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.