion and I escaped. There was a little more to do. But we’d leave the following day, we hoped without being searched and we hoped never to return to Nauru.

Opinion

How to turn detainees into dollars; the profits and losses of the Pacific Perversion Policy and the carrion feeding of agencies like the IOM.

Almost everyone, it seemed had an excuse or a justification for their presence here. Some, like the IOM said they wished they weren’t. So did many of the staff we met, even the toughest. But to me the point was that they were there, making an unconscionable project a reality. They made a fist of it. They made it possible for our Government to organise this hell-on-earth; a human warehouse on a third world desert island. It was a peculiar experiment. They enclosed and filed away the most dejected and defenceless people and their stories and calmly went about the process of destroying them, bureaucratically, then summoning the excuses that would allow them to return these victims to their former horror in Afghanistan with even less hope of security than they had had in the first place.

DIMIA will send these Hazara back to a country where most of them no longer have family ties, or a village they may be safe in. Land outside Kabul is laced with mines and cluster bombs. Our own military forces have assisted the destruction of what is left.

What possible damage could these worn and sad souls do to our country? What future potential in them have we extinguished? What can those beautiful “white mice” girls, with their babies, do to survive in Kabul, while their husbands are on temporary protection visas in Australia? Their deaths are imminent. Their children’s a certainty.

Mohammad and Ali and my other Hazara friends have told me they’d rather die, because to survive in Afghanistan they will have to loot, murder and rob. That is why they fled. They couldn’t live with the fact that criminality was the only career for them. Pashtuns are still killing Hazara. Their mullahs have told them they will go to Paradise. Their vehicle, Hazara blood.

I will never recover the love I once had for my country. I will never forget those young Hazara men. I think of them and I think of their dignity, their subtlety. I will never forgive those who sacrificed them. These men are the young deadand who can claim that we haven’t killed them?

Media Release (Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery)

In the year 2001 at my exhibition here at Gabrielle Pizzi’s gallery I launched my satirical book “Trust Lust Chaos and Cruelty”. I was planning to take it also to Ray Hughes, my gallerist in Sydney.

When my husband, Julian Burnside, became involved in the Tampa case this changed all my plans. I set up Spare Rooms for Refugees, a web-based register of people who were, like me, willing to give accommodation to refugees released from detention centres. And I attempted to sponsor a young Afghan man who, like 1600 others had been plucked from the sea and packed off into Australia’s new tip – Nauru. 

Through bluffing and a dogged persistence I got the names and ID numbers of almost everyone there and my husband started offering the names in small groups to letter writers all over Australia. They have formed friendships which I know have saved lives, others have been lost to us. About 1100 were returned to Afghanistan after two years of misery on that benighted island. 

“Activism”, as it’s now called, of this kind cannot be done in one’s spare time. The descent into these and other lives destroyed by detention has been shattering. I would say that I suffered two entire years of grief. Stories of agony, injustice, malice, daily deception, violence and cruelty have been our regular conversation for three years. I am more calloused now. This is a callous country after all.

I’ve been absent from art for three years. In this third year, I’ve emerged with a sense of myself that I would never achieve from art alone. My art will do nothing for refugees, but my care of them has done something. It’s been an honour to be entrusted with their stories and their friendship. It is the lot of an artist to lack usefulness and agency.

Traditionally, artists painted narrative and epic paintings, because without imagery many stories don’t cohere in the mind. Today, without photographs, we are lost. Asylum seekers are the least photographed and least spoken to people in Australia today. My pictures are an attempt to introduce characters, people even though they’re imaginary. These pictures are not “political”, they are about a tragedy.

It’s hard to paint drowning or dead people sweetly. It’s harder to paint them in those glorious holiday waters of the Pacific. I wanted to paint them like the tiny islands like Nauru that I’d flown over and visited, little faces upturned in the water. Could I paint 353 or the oil and diesel that choked them? It’s not until you try that you realise how many people that number represents. I’m not sure if it’s art or illustration. I haven’t finished this work, there’s yet another face and another wave ahead. 

This exhibition is dedicated to Amal Hassan Basry, a brave woman who kept herself afloat clutching a dead woman’s body in the water for 22 hours. She is now battling bone cancer.

Speech: Jill Singer – 1.30 pm

KBD Documentary

I am proud that I assisted this documentary, I am as in awe of the BBC as I am ashamed of the ABC, this government, this opposition and this Australian media.

I knew many of the detainees on Nauru by letter and fax. My attempted sponsorship of Mohammed Mehdi enabled that and I was able to collect names, stories and news via fax and letters from Nauru.

Most of my efforts to share the information I was getting were gracelessly ignored by Australian media. These were claims of hunger, thirst, inadequate accommodation, jailings, riot, missing people and drownings.

The eloquence and pain of their letters was always commented on, but never put into print. I had received some of John Pace’s documents for Amnesty that alleged brutality, mistreatment, deprivation or the deliberate spiking of food for children with chilli or salt, humiliation, beatings and abuse, designed to get the people to leave the boats of rescue like the Tampa and to comply with their aggressive captors, our SAS, and our defence forces and submit their freedom and their fates to cruel detention in the care of the carrion feeders, the IOM and the Nauru government, intent on turning these detainees into dollars; the new Pacific Perversion. Amnesty, for their own reasons did not release the documents they had collected, translated and studied in London.

I begged the detainees to reveal those stories to me, but they were too afraid to trust them to the mail system in the camp or of Nauru.

They’d been told such revelations would damage their claims for asylum. Tomorrow, Carmen Lawrence will launch Spare Rooms for Refugees’ report – “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers”. I had to go to Nauru myself to get the primary documents (about 60 of them). Amnesty’s documents and mine dovetail, it’s concise and you can read it tomorrow, please recommend it to your friends. It’ll be on Spare Rooms for Refugees’ website.

In the BBC’s documentary “The Pacific Solution” Sarah Macdonald reads from those handwritten documents, boldly stating the brutalities Nauru’s detainees claimed to have experienced. No Australian journalist would touch them, the defence forces are very popular since East Timor and the ABC told me these were mere “allegations” against the SAS, the Navy and Army.

However, the IOM’s translators many of whom had been reluctant witnesses told me how true the stories were, and in far more lurid detail.

Modest Hazaras, Afghans and Iraqis were concerned not to complain vociferously because they knew that criticism from them could be construed as ingratitude. And in addition they were told they would be rewarded by silence, it was in their own interests. How betrayed they were.

The young man Mohammed Mehdi (ID No. 105) who I am still forlornly trying to sponsor took enormous personal risks for Sarah and me. Daily, he taught English, prepared letters and translations, he poured over rejection letters, critiquing their inconsistencies, errors and malign findings. It was all to cost him dearly.

He is the most sensitive, intelligent and world-weary 22 year old I’ll ever meet. His reward is none. Ostracised by the authorities he took the $2,000 compensation prize back to Kabul. He last contacted me over three weeks ago by fax; homeless, cold and afraid of looters, unable to receive aid, he could not give me an address to send help/money. He like the others is probably on the run in Iran, they can’t go to their former villages or afford to stay in swollen Kabul.

We’ve sent them back to conditions that are worse than when they thought they’d found a saviour in a people smuggler. In spite of Hamid Karzai’s polite request not to have any more returnees until April (the end of Winter) our detainees are threatened with forced removal, if not voluntary repatriation. On Nauru they know well how we exercise force. Peter Reith sanctioned it. David Marr’s upcoming book will tell you how.

There are five million people on aid in Afghanistan. Our government is demonstrating its concern for Afghanistan’s task of rebuilding itself, by sending our refuse back to them covered with our contempt. How could those poor Nauru detainees deserve this further insult? They can’t help Afghanistan, they can’t help themselves their lives are simply broken, irreparable. Their country ravaged by our war and laced with little reminders like cluster bombs, smashed houses, orchards and fields, the fundamentalists regrouping, torturing musicians who dare to play at weddings.

Iraqis, the world over are incredulous about the callous way its escaped nationals have been tormented, locked up, drowned and abused. Iranians are being returned to a country that debates whether it should boast of its tortures, removal of hands, limbs and eyes to the outside world.

Many of the sufferers of Nauru’s camps were the best and brightest of their former homes. Like all refugees they could have revivified and enriched our country and sent direct aid, hope and aspiration to their loved ones left behind. Those same loved ones who sacrificed all to get their young out of perpetual trouble. Out into a fair and democratic world, the “free world” as George Bush calls it or “Tomorrowland” as Walt Disney did before him, only to find that freedom and tomorrow belong only to those who already have possession of them.

Back in June, Sarah Macdonald of the BBC introduced herself to me and spoke of her wish to get to Nauru, and to use my help.

While I was thinking about it, she said dryly “Your government is so corrupt it reminds me of the last days of the John Major government – the BBC is fascinated by your appalling politics.”

I liked her immediately and as I’d found out about a lengthy pacific air ticket that allowed three days transit visit to Nauru without a visa, I said “let’s go!” I had been unable to persuade any Australian journalist to get there with that ticket, when they whined about Australia’s visa restrictions.

We don’t live under an extreme conservative government, we live under an authoritarian corrupt and ruthless government, though John Pilger who reviewed Sarah’s BBC production called our government extremist and it is.

And our dreary Australian media is unwilling to admit that they can’t handle big subjects any more. They won’t research and they won’t report. Yes, they let anti-government commentators stray onto their screens and pages but they can disown them by finding someone to provide what is euphemistically called “balance”.

“Balance” can’t eradicate facts. But facts aren’t sought by journalists and nowadays they shudder at the thought of stories about asylum seekers. “It’s been done” they tell me. They behave like everyone else, clutching excuses for their treatment of these delicate, unhappy people. Bemoaning the caution of our times, of our editors and blaming the public.

They behave as if they have an audience to please, I have a letter from Michael Gawenda editor of the Age saying just that. The readers are tired of it and you are losing the battle. The truth is, our fearless reporters will report it when our movement shows some signs of success.

They say the people support Mr Ruddock, he is a success, but they’ve made him a success by accepting his department’s lies, refusing to report stories without a “balanced comment” from Mr Ruddock or a mignon of his. Therefore if DIMIA choose not to comment the ABC won’t report it.

As I am just a failure and the media are not interested in my views, I turn to you, please monitor the media with vigilance, complain to editors and producers about their coverage critique and time it, tell them you’re not getting good service, demand that they demand access to the camps, push the Refugee Review Tribunal to answer for itself.

Interview DIMIA staff, ask immigration lawyers what’s being withheld, for god’s sake, tell them there’s more to this issue than the fate of children in detention. And tell them this asylum seeker issue is a test of our national character, it challenges each of us to assess the strength of our beliefs and to exercise the privileges that we have for those who don’t.

And tomorrow, please phone or email, the ethnic press the mainstream press and television if you don’t see decent coverage of Carmen Lawrence and our report “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers.” It’s our last appeal to decency, if it sinks without trace like the Siev X and many others forgotten and put aside in favour of a story about Shane Warne’s shoulder you’ll know what kind of journalists we have and what kind of country we’ve become.

I think Sarah Macdonald’s documentary is clear and coherent unlike most of what’s been presented to the Australian public, and the disgrace is that it should have been made by us.

Kate’s Account of Visit to Nauru

From September 2001 I made three attempts to obtain a visa to visit Nauru in
order to gain first hand knowledge of the conditions under which asylum
seekers were being kept and to hear their stories.

In particular I wanted to speak with Mohamed (family name undisclosed), an
ethnic Hazara with whom I¹d established written contact. I¹d engaged a
solicitor to put into action a sponsorship plan and formal application for
me to sponsor Mohamed through DIMIA. My wish was to take full financial
responsibility for Mohamed in the event he could be brought to Australia,
either under a migrant or humanitarian program. Mohamed struck me from the start as an articulate ambassador for his people.

All attempts to gain a visa were fruitless. The only reason given was lack
of accommodation and that all hotels are fully booked. This is not true.
I eventually obtained a visa to visit Kiribati which allowed me a three day
stop-over in Nauru. (Interestingly New Zealanders don¹t need a visa for
Nauru but Australians do).

On my arrival in Nauru on May 31, 2002 I passed through customs without any
trouble. Also on the flight was a BBC journalist called Sarah (who travels
on a NZ passport) with whom I¹d planned the trip.

We were met by separate contacts and taken to our hotel which is said to be
the “second best” in Nauru. It was dirty, there was no running water,
electricity was rationed to brief periods during the early morning and
evenings (which also regularly failed) and very limited telephone access.
Any calls to other hotels had to be booked through the hotel and no phone
contact could be made with anyone else on the island. All attempts to call
Australia failed.

There were Australians all around the hotel, primarily security staff for
Chubb and Australian Protection Services APS.

Sarah and I headed straight for Topside camp.

The road to it was lined with smouldering rubbish and smelt like a tip.

The heat was the most intense I¹ve felt.

Sarah had a hidden camera on her. I had five letters for female detainees
from their husbands who are in Australia on TPVs along with personal affects
for them and their children; legal letters from solicitors searching for
survivors of certain maritime incidents who were entitled to participate in
pending coronial inquests; cash for detainees and a stills camera.
We drove past the first sentry point after saying we were visiting, smiled
and waved ourselves through.

The next sentry-box had a boom-gate and two Australian guards whom I told I
was a visitor ¬ while they were trying to stop me I walked around into the
camp which appeared to be like a series of gate stock-yards. There were
about thirty detainees and I asked them for Mohammed. More detainees
started gathering around me as the guard started to panic and got onto his
walky-talky. Two more Australian guards came.

We were forced to accompany the guards back to the first sentry-box and
after about half an hour an IOM car came and picked us up.
We were taken to the Menen Hotel where IOM management, UNHCR, Chubb security
and DIMIA all reside and work.

We met Cy Winter, head of the IOM who was on his way for a swim, he cheerily
greeted us, praised us for our compassion and left us to talk with other IOM
staff. I told them why I was there and they didn¹t ask Sarah the purpose of
her visit.

They stated concern that our presence would cause a disturbance in the camp
and suggested they would bring some detainees out of the camp for us to
meet. They asked for a list of whom I wanted to meet and were despondent
when I gave them a list of roughly thirty names and ID numbers.

Eventually they arranged to take us back to a room on the perimeter of the
camp and said they would bring all the listed detainees out to meet us. As
it turned out roughly twenty were brought out including Mohammed. Those on
the list who were not brought out and whose existence was denied by IOM were
people who¹d written to me in Australia telling me they¹d lost family
members in failed rescues at sea. I knew they were in there.

Our two hour visit was observed by Chubb security as many other detainees
clamoured to meet us but were ordered to keep away like cattle.

While security was distracted we filmed our visit and took statements on
film.

I also showed the detainees how to work my stills camera and left it with
them. Additionally I asked them to write their recollections of dealings
with the Australian Defence Forces as I¹d heard numerous disturbing accounts
of how detainees had been treated aboard the Tampa and Australian ships
including the HMAS Manoora and HMAS Tobruk. ( I eventually obtained about
fifty accounts which are attached).

IOM then returned us to our hotel.

The next day we were met by the Australian Consul-General and IOM head Cy
Winter. Winter was very hostile and said our presence would disturb his
plans to start excursions around Nauru for the detainees.

He also claimed that Nauruans objecting to my presence. I told him it was
nonsense that any detainees or Nauruans were objecting to my visit, that any
objections they had were to his obstructing my visit.

Suddenly my visa became an issue and Winter claimed I¹d misused my visa.
Sarah explained that visas were not an issue as we were legally in transit.
As I¹d said on my immigration card, I was in Nauru to visit friends. Those
friends happened to be in detention.

Winter said he was going to call the Nauruan police and have me jailed, that
their jails were unpredictable and frightening and who knows when I¹d be
released?

(the police we¹re talking about here are predominantly Australian. As Nauru
only had about three police, APS members have been inducted in to the
Nauruan police force)

I turned to the Consul-General and said that in that event he would of
course be helping me. He agreed that of course he would but was obviously
feeling very uncomfortable with Winter¹s threatening us.

Winter kept abusing us for daring to visit Nauru. I told him I wanted to
take photos of family members for husbands who hadn¹t seen wives or children
for more than two years. He said he¹d be delighted to jail me if I took a
single photo.

They said that while the Australian government would help me if I landed in
jail, there¹d be very little they could really do if Nauru decided to take a
dim view of me.

After prolonged argument about my wish to hand over letters, money, goods,
clothes and toys to detainees I¹d been in contact with it was eventually
agreed I¹d be escorted on a brief visit to each camp.

At Statehouse Iraqi people are detained. The men looked as if they were in
shock. They were ceaselessly moving, talking and restless. I was prevented
from talking to them.

Sarah and I were taken to different rooms.

Five women and one man from my list were produced and I spoke with them
through a translator. I gave the women their husband¹s money, letters and
news. They each cried and asked me when this would end. They were all
young, pretty, polite and defenceless.

At Topside camp we were met by Cy Winter who had suddenly switched into PR
mode.

I didn¹t trust him a bit. This is the man who rules the camp and the Menen
Hotel where all the workers in the asylum-seeker industry worked and hid out
in cool air-conditioned comfort with ocean views ¬ detached from the pain of
the place.

It is a thriving business with enough administrators, translators, Chubb
security officers, builders, carpenters, technicians, electricians, UHNCR
staff, DIMIA staff, APS staff and more to run a country.

These are the carrion-feeders of the industry. We saw builders and other
tradesmen fly in business-class. Carpenters told us of being paid $5,000
Australian per week plus perks, with contracts insisting on absolute
secrecy.

Electricians were being paid more than $5,000 per week.
If only as many experts were assisting Nauru, with its meagre population of
11,000 impoverished and ailing citizens.

Little wonder there are signs that Nauruans now loathe what Australia has
done to their island.

There is graffiti around the island such as OUT IOM and AUSTRALIA CARES?
I personally witnessed a violent attack on Australians by a Nauruan. A
dance was being held at the Bondi Club. Some Australian builders arrived
and a Nauruan smashed his fist through the windscreen of their land-rover
screaming “I hate all whites”.

He was not arrested. Other Australians at the club said it was a common
occurrence and they did what they usually did ¬ which was to leave.
Nauru is a disaster.

Apart from power and water shortages, petrol is rationed.

IOM and UNHCR vehicles without petrol locks have their petrol siphoned off
and stolen.

The situation causes constant tension and creates an environment in which
business is impossible to conduct.

There is no reliable source of information and news. There is no newspaper.
The food supply is appalling with no access to fresh fruit, milk and
vegetables. According to translators any attempts to fly fresh produce in
generally see the food perish due to the intense heat and transport
difficulties.

Cy Winter treated me to the best on offer in the camps ¬ a plate of greasy,
sweetened noodles.

The water for detainees comes from the Solomon Islands and tastes foul.
There are serious health problems in the camps. Bacterial skin infections
are common and persistent due to hygiene problems. Detainees have no water
to wash their hands after toileting. They bathe when there¹s rain which is
an uncommon event. Soap is rationed to one block per detainee per month.
Detainees have great trouble washing their clothes and bedding. Against
advice, Australians have installed flush toilets, which have no water to
flush them. They overflow with human waste and are insect infested.
Many detainees have been hospitalised outside the camp after suffering blood
diarrhoea and other endemic parasitic and bacterial illnesses.

Nauru¹s small and struggling hospital has a permanent rotating population of
psychologically traumatised detainees even though Nauru was assured by
Australia that this would never happen.

Local Nauruans have been told there is a bed shortage at the hospital and
requested to bring mattresses with them when admitted.

Drugs are in short supply.

The medical and baby clinic at the camp is under-resourced. Six babies have
been born in the camp. These babies are now stateless.

In all, I visited the Topside camp on three occasions. Children could not
even approach the newly installed tiny playground as they would fry. It is
totally unsheltered. Everywhere you look there are listless men lying on
their beds, too hot and dispirited to get off them.

Men are regularly jailed in Nauru for walking outside the camp, for
expressing distress or causing any sort of disturbance. They are jailed for
up to three weeks and are kept naked in prison in case they attempt suicide
with their clothing.

Muslim men told me this indignity is the worst humiliation they have
suffered.

Everywhere in the camps there are signs of ongoing expenditure. The
building works suggest permanency.

Translators told me that they feel guilty about what is happening to the
detainees, that they love these people and feel protective about them. Many
say they are reduced to tears at night.

There is a lot of pressure being put on staff to convince detainees into
taking the Australian Government¹s “package” and return home.

Translators and other staff say they are being pressured to bully the
detainees and feel they are being spied upon by DIMIA.

On my third day on Nauru I was apprehended by four APS officers after I was
trying to re-visit Topside. I told them I knew I was acting within my legal
rights and that the detainees also had a legal right to receive visitors.
They told me I was infringing my visa.

I referred them to article 5 of the Nauruan constitution which allowed my
presence there.

They called Cy Winter who ordered my arrest.

The APS officers then refused to say if I was in fact under arrest but
agreed to my request to be taken to the IOM at the Menen Hotel.

They drove off after depositing me at the Menen Hotel. I was assaulted around my neck. I will not accuse the person who did this in print. As I know the detainees will suffer as I will from new restrictions and possibly a ban on communication. I do not know if it hasn’t already happened. No-one at the camp has answered my letters, emails or faxes.

I fled to a translator¹s room where I told a number of Australians working
in Nauru what had just happened to me. They believed me.

They told me they were under a lot of pressure from the Australian Government.
They also gave me numerous and lurid accounts of what they themselves had
witnessed aboard the HMAS Manoora.

Among other atrocities, children were witnessed having their mouths burned
with chili in order to force their mothers to disembark.

The Nauruan opposition (leader David Adeang) wants to know where all the
money that Australia says has been paid is going and is calling on
Australian lawyers to help them trace the money-flow.

PM Rene Harris and cohorts are said to have purchased a fleet of cars from
Japan. When challenged on this he says the cars are not for personal use
but are part of a new business enterprise he¹s setting up to benefit Nauru.

Nauruans are living just as badly as ever while the Australian dominated detention
centre industry on the island is thriving. It’s a parasitic business to be sure.

If you would like to write to or assist detainees on Nauru, we have an informal guardianship scheme. Why not send a self-addressed business envelope. We’ll assist you to contact a small group of detainees on Nauru.

I’m An Abolitionist

I’ve titled this next piece I’m an abolitionist WHO ARE YOU are you an abolitionist too?

It’s my paraphrase of Emily Dickinson’s I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?

For me it has a resonance because activists are mostly nobodies. If they were somebodies they’d be given another name, it might be based on their profession or job – lawyer, journalist, politician etc. Those people are the insiders, activists are so-called because the names for them are so blurry, they’re such outsiders, such nobodies and then such activists. You can see how the word pushes people further away. But nobodyness, when used correctly can be a tremendous source of power. Think of Pauline Hanson. She was very stupid, but still too smart to be called an Activist.

Activist – the word is repellent, and it generally makes the person described by the word repellent too. It’s a word that parcels and labels people in a generic sense, it dismisses them.

And yet it has been taken up by Beauty Editors I’ve read in the sillier magazines of “skin-care activists”.

When that happens you know the word if it was ever useful is now utterly debased.

But words are so expressive that we must always attempt to find words that fit specifically and authentically because they in turn exert a discipline over ideas, sentiments and rationality.

If the words are sloppy, the activism will be too. That is why I say I’m an abolitionist, not an activist I’d rather assert my own self-definition than put up with someone else’s. There is also strategy, it may also make the listener curious.

If I say I’m an abolitionist I am more likely to be asked “What’s that?” which will provoke a conversation and that’s what I want most.

As an abolitionist I will say that I want two things abolished, long-term detention for asylum seekers and the temporary protection visa.

Because I believe that I have the material and the facts to support my case, I rate my chances of getting people to agree with me pretty high, when the lies are put to one side.

Then all that is left to discuss is when, where and how will the abolition begin.

If I could turn young people into abolitionists I would be very proud. The Early Abolitionists were opposed to the evil of their time – SLAVERY.

We can use the same word to put an end to the evil in ours.

Young people are especially creative in finding tags for themselves, forms of self-identification, this is “what I am” statements; I am a vegetarian, I am an animal lover, I’m a conservationist etc.

It compels those around that young person to endorse or decry that choice, which side of that line does the listener fall into.
It requires no special political activity or behaviour but it’s one of the ways people express the gravitational leanings of their interests and will affect their choices of friends, careers and aspirations for that period or for life.

Young people in my experience have their hearts in the right place but they make unreliable committee members. Traditional “organising” is all a bit alien.

But young people have a particular strength that we gradually weaken in. Something I think all young people share is a passionate attention to friendships. It might sound artificial, but through the Hazara Association – Spare Rooms for Refugees wants to implant friendships between very young Hazara men and boys with their Australian peers. 

We want you to take a couple of names, and go clubbing or to have a coffee or some-such and regularly phone that Hazara kid. He will be on a TPV and facing another tribunal hearing and possible deportation.

Gabrielle Pizzi

Gabrielle was an artwork herself; a puzzle, a treasure, a great and gentle woman.

Gabrielle was as disobedient as a minxy school girl.

Her feather-light manner disguised her deep defiance, which cannot be measured by her talk but by her wilful and committed acts.

She was responsible for my last show. It was hers also.

The show was her idea not mine; when I lost confidence and time, she gave me both. I am grateful to Gabrielle; my show was little. Gabrielle always thought big. I will aim to borrow that thought, thank you Gabrielle, rest now.

Free Speech Victoria

It’s consistent with my luck, that I’m speaking to you through teeth that have just suffered a dental trauma. SPEECH, free or otherwise is a little awkward for me, I might be slow, I hope you can bear it. 

Now, to account for myself. In 2001, I set up “Spare Rooms for Refugees” I also smuggled letters into Nauru and established contact with many of the detainees there. Through them we got a near complete list of names which we distributed in groups of five to concerned Australians and the letter writing began.

In those early days I lobbied Canberra bureaucrats and the press daily as I learned the conditions, mistreatments and mistranslations the detainees were suffering.

My distress rose as it dawned on me that our press was not as interested in reporting or getting to Nauru as I was. I’d discovered a long but legal way of getting there. It required flights from New Zealand to Fiji, then Kiribas, and allowed a three day layover in Nauru.

At last, Four Corners producers asked me to assist a bright British journalist. She would make a one hour documentary called “The Pacific Solution” for a world audience, and Four Corners were to air it here on the ABC.

In June 2002, armed with secret contacts and cameras, and the story that we were half-cocked housewives on a charity mission, we set off to Nauru. At first, we were believed. We got into both of the monstrous camps and were escorted on a very grim tour. The misery of that place haunts me still. Imagine a building project and a makeshift army camp, streets of it set out on a white hot baking tray. Men crisping as they lay on stretcher beds all day, like the injured they were. Tiny pale wrapped women confined to even smaller quarters, the nauseating toilets and the obscenity of a giant generator that made this madness a possibility. Hell should be chaos, not organized like this one. Cruelty like this really costs.

At the time I was there it was admitted that $400 per day per detainee was the tariff, or “units” if you prefer Mr Ruddock’s terminology. “Unit costs” rise, he informed us, when numbers dwindle, as they indeed did over four years. In Nauru I was eventually arrested, I was even briefly assaulted.

Free SPEECH was forbidden when I returned, as the air date for the BBC was held over until September. Both networks lectured me long and hard that if I spoke I might even jeopardize the film’s viability on air. The film received glowing reviews in Britain especially from John Pilger but it wasn’t until December that Four Corners rather shamefacedly said they would not air it. The ABC also made their footage used in the film too expensive for SBS and the commercials to buy it. Effectively, I’d had my tongue lasered. 

However, I still had about 70 letters I’d gathered from nervous hands in Nauru. These weren’t the sort of letters the prisoners felt were secure enough to send by post, and they were always reluctant to complain about their hosts. But I implored them. The letters detailed their mistreatment at the hands of our navy and military in their removal from boats and from our all important Australian waters.

I had all the letters translated, and with some lawyers we made a report called “Soldiers, Sailors and Asylum Seekers”. Our findings and their speech. It was launched by Carmen Lawrence and was universally ignored except by SBS. Since then I’ve helped journalists with countless stories that were cut short or washed away. Free Speech isn’t all that useful or interesting when no-one wants to hear.

I will never forget those discarded young Hazara men in Nauru. I can’t forget their dignity and subtlety, and I am still burdened with the stories they’ve entrusted me with. They’re still locked up.

There is no shortage of Free Speech in Australia. If you’re with the Government, you’re rolling in it, you can lie, distort, make ads, spin and rant as unaccountably as any bigot could wish. We, who shyly regard ourselves as humanitarians have been abandoned by the Labor Party, and possibly the High Court. I think we’re at sea. We are marooned on another pitiless, crude and poorly managed island – AUSTRALIA. I am comforted by you to celebrate and drink to an older notion of free speech, especially at a time when our legislators are gorging themselves on laws that won’t tolerate it.

Another intolerable and dying Australian tradition of rewarding failure or the underdog has been resuscitated here tonight. You’re honouring my aim and not my success as there has been so little. I very humbly accept your kindness.

Fitzroy Learning Network Speech March 2005

Clearly, I am standing before a room of great ladies, my mother’s one of them, Anne Horrigan-Dixon’s another, and I’ll talk about her soon.

But, before I can, there is a lady whose status was earned from a level of suffering that is beyond us to imagine, but I’m going to ask you to try.

This woman fled Iraq with her youngest son to join her husband in Australia, she boarded the ill-fated S.E.I.V. X (which means dully, suspected illegal entry vessel No. 10), she floated in the water supported by her life raft – the body of a dead woman, for 22 hours. She heard and saw the goodbyes of many of the 353 mostly women and children who drowned.

She was not rescued by Australians, but by fishermen. Sick, her skin in blisters, she and her son and 60 or so people took another two days to return to Indonesia, where she was again abandoned. Seven months later she was grudgingly granted a temporary visa by our government. She arrived and contracted breast cancer, now she battles bone cancer – Amal Basry is her name, it’s a simple name, it ought to be famous.

Amal believes she was saved in order that she represent her story and the story of the 353 that drowned, and that is why, Amal, you struggled to come here tonight. I asked you, Amal, because I knew that in this room you’ll meet women who would be pleased to befriend you, if they can in as many ways as there are women here. They’ll find you to be the surprising, warm and loving creature that you are, which will be their reward.

Which brings me to the formal love target of the evening, which for me is the Learning Network, its volunteers and Anne Horrigan-Dixon.

After four years of Activism or Advocacy, my preferred time, I do know EMC, RILC, the Refugee Council, the Hotham Mission, Sister Bridget Arthur, RAC, Rurals for Refugees, Adjust Australia, the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre, Spare Lawyers, the Uniting Church, Welcome House and my own Spare Rooms for Refugees etc.

Trust me please ….

1. This group is not accountable to Federal funding or church bodies, for reasons that are very depressing, groups with those affiliations often take a very cautious or “policy” bound approach to their responsibilities.

2. The Fitzroy Learning Network is not constrained that way, it has a quiet but respectable relationship with the State Government, through Richard Wynne and John Thwaites – highly useful, gives independence, they’ll teach English to whom they want to.

3. There don’t seem to be any discernable politics here. There is no empire builder. There are no career or warpaths. Fitzroy Learning Network just responds to need, no matter what it is.

4. Fitzroy Learning Network is misnamed, because it’s an aid organisation providing learning, teaching and crisis and life support.

5. All of the Afghanis know this. All of the people who came from Nauru were met at the airport with flowers, all were found flats, beds, pillows, heaters, clothes, doctors, dentists and jobs by this organisation. No-one else.

6. Fitzroy Learning Network doesn’t teach, it treats people beautifully. As if they matter.

7. The parties

I’ve been to so many parties in my life. I love them. But I’ve never been to parties such as theirs. Their parties are loving, funny and profound. Everyone helps, the sun seems to shine. At each party you notice something or someone new, you see people transform, sometimes in a party, sometimes over time. But this place changes everyone. There was one party – when I opened the door and saw a pony – I thought I was imagining it. Magic is also supplied, or a hundred wrapped Christmas presents or a Santa, music or a belly dancer, it’s always fresh.

Sometimes parties of about 70 people have gone away for the weekend. Sometimes to Canberra to fit in a bit of lobbying. They can and do turn their hands to anything.

Now my subject turns to art, I am an artist. I know art when I see it.

Kam Yama Kam, was a semi-professional play, which used actors, writers, producers, directors, real life asylum seekers to tell the refugee story. The idea came from Anne and it was acclaimed.

The truth is that Fitzroy Learning Network’s strength is its wit and its art. This is an art that is always in process, it’s a teaching organisation, it’s an aid organisation but it does more, it builds and restores people, it fixes problems and mends minds, it’s a creative force, it’s Anne Horrigan-Dixon and it’s very beautiful.

Support it, visit it, love it, there is no other, there’s none like it.

Fitzroy Learning Network Nov 2005

The Fitzroy Learning Network has become a second family home for me – Kate Durham, and Julian Burnside, my husband.

It a second home to newly arrived migrants and refugees from every part of the globe.

Fitzroy Learning Network has created an informal but close family structure that cares and responds to any small need or large emergency. It does far more than teach.

Like a family, it protects its members, and involves itself intimately with sourcing jobs, beds, houses, clothes, doctors and dentists, whatever is required. It has the flexibility, love and imagination not to question, but just to help.

It’s a home to go to, even for us, being so closely involved, we do marvel at the small but daily miracles they perform there.

Become part of the household and join us there.

Defiant Dandenong

Dandenong Annual Arts Prize

Dear Dandenong,

Defiant Dandenong, look at you, how you’ve grown. I remember you, but not like this. Dandenong you are like a council of nations. Here in this intricate city is an Ark, as if from the bible, representatives of every breed, clan or culture are assembled here, a gathering has taken place, Moses would be pleased. What did this city know of the bewildering displacement, the loss of art and cultivation, the self-expression or the needs of the people of the world? Or how to welcome their tentative steps towards a cautious resettlement, in an often hostile terrain?

What is the purpose of the shelter, the vessel, the shield you have made here? The purpose is a very human one: to allow people to represent and to reproduce themselves, and their lives; to find passage to future generations, to stretch their allotted time and space on this ground, to leave the sea of turmoil. Like those animals in the Ark, people seek, if not deliverance from a place of evil, then a place to stay, the way a creature needs a habitat.

The people of the well-named Greater Dandenong recognised as an opportunity, other’s need to find a resolution to the search, a nest, a home, a full stop. With them, they also knew those exotic people would bring their freight of ancestry, their knowledge,,, their joke-bags, their grievance and losses, fears and expectations.

Their great enterprise will be to flourish, but also to pass on an indefinable essence, to pass it on, and to pass it on. Like the game Pass The Parcel: here is my gift, it may get smaller, but keep it, please keep it.

I’m picturing Dandenong, twenty years from now. Take yourself there now, on a little mental voyage. You may discover, that for the first time in a long while, white people, and certainly white females like me, even with the price of a ticket, can no longer travel to more than a quarter of the world’s surface, its prohibited or at least risky. White people are astonished, they have been the ones fussing over, visas, tickets and border control . We, no longer rule the world. we start to experience ostracism, mistrust and boundaries, like those immigrants only a generation ago.

The travel Industry, has not shut down, a vast commercial machine like that won’t rest or die, it will simply restrict or invent our horizons in a manner that suits its business model. They are already doing it. Travel is re-focussing, its offering has changed. In the 70’s the idea was to experience otherness, other cultures, other vistas. Nowadays its imperative to experience more about YOU. You, trekking, you on a mountain. you, snorkelling, you chilling on a beach, any beach. You taking a short trip around Europe within the sanitary and speedy confines of an ersatz Las Vegas: Disneyland for grown-ups, time – poor and afraid of anything but the highlights…

Some of you and some of these artists will remain here in Dandenong. Most of you will possess far more than highlights, you will have the fine grain, the memory, the advice of your former politics and parents. You will have a culture that is not thin, not dilute, but strengthened by its hybridity. Dandenong will be well known for its cultural curiosity and learning.

The artists in this show have something in common, mostly their otherness. In the future, artists like Valamanesh will not have such close, direct insight into Islamic Art and its cosmic gaze, but they’ll have this artist to guide them so the past won’t be so misunderstood. I’ve followed this artist for a while, admiring his cool austerity and wit.

I also know and have desired artworks by Guan Wei, also witty, with an out-sider’s idiosyncratic eye in relation to Australia.

Rhubaba Haider’s work spoke immediately to me of her feminine Hazara heritage. She has morphed that knowledge into something strong yet fragile and contemporary, and philosophical. Whilst retaining a great deal of typical Hazara woman’s discipline and personal restraint.

Khaled Sabsabi”s work turns like a Dervish on Sufi themes, that strange metaphysical branch of Islam which is becoming endangered. Thank you Khaled for preserving it.

Gosia Wlodarczak’s unsettled lines following and chasing life, restless and unfixable, charting her relationship to objects. She makes a cartographic record over time and space.

Kosar Majani’s work is highly symbolic and resonant. It speaks of unrelenting rituals and repetitions that we’ve never known or encountered, in our young country.

20 years from now we may find ourselves grateful that Greater Dandenong ignored the ”Team Australia “slogans of some of the worst leadership known in this country. That Prime Minister tried to frighten us about the living and cultural aspirations of others, demanding to know whose side we were on, challenging us to mistrust foreigners or the unfamiliar.

Fortunately we barely remember that Prime Minister, he left no relics or artefacts. Unlike these artists who have joined us in a gathering just like this to fill this once slight and shallow space with all our lives, heredity, children, art, adventures and exploration on the vast subject of US and WE. Not THEM or THEY.

Thank you Dandenong, dear Dandenong: you are the Ark. Pass it on, pass it on.

Death In Custody

Thank you for hearing me, I am not a speaker, I am not a brave journalist nor one of Mr Ruddock’s despised lawyers, but I got into Nauru. Why are journalists not refusing to report Mr Ruddock’s utterances until he allows them into Nauru. On Monday a 28 year old man woke up screaming and died of supposed “natural causes”. Journalists accept that a man’s life can end with a media release where his life, his story, his case can be disposed of without review and without a postscript.

This is a death in custody. It is possible that even if a proper inquest was held, no cause of death could be found, grief, hurt and misery don’t show up in a post mortem, and if he died of that, and not by his own hand, then we are still responsible. We broke his heart.

I get Nauru postmarked letters every week from the damned [people]. They are damned by their neediness and by our government’s termination of what few legal remedies they had left. Their loss is this government’s gain.

The new letters tell me of their bewilderment at the deceits and distortions played upon them in their interviews, in the last rounds, of the last appeals they may ever make.

They speak of intolerance and incompetence of their interpreters. If a case was complex and they all are, an interpreter might shut them up or advise them to pretend they were Tajik. These Hazara have been told to prepare their returns to Afghanistan. They’ve been told they have 28 days from the last day of notice of rejection. They will be returned, willing or not. In strangely quiet tones, they tell me they will starve. Some will be killed in Kabul, others won’t dare to venture further. Outlying areas are it’s said, even more unstable than in the era of the Taliban. 

Many sold all they had, and borrowed more, in order to get here. They have nothing. They cannot now repay their loans. Shame alone would prevent them from returning to their districts. Why return anyway their lands are sold or occupied by their enemies? Their families are scattered like poppy seeds. Some Hazara on Nauru are well known and wanted by warlords who have authority in the current government. Their dismay at not being permitted to present these stories underlines the slow reluctant extinguishment of trust and belief in us, a civilized country.

Some letters have modest, embarrassed requests. Can Australia give us some tents? Some of us had trades, would tailors’ or bricklayers’ tools be too much to ask for? Many have worked in Iran, often for months without pay on building sites. Perhaps, as slaves, they’ve been slaves before, they might survive. Warlords and Pashtoons are still making gifts of the Hazara women though. Young mothers with children, illiterate innumerate and frightened. There are no exceptions, no one will be saved.

Some of Nauru’s inmates have already lost their minds, some still hallucinate that they are still on the sea, the sea in the cemetery of their loved ones. 

Pacific Perversion and Turning Detainees into Dollars

Landing in Nauru with a secret camera and a suitcase

My recent adventure to Nauru would not have been possible if I was a journalist. It wasn’t even allowed to me as a citizen. I had tried many times, then I found a way that didn’t require a visa. By travelling to a number of Pacific countries from New Zealand I was able to visit Nauru for three days as a transit or layover visitor.

I went to Nauru with an undercover BBC journalist, Sarah Macdonald.

Under sufferance I was allowed to visit a selected number of people, but not all of the people on the list I’d prepared. Nor were the various individuals and groups within the camps allowed a visit from me, even when they requested it. There were limits even to the veneer of fairness that management allowed. The management had the running of the camps finely balanced between hysteria and calm.

The running of the camps is done by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Its headquarters are in Geneva. The IOM offers deportation services to about 79 countries. It’s like a mercenary army and seems to be able to do work for governments that these governments find inconvenient or too tricky to perform legally or morally. The detainees told me they became afraid for their futures when the IOM embarked the Manoora, some of them had experienced them in Pakistan and Indonesia.

The IOM offered me a tour, they tried to present this hell as a five-star facility the IOM have turned detainees into dollars, this is the growth industry they want to market to Europe.

Nothing prepared me for the size of the monstrous construction known as Topside Camp. It housed 775 people. Try to imagine a makeshift town compressed into what feels like an oven tray.

Nauru is mostly blinding white rock, which intensifies the heat and repels rain clouds. Its climate is unique even at the equator.

The Topside Camp is high on the “rubbish dump” road. As if art directed, the road was lined with a series of massive dumps of litter, every third pile alight. Nauruans just burn their rubbish, as if to add to their blighted air and environment.

The IOM runs the two camps, Topside and Statehouse. Statehouse had mostly Iraqis and some Iranians, about 350. And Topside, the unfortunate Hazaras and other Afghans. Topside had no trees. The only shade was under the few old buildings. There were six babies and about 200 children, 100 under the age of 5.

I met families who had slept and lived every day in the rough one metre space between house floor timbers and ground, for the first five months of their incarceration. I tried to imagine life there when, at its peak, the camp housed 1200 people. How, without electricity, did they cook, clean, find their way around? The most permanent structures were rows of interview rooms. I saw crying people in them.

I was escorted around the vast camp. In each long house (plastic-sided dormitories), a man lay on every third bed, collapsed from depression, boredom and heat. Some of Nauru’s inmates have already lost their minds, some hallucinate that they are still on the sea.

The toilet facility advertised itself by its stench. Water is found to clear the toilets about once a week. Flush toilets should never have been installed. The pans and lids are coated or specked with dead and breeding insects. Here was the infectious source of health problems.

A playground was newly installed but on each of my three visits, no child used it. In the open heat a child would turn to a crisp.

As I walked the mini streets of shanty camp dwellings and ghastly crowded long houses, I could see what the letters sent to me by refugees had been unable to describe: the boredom, the waiting and the crowding.

Nauru is an island without fresh water. Australia consistently repairs Nauru’s desalination plant which can barely meet the needs of the Nauruan population of 11,000. Water is rationed. For the detainees, water is shipped in from the Solomons. They say that it tastes foul and causes chronic stomach problems.

Food for the detainees comes every two weeks from Brisbane because no food is produced in Nauru.

The soils won’t support much, and leaves get coated with the dust of the phosphate plant still lazily grinding what’s left for a disappearing world market.

Could any location in the world be as unsuited to housing a temporary settlement? Nauru is a sick little country. The hospital is clogged with detention centre patients. Nauru’s Opposition party says that the public service is working solely on detention centre matters. None of its own problems get any attention. If I am not allowed to say that Nauru’s camps are concentration camps, I will say that they concentrate depression, they concentrate despair.

Australia is providing the model, assisting a gruesome 21st century form of commerce, mandatory detention. A business that can flourish out of misery, a business that can produce no solution and no product, only more of what it started with; concentrated misery.

The UNHCR have hurt the refugees on Nauru, and set the cause back six months in Australia by declaring the majority Hazara group not to be refugees. The UNHCR like the IOM do their humanitarian work until the money runs out. To me they began to seem like carrion feeders, they were so numerous, so cheerful, so detached. They lived and worked in a paradise, it’s the Hotel Menen, rarely, it seemed, visiting the camps. Their staff was young. There were careers to be made and more jobs to anticipate, it all looked so promising.

The UNHCR refused to write a letter recommending my visit to Nauru. They used Mr Ruddock’s language when they told me it would be “inappropriate”. 

All the administrators on Nauru had an excuse, or a story they told themselves, for their presence there. Some like the IOM said they wished they weren’t. So did many of the staff we met, even the toughest. But to me the point was that they were there. These people were making an unconscionable project a reality. They made a living of it. They made it possible for the government to organise this hell on earth.

Hell ought to be chaos. Countless administrators had made this hell worse through nurture. It is now orderly and well organised.

The expert professionals, the IOM, have assisted the government to make a human warehouse on a third world desert island, like a peculiar social experiment. They enclosed and filed these the most defeated and defenceless people and their stories, and calmly went about the process of destroying them bureaucratically, while preparing the excuses that would allow them to return these victims to their former horror on Afghanistan with less than they had in the first place.

DIMIA will send these poor Hazara back to a country where most of them no longer have land or ties or villages where they may be safe. What land there is outside Kabul is laced with mines and cluster bombs. Our own military is assisting the destruction of what is left. What possible damage could these worn and sad souls do to our country? 

We could end this, if we put some spine into our journalists and the fear of god into the Labor Party. We should represent our views to DIMIA staff everyday. We must ask our friends – What are you doing about this? Tell the media – we need more, not less information about Afghanistan. The security problems in Afghanistan are barely reported. There are people here who face return to that nightmare. They need to know.

I will never recover the love that I had for my country. I will never forget those young Hazara men. I think of them, and I think of their dignity, their subtlety. I will never forgive those who sacrificed them. These men are the YOUNG DEAD and who can claim that we haven’t killed them?

Amal Basry

Amal Basry died five minutes after her friend Stephen Thomas and I left her hospital room.

Only two weeks before that, Amal had engineered an elaborate Iraqi feast for us. She’d prepared it, hobbling painfully on a crumbled hip, broken through by her bone cancer. Pain alone would never defeat her. Her health didn’t interest her. Everything else did.

When I first met her, I met a small almost spherical woman. She had the effervescence of a bubble, she was expecting to meet a martyr, a victim, the little bubble lady kept talking still buoyant, still keeping her head above water. It was easy to see what a lively, fun woman she was used to being.

I got another glimpse of that later, once in hospital although jaundiced she was almost shockingly beautiful without her hijab. She’d lost a little weight, her hair tumbled around her and she looked just ravishing. No wonder, I thought, these Arab beauties must cover themselves, they truly are too tempting.

Amal was a good and rapid storyteller. I asked her what it was like bobbing for 22 hours in those turquoise holiday waters of the Pacific, and she told me of the mountainous waves raising her into the light and then plunging her deep into watery valleys. She told me that the people prayed and yelled to each other, urgently at first and then less and less as they drifted and died. The swish of fish and the mysterious appearance and disappearance of ships and their lights. And then about the corpse of a woman that she clutched as a life raft. Amal said she prayed for the unknown lady. “Forgive me, my dear” she said.

Amal described what I tried to paint, 353 individuals, mostly women and children, sinking without trace. I’ve still not exorcised those images, I’ve painted at least 300 faces in that cool and blameless water, but I have to go on.

The Government’s good fortune was that there were no bodies. Even the live ones were erased off to Sweden. Only a few were kept for about seven months in a pound in Indonesia. Eventually, they were grudgingly permitted to join their families in Australia.

Amal was the only survivor who was prepared to speak about her ordeal. Grief and a “well founded fear” of DIMIA, prevented the others speaking publicly. The world’s continuing indifference had also closed those doors.

Amal always referred to the sinking of the SIEV X as the “accident” but the unpalatable truth may be that it kind of wasn’t. The Navy could so easily have saved them, no-one can explain adequately why they did not. The SIEV X certainly “sent the message”. The boats stopped.

Amal’s dreams were of saving her children, again and again she found she had more to do for them. For activists like me, she was happy to be an instrument in the tool kit, use my life, have it all, use my story, tell it, if it helps.

It did help, Amal, we are really grateful. Stephen Thomas is making a beautiful film about you, we’ll all support him in it.

Under One Roof

Under One Roof as a title has for me a wistful, retrospective air about it. It evokes nostalgia for a time when “Universal Human Rights” was a theme we all felt we were working towards, not backing away from.

Times change, and we seem to have descended to a place where even the word “human” has a suspicious ring to it. Where expressions like “Reale Politikue” and in the “Real world” and “bottom line” are the expressions we use to show how pragmatic, hard-line and contemptuous we’ve become.

The title Under One Roof implies an agreed need to share and a sense of obligation to protect and shelter others.

Spare Rooms for Refugees expressed a similarly quaint and buoyant attitude. And I’m sure that’s why I’ve been asked to open this exhibition in this room, under this roof. But as you know, we don’t really belong in Australia. We belong in “La La Land” (another expression used by John Howard) to ridicule our illusions about the foundations of this Australian household. All the familiar clutter of notions and beliefs we’ve nurtured about ourselves.

The people in power today, must have their revenge on people like the ones in this room and their assault on asylum seekers is a way of cutting us down to size, of undermining what I thought were the underpinnings and the satisfactions of living here.

The misanthropy this government has promoted has adhered rather well to Australians, and our new acquisition indifference is proof that this government has changed us. Australia has by no means had a blameless history but it has probably through luck had a relatively innocent life to date.

And innocence is what I really want to talk about. Innocence can’t be recreated, like virginity once lost it’s forever. I resent the needless abandonment of innocence. I wish I hadn’t been an angry lobbyist for four years. I wish I’d been more effective and I felt powerless.

Which brought me back to art. I am an artist too and I spent a large part of last year painting my heart out over asylum seekers, their fate in the SEIV X and in this country.

Like humanitarians, artists don’t get the welcome mat around here much anymore. They’re not really constructive people, they’re mostly carping in gutters or performing pretentious stunts at some government funded swill that no-one cares about.

But look around you, look at the art these artists have produced, it’s heart-breaking and it’s intelligent. They are guiding you back to your sensitivities, your empathies and your desire to protect and care for what is after all our own species. Us.

This government has tried to persuade us that we don’t share and that we’re not obliged by our own nature to be concerned for these people. But maybe art is pragmatic and constructive after all, perhaps it can repair some of the damage, it won’t return us to innocence, but it might do better. It might reveal and renew our right to care, to shelter and nourish our sense of belonging to human kind.