12 April 2013
Australia's Guantanamo isn't offshore: it's in Melbourne
While America's indefinite detention policy is kept at arm's reach from its citizens, the men, women and children that Australia keeps in legal limbo can be found in the perfectly ordinary suburb of Broadmeadows in Melbourne, writes Jeff Sparrow.
Indefinite detention is the worst form of torture. I am an innocent man. […] But if anyone believes that I have done anything wrong, I beg them to charge me with a crime, try me, and sentence me. If not, release me. Even a death sentence is better than this. Instead of a swift execution, we are being subjected to a cruel, slow, and cold-blooded death.
That's a man called Musa'ab al-Madhwani. It's a message smuggled from Guantanamo Bay, where detainees have embarked on a mass hunger strike.
Yet so deep has Australia descended into a moral abyss over refugees that the passage might equally have come from Melbourne and the eerily parallel struggle currently taking place there.
If the ... government does not release us, we ask that they kill us mercifully … [we] can't keep living like this. We are not in detention. We are in a cemetery.
The Fairfax papers yesterday reproduced that snippet from a document written by 27-hunger-striking detainees at the Broadmeadows detention centre.
The similarities are chilling - shamefully so.
There are 166 detainees still in indefinite detention at Gitmo, with no legal remedies available to them. In the public mind, Guantanamo looms as a prison designed for "the worst of the worst", so that anyone detained in it seems tainted by association. Yet many of the men remaining were simply low-level Taliban soldiers, often sold to the Americans for bounties.
A US government taskforce has already assessed nearly half of them for immediate release. Yes, that's right. The government has cleared them to leave. But they remain locked in cages because there's nowhere to send them - the US won't, for instance, send Yemeni prisoners home, apparently because they might subsequently be influenced by people hostile to America.
By refusing to eat, the detainees have embarked on the only form of protest available to those with nothing whatsoever to lose.
It's the same in Melbourne.
All 27 of the strikers in detention at Broadmeadows have been assessed as genuine refugees. That means that the Immigration Department acknowledges that they faced persecution in Sri Lanka. But they can't be allowed into the community because they have received adverse assessments from ASIO.
What do these assessments say? The refugees don't know. They are not permitted to see the accusations against them, nor can they appeal. Though they have been charged with no crime, they now face detention without end.
As Stephen Blanks, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told Fairfax:
It is absolutely unarguable that keeping these people in detention on national security grounds is one of the greatest injustices Australia has inflicted on individuals.
An 'adverse assessment' from ASIO sounds frightening. But what does it mean? Andrew Zammit quotes ASIO director-general David Irvine:
ASIO has, over the years, developed very careful processes that enable us to eventually make a predictive judgement as to whether this person might be a potential security risk to Australia, and the security here being defined in terms of section 4 of the ASIO Act. Someone who might be coming to Australia to conduct espionage, someone who might be coming to Australia to conduct an act of sabotage, someone who might be coming to Australia to conduct an act of terrorism, and so on. [Emphasis added.]
Think about that. These men (whom we know, remember, to be genuine refugees) must remain in custody forever, without trial or appeal, not on the basis of anything they have actually done, but on ASIO's prediction of what they might do in the future!
Most of us would scream blue murder if council allowed its parking inspectors to write tickets on the basis of 'predictive judgements'. Yet that's the basis on which we're confining refugees for years.
Furthermore, the notion that ASIO - of all people - should be blindly trusted in such matters will seem utterly extraordinary to anyone with the slightest knowledge of that organisation's dire history. Under the 30-year rule, you can read in the some of its earlier documents now in the national archives. Here is its 'predictive assessment' of the Vietnam moratorium and its leader, Jim Cairns:
Cairns' activities could lead, via civil, industrial and political unrest to the growth of elitism in every sphere, to the manipulation of people by demagogues, to the fascist cult of the personality, to the worship of force, and to the destruction of the democratic parliamentary system of government and its replacement by a form of collectivism ... That way lies anarchy and, in due course, left-wing fascism.
That might seem a document from another age, a bizarre screed by some anonymous right-wing zealot. Yet security forces operating with great power and little accountability are notoriously susceptible to going off the rails.
Remember, in 2007, Justice Adams found that, in the case of Sydney medical student Izhar Ul Haque, two ASIO operatives had "committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping at common law", and engaged in conduct that was "grossly improper" and that they knew was "unlawful".
Read the reports of how those particular ASIO agents behaved ("a gross breach of powers") and ask yourself how you would feel about people like that assessing whether you might commit a crime some time in the future!
But it gets worse. The hunger strikers are overwhelmingly Tamil. Last month, the UN condemned, for the second time in two years, ongoing human rights violations in Sri Lanka (despite efforts of the Australian government to water down the resolution). Human Rights Watch comments:
Since the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution at its March 2012 session calling for action, the Sri Lankan government has taken no significant steps to provide justice for victims of abuse and accountability for those responsible for war crimes and violations of human rights in the country. Instead, over the last year, the Sri Lankan government has continued its assault on civil society, human rights defenders and media.
And where do you suppose that ASIO obtains the information for its "predictive judgements"? Almost certainly, much of this "intelligence" comes from the Sri Lankan state: that is, the very people most implicated in the dirty war against Tamils.
This is the point that Hannah Arendt made about the refugees of the 1930s: the treatment they received was largely determined by their oppressors. "Those whom the persecutor had singled out as scum of the earth […] actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere," she wrote. The Tamils brutalised and deprived of their rights in Sri Lanka receive more of the same when they get to Australia, almost as if the Sri Lankan regime has outsourced its cruelty to an independent contractor.
Such is the Guantanamisation of refugee policy.
There is, however, one point at which the comparison breaks down. Citizens in the US at least have the excuse that Gitmo is located in Cuba, a long way from the everyday lives of mainstream Americans.
Here, by contrast, the men, women and children that we keep indefinitely detained can be found in the perfectly ordinary suburb of Broadmeadows.
In other words, when future generations ask us how we allowed our government to do this, we will not be able to say that we did not know.
Jeff Sparrow is editor of Overland literary journal. View his full profile here.
