With Intent - Death and suffering as policy
Whenever there have been protests -- including hunger-strikes -- over intolerable
conditions and harsh treatment in the concentration camps, the Australian Minister
for Immigration has increasingly responded, as have other local politicians,
by insisting that this should be seen as a necessary part of the deterrence
of potential asylum seekers. That is, the suffering of one group of people is
justified as a means of deterrence of others potentially seeking asylum in Australia.
Far from constituting an embarrassment or prompting denials, the Government
affirms such suffering and moves to transform it into a policy device, a distinctive
mechanism for the restriction of asylum applications to Australia. [AM]
Suffering is a goal
Benjamin Rozensweig
Precisely because suffering is a goal and not merely a by-product of government
refugee policy, protests highlighting the sadistic realities of internment are
important, and can play a part in our efforts to place what limits we can on
the ability of the government to pursue such ends. Immigration law is one area
in which the federal government has made the achievement of public policy objectives
of far higher priority than any concern for liberal concepts of human rights,
of equality before the law, of independence of judicial procedure from Cabinet,
of formal legal procedures intended to prevent abuse, ensure fair treatment,
and allow individuals recourse to legal institutions should their legal or human
rights be violated.
In fact, these public policy objectives are simply to treat refugees as badly
as the federal government feels that it can get away with, in essence to send
a message carved in the medium of organised human suffering: if you need to
flee your present country to stay alive or to live without fear or degradation,
try as hard as you can to end up somewhere else, because Australia will probably
send you back to suffer the attentions of those from whom you are fleeing, to
endure once more what should not have to be endured, and in any case will treat
you worse than, for example, very poor citizens convicted of the kind of violence
from which you may be fleeing. That you have done nothing wrong makes no difference.
In the best of circumstances, you will be automatically gaoled and denied the
legal rights of citizens, in conditions often not very different from those
of refugee camps or prisons in the third world.
The Minister will justify your internment by reference to the threat you
poise to national security and in general posed by your apparently dirty, disease-ridden
bodies. Should you by some miracle be permitted to stay (ie., you are not from
one of the countries with whom Australia has a tacit agreement to return all
refugees, eg. China) and let out of gaol, you will be denied the rights of the
lowliest of citizens. Foreigners without money are not welcome here. This is
not the place to end your ordeal: here, your ordeal continues.
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Deaths A Necessary Part Of Border Policing
Angela Mitropoulos
AUSTRALIA - Wednesday, December 3, 2000. Australia's border policy this
week claimed more lives. Reports have emerged that over 160 people are likely
to have drowned as two ships sunk in cyclonic conditions off the northern coast
of Australia. Only four people from one of the ships have been found, saved
by the crew of a Japanese tanker. Speaking to reporters, the Minister for Immigration,
Philip Ruddock, rose to the occasion by declaring that these deaths were a consequence
of attempts to enter Australia "illegally" despite the fact that the
legal status of arrivals is only determined after they are released from one
of Australia's internment camps whereupon they are deported or granted only
a three-year stay.
The Minister went on to insist that this was a vindication of the media campaign
his Department had instigated across Asia and the Middle East that, amongst
other things, depicted death and extreme suffering as the result of entering
Australia without the necessary papers.
What reporters refused to ask is why, if the Minister or sections of the
Government had been told by Indonesian authorities a week ago that two boats
were heading for Australia, and it was known that a cyclone was active off the
north coast, did the Government not send out a vessel to pick them up. Why was
it left to the crew of a tanker to find those who had managed to stay afloat?
Instead, these deaths are paraded as a central plank of Government border
policy and the penal industry that it makes possible.
It is no longer implicit. The death penalty has been declared a useful and
acceptable means of deterring undocumented migrants.
Unlike the deaths of citizens and non-citizens in tourist spots here and
elsewhere -- which is to say, those who's movements act as transports for sums
of money -- there will be no state-funded funeral attended by parliamentarians
in a show of 'national unity'. The people who died this week will not be officially
mourned here. They are sacrificed as a way of illustrating the inescapable power
of the nation-state's borders.
In 1999, over 350 people died off Australia's coastline as they tried to
make to make their way to asylum.
For the local audience, the announcement of these deaths was meant to serve
as a vindication of the Government's "get tough" policy against asylum
seekers and undocumented migrants, despite the fact that the Minister knows
full well that the moderate increase in undocumented arrivals by boat from the
Middle East in 1999 was a direct result of the closure of the UN office in Pakistan
and the move to wholesale deportations from refugee camps in Jordan back to
Iran and Iraq.
The Minister prefers to depict the impetus for arrivals in terms that serve
to flatter the local audienceand themselves, depicting the border as a necessary
wall against what would otherwise be a 'flood'. It is proffered as axiomatic
that 'everyone' would come here were it not for this wall of violence and internment.
No doubt there is mileage for any Government in presenting life in Australia
as attractive and 'the Australian way of life' as something which others, and
in particular the otherly-complexioned, will naturally covet.
Fact is that recent documented migrants are leaving Australia within the
first two years of their stay in unprecendented numbers and the numbers of undocumented
arrivals, even at the 1999 peak, have always been remarkably insubstantial by
comparison with almost all other countries in the world.
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