Children Out Of Detention-

A person who becomes a refugee does not always come with the hope of a
better life, they come for survival, because they cannot continue to
live and be alive in the country they are fleeing from. It takes
desperate steps to leave in small boats to set off for a place that may
never let you stay, but none of that matters because you leave your
country for Freedom.

This quote is from Mai in "For the Love of a Child, Mai's Story",
by Khazmira Bashah, Winner in the "Australia IS Refugees" competition for school children.

Handful of people from 21st century
with tired hands
with broken hearts drained of life
pulling plastic bags along.
there is nothing inside but something to eat and drink
Staying in the queue for between 10 minutes or two hours
their worried hearts are full of pain caused by the government
They want to do something
They want to slap the policy maker in the face
They have hearts full of pain and eyes full of kindness
Old hands and young hands full of warmth
Shame and embarrassment visible in the pupils
They can't do anything just share a moment of their life and sadness
They can only make a party, talk, eat and drink
Where do we come from?
What is our nationality?
What religion are we?
Do we believe in God or not?
These questions don't matter.
They are people of the 21st century but they are still looking for
humanity and compassion.

by Mohsen - a Detainee at Villawood in Sydney, October 2002.

"...The ALP should abandon support for the Pacific Solution as a response to the refugee issue, and the use of detention centres as a punitive instrument of Australia's immigration policy. The first is an overbearing neo-colonial policy imposed on Australia's island neighbours. The administration of the second policy is an Australian disgrace. It punishes the victims of poverty and of tyrannical governments. No votes worth having are to be lost by by more humane administration of these centres, by speeding up processes and limiting the time for which people can be detained, perhaps on the British model of day-release schemes. The Immigration Department should be made to pull its finger out.

"..This is an issue on which the ALP should clearly distinguish its position from the opportunistic policies framed by comfortable WASP-ish lawyers in the present government....."

"...The problem of refugees is not going to go away . It will only be resolved by international agreement, in which, one hopes, rigorous and more humane standards are set. Labor should commit itself to supporting the best of these standards, not the worst. ...."

Excerpts from "Beyond Belief: The Future of the ALP"
By former Labor Senator John Button
Quarterly Essay Issue 6 (May) 2002, p 73
Publisher: Black Inc
ISBN: 1863951474

Read nurse M-J's first-hand account of Woomera
Witnessed the guard making a detainee beg for soap. No English did this woman speak, she had learnt the word soap from someone. To the guard she said, "soap". The soap was proffered and withdrawn when she reached for it, again and again until she said please.

From a Laos jail to Woomera: a very short step

I was deeply disturbed finally to come home from spending almost a year held hostage in a dirty Laos jail to find the communist "brain washing" we were subjected to on a daily basis was perhaps not totally inaccurate.

We were told repeatedly the benefits of communism, the party and politics. When I found myself asking "why does the Australian Government make a deal with the devil that urges me to sign a confession of guilt?", the commander of the prison asked me what was the difference between Australia and Laos, between democracy and communism? I had to tell him that I really didn't know except that maybe one is a little more transparent, that being communism.

Now I am even more confused when I see the refugees at Woomera and I feel the chills run down my spine like a terrible case of deja-vue.

The UN are visiting only because the people force them. How lucky we are to still have a little power, but how many suffer in Woomera whose stories we will never hear before they are shipped off?

A facelift for Woomera? It sounds like something Laos would do if the UN ever got the chance to inspect its prisons. Could it be true that Australians treat people like the communists treated us? Our government tells the people "the Woomera detainees" are suspected terrorists. The Lao Government told their people we were Mafia.

It's said if you treat people like animals then don't be surprised if they begin acting like animals. When I was in solitary confinement for two months, I paced my tiny cell like a tiger, and now I understand his torment.

I believe our country has a lot to be ashamed of if we do not treat people with human decency, as seems to be the case at Woomera. How can we set an example to the rest of the world if human rights are not upheld in our own country? How can we make others accountable if we are not accountable.

Why are our refugee camps worse than our prisons? In Laos, you can be held 12 months before going to court - a direct violation of the UN Declaration for Human Rights. How long have the Woomera detainees (prisoners) been held now? "Democracy" means little when you have no freedom.

Kay Danes, Brisbane

Letters, The Age, 25 May 2002.
Kay Danes spent time in a Laos Jail and was returned to Australia with the help of the Howard government.

Ruddock Speak

In writing about politics and the English language Orwell might have had Philip Ruddock in mind. On one occasion the minister was asked how he could justify continued detention of the family of a traumatised six-year-old boy who no longer ate or drank or spoke. He answered: "Well, I do look at these issues in the context of humanitarian considerations and there are a broad range of issues that I have to look at, firstly in terms of whether or not we give up a refugee place that could otherwise go, in this case, to four other people, whose circumstances would, I suspect, be far more compelling."

This is not an extreme version of Ruddock-speak. For him a broken child has suffered an "adverse impact"; people who go on hunger strike or sew their lips together are involved in "inappropriate behaviours"; refugees who flee to the West in terror are "queue jumpers"; those who live without hope in forlorn refugee camps are "safe and secure"; those who are dispatched to tropical prisons financed by Australia are part of the "Pacific Solution".

By teaching Australians to think and speak like this, the minister has gradually helped to reconcile a goodly part of the nation to the unspeakable cruelties enacted daily of the kind we were able to witness on Lateline last week.

Robert Manne, Associate professor of politics at La Trobe University.
Sydney Morning Herald, April 29 2002.

Shame on us all
What will you say when your grandchildren ask you: "Didn't you know that little children were kept behind razor-wire fences for two years or more?"
Hugh Mackay, Sydney Morning Herald, March 30 2002.

Grandparent's Day
My tears were for the hundreds of children in refugee concentration camps (for that is what they are) in Australia. These children are children too, with all the innocence, all the vulnerabilities, all the needs of the children I saw before me at Grandparent's Day. But these children are deemed different - by our government via their Act of Parliament.

The despair of some doctors who work inside these centres is palpable.
One wrote of his seven months in Woomera that: "This place truly must have one of the highest concentrations of human misery in the whole world. Never have I seen so many patients for whom I could do so little."

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, LATELINE
Broadcast March 19, 2002. Read the transcript.

Theres got to be a fairer, more humane way to treat these people.
Daniel Johns, Silverchair.

For Australian overseas travelers whove at any time proudly trumpeted our countrys legendary belief in the fair-go the internationally digested images of our governments inhumanity towards desperate, displaced people is more than a mere embarrassment. Its a betrayal.
Rob Hirst, Midnight Oil.

Its time to reclaim the heart of the nation and give asylum to those who qualify now.
Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil.

Quotes from artists appearing in Juice Magazine, Issue 111, March 2002. Read the full text.

Quote from a federal Immigration officer, reported in Sydney Morning Herald, March 13, 2002.

Self-harming behaviour
The official statistics provided to HREOC officers by ACM indicated the following incidents of self-harm occurred over a two week period:

Lip sewing: 5 children (one 14 year old sewed his lips twice)
Slashing: 3 children (the above child also slashed "freedom" into his forearm)
Ingestion of shampoo: 2 children
Attempted hanging: 1 child
Threats of self hurt: 13 children

This is a significant proportion of the total child population of 236 at the Centre. It would indicate that, not unsurprisingly, children are responding to the atmosphere of despair in which they live. It is self-evident that manifestations such as these are likely to permanently mark the psychological outlook of these children. HREOC officers in discussion with ACM found no evidence of parents encouraging children to engage in acts of self harm.

Interviews by HREOC officers with children produced many responses that indicated a propensity for self harm and suicidal thoughts.

Examples from three interviews:

Interview 1 (12 year old girl)
"I am getting crazy, I cut my hand. I can't talk to my mother. I can't talk to anyone and I am very tired. There is no solution for me - I just have to commit suicide - there is no choice."

Interview 2 (16 year old boy)
"Some of us, we not have anyone in here. What can we do except kill ourselves? If no-one help us, I kill myself. If I kill myself, at least I do something for the people."

Interview 3 (13 year old boy - quote from family member)
"We notice that while he sleeps he talks and screams: "fire, fire, fire", and jumps up from sleep in nightmares... We ask him to go and bring a book and he forgets about that and when he is walking he walks disordered and is not concentrating."

That children are suffering psychological trauma from these experiences would seem beyond doubt.

Mothers in Australia's detention centres cannot provide the sort of care and support to their children that we would take for granted in our community. They are, by definition, required to fit in with an institutional regime. They cannot prepare their children's food or decide when or how to feed their children. They are denied the opportunity to provide extra food and milk beyond set meal times, as most parents know is often necessary with young children. It has been reported that there is no baby food or formula provided at all in Woomera, and one mother who was having trouble breastfeeding was reportedly told to try reconstituted chicken stock.

Mothers, and fathers, cannot make the decisions we take for granted about children's sleeping arrangements; they are unable to provide a quiet and secure environment free of disturbance. Neither can they control what their children experience in the close confines of the detention centres or the relationships and values that the children are exposed to, especially if they are confined for months or even years.

Excerpt from Australia Day article by , Friday 25 January 2002.

If children were in the care of a parent who left them exposed to violence and did not provide adequate education or a place for safe play and development, we would remove those children and consider prosecuting the guardian. This is the condition of children in the Woomera Detention Centre.

The Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, is the guardian of about 50 unaccompanied children there. The remaining 240 children in Woomera who have a parent with them are little better off.

Mr Ruddock's policies make adequate parenting in immigration detention impossible. The harsh, dehumanising environment and the prolonged time in limbo undermines even the most resourceful. Asylum-seekers are already vulnerable and traumatised. Does any other country lock children and families behind walls of razor wire in the desert?

We recently visited children and families in Woomera and Villawood Detention Centres and saw their conditions of detention and the effects of these on children first-hand. At Woomera, people were introduced to us by number rather than their name. There was evidence of violence and despair in the filthy and blood-stained toilets the detainees use. There was not shade or a blade of grass in the compound, except the administration building.

Younger children asked us why there are no flowers in Australia. Keeping children in conditions akin to concentration camps is medically and morally wrong.

Dr Michael Dudley, Chair, Suicide Prevention Australia,
Dr Sarah Mares, Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, RANZCP,
Dr Fran Gale, Sydney, January 20.

Conditions in detention
Read eyewitness accounts and affidavits of the conditions under which we condemn detainees and their children to live.

Don't kick refugees just to score points
Politicians who demonise asylum seekers are playing with peoples lives.
By Ruud Lubbers, United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees and former Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
The Australian, Wednesday, 20 June 2001.

Child health specialists call for release of children and their families from Australian detention centres
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Paediatrics & Child Health Division.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Media Release, 17 August 2001.

Take a long look at the picture of that grieving lost child
(page 12, SMH, October 24 2001)
and ask whether he ought not be welcome here.
Welcome in our town? On our street? In our school? At our table?
Might he not be our child? Is he not our child?

Would our political leaders respond?
If they say that this is not the question,
that there are issues of policy which must be considered,
they might think about this:
that child is the only issue; always was, always will be.

LETTER TO THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Published October 26, 2001.