Let a thousand Yarl’s Woods blossom, and may the women be damned

September 16, 2013 by 21 Comments

Evenia Mawongera

 

On Friday, Zimbabwean activist, outspoken critic of Robert Mugabe’s regime, grandmother, long-time resident of Leicester, England, Evenia Mawongera made her weekly visit to the Border Agency. She shows up each week because she’s applying for asylum. Mawongera was detained, held and then shipped off to Yarl’s Wood, where she now awaits deportation.

Evenia Mawongera has lived in England for a decade. She went to England, fleeing persecution in Zimbabwe. She went to Leicester because her two daughters lived there. They had gone to University in England and had been allowed to stay. The daughters have lived in England since 1999. Mawongera has no family left in Zimbabwe.  Her daughters and her grandchildren are all British citizens.

By all accounts, since her arrival, Mawongera has been a model and exemplary person. A little over three weeks ago, Evenia Mawongera was awarded the Good Neighbour Award for her many contributions to the community.

And now she sits in Yarl’s Wood.

And what exactly is Yarl’s Wood? It’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, and, as we’ve written many times, it’s a bad place, and a particularly bad place for women: Mojirola Daniels, Aisha, Denise McNeil, Gladys Obiyan, Sheree Wilson, Shellyann Stupart, Aminata Camara, Leila. Bita Ghaedi. Azbaa Dar. Gloria Sestus. Brenda Namigadde. Betty Tibikawa. Lemlem Hussein Abdu. Marie Therese Njila Nana. Jackie Nanyonjo. Roseline Akhalu.

It’s only a partial list, which doesn’t include the names of those who must remain anonymous, to `protect’ their identities, nor the widows and widowers and children. Others have written as well of the sexual predation, of the abuse of pregnant women that takes place in Yarl’s Wood.

For example, yesterday, Tanja’s story broke. Yet another story revealed the systematic sexual predation that is the bread and butter of Yarl’s Wood. Yarl’s Wood is a designed community in which staff preys upon the most vulnerable, typically young women fleeing sexual violence. The police yet again say they will conduct an investigation.

For some, Yarl’s Wood isn’t the disease, it’s the symptom. Others have named the disease: evil. A building whose express purpose is `removal’ is a factory that produces sexual violence, torture, despair and death. It’s in the architecture of the mission. If human beings are just so much dross to be removed, then vulnerable human beings, and especially vulnerable women, are less and worse than disposable, and they are less and worse than despicable.

And this is where Evenia Mawongera sits today.

Yarl’s Wood is part of a global political economy in which vulnerability is a natural resource, meant for exploitation and abuse. Yarl’s Wood is meant for export. Just last week, the newly elected Australian government announced its plans to emulate the fast-track immigrant `processing scheme’ of the United Kingdom. Let a thousand Yarl’s Woods blossom, and may the women be damned, each and every one.

 

(Photo Credit: The South African)

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Roseline Akhalu and the atrocious barbarism of the Home Office

July 29, 2013 by 3 Comments

Roseline Akhalu on her way to an immigration tribunal

Despite the greatest efforts of the United Kingdom Home Office, it appears that Roseline Akhalu will be allowed to live. Last week, judges rejected `an appeal’ by the Home Office to deport Roseline Akhalu. Akhalu committed no crime, other than that of being ill and of being Nigerian. If she were to return to Nigeria, it is certain that she would die. No one disputes this. And yet … the Home Office has spent years and untold resources trying to deport her. Why?

Furthermore, why do they call it the Home Office, when that agency dedicates its resources to expelling, incarcerating, and generally despising the precisely those who need help? What kind of home is that, anyway?

In 2004, Roseline Akhalu was one of 23 people to win a Ford Foundation scholarship to study in England. That would be enough to celebrate in itself, but Akhalu’s story is one of extraordinary pain and perseverance. Five years earlier, she and her husband were working in Benin City, in Nigeria. Her husband was a nurse, and Roseline Akhalu worked for the local government. They didn’t earn much but they got by. Until March 1999, when her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The couple was told that they must go to South Africa, or India, for care, but the costs of such a venture were prohibitive. And so … Roseline Akhalu watched her husband die because there was no money.

Now a widow, and a widow without a child, Akhalu confronted a hostile future. After her in-laws took pretty much everything, Roseline Akhalu set about the work of making a life for herself. She worked, she studied, she applied for a masters’ scholarship, and she succeeded.

Akhalu went to Leeds University, to study Development Studies. She joined a local church; she tended her gardens, saving tomatoes that were otherwise destined to die; she worked with young girls in the area. She planned to return to Nigeria and establish an ngo to work with young girls. It was all planned.

Until she was diagnosed with kidney failure. That was 2004, a few months after arriving. In 2005, Akhalu was put on regular dialysis. In 2009, she had a successful kidney transplant, but the transplant meant that for the rest of her life Roseline Akhalu would need hospital check-ups and immunosuppressant drugs. In Nigeria, those drugs would be impossibly costly.

Her attorney informed the government of her change in status, that due to unforeseen circumstances Roseline Akhalu, who had never planned on staying in the United Kingdom, now found that, in order to live, she had to stay.

And so began Roseline Akhalu’s journey into the uncanny unheimlich of the Home Office, where home means prison or exile, and nothing says “compassion” like humiliation and degradation and persecution.

Once a month, Akhalu showed up, in Leeds, at the United Kingdom Border Agency Reporting Office. Then, in March of 2012, without explanation, she was detained and immediately packed off, by Reliance `escorts’, to the notorious Yarl’s Wood, where she was treated like everyone’s treated at Yarl’s Wood, and especially women … disgustingly.

So far this is business as usual. Here’s where it gets interesting. In May, Akhalu was released from detention. In September, the Home Office refused her appeal. In November, a judge overturned the Home Office decision. The judge declared that, since Akhalu had established a private life of value to her, to members of the Church, and to a wider community, removing her would violate her right to a private and family life protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The judge noted that Akhalu had done absolutely nothing illegal. She had come to the United Kingdom legally and was diagnosed while legally in the country. Most chillingly, perhaps, the judge agreed that to send Roseline Akhalu back to Nigeria was a swift death sentence. Given the health care system and costs in Nigeria, she would be dead within four weeks. Nigerian and English doctors agreed.

On December 14, the Home Office appealed the decision. That’s right. They’re pursuing a case against Roseline Akhalu, despite all the evidence and mounting pressure from all sides. Why? Because that’s what the Home Office does. Want an example? In 2008, Ama Sumani, 43-year old Ghanaian woman, was lying in hospital in Cardiff, in Wales, receiving kidney dialysis for malignant myeloma. That was until the good old boys showed up and hauled her out and then shipped her off to Ghana, where she died soon after. The Lancet put it neatly: “The UK has committed an atrocious barbarism.” That was January 19, 2008. Five years later and more … the atrocity continues.

(This originally appeared, in January 2013, in a different version, at Africa Is a Country. Thanks as ever for the collaboration and support.)

 

(Photo Credit: guardian.co.uk)

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Perception matters. Ask Australia’s women asylum seekers.

July 2, 2013 by 3 Comments

 

Recently, Geena Davis noted, “We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”

Perceptions matter, and perceptions of those in control are typically sexist and racist, especially when the `tipping point’ is involved, when those in power feel the threat of a `new majority’. That’s why perception can’t be the motor for public policy and, even less, for the pursuit of justice, Take Australia … please.

A key plank of Australia’s asylum policy has been deterrence. This has resulted in brutality, torture, horror, despair … and big profits for the private security corporations, most infamously Serco, who run the immigrant `detention’ and `transfer’ installations. With the shift in government over the past week, some wonder if anything will change in terms of Australia’s racist and sexist asylum policies.

If anything, it looks like they will get worse. Within hours of the new government’s installation, the new “de facto Immigration Minister” declared that most refugee applicants are “economic refugees”. There’s no evidence for that statement, but who needs evidence when `perception’ is on your side?

And what is the perception? The boats. The boats keep coming, and sinking. The refugees keep `swarming’. It’s a human tsunami bearing down on Australia. These images are merely part of the `ferocity’ of the anti-refugee anti-asylum-seeker discourse. Meanwhile, the women and children pile up in the `detention centers’. They’re prisons. Detention is too fine a word. Ask the children who go on hunger strike. Ask the 16-year-old Afghan boy who ended a five-day hunger strike yesterday. Why was he barreling towards his own death? He’s an unaccompanied child, in prison, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by every form of hostility, with no visible end in sight to his torment. Perhaps that’s the reason.

The treatment of asylum seekers, and in particular of women and children asylum seekers, has been a mounting succession of cruel jokes. Each step of the way, the asylum seeker’s vulnerability and precariousness are intensified.

But here’s the thing: Australia is not drowning in asylum-seekers. Pesky numbers keep denying the `perception’. Yes, the numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers are rising. Yes, the numbers coming by boat are, for the first time, exceeding those coming by plane. BUT Australia takes a very small percentage of the world’s refugees, around 3 percent. Officially, there are 30,083 refugees currently living in Australia. That means, if you consider the size of the country, Australia has one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world. Australia has 1.4 refugees per 1,000 people. Germany has 7.3; Canada has 4.7; the United Kingdom has 2.4. (The United States has .8.)

There is no flood. Australia can stop building sea walls, prison colonies, and worse. It can. But it won’t. Rather, the new government will opt to continue, and probably fortify, the “`hard bastard’ approach.” Perception matters, as does patriarchy.

 

(Photo Credit: AAP / Julian Smith)

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Prison is bad for pregnant women and other living things

June 11, 2013 by 2 Comments

 

A report entitled Expecting Change: the case for ending the immigration detention of pregnant women was released today. It describes the nightmare that is Yarl’s Wood. The report bristles in its portrait of a system built of violence, planned inefficiencies and incompetence, and general disregard for women. You should read this report.

At the same time, a question haunts the report. So much of it is commonsensical that one feels compelled to wonder about the groundwork and horizons of social justice research. Here’s an example: “Asylum seeking women have poorer maternity outcomes than the general population. Many women in the sample were victims of rape, torture and trafficking.” The vast majority of women asylum seekers are fleeing sexual and other forms of violence, and so it comes as no surprise that they have poorer maternity outcomes than the general population. They also have poorer health outcomes generally, including mental and emotional health. They are asylum seekers.

On the one hand, we could discuss `the system’. We could talk about the planning that goes into systematically “failing to recognize” and “failing to appreciate” the particularities of women prisoners’ lives and situations. We could talk about the political economy of that planned failure, about who benefits and howbut we’ve done that already.

Instead, let’s imagine. Imagine what we could be researching and developing if we weren’t constantly working to undo over three decades of intensive, systematic and, for a very few, profitable mass incarceration.

Here’s where we are today. We have to conduct a multi-year study to prove that pregnant women asylum seekers shouldn’t be in prison.

We have to conduct other studies to prove that prison is an inappropriate place for children seeking asylum. We have to conduct another series of studies to suggest that maybe prison isn’t the best place for children, and that adult prison might be an even worse option. We need another multi-year study to `prove’ that sexual violence against children in juvenile prisons is epidemic. We need that same study to `demonstrate’ that the majority of acts of violence against those children, our children, were perpetrated by adult staff members.

We need another study to prove that the reason that self-harm and hunger strikes are so common, so everyday, in immigrant prisons is that the conditions are inhuman and dire. Prisoners have given up hope as they refuse to give up hope. We need many studies to demonstrate adequately that LGBT immigrants suffer inordinately in immigration prisons, and we need many more studies to demonstrate that the same is true for immigrants who live with disabilities. And then of course we’ll need more studies to prove that immigrant prisoners living with HIV have a tough time behind bars. We’ll need studies to prove that the prisons for immigrants and migrants and asylum seekers are extraordinarily cruel, and then we’ll need other studies to prove that the cruelty of those prisons is actually quite normal, and quite like the cruelty of all the other prisons.

We’ll need studies to prove that immigration prisons embody the architecture of xenophobia, and we’ll need other studies to prove that the asylum system is “flawed”. We’ll need other studies to understand that the xenophobia and the flaws are gendered. And then we’ll need meta-studies that will analyze the curious phenomenon of the complete lack of improvement. These studies will note, with compassion, that after decades of detailed research, the prisons are still hell.

I am grateful for the work scholars have performed. It’s often impossible work, and yet individuals and groups, such as those at Medical Justice who produced today’s study, do that work, and do it with grace. At the same time, imagine. Imagine what we could be researching and learning if we weren’t still drowning in our own Hundred Years’ War of Mass Incarceration. Imagine.

 

(Image Credit: Medical Justice)

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Laura S. didn’t have to die

June 8, 2013 by 8 Comments

This is the story of Laura S.

Laura was born in Mexico in 1986. She became involved with a boy, Sergio. Early on Sergio became violent. And Laura stayed with him. At the age of fourteen Laura S. gave birth to their first son, in 2001. She became a resident of Hidalgo County, Texas. She gave birth to two other sons by Sergio, in 2007 and 2005, respectively.

Sergio became increasingly violent and abusive. In March 2003, Laura obtained protection from the local police and courts. Sergio kept harassing Laura. In 2008, she obtained an order of emergency protection. Furious, Sergio returned to Mexico.

On June 8, 2009, Laura S. went out with a cousin and two friends. They were stopped near Pharr, Texas, by a local police officer for a minor alleged driving infraction. The officer then demanded their immigration papers. Only the cousin could produce papers.

“Laura S. began to weep, begging the officer to let her go.”

She explained about Sergio, about the threat to her life. She explained about the protective orders. She explained that her life would be finished, and violently so, if she were returned to Mexico. She talked about her three small children, one of whom was about to have surgery.

The police officer turned the three over to ICE. ICE took the three to Harlingen U.S processing center.

“On the way to Harlingen, Laura S. continued to weep and beg to be released.” More agents came in. Laura explained everything, again, to the federal agents. Laura wept and explained, explained and wept, begged and explained, explained and begged. No one listened.

Laura wept and trembled as she spoke with the agents. No one asked her any questions. No one tried to verify or evaluate her risk of harm. No one explained any of her legal rights to her. If Laura had had a hearing, even in Texas, there’s a good chance she would have been able to stay in the country.

Given the dangers Laura faced in Mexico, a hearing should have been “mandatory and non-discretionary”. Laura never saw Judge or lawyer. Instead, the federal agents decided on their own to ship Laura S to Mexico.

Although the agents intimidated and coerced Laura, she never agreed to go. She continued to beg and explain, to explain and weep, all the way to the Hidalgo/Reynosa international bridge. In the early morning hours of June 9, 2009, a mere few hours after having been stopped, Laura S. was forced to cross the bridge into Mexico.

Within a few days, Sergio found Laura, and slowly tortured and then brutally killed her. On June 14, less than a week after the traffic stop, Laura’s body was found in a burning car. Her mother went to Mexico and testified against Sergio, who was imprisoned. He later escaped.

Now Laura’s mother and her three young children are suing ICE and the Border Police.

Laura S. was forced to cross the bridge into Mexico. What authorizes that force? What is the the force that `gives’ a woman protection only to steal it at the moment its needed? What is the force that refuses to listen to or hear a woman begging for life? What is the force that refuses to recognize its own “mandatory and non-discretionary” rules?

That force is the regime of brothers, the fratriarchy, which underwrites national democratic sovereignty. One law protected Laura, but those federal agents understood that there is a more powerful law. There is the law of force that makes brothers of police agents on one side of a border and a torturer on the other. And the shuttle that binds them is always a woman.

And so Laura S, weeping and begging and explaining and trembling, was forced to cross the bridge. Her mother’s lawyer says, “Laura didn’t have to die.” Tell that to the State.

(Photo Credit: Proceso)

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My name is Adrienne Kambana. I am the widow of Jimmy Mubenga

May 23, 2013 by 8 Comments

 

Last Tuesday, a woman appeared before judge and jury, and she sobbed: “My name is Adrienne Kambana. I am the widow of Jimmy Mubenga and the mother of our five children. Jimmy Mubenga was a good father… [and] a good husband… He had never been in trouble with the police before. He had never done anything wrong. When he was arrested he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. An argument started and Jimmy got caught up in it. Jimmy was convicted of an offence of causing actual bodily harm and he was sent to prison in March 2006. Although I was not a witness to what happened, I was present at the trial where he was found guilty. He told me, `I was innocent’ and I believed him. This was the first time he had ever been away from the children. By April 2007 he had served his sentence but he was detained under immigration powers. He remained detained until June 2008 when he was granted bail. It was during this time that Blessing was conceived. Jimmy instructed a solicitor and tried to challenge the deportation because he wanted to stay with his family… I was asked by the police to tell them about the phone calls I had with Jimmy on 12 October 2010… He said, “I’ll call you back” and he did not call me back. That was the end of the story.”

That was the end of the story.

The so-called liberal democracies festoon themselves with inquests as if these carnivals of `the rule of law’ equal justice. They don’t.

The current manifestation is “the Jimmy Mubenga inquest,’ taking place now in London. On October 12, 2010, Jimmy Mubenga boarded a plane for Angola, in the custody of G4S guards. Within 50 minutes, Jimmy Mubenga was dead. During those 50 minutes, Mubenga repeatedly asked for help and received none. He begged, he screamed, he called out, “They’re going to kill me.” And they did.

And now we `discover’ that the G4S security guards had racist jokes on their phones. While that is `unfortunate’, mobile phones did not kill Jimmy Mubenga, nor did a few racist guards, be they privately employed or working for the State. Jimmy Mubenga was killed by State policy. He was killed by the very entity that is now `conducting an inquest’ in full view.

While the possibility of arriving at something like the truth of the event of Jimmy Mubenga’s death is important and worthwhile, it does not constitute justice. Jimmy Mubenga is dead. The children can’t stop crying, the widow can’t stop crying. If there were justice, Jimmy Mubenga would be alive.

Only a fundamental structural change – one that never again criminalizes, cages, and executes `the strangers among us’ – would begin to arrive at justice. Jimmy Mubenga’s death, like that of Ashley Smith in Canada and so many others around the so-called `free world’, are part of State policy, not the errant acts of individuals.

Adrienne Kambana concluded her remarks, sobbing: “Jimmy has gone forever. We need justice. Justice will help Jimmy rest in peace. This will prevent the situation from happening again. Justice will give the other passengers on the plane peace of mind about what happened. Justice will protect people in the future because I don’t want anyone to be in my shoes. Justice will help my children not to feel angry about what happened to their father. Justice will help me to live a long and healthy life so that I can take care of our children. I need justice, especially for my daughter who did not get the chance to know her father. We will never forget Jimmy.”

The inquest is expected to continue for eight weeks.

 

(Photo credit: IRR.org.uk)

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In Australia, a transit camp to nowhere means …

April 12, 2013 by 12 Comments

In Australia, refugee and asylum seeker prisoners at the Broadmeadows detention centre are on hunger strike. Except that Broadmeadows is not formally a detention centre. It’s actually the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation. And the only part of that title that in any way approximates the truth is Melbourne. For the prisoners on hunger strike, there is no immigration, there is no transit, and there is absolutely no accommodation. There is indefinite detention in a no man’s and no woman’s land. Sometimes silence = death. At other times, language = death. This is one of those latter times.

The hunger strikers have all been deemed acceptable for refugee and asylum status. But they have been deemed, by the ASIO, security risks and so cannot be released. They can’t stay; they can’t go. Samuel Beckett seems to rule Australian jurisprudence, except, as is so often the case, this Samuel Beckett has no mercy, no sense of irony, and less than no sense of justice. Once again, the theater of the absurd gives way to the theater of atrocity.

The ASIO is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and it claims its “role is to identify and investigate threats to security, wherever they arise, and to provide advice to protect Australia, its people and its interests…. Security is defined in the ASIO Act as espionage, serious threats to Australia’s territorial and border integrity, sabotage, politically motivated violence, the promotion of communal violence, attacks on Australia’s defence system, and acts of foreign interference.”

So, the ASIO `evaluated’ the asylum seekers, who had been deemed legitimate asylum seekers, and found them suspect. On what grounds? More often than not, on little to no grounds: “One Sri Lankan refugee was assessed negative because he ran a shop where Tamil Tigers were alleged to have done business. Another is claimed to have trained with the Tigers — he insists he was at university at the time and can prove so through enrolment and attendance records.” Of course, the actual evaluations are unavailable, even to the applicants or their attorneys. For `security reasons.’

And so, 25 `indefinitely detained refugees’ entered the fifth day of a hunger strike today, at Broadmeadows. The sad, and ironic, truth is that Broadmeadows is the tip of the iceberg, as the refugees well know. They are constantly threatened with removal to Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Facility, where conditions are, incredibly, infinitely and brutally worse.

For some, the fact that these facilities are private, run by Serco, is the key point. For me, it’s the State that contracts Serco to run these facilities that must be interrogated. What is the name of the public policy, and the order of justice, that imprisons indefinitely and without charge legitimate asylum seekers? Where is the language for that atrocity, and who will finally speak its truth, not in civil society but at the level of State?

 

(Image Credit: mitahungerstrike.wordpress.com)

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Jackie Nanyonjo died last Friday

March 14, 2013 by 1 Comment

Jackie Nanyonjo

My grandmother did not die of uremic poisoning. She died because she was in hiding, in Nazi-occupied Brussels, and could not get the medical care she needed. And so she died and was buried in an unmarked grave in a potter’s field `somewhere in Brussels’.

Jackie Nanyonjo died in Kampala, Uganda, last Friday. Jackie Nanyonjo was a lesbian who fled Uganda, made it to England, and applied for asylum. In so doing, she joined women like Betty Tibikawa, Linda Nakibuuka and so many other Ugandan lesbians who, having asked for safe haven, trade one rung of hell for another.

Jackie Nanyonjo fought for the rights, power and dignity of women, LGBTI individuals and communities, lesbians, asylum seekers. She fought for those rights on the streets; in the cells and corridors of Yarl’s Wood; and in the airplane that took her, abducted her more accurately, to Kampala two months ago. When she arrived in Kampala, she went into hiding. She didn’t contact members of the organized LGBT rights communities, most likely because of the current pogroms against lesbians and gays and their organizations. And so, on Friday, March 8, 2013, International Women’s Day, Jackie Nanyonjo died, in hiding, in Kampala.

Friends report that she was in poor health in the United Kingdom and in very poor health when she arrived in Kampala.

My grandmother did not die of uremic poisoning. Jackie Nanyonjo did not die of poor health. They were both killed. May they both rest in peace. May we do better than merely remember and intone their names.

 

(Photo Credit: PinkNews)

 

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Australia tortures migrant children

March 5, 2013 by 2 Comments


The Australian government continues to torture refugee and asylum seeking children. The State currently holds some 2000 children in detention. That’s mandatory detention for all non-citizens who arrive without prior authorization. That rule includes children. And so there is a `furor’ of  `concern’ for the well-being, and in particular for the mental health, of the children behind bars.

None of this is new, and none of it is surprising. A mandatory incarceration policy that makes no exceptions for children, and in particular for children fleeing violence and persecution, will have exactly the effects you imagine. Seemingly healthy children will engage in `self-harm’. This includes slashing one’s body and suicide by any and every means possible. Children report not being able to sleep. Children report a desperate desire to go to school, to play, to have normal children’s lives. Children report fear that they will go crazy and kill themselves. And then they kill themselves.

For girls, the situation is equally predictable. Girls are `particular’: “Girls and young women are at particular risk of gender based violence and sexual abuse… Girls and young women are particularly at risk of harm due to their sex… Moreover, girls are particularly susceptible to marginalization, poverty and suffering during armed conflict, and many may have experienced gender-based violence in the context of armed conflict.” The particularity of girls’ vulnerability emerges from both detailed and extensive research scholarship and from simple common sense. You know migrant girls, girl refugees, and asylum-seeking girls are `particular.’ So does the Australian government. What does the State do in recognition of this particularity? Absolutely nothing. Less than nothing. It intensifies and increases the pain, the torment, and the torture.

Children in low-security prisons in Pontville, in Tasmania, and in Darwin, in the Northern Territory, are falling apart. Their precariousness is not about this condition or that condition. It emerges directly from the totality of being-caged. The intensity and levels of self-harm in both locations is off the chart. Meanwhile, Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs has been informed that she cannot visit the refugee and asylum seeker detention camps on Nauru and Manus Islands because that would violate the sovereignty of the island nations. Australia’s massive funding of those prison camps apparently did not violate any sovereignty. Australia’s insistence on shipping off hundreds of women, girls, boys, and men to the island nations also did not violate any sovereignty proprieties. This is the way of sovereignty, the wink-wink nudge-nudge of fraternal violence.

This is why the Australian government can so easily ignore reports of sexual violence against Tamil refugees, and especially the `particular’ targeting of Tamil girls. To accept such reports would violate Sri Lankan sovereignty, and after all, the refugees and asylum seekers had already violated Australian sovereignty. That’s why they’re in prison, isn’t it? It’s a perfect circle … of hell.

Rather than `discovering’ yet again the nightmare of child detention, why not discover the simple, open alternative? Recognize and respect the particularity of girls. Take the children, all the children, far from the cages. Teach them to respect themselves and others. Help them to find peace and love. End child detention. Do it now.

(Image Credit: The Conversation)

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In the camps, the women sigh, “O brave new world”

February 11, 2013 by 7 Comments

A key plank of Australia’s asylum policy is deterrence. What happened to asylum being the key plank of asylum policy? Deterrence in this instance means “offshore camps”, particularly on the islands of Manus and Nauru Islands. Manus Island is part of Papua New Guinea, where a trial opened today to challenge the legality of the “processing camps”. The charge is that the Papua New Guinean law does not allow for detention without any charge. Detention camps. Processing camps. Or, as Marianne Evers said of the camp on Nauru, “I actually liken it to a concentration camp.” Not surprisingly, the Australian government takes offense at the likening, “I think invoking concentration camp is a disgrace.” Calling the camps on Manus Island and Nauru Island “concentration camps” is a disgrace, but the camps themselves … are fine?

No.

Last week, New Matilda published three sets of letters by women asylum seekers currently imprisoned on Manus Island. The women are from Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan. They describe terrible hardships in their homelands, terrific struggles to get to Australia, and then debilitating, crushing conditions on Christmas Island and then on Manus Island. They describe the dire mental health crisis that sweeps through the camps, especially among the younger men who are increasingly suicidal. They write about their struggle for safety for themselves and their children. They write a great deal about their children. They describe the life draining out of their children within the universe of trauma that constitutes the detention camp. They describe the cultures and public policies of violence against women in their homelands that compelled them to leave, to seek personal safety and dignity.

The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, issued a report last week on Manus Island, based on a January visit. The agency confirms the reports of the women asylum seekers. The physical conditions are “harsh”. The living quarters have no privacy, which is a particular concern to parents of girls; are unbearably hot; and have grossly inadequate sanitary facilities. And that’s the family compound. The conditions in the compound for single male adults are worse.

The conditions are generally and specifically traumatic. They breed mental health crises on an individual, collective and structural basis. For the adults, it’s terrible. For the children, it’s crushing.

The UN list of dehumanizing conditions goes on, but here’s the point. This is what happens when deterrence is a key plank in asylum policy. Since Australia began “offshore processing” its asylum seekers, have the numbers gone down? Absolutely not. They’ve risen, incrementally. Does that mean the policy hasn’t worked? According to the State, it means the State hasn’t arrived at the proper balance of harsh and brutal. When the Australian government can match the brutality the women, children and men have fled, then it will have arrived at what it considers to be an appropriate asylum program.

Australia has invested political capital, national identity, and hard cold cash in brutalizing asylum seekers. They have sought partners. First they turned to Papua New Guinea, and this week, they turned to New Zealand. Australia sees asylum seekers as another `opportunity’ for regional free trade agreements. This time trade is in battered bodies and dreams.

Why can’t asylum, rather than deterrence, by the key plank of the asylum policy? What would it take to move the concept of the right to asylum to the center of all asylum policy? Ask the women asylum seekers on Manus Island. Repeatedly, they say they fled violence but they sought peace. Peace, rather than `security’, must govern asylum policy.

Meanwhile, the women who sought peace sit in the harsh camps on the remote islands, look at their children, look at themselves, look at the guards, look at where they’ve come to and where they’re probably going, if the State has its way, and they sigh, “O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”

(Photo Credit: Al Jazeera)

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