Desert Storm

Faces

Aamer

I left Oman, a country bordering Saudi Arabia, six years ago. I hadn't seen desert again until coming here to Woomera. Today it broke my heart to see the same women that I had seen at schools, the same children I saw swinging in playgrounds, and the same men I had brushed past at markets screaming from what looked to me like a mosque behind bars. I can't describe what it's like to see a woman collapse, screaming hysterically that she is not an animal in a zoo.

The White Australia Policy was supposedly abolished over twenty years ago, but when I looked through the razor wire today, I didn't see the hundreds of American, British, Irish, German and French tourists who consistently overstay their visas here in Australia.

I saw men with brown skin, women with their heads covered in hejab and babies below the age of two. It must be torture to have no freedom but to see, only a few metres away, people who do. It's also torture to be free and to know that you have done nothing to deserve that freedom any more than those behind the wire.

I've just come back from the detention centre, so I'm more than a little emotional. I'm ashamed that there aren't more people like myself - people of the same background, race or religion as those in detention - protesting here.

I can't understand how people who have had their beliefs slandered, their colour demonised and their culture tainted by the same lies that have put their brothers and sisters in detention, can stay at home and do nothing.

What we have seen here in Woomera are the faces behind the statistics and the slogans. Not boat people or illegal immigrants or asylum seekers or refugees, but real people.

Men, women, children and babies who cry real tears, who write freedom in their blood from razor wire cuts, and who would do anything to be free.

As long as mainstream media is peppered with labels and slogans, those faces will never be seen. Conventional media outlets that have been responsible for painting current perceptions of refugees need to consider what their 'stories' and 'scoops' have done for racism and migrant identity in this country.

Maybe they need to consider that bleeding refugees and crying babies might pull the same ratings as carefully edited footage of 'violence' between police and protesters. Maybe they need to consider that the truth, however discomforting, might be worth telling.