[Nettime-bold] Fwd: John Pilger on asylum seekers

[Tracey Benson <tracey.benson@anu.edu.au>]

>this may be of interest
>
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>Few asylum-seekers actually reach Australia's shores, and if they do, 
>their treatment beggars belief : John Pilger :25 Jan 2002
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>One of my first assignments as a young reporter in Sydney was to go to the 
>airport and ask famous people arriving from overseas what they thought of 
>Australia. There was a checklist; our beer and beaches were near the top, 
>followed by our "mateship". If the famous person hesitated or, in the case 
>of the movie star Elizabeth Taylor, objected to this asinine 
>interrogation, pleading that they could not possibly answer the questions 
>because they had never previously set foot in Australia, they were in big 
>trouble.
>
>When Taylor and her then husband, Mike Todd, the Hollywood producer, told 
>the press to sod off, they were dogged by negative publicity and their 
>visit was, in show-business terms, a disaster. Something similar happened 
>to the great star Ava Gardner, filming Nevil Shute's On the Beach in 
>Melbourne, about the nuclear apocalypse. Asked what she thought of 
>Australia, she replied: "I cannot think of a better place to make a movie 
>about the end of the world."
>
>She was duly unforgiven, and vowed never to return. These days, it can 
>seem that nothing has changed. Foreigners (and expatriots) who smudge the 
>picture postcard still excite an indignation unknown in New Zealand and 
>Canada, especially in a press dominated by Rupert Murdoch, whose 
>patriotism is distinguished by his abandonment of Australian citizenship 
>in order to buy television stations in America.
>
>For Godzone's political and media elite, based in Sydney, the 2000 
>Olympics was regarded as an ultimate rite of passage to the rest of the 
>world. Small-time politicians pressed the flesh of the international great 
>and good, Sydney's traffic lights were fixed on green for the motorcade of 
>the International Olympic Committee, and civil liberties were suspended so 
>that the authorities could control those who might interrupt the joy; 
>Aborigines were of particular concern. And the world duly applauded.
>
>Alas, all those warm millennium feelings are long forgotten as the 
>Government of John Howard has, at a stroke,demolished the national image 
>with racist and inhumane policies, shamelessly and aggressively 
>implemented, currently against desperate refugees.
>
>There is a terrible irony at work here. Last October, as the "war on 
>terrorism" burst on the world, flags bedecked the Murdoch tabloids as 
>Australian troops were sent to join the great crusade. This was in keeping 
>with a long tradition of going to war for great powers and colonial 
>masters: from the despatch of Sydney Tramway Company horses to relieve 
>General Gordon at Khartoum (they died on the way) to the tragic adventures 
>of Gallipoli and Vietnam. No one seemed to know what the troops headed for 
>Afghanistan would do; and the Americans have since tried their best to 
>give them odd jobs, such as "commanding" the American naval blockade of 
>Iraq, which, according to the United Nations Children's Fund, is mostly 
>responsible for the deaths, every month, of 6,000 Iraqi children under the 
>age of five.
>
>Australia is not at war with Iraq or any country, but it is at war with 
>refugees heading for its shores, many of them Iraqis fleeing the 
>conditions that the American blockade has largely created. For a nation 
>that bases its popular history on the elevation of its Anzac "diggers" 
>(soldiers) to a pantheon of mateship, the guardians of a society of "fair 
>go", the craven campaign against ordinary people at their most vulnerable 
>has been salutary.
>
>When a freighter, the Tampa, having rescued 400 refugees from almost 
>certain drowning, approached Australia's shores, the Canberra government 
>sent special forcesto prevent traumatised men, women and children from 
>landing. In full battle kit, the soldiers steered the refugees to 
>miserable conditions on remote Pacific islands, where several contracted 
>malaria. In their attempts to justify this contravention of the most basic 
>of human rights, the right of refuge, Prime Minister Howard and his 
>ministers lied that another group of refugees had thrown their children 
>overboard as a sacrificial means of attracting attention. "I find that 
>[the refugees' behaviour] is against the natural instinct," said Howard. 
>These people, said a senator, "are repulsive . . . and unworthy of 
>Australia". The then Labor Party leader, Kim Beazley, joined in the 
>condemnation, to the disgust of almost everyone. In fact, the refugees had 
>jumped from their leaking craft when an Australian warship fired across 
>its bows. No children had been "thrown overboard", admitted Australia's 
>naval chief, in a rare contradiction of his political master.
>
>Those Iraqis and Afghans who have succeeded in reaching Australia receive 
>treatment which, for a society proclaiming humanist values, beggars 
>belief. Many are imprisoned behind razor wire in some of the most hostile 
>terrain on earth, deliberately isolated from population centres in 
>"detention centres" run by an American company specialising in 
>top-security prisons. In their desperation, the refugees, many of them 
>unaccompanied children, have resorted to suicide, starvation, arson and 
>mass escapes. Last week, 62 refugees in a camp at Woomera in the South 
>Australian desert sewed their lips together to protest the government's 
>admission that it was delaying their asylum application, "deliberately to 
>break their spirit", say lawyers allowed access to them.
>
>A study has revealed that most had experienced terrible suffering before 
>fleeing their homelands. "On many occasions," wrote Robert Manne, a 
>professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, "the refugees had been 
>required to visit the horror of such experiences in interrogations by 
>ignorant officials who make it transparent they do not believe the stories 
>they are told." In one camp, their life consists of daily musters and 
>nightly headcounts, at 2am and 5am, under a regime of arbitrary 
>punishments that range from the denial of visitors to solitary confinement 
>and enforced sedation.
>
>Howard and his ministers have promoted a propaganda exercise of fear and 
>loathing among the Australian public. Such is Howard's cynicism that he 
>has never explained to Australians that their country actually receives 
>one of the smallest numbers of "illegal" asylum-seekers in the world: 
>about 4,000 a year. Of these, three-quarters are eventually accepted, but 
>only after mandatory and indefinite imprisonment in camps described by the 
>former conservative prime minister Malcolm Fraser as "hell-holes".
>
>The minister responsible is Philip Ruddock, a man who speaks in a strange, 
>congealed jargon, usually with a smirk. Three years ago, Ruddock boasted 
>to me that Aboriginal infant mortality was "only" three times that of 
>white children. Ruddock's abuse of his victims has become his curious 
>signature. Last year, he referred to a six-year-old Iraqi boy struck 
>speechless by his experiences in a detention camp as "it". When an 
>official of Amnesty International told him of the appalling conditions in 
>the camps on the Pacific island of Nauru, whose debt-ridden government 
>Australia has bribed to take its boat people, the minister's jocular jibe 
>was: "Do you think they would prefer to be at one of our detention centres 
>here?"
>
>The treatment of "white" illegal immigrants is very different. In 2001, 
>there were 6,160 Britons who had overstayed the duration of their visas, 
>and as many other Europeans. None goes to a detention camp and most are 
>given a "bridging visa". It is said that Howard's "tough stand" against 
>the combined "threat" posed by helpless refugees and international 
>terrorists gave him his election victory last November. "Is Australia 
>safe?" pleaded a headline in the Melbourne Age, in probably the safest 
>place on the planet. Murdoch's Sunday Telegraph joined in with: 
>"Exclusive: A traitor's innocent son asks . . . will Dad blow up 
>Australia?" The Murdoch newspapers' campaign against an Australian 
>drifter, David Hicks, who fought with the Taliban, is matched by Howard's 
>disgraceful refusal to demand that the United States hand him back to his 
>own country or treat him as a PoW.
>
>There is a correlation between this false hysteria and the "tough stand" 
>also taken against Aborigines, a minority of around 2 per cent of the 
>population. When an Aboriginal boxer, Anthony Mundine, remarked on 
>television that Americans had "brought [terrorism] upon themselves [for] 
>what they done in the history of time", he was all but lynched. He is a 
>Muslim. Thanks to his "traitorous talk", crowed one of the media lynch 
>party, "word is that his promising international career is over".
>
>As Australia is entrenched as yet another colony of the "global economy", 
>the tragedy for those seeking personal pride in the achievements of their 
>nation is the suppression of a political history of which there is much to 
>be proud, and whose wonderfully subversive stories are seldom told.
>
>Australia was the first country where ordinary people won a 35-hour week, 
>half a century ahead of Europe and America. Long before most of the world, 
>Australia had a minimum wage, child benefits and pensions. Australian 
>women were the first to be able to vote and stand for parliament. The 
>secret ballot was invented in Australia.
>
>In my lifetime, Australia has been transformed from a second-hand 
>Anglo-Irish society to one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, 
>and this has happened peacefully, if by default. By most standards of 
>civilisation, the transformation is a remarkable achievement. Of course, 
>indigenous Australians were never included. Their extraordinary 
>civilisation, their survivalism and oneness with an ancient land, was not 
>taught, until recently, as a source of national pride; and their 
>inclusion, still to be achieved, may well be the key to what the small 
>liberal elite constantly refers to as "the search for identity" and which 
>means overcoming a legacy of brutal racism.
>
>Last week, Pauline Hanson retired from politics, mainly because the Howard 
>government pre-empted and absorbed her populism. Her openly racist One 
>Nation party at its peak captured 10 per cent of the national vote: about 
>a million people. Now they are Howard's people. She appealed not only to 
>those left out of the consumerism that has taken over a society that once 
>had the most equitable spread of personal income in the world and is now 
>one of the most unequal. She also had middle-class support, though this is 
>seldom mentioned. "Pauline, you made us more honest", said the headline 
>over an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The writer, Margo Kingston, 
>who apparently thinks of herself as a liberal, waffled about "the 
>unfinished legacy of the redhead from Ipswich (Queensland)" and about 
>Hanson's stimulating contribution to a national "debate". In fact, Hanson 
>encouraged dishonesty by giving bigotry credence.
>
>In recent years, this "debate" has been influenced by a group of David 
>Irving-style denialists who say there was no slaughter of the first 
>Australians, no rapacious past. This chorus of windbags of the "lunar 
>right" (a term used by one columnist who likes to pretend he is not one of 
>them) dominates a press with a narrower ownership than anywhere in the 
>west. Murdoch owns 70 per cent of the capital city press; and journalists 
>and broadcasters who speak too freely must consider the consequences, 
>especially those in the state-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
>
>It is more than 20 years since David Williamson's fine play Sons of Cain 
>described this intimidation, and little has changed. Only a few, like the 
>investigative writers Brian Toohey and Ken Davidson, have bothered to 
>understand and consistently alert the public to vital issues, such as the 
>secretive trade deal that the Howard government is stitching up with the 
>United States and which will allow American multinationals to subvert much 
>of Australia's fragile primary industry and manipulate its trade.
>
>A great many Australians care about this, and express their powerlessness. 
>Over a year ago, almost a million people filled the Sydney Harbour Bridge 
>in protest against the treatment of the Aborigines. It is difficult to 
>find anyone not appalled by the policy on refugees. But their gestures, 
>however noble and charitable, are no longer enough, now that Hanson's 
>"unfinished legacy" has found its true legitimacy in an elected government.
>
>For many, there is the spectre of comparison with apartheid South Africa. 
>The other day, Andrea Durbach, formerly of Cape Town and now a prominent 
>human rights advocate in Sydney, said she did not believe the horrors of 
>apartheid South Africa would ever be reproduced in Australia. "What may be 
>coming is not as crude," she said. "The language is not as crude. It's 
>much more subtle; it's much more consensual."
>