Coroner & Legal
Christmas Island asylum seekers desperate to escape hell
Imagine the following scenario: you are innocent of any crime, yet you are locked up behind rings of chain-link fences and razor wire.
You have been charged with no offence, yet you have no idea when you may be released and nor what fate awaits you when judgment is eventually passed.
You are thousands of kilometres from your family and loved ones (at least those who have survived the oppression and terror from whence you came) and you are reviled as some sort of menace to society simply for your very presence.
Welcome to Christmas Island, a remote rock off the Australian coast that will go down in the annals of our history as synonymous with the capacity of man to inflict injustice and deprivation on his fellow man.
Personally I feel considerable sympathy for the frustrations of the asylum seekers penned up there like cattle for months – sometimes years.
The violence and vandalism that has erupted in recent days may not be excusable but it is certainly understandable.
What drives people to the point where they will rise up against their captors in a fit of rage and destructive desperation, knowing full well that their actions may ultimately cost them their freedom and may preclude them from starting a new life in a land not ravaged by war and tyranny?
Just how forlorn and hopeless do you have to be to risk everything to draw attention to your plight and that of your fellow detainees?
There’s nowhere to run, there’s nowhere to hide, there’s damn few who care and you will be caught and punished, but still you rise up.
Why? Because despite the months under lock and key you still have dignity and humanity and refuse to be treated like an animal in a pen, cooped up indefinitely while you await an uncertain future.
The Christmas Island facility was originally built by the Howard government (“We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”) to hold 400 unauthorised arrivals and later expanded to cater for 800 detainees.
Today, there are some 3000 people crammed into this God-forsaken gulag, an island that ironically takes its name from one of the most holy days on the Christian calendar – a day on which we celebrate the birth of a man who taught compassion, sacrifice and tolerance and reached out a healing and helping hand to those cast aside.
What would Christ think of this island that bears his name?
What would he think of a society that locks up the innocent, that tries to bar the doors to the dispossessed and demonises those who are somehow “different”?
The radio shock jocks and the right-wing demagogues who use their newspaper columns to whip up fear and xenophobia often allege that these new arrivals will fail to assimilate into Australian society. Well, isn’t locking them up on Christmas Island a great start to fostering multiculturalism and a smooth integration into a new society? Not.
Instead of saying “g’day”, we dump our asylum seekers in cages for an indeterminate period and, when they get restive and uppity about being imprisoned without trial, we respond with tear gas, Tasers and “bean bag” bullets.
And these souls are not illegal immigrants, despite what the misinformed and angry minority would have you believe.
They have not arrived at Mascot airport on a tourist visa and quietly melted away while they try to build a new (false) Australian identity.
Rather, they have arrived on our shores seeking asylum.
And there is nothing illegal under either international or Australian law about arriving unannounced and requesting refugee status.
The only real crime in the events of recent days has been committed on behalf of the Australian people by successive governments.
Cheap and populist politics saw the Government decide nearly a year ago to suspend processing of visa applications by Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers, purportedly because of “changed circumstances” in the two countries.
This, coupled with the arrival of more potential refugees, has seen hundreds of asylum seekers relegated to limbo on an offshore detention facility that was created to exploit a legal loophole that the High Court has since closed. Equally cynical and exploitative politics has seen the arrival of hungry and desperate people on barely seaworthy fishing boats viewed with fear and enmity rather than a sense of fraternalism and generosity.
The Christmas Island facility needs to be closed and those detainees who are not considered an immediate security threat moved into mainland society on temporary visas while their claims are processed.
If our immigration and security agencies don’t consider an applicant fit for a residency visa, then fine, return them home after allowing the right of appeal.
But in the meantime, don’t treat them like criminals, for they are not.
Rather, many of them are victims and, under the existing punitive regime, all we are doing is continuing to persecute them for wanting better lives than the ones they left behind.