<nettime> Inflammatory denial of human dignity

[scotartt <scot@systemx.autonomous.org>]

[[ I send this article to nettime so that non-Australians can get some
grasp of the appalling levels to which the Australian Government has
descended during the whole Tampa 'crisis' and in fact, in the course of
the entire debate about refugees in this country. Even if we had let those
Tampa refugees onto Christmas island, they would have been detained in
camps that are really prisons, manned by prison guards and run by a
privately owned American prison management company, Austrlaian
Correctional Management. The real story is not so much what was done by
this Government, inhumane though it was, but rather in how it went about
doing it, and why (for the cheapest, grubbiest, most partisan reasons
imaginable, all while employing 'national security' rhetoric as if we were
actually talking about an armed, invading force, and denying any oversight
or access to either the refugees or the operation as a whole).

Greg Sheridan is typically a hawkish defence commentator; I think that's
what makes this particular comment especially relevant. He is one of the
few mainstream journalists I have seen in recent year who understands the
ridiculousness of using highly expensive to operate FFGs (guided missle
frigates) to keep watch for barely seaworthy boats carrying refugees
escaping from a highly repressive regime. Meanwhile, in our southern ocean
territories, systematic illegal fishing, probably to extinction for
several species, by well equipped European flagged 'factory ships'
operating out of Madagascar, occurs on a regular basis. Those same FFGs
are the only navy ships we have at present which have the capability to
patrol and capture these environmental vandals. But, it appears at the
moment, that there's votes in detaining refugees, not those illegally
pillaging our national environment. -- scot. ]]

==
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,2776821,00.html

Greg Sheridan : Inflammatory denial of human dignity
By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor, The Australian.
06sep01

THE Howard Government has embarked on the most cynical, costly, dishonest,
dangerous and destructive foreign affairs and defence adventure in the
recent history of this country, certainly in my 22 years of paying serious
attention.

These asylum seekers must be a fierce group of people. Not content with
our state of belligerency with Norway - which has cynically manipulated
these events for electoral purposes, so we are told, those diabolical
Norwegians - we have sentt in effect our entire navy to meet the
frightening military threat of unarmed civilian refugees. We have deployed
two ANZAC frigates, a guided missile frigate (guided missiles are
exceptionally useful when dealing with refugees), a supply ship and a
transport ship, supported by an unknown number of patrol boats, plus four
PC-3 Orion aircraft – aircraft designed to hunt and kill submarines – on a
three-week mission.

In the Prime Minister's words the purpose of the mission is to "act in a
surveillance, patrol and deterrence capacity".

This is about half of our notional navy, but given how much time our
ageing boats must spend in maintenance, down-time for crews, etc, it
represents the overwhelming bulk of our deployable surface navy strength.

What a joke.

Among the many bad habits this Government has developed in these issues is
a culture of misrepresentation and unwillingness to let the public have
any useful information. Thus we are not told what our frigates are going
to do if they meet refugee boats. Yet there can be no possible national
security interest in concealing such information.

The truth is it's all a giant bluff, a massive, political misuse of our
defence forces. Any determined refugee boat could simply ignore the
frigates and keep coming. What are we going to do, machine-gun them all to
death? In any event, this deployment, which will cost many millions of
dollars, far more than behaving decently towards the refugees would have
cost, is not sustainable for very long. The so-called people smugglers
don't want extra attention. Obviously they can just wait for a few weeks.
This whole saga is likely to achieve nothing beyond a well-earned
shellacking for Australia in international public opinion, an entirely
gratuitous deepening of anti-refugee and anti-Muslim feeling in Australia,
and, of course, most important, the improved prospect of re-election for
the Howard Government.

The Government's behaviour towards asylum-seekers is appalling by any
standards. Australia is the only nation in the developed world which has a
policy of mandatory and non-reviewable detention for all asylum-seekers
who arrive without a visa.

You should believe virtually nothing the Government tells you about this.
It constantly claims we are the second most generous nation in per capita
terms in resettling refugees. In fact this is utter baloney. It does not
count any of those countries who accept people across their borders, by
far the vast majority of refugee resettlement.

Part of the basic function of any decent government is to calm people down
when they are becoming paranoid and exaggerating the dimensions of a small
problem, especially when that paranoia is likely to find expression in
hostility to a particular group of people. In the last financial year
Australia had 4450 asylum-seekers arrive in irregular fashion, that is,
boat people. Britain in the same period had 97,900, Germany the year
before 95,000. We have a small problem, not a national emergency.

The Howard Government has consciously and deliberately exaggerated this
problem and inflamed public opinion. All of its statistics are ropey. It
claims 85 per cent of Afghani and Iraqi asylum-seekers are accepted as
refugees in Australia, but only 15 per cent in Indonesia. That 15 per cent
is the proportion of people who have had any contact at all with the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Indonesia.

OF those actually assessed by the wildly under-resourced UNHCR in
Indonesia, in a highly unsatisfactory process, substantially more than 30
per cent are classified as genuine refugees.

Of course the notion that Afghanistan – the most repressive regime in the
world with the possible exception of North Korea, where it is a criminal
offence to own a Bible, and which is involved in a civil war with heavy
ethnic overtones – the widely accepted idea that this nation does not
generate genuine refugees is another triumph of Howard Government
propaganda.

Similarly, characterising Afghani boat people as wealthy queue-jumpers is
utterly dishonest. Wealthy people don't travel these perilous journeys.
They have other options for leaving.

The most consistent and shocking human rights abuses in modern Australia
occur in the refugee detention centres. In South Australia an
unaccompanied eight-year-old boy is entering his third month of detention.
The Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, refers to another deeply
traumatised little boy as "it" in television interviews.

The Government has consistently tried to dehumanise the refugees. This
follows a familiar historical pattern. If you dehumanise a group of people
in the public mind it is much easier to deny them their human rights
without generating a vast public outcry. Thus, in typically undemocratic
fashion, the media has been consistently denied access to the refugee
centres lest it actually report on the harrowing stories of these people
and, by humanising them, generate some sympathy for them.

But you know what – Muslims are human beings too. Even Afghani, Iraqi and
Iranian Muslims, and we have an obligation to respect their human dignity.

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