Policy of insane cruelty

By Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor, The Australian
May 16, 2002

PETER Costello's Budget, designed to secure him the prime ministership, was big on "border protection". But what does border protection actually buy us?

I wish you could meet Humam Al Abbady. All of 16 years old, a talented artist, he is a slightly built boy and darkly handsome. To look at him you'd say he's in the prime of life. Nature intended him to be worrying about the performance of his football team, his marks in school, a future career.

Instead, the systematic and deliberate cruelty of the Howard Government's asylum-seeker policies have driven Humam to the brink of suicide and despair.

I met Humam on Tuesday at Cumberland Psychiatric Hospital at Westmead in Sydney's west. He was there because of his third suicide attempt.

Humam has been dealt a pretty rough hand by life, though nothing as rough as since he came to Australia as a 13-year-old. Humam was born a Shia Muslim in Iraq, where the Shias are a despised minority. His uncle was murdered by the Iraqi security forces, two of his first cousins disappeared. His aunt was arrested, stripped and beaten. Humam's father was twice taken into custody and assaulted and Iraqi security personnel routinely looted his shop.

All this is accepted as fact by the refugee tribunal. However, according to the tribunal Humam's father did not have a well-grounded fear of persecution. Here the reasoning is exquisite. According to the judgment, the Iraqis are very expert at persecution so if they had been planning to persecute Humam's father they would have done so, rather than leaving him at large. On the basis of this logic presumably you have to be actually dead before you qualify as a refugee.

However, the tribunal decided that the act of applying to become refugees meant the family could not be sent back to Iraq because they would certainly be persecuted now.

But, because in their flight they had spent time in Syria they could go back there. Therefore they are not refugees. Syria, with its own appalling human rights record and growing restrictions on Iraqis, will not accept them back so now they are in a wretched no-man's land, in which they must dwell for as long as it suits the pleasure of the Howard Government.

Humam, his brothers and sisters and parents have been in detention almost three years, in Western Australia and now at Villawood. During their time in detention they have been involved in numerous incidents of which, of course, there are various versions. But I would ask anyone with teenage sons to imagine how they might react to year after relentless year of cruel and degrading confinement.

Their treatment has certainly been cruel and degrading. At one point Humam's mother was put in solitary confinement with his young brother and sister. Humam has endured spells of solitary confinement, trapped in a freezing, lightless room, without even a toilet, only a plastic bag to receive his waste.

Humam's family has been several times split up in detention, at one point all the older members of the family being sent away for punitive purposes and no one left to look after the little boy and little girl, then aged six.

At another stage last year Humam was sentenced to a couple of weeks in jail because of his involvement in a riot. The magistrate, Stephen Vose, said he couldn't understand why the children were in detention anyway and commented: "If you have young teenage males locked up in jail, because rest assured that's what this is, for an indefinite and substantial period of time it is inevitable that you are going to have serious outbursts of bad behaviour. These boys will spend a substantial period of their youth in jail for nothing . . . The whole process is flawed from the start."

Humam agrees with the magistrate: "Jail was much better than detention. There was much more respect from the guards, better food, better activities."

IN the little hospital room where I talked to Humam was an obviously accomplished portrait he had painted of a friend. Why would this innocent boy try to kill himself?

"I just tried to finish my life. I got bored of my life in the detention centre. They steal something which is mine, which is my freedom.

"People who have killed themselves is because their patience and their strength is all gone. Even myself starts to hate me. I say to myself I don't want to live with you.

"I talk to some Australian friends, people my own age. I say the chance in this life is all for you. I just don't have chance in this life."

In the psychiatric hospital Humam was under the eye of two security guards. The other patients there said to him he must have done something incredibly bad to warrant that.

"No," he said, "I'm just a refugee."

A couple of hours after we finished speaking Humam was taken back to the Villawood Detention Centre, although a doctor had told him and his friends that this would certainly not happen because the danger to his life was so great.

Within the Government, if small-l Liberals are inclined to speak out about the gross inhumanity of Australia's treatment of children in detention they are quickly rounded up by the Prime Minister or his minders and told to keep quiet.

The ABC, which revealed some of the shocking truth about conditions in the detention centres, was subject to a sustained campaign of intimidation by the Government to try to keep it quiet.

If Humam dies while under Australian care it will be the fault of the determined, vicious cruelty of the border protection policy.

This quiet, gentle lad could make a real contribution to Australia. It is insane that he is treated as he is.