Barbed-wire playground

Concern for the well-being of 582 child asylum seekers is bringing increased opposition to the policy that keeps them locked up. Tony Stephens tells some of their stories.


While the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, fought in Geneva this week to have Australia's hardline policy on refugees understood as part of a global problem, a growing number of Australians were fighting on the home front to help the asylum seekers in Australian detention centres.

In particular, the battle is for the children. Until quite recently, the defenceless and exposed children had been lost among the newspaper headlines and the political rhetoric. Now there is a growing focus on them.

Groups of people are springing up to visit the children, bearing gifts, encouraging them to draw pictures and to engage in other distractions from their debilitating existence behind barbed wire. The churches and other organisations are putting their hands up to help.

The latest available figures, from the end of November, showed there were 582 detained children, about a fifth of the total. Of the 582, 53 were unaccompanied minors.

Jacqueline Everitt, an advocate for asylum seekers who is working towards a master's degree in international law, says: "Some come on battered boats, others by air. Most children who arrive in Australia are part of a family unit. But sometimes they are alone, pushed into the hands of people smugglers by parents desperate to buy them a chance of safety in another land. Many arrive already seriously traumatised."

Many of the children have what Dr Aamer Sultan, an Iraqi detainee at Villawood detention centre, calls immigration detention stress syndrome. Sultan says the illness can lead to an almost catatonic depressive state.

Professor Louise Newman and Dr Michael Dudley, of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, told a conference on refugees last weekend that many of the children had witnessed trauma, torture and other horrors. Now they were seeing self-immolation, destructive behaviour and attempted suicides. The psychiatrists said conditions at the centres violated the United Nations convention on rights of the child.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is investigating present and past practices in the privately run detention centres. The commission is also investigating the question of Australia's adherence to international obligations, such as the convention on the rights of the child.

Everitt says: "Is there any other country prepared to lock up, open-endedly, children who have not been charged with any crime? These children, who have already suffered in their own country, who have made a frightening and perilous journey to get to Australia and are possibly already among the most traumatised of the world's children, have their trauma compounded by being taken to a forbidding place and locked behind the razor wire, their rights neatly incised.

"They are out of sight of the Australian people. If we don't see them, we don't know they're human. They can't be real.

"It's an irony that Australian law provides for mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse by professionals - and mandatory locking up of child asylum seekers. We call both these practices government policy. One protects, the other destroys.

"These children are suffering behind the wire at the hands of government policy. Just think of the wasted humanity."

CASE ONE

Zahraa Badraie, back behind the razor wire at Villawood after visiting her son Shayan, tells how hard it is to leave him in Hornsby. "He clings to us when our two hours are up and it is time to leave him," she says through an interpreter. "It is hard."

Zahraa and her husband, Mohammad Saeed Badraie, are heartened, however, by the fact that Shayan has grown stronger since moving in with members of the Iranian community.

Dr Aamer Sultan, the Iraqi who fled persecution in his home country after providing casualty medical care to Shi'ite Muslim rebels and who is detained at Villawood, says Shayan has witnessed his parents' helplessness and started to lose faith in them as a source of security.

A psychologist who sees Shayan says the boy now needs his parents' presence if his recovery is to continue. The problem is that he sees them only twice a week at Hornsby, for two hours each time, and in the presence of detention centre officers. Then the parents are driven back to Villawood with their three guards.

The Badraies are appealing to the Federal Court against the order to deport them. They fled Iran, claiming persecution, and arrived in Darwin in March last year, when Shayan was four years old. They were taken to Woomera, where Mrs Badraie gave birth to a daughter, Shubnam.

Staff, former staff and detainees say that Shayan witnessed in detention a number of events that would terrify adults - a detainee shutting himself in a room and setting fire to it, another threatening to slash his chest with glass, a third threatening to jump from a tree. They say he saw self-immolation and the use of tear gas and water cannons.

The Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, has denied that Shayan witnessed such events.

In any case, the boy stopped eating and drinking and became mute. He was hospitalised eight times. Staff at the New Children's Hospital, Westmead, diagnosed him as suffering "acute or chronic post-traumatic stress disorder", developed "in the context of a physically restraining environment" in detention.

The hospital recommended a more normal environment and that he should remain with his family.

His parents decided, however, that the boy had a better chance of recovering his health away from Villawood.

CASE TWO

Reports this week suggest an Afghan child as young as seven years is being detained at Woomera, having been sent, unaccompanied, by a relative who thought it the best way to give the child a chance of a future. Another resident is a girl of 15, whom we'll call Qamar.

She wears a hand-embroidered headscarf and spends her time with her brother, aged 11. The children are orphans.

Their mother died some time ago and their father was taken by the Taliban. They believe he is dead. The brother and sister had been living with grandparents, who feared for their lives and futures and decided to get the children to safety. The grandparents handed the children, with money, to people smugglers. The children had no idea where they were going.

Jacqueline Everitt, an advocate for asylum seekers, says: "When they arrived in Australia they had one interview with the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. After this, each morning this girl would dress carefully and wait to be called for another interview like all the other people. But she and her brother were never called. They hadn't said the magic words, 'I was subjected to convention-based persecution in my own country, I have a great fear of returning, I am seeking the protection of your country and I want a lawyer'."

Everitt says the children's applications are now being considered, after six months' wait.

A tearful Qamar told Everitt she was desperately worried. Her grandparents' last words as she and her brother left were: "We will try to raise the money and follow you, so we can take care of you in Australia."

Qamar had heard that a boat had sunk and she was certain her grandparents had drowned. She had no way of finding out if they were still in Afghanistan. She sobs in bed every night, while trying to comfort her brother.

CASE THREE

A boy of 16 in Port Hedland left Rwanda because of the war between his Hutu people and the Tutsis, which ended in the genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and the slaying of thousands of moderate Hutus. We'll call him Benjamin.

"In 1990 the Tutsis came to our village and burned our house, killing my parents," Benjamin has written in English. "We [he has, or had, a twin sister] survived because we were with our grandmother but we saw what happened.

"We fled to another village and lived with our grandmother until she died. Then we heard the Tutsis were approaching. We were afraid that, if they caught us, they would kill us.

"Together with some other young people, we asked an old person, who had a truck

and was travelling to Mozambique often, to save us."

Benjamin got his lift. His twin sister did not. "I don't know her whereabouts," he says. "Last I saw her in Mozambique."

His application for asylum is being heard.

CASE FOUR

Hossein Avesta, his wife Susan and their children, Parviz and Shana, fled political persecution in Iran. They arrived on Christmas Island in November 1999. "The whole family had great hope and felt great happiness that we were finally free from danger," Avesta says in an affidavit still to be sworn.

They were taken to Curtin detention centre. "The children were shocked at being sent to jail," Avesta says. "They didn't understand. Susan and I tried to reassure them that everything would be all right."

Parviz was then 15 and Shana 13. And, the Avestas maintain, everything was far from all right. Hossein's affidavit and another from Shana claim they had to wear the same clothes for two months, washing and wearing them wet until they dried. They say the family was separated. Parviz and Shana joined a hunger strike.

"Parviz has been very depressed and his hands shake constantly," the father says. "He no longer associates with other people his age and spends most of his time alone in his room ... Shana lost about 11 kilos and is still very weak.

"Our children have both changed completely in the last two years. Before we came, they were bright, intelligent and active. In Australia my children have forgotten how to laugh and forgotten how to smile."

Shana says: "I believe in Jesus and pray to him every day and night. I don't want this life where there is no meaning for love, care, peace, Jesus and God."

The Avestas are appealing to the Federal Court against their rejection.

CASE FIVE

Afnan Al-Abaddy this week drew pictures of two different girls. One stands under a cloud, with rain falling about her. The other, who is blonde, stands under a shining sun.

Afnan, an Iraqi asylum seeker who lives at the Villawood detention centre, wants to send her drawings to her father, who is in jail in Western Australia.

It would be wrong to read too much into Afnan's work of art. She is, after all, only six. It is clear, however, that one of her pictured girls is having fun. The other isn't.

When would she get out of the detention centre? Afnan shrugs, and dashes off to draw some more.

Humam, her 15-year-old brother who is also in Villawood, has a book in which he draws. At one end are romantic drawings of young couples. At the other, grim depictions of people in jail, of giant fists of authority bearing down on groups of detained people, of limbs entangled in barbed wire and hanging bodies. Another drawing shows a bird in a cage, with two other birds on a nearby branch.

"That's me," Humam says, pointing to the bird in the cage. "The other birds are my friends. They're free."

Where? "Oh, in Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand ..."

When would he be free? "Who knows? Never?"

Their father, Jasim Al-Abaddy, has written from Roebourne jail in Western Australia. The envelope carries his drawing of a hand, restrained by barbed wire, reaching towards a group of candles which show human faces in the flames.

There's not much hope in these drawings. Yet Jasim has written a message in Arabic on the back of the envelope. It says: "Certainly the sun will rise."

Jasim was a tailor when he, his wife and six children fled Saddam Hussein's regime. The mother, Nahtha Al-Raheem, says they paid a people smuggler, whom most refugees call agents because they see them as saviours. Their boat landed at Christmas Island two years ago.

The Al-Abaddys spent five months at Curtin detention centre before moving to Port Hedland, from where Rami, the oldest son, escaped. While the parents were jailed for their parts in a riot, the four youngest children were sent to Villawood in June. Their mother joined them in September.

Their father has been charged with people smuggling. The family and their lawyers deny the charge and claim it arose from an argument over money.

The family's claims for refugee status have been rejected but, because Australia has no diplomatic relations with Iraq, they cannot be sent back. They have no idea where their future lies.

Nashwan, 17, who tried to look after the younger children while they were separated from both parents, says: "If I knew Australia would be like this, I would have taken my chance with Saddam Hussein's torture."

Dr Michael Dudley, senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of NSW, told a conference on refugees last weekend of his concern for the Al-Abaddy children and others in similar situations. He says they have witnessed or experienced deliberate self-harm, suicide attempts, beatings, the use of tear gas, water cannons and handcuffs. They endure multiple daily musters, nightly head counts and a persistent public address system.

Nashwan stitched his lips together during a protest at Port Hedland. Humam has twice threatened or attempted suicide. Dudley says: "The older boys have high levels of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. The younger ones want to scream and hide and suffer major separation anxiety."