Authors: Caroline Moorehead
The
Tampa
was not, however, the end of the story. For a while at least, before Australia’s message of deterrence spread, boats kept on arriving, and the navy went on turning them away, without taking time to discover whether they contained genuine refugees. Between September and November 2001, thirteen Indonesian boats filled with asylum seekers tried and failed to reach Australia. Four were intercepted and sent back. One sank. Of the remaining eight, either unseaworthy or actually sinking, all were intercepted and their human cargo transported to Nauru or Manus Island. Those who tried to influence or restrain Howard—the United Nations; a number of lawyers, politicians, and commentators—achieved almost nothing. There was a moment’s pause, when the Australian government ill— advisedly released photographs purporting to show parents throwing their children overboard from an Indonesian boat, in order, so it was claimed, to blackmail Australia into accepting them. The asylum seekers, it was suggested, were not human beings with the same values as ordinary Australians, since they were capable of treating their children this way. (Howard appeared on television saying that the kind of people who threw their children overboard were not the sort of people Australia wanted.) But the pictures were later shown to be misleading. The children had indeed been thrown in the water, but only because their boat was sinking. And there was a further, heart-rending pause when a boat code-named
SIEV-X
sank, drowning 353 asylum seekers; the forty-six survivors later described how their boat had broken up in high seas, how they had floundered in the water, swallowing the fuel that flowed from the boat, how they had watched those who could not swim struggle desperately before slipping underneath the waves. A young mother called Sundous lost her three daughters, Emaan, Zahra, and Fatima. Another, Ronkayya Satta, saw first her five-year-old daughter, Kawthar, stepped on in the frenzy to leave the sinking boat and drowned; her second daughter, Alya, who was two, slipped out of her arms. A woman who had just given birth was seen drifting away, one survivor later recalled to
David Marr and Marian Wilkinson for their excellent book
Dark Victory
, her baby attached by the umbilical cord. Wherever you looked, you saw “dead children like birds floating on the water.”
It was hard to imagine that things could get worse, but they did. September 11 had now put terrorism at the front of all political agendas, and Peter Reith, Australia’s defense minister, was able to point out that unauthorized boats could well become a “pipeline for terrorists.” When election day came, Howard swept to victory. Tough border protection, Operation Relex, September 11, the destruction of the One Nation party, and the new Pacific Solution had among them proved a vote-winning formula, though the country had been polarized as never before. Neither the Australian judiciary, nor the refugee advocates, nor the human rights campaigners, nor the many ordinary Australians who had raised their voices against Canberra’s overbearing directives, had been able to do much.
*
What Ruddock repeated, and what Amanda Vanstone, his successor, repeats, is that Australia’s resettlement package is generous and that countries whose national policy is to accept fewer refugees are ill-placed to be so critical. The Liberal government said, and continues to say, with some reason, that steps must be taken to formulate coherent asylum policies that actually work, and that first among them is the need to end the vast and lucrative trade in smuggled people, which can only be done if smugglers are shown not to be able to deliver what they promise.
Australia’s new policies had not, of course, come cheap. Between August 2001 and the middle of 2003, Australia was said to have spent $500 million on its Pacific Solution. But it had, in a very practical way, worked. Punishment and deterrence had born fruit. Only three boats arrived in the next three years. The question, people were left asking, was at what moral cost this success had been achieved. What had it all done to Australia itself? And how does one justify locking up people who have broken no laws?
• • •
ONE OTHER EVENT,
which made little stir at the time, grew later to challenge the whole spirit of mandatory detention as nothing had before. It is the story of an Iranian boy called Shayan. I met Shayan, who is now nine, in a park in Parramatta, a suburb just outside Sydney. He is tall for his age, very thin, with mouse-brown hair cut short. He would look much like any other nine-year-old, fit and brown from the Australian sun, except for the extreme wariness of his expression, which makes him look rather like a startled young animal, and the way he sits, or stands, extremely close to his parents, stirring when they stir, watching their faces. Saeed and Zahra, Shayan’s father and stepmother, drove me to the edge of a small lake in the middle of Parramatta’s green and tropical park, and there in the sunshine, looking out across the water, while Shayan was persuaded to sit in the car very close by and listen to music, they told me his story.
Saeed is a computer technician, a Kurd who belongs to an Islamic sect, Al Hagh, regarded in Shiite Iran as heretical. He married young, and unhappily, and his wife soon left him, yielding him custody of their only child, Shayan. Saeed remarried a Shia Arab, Zahra, who converted to the Al Hagh faith. In 1999, Saeed became involved in student protests at his university, and though he was not among the many to be arrested, he was already marked down by the police for his religion, and for the fact that he had converted a Muslim, a serious offense under Sharia law. The family fled, arriving in Australia on an Indonesian fishing boat in March 2000. Shayan was almost five and, according to his father, liked watching the flying fish; he was bright, intensely curious, and regarded Zahra as his mother, having scarcely known his own. Zahra was pregnant.
In keeping with the immigration policy then current, the family was taken into detention and sent to Woomera until its application for asylum could be processed. There were at this time about five hundred refugee children in detention in Australia. The family had been in the camp less than a week when a riot broke out among a group of detainees who had been allowed no contact with the outside
world for over three months. A fence was torn down. Guards in riot gear used tear gas and batons to restore order. Shayan watched. Later, he asked his father to explain what had happened. “I had no answer,” says Saeed. “I didn’t know what to say.” Soon afterward, a detainee driven beyond endurance broke a bottle and held it to his heart, threatening to kill himself unless he received some kind of response from the Australian authorities. Shayan watched this, too. “Gradually,” says Zahra, “we were becoming scared about him. He didn’t seem to want to play with the other children, and he seemed easily frightened.” It was at about this time, she says, that Shayan started having nightmares and wetting his bed.
Woomera, by all accounts, was a desperate place; it was hot and crowded, and when it rained the dust and sand turned to mud. By the spring of 2000, violence had become common. The atmosphere was tense and wretched. One day, a young Iranian climbed to the top of a tree and said that he would jump to his death. There were endless fights between guards and inmates. Fires were lit. Guards often wore riot gear. Shayan watched.
The center was divided into various compounds. Sierra, a little to one side, was the punishment block, in which unruly people were placed in solitary
7
confinement. When a batch of new arrivals was due, Shayan and his family were moved into Sierra to make room for them. This seemed to frighten Shayan out of all proportion: he believed that only “bad” people were sent to Sierra. Apart from his new baby sister, Shubnam, he was the only child in the punishment compound. He refused to eat, saying to his father: “You eat my food. It will make you strong to fight off the guards when they attack us.”
After eleven months, it was clear to everyone that Shayan had become extremely disturbed. Doctors diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder, and in his report to the authorities, Wayne Lynch, a counselor who had taken an interest in the family, listed “bed-wetting, nightmares, anorexia, insomnia, fearfulness” among his symptoms. Shayan was now six. On March 3, 2001, the family was transferred to Villawood on the edge of Sydney, a detention center generally regarded as calmer and better for children. By now
they knew not only that they had been turned down as refugees by the immigration authorities on their first interview, but that their appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal had failed as well. They were running out of options: only the High Court and a direct ministerial appeal remained.
Villawood proved no easier for Shayan. In fact, he quickly grew worse. He witnessed more violence, more self-mutilation, other suicide attempts. He was taken for observation to Westmead Hospital, where a consultant psychologist, Dr. Timothy Hannan, warned of the consequences of returning Shayan behind bars. His disorder was becoming chronic, he told the Australian authorities, and each return to detention would trigger again all his symptoms. Shayan was sent back to Villawood. On April 30, he watched a detainee cut his wrists and bleed heavily. He stopped eating and drinking; soon he refused to speak. He was taken back to Westmead.
Under Section 417 of the Migration Act, Ruddock had the power to release the family on humanitarian grounds. An application, by lawyers and doctors, was presented: Ruddock turned it down. Shayan went back to Villawood. “For the next forty-five days, he would not eat or drink or talk,” explains Zahra. She speaks excellent English and is a gentle and quiet young woman. Saeed, whose English is less fluent, leaves the talking to her; he is a slight, short man, with receding hair and a small mustache. Like his wife, he is soft-spoken. “Every four days, they took him back to Westmead and put tubes down his throat and his nose. Then twenty-four hours later, they sent him back.” Shayan lost more weight and there were fears that his kidneys might be damaged. When in Villawood, he preferred to spend his days in bed. One day, as the guards were returning him from the hospital to the detention center, he managed to slip away. They chased him, and as he ran, he shouted: “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back.”
Shayan’s case was now beginning to attract attention in the medical and legal worlds. Psychiatrists were writing reports and letters to the immigration authorities. Shayan, they warned, was “acutely traumatized.” In August, a video camera was smuggled into Villawood
and on the thirteenth—less than two weeks before the
Tampa
rescue—a national news show put out a film showing Shayan lying in Saeed’s arms, limp and apparently lifeless. Again, Ruddock could have acted. Instead, he let it be understood, speaking on a news program, that there was more to the family’s story than met the eye, and that the fact that Zahra was Shayan’s stepmother was in some way significant. On four separate occasions, he called Shayan “it.” Challenged as to why he was not prepared to show more compassion, Ruddock said that he could not make exceptions to government policy. Were he to let Shayan and his family in, would other families claiming mental illness in their children not demand the same? The Melbourne
Herald Sun
and the Sydney
Daily Telegraph
both carried stories hostile to Saeed, accusing him of having kidnapped Shayan and of deliberately starving him.
The family, nearly all legal avenues having failed, were told that they would almost certainly have to return to Iran. Meanwhile, Shayan could be fostered in the community. Saeed and Zahra hesitated. Doctors insisted that a child in so desperate a state needed above all to be with his parents, but they worried that keeping him in detention any longer might prove too dangerous: Shayan had by now witnessed three serious riots, four suicide attempts, many acts of self-mutilation, arson, fights, and the repeated humiliation of his parents. One day, while his parents, doctors, and authorities discussed what would be best for him, Saeed was led into another room in the hospital. Zahra remained with Shayan and Shubnam. She describes the scene: “Shayan was clinging on to me. A guard came up and said that they were
going
to take him. He began to pull him away from me. Shayan screamed: ‘Mum, help me.’ What could I do? They pulled him away and locked us in a room and took him away.”
For the next few months, Shayan lived with a Muslim family in the community. His parents and Shubnam were taken to visit him two to three times a week, for an hour, always with guards who stayed with them even when Zahra went to change the baby’s diaper. Their uniforms seemed to terrify Shayan. He was eating and
drinking again, but his foster parents noted that he clung to them all the time, that he could not sleep unless one of them sat with him, and that he was still wetting his bed. At night, he often screamed. After four months, Ruddock granted Zahra, Shayan, and Shubnam bridging visas, which meant that they could live in the community; but since bridging visas do not include financial support, they were forced to live on the charity of friends. Saeed stayed in Villawood for the next eight months.
In August 2002, the Federal Court having referred the case back to the Refugee Review Tribunal, Saeed and Zahra were found to be refugees after all, on the grounds that they would face persecution on account of Zahra’s conversion if they returned to Iran. Looking back over the long nightmare, Saeed asks: “If we are refugees now, why were we not refugees then?” He and Zahra took their case to the Human Rights and Equal Oppurtunity Commission, which found that their rights had indeed been seriously violated.
But Shayan sleeps little, has severe nightmares, and wets his bed. When he draws, he draws pictures of people behind bars. He has few friends his own age, saying that they do not know what it is like to have lived inside a prison, but he plays affectionately with Shubnam, who is now three. He will not watch children’s television but prefers to see the news, though when he sees people in uniform, he cries. For a while, Saeed and Zahra hoped that he would get better on his own, in the flat that they have been given on a Parramatta housing estate. But since he seemed to remain so depressed and so fearful, and his screaming fits continued, they agreed to put him on medication. Every week, he sees a psychiatrist, who has told them that Shayan may take a very long time to get over what he experienced and witnessed; and that, possibly, he never will. As for his parents, their difficulties are not over, either. They have been granted temporary protection visas, like all “unauthorized arrivals” who are recognized as genuine refugees. At some point in 2005, they will have to apply to have their visa renewed for a further three years, and it is not impossible that they will be turned down. If they judge it too dangerous to go back to Iran, too likely that one or the other
would be imprisoned or killed, then Shayam may once again find himself behind the razor wire.