Dave/Ross on Mon, 29 Apr 2002 14:14:01 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> A Lesson in Lip-Sewing |
A Lesson in Lip-Sewing "I'm prepared to keep my mouth shut, and my head down if you will just let us visit the detainees." I was talking to Mike Hughes, the Manager Designate at the Woomera Detention Centre, from whom Ross Parry and myself had been trying for four weeks (fulltime), to get permission to visit asylum seekers. "But you can't order me to shut up and to stay out both," I said. "You're asking me to pay for something that I'm not getting. So which is it going to be?" Mike had earlier told Ross that our emails were being read by "DIMA intelligence" and that they had to be cleaned up before we would be allowed into the Centre. "I don't want to see my name appearing in anything you write, and I don't want to be quoted on anything," he warned. I asked if they were reading my private mail as well, and he replied, "That's just the start of what they are doing." He went on, "I'm not telling you anything you can't work out for yourself. Certain places have paranoia about things here. A decision regarding your status can be made on the basis of anything that is seen, read, or heard." And then he added, "These decisions are all made in the interests of the detainees, you understand." Yeah, sure. When I challenged Mike about the illegality of anyone reading my private mail, he said, "There are organisations around -- government or otherwise -- who do those sort of things." I wasn't so upset that my own government (or 'otherwise') was illegally spying on me for no other reason than that I wanted to visit asylum seekers at a detention centre that only gets about two or three non-official visitors a week for the 250 people being held there. What really upset me was that I know I've said nothing in my mail that was either illegal or prejudicial to the security of Australia. What I have done is no worse than what many of the asylum seekers had done under the corrupt dictatorial governments of their homelands. I had dared to criticise the Howard Government, and some of its agencies. A whisper around to others who have attempted to work in the best interests of the detainees suggests that I may not be the only one who has been spied on, nor the first one who has been told that keeping your mouth shut is the primary requirement to get inside the Centre. It is generally agreed that, because of the extent of the corruption that exists at ACM and in the Department of Immigration, closed lips are an absolute essential. I was prepared to co-operate. But this morning I received yet another call from Mike. "I'm afraid I don't have any good news," he said, feigning sadness. "Your status is still under review on the grounds that it is alleged that you have had associations with demonstrators." Alleged my foot! I WAS a demonstrator, for Pete's sake. But what does that have to do with it? Mike went on, "What I can do," he said conspiratorially, "is to make arrangements for some of your friends to visit the detainees who have already requested visits from you. You just give me a list of your friends, and I'll fix things up for them." I had had enough of diplomacy. "What do you take me for?" I asked. "You've just told me that it only takes an allegation of association with a demonstrator for you to ban someone permanently from your little prison camp, and now you want me to give you a list of everyone associated with me?" A similar letter had been sent to me by my internet service provider a week earlier, stating that he had noted that I was sending mail out to quite a number of mailing lists, and asking for a statement from me on how I had obtained the names for those lists. The suggestion was that I may have been spamming these people. A strange request, considering that the mailing lists were relatively short, and that most of them were just yahoogroups, to which anyone can sign up. But I was also getting in-mail that was arriving in my email box with the "unread" button missing, showing that they had already been read... not many, but just a few, as though overlooked by a careless spy. Then there was the personal letter from my wife and the text of a newspaper article about myself from London. They went missing for more than a week, and when my wife suggested that maybe someone was intercepting our mail, they both dropped back into existence from cyberspace the next morning. There was just one problem: the dates on the letters. One was incorrect, and although they both carried dates from the previous week, my in-box recognised them as having just been sent that morning, and so they were filed incongruously amongst the current day's mail. Something similar happened on the 24th of April, when I wrote and emailed off an article explaining that I had information from inside the detention centre, that several detainees had been writing to Ross and myself, some as many as four times, even though we had not received any mail at the post office in Woomera for more than two weeks. Three hours after the article went out, a stack of mail from detainees, dating back for almost two weeks, arrived at the post office, which is practically across the street from the Centre. "You can't prove anything from that," Mike said. "Maybe they all just got around to writing to you today. Or maybe the same person wrote several letters in the same day and put different dates on each of them. They do that sort of thing sometimes." That was five days ago. But I said nothing about it. We were keeping our mouths shut, remember, in the hope that our status would be reconsidered. We had been assured that a decision would be forthcoming today, the 29th of April. I woke up this morning with high hopes of spending the day conversing with some of the many asylum seekers who have been aware of our presence in the "Refugee Embassy" bus outside of Woomera for the past month. We had given these people hope that they could be heard. At last our silence was going to be rewarded. But now it looks like I will be flat out filing complaints to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Human Rights and Opportunity Commission, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee... for starters. And, of course, there will be articles like this one. I would have preferred to offer the practical and more immediate comfort of a sympathetic ear, but that has been denied to both Ross and myself, and for no other reason than just that we happened to be the ones who turned up here over and over again asking for permission to visit. The official policy, you see, is that visitors are welcome at Woomera... but reality is that they are only welcome so long as they don't turn up. Anyone who does turn up, and especially if they are not easily turned away, is regarded with suspicion. Our expulsion means that the mouths of the detainees have been successfully shut once again. This is an enormous tragedy. But I do have to admit that there is a certain relief in having the thread taken out of my own sewn-up lips! They have told us to stay out, but, because or that totally unjustified decree, they can no longer tell us to shut up. We will now campaign to have the spying and lying stopped. Dave McKay and Ross Parry will be taking their mobile "Refugee Embassy" to Parliament House, Adelaide, at noon on Friday, to present a letter of thanks to the Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, for his Government's attempts to defend the rights of children being held in Woomera. This will be the first time that the pair have been away from Woomera since they started their "Embassy" vigil on Easter Monday. Phone: 0407-238805 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net