Human Cargo (20 page)

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SHAYAN’S STORY HAD
pitted the Australian medical profession sharply against the government. Doctors realized that whatever treatment they might offer their patients was meaningless unless they were removed from the environment causing the trauma. At no time in the past, not even over the “lost generation,” the children stolen from the Aborigines, had the suffering of children been so starkly juxtaposed against political indifference. A Professional Alliance for the Health of Asylum Seekers and Their Children was set up, bringing together 50,000 doctors and health workers from across the country—the largest alliance ever formed on a single social issue in Australia’s history. Drawing on earlier studies from the concentration camps of the Boer War and the Nazi years, and on comparable detention center reports from the United States and various parts of Europe, they began to submit evidence, draft appeals, and draw up statements. Shayan was not the only child to stop eating and become mute. Elsewhere in other parts of Australia, it now emerged that other children in detention had become anxious, anorexic, and agitated; they were wetting their beds and walking in their sleep. One small girl was described as wetting herself every time she saw a guard. Mothers reported aggressive and violent behavior in otherwise placid children. One, anxious about the failure of her newborn baby to thrive as it should, was reported as saying: “I am afraid that she takes in my unhappiness from my milk.” A young boy, deciding that he wished to die, was found digging his own grave. Another, asked why he had burned his hand with a lighted cigarette, replied: “Because I can’t feel anything.”

I could only talk to Shayan’s parents and not to Shayan himself; he was too wary and too young to speak to strangers. It was from Morteza, another young Iranian already in Woomera when Shayan first arrived, that I heard at first hand what it is like to be a child in the Australian camps. Morteza spent three years and eleven months
as a detainee, from early 2000 to his release—as a recognized refugee—on November 20, 2003. He was sixteen when he first saw Woomera. He was flying in low over the desert, after a terrifying and stormy journey by boat with smugglers, and he thought: “Where are we going? There is nothing there.” He was right. Woomera had not yet been completed, and the first detainees lived in huts as the razor wire went up around them. There were soon 150 children in the camp, the youngest a newborn baby.

Morteza had been there about five months when the 1,500 detainees, who had had no contact with the outside world for a long time, asked for a mobile phone to be brought in so that they could call their families. What started as a peaceful demonstration turned rapidly into agitated confrontations with the guards; tear gas was used; the detainees fought back; the ringleaders were taken to the punishment block. It was Morteza’s first experience of violence, and he joined the ranks of the protestors. His younger sister, Mena, was by now so depressed that she became incontinent and barely spoke; his younger brother, Hussein, was growing thinner all the time. The months passed and the family seemed to have been forgotten. The riots multiplied. There was a breakout and Morteza was among those who got as far as the town of Woomera itself, after which concessions were made concerning phones and the pace of the processing interviews. There were even some releases, but not of Morteza and his family. At some point during this period, Morteza tried to hang himself; later, he joined others on hunger strike; later again, he slashed his wrists with a razor blade. In the right-wing press, those who tried to kill themselves were labeled crazed, selfish, and manipulative.

In January 2001, the family, the two younger children very troubled, was moved to Port Hedland. By now Mena was writing in her diary: “If suicide were not a sin in my religion, I would have done it already.” One day, Morteza and Hussein watched as a Turkish detainee took out a razor blade and began to cut from his neck downward, across his chest, his hand and arms and stomach. It was his third suicide attempt. Hussein, says Morteza, had a peculiar smile
on his face. That night the little boy began to cry and couldn’t stop. He started to wet himself and to stutter. “Please God,” wrote Mena in her diary, “if you want to finish my life, finish it quickly.” In Woomera there had been two girls her own age; in Port Hedland, she had no friend. Morteza spent his time with older boys. One night, trying to prevent his father being taken away by the guards to another compound, he was knocked to the ground and beaten with batons. There were more riots; some of the huts were burned down.

On May 21, 2001, the family, having had its application for asylum turned down at every stage, was sent to Villawood. In a friend’s room one day, the young men discussed what new tactic they could try; someone suggested sewing up their lips. The three boys did it to one another, carefully pulling the thread through; it caused surprisingly little pain, Morteza remembers, though it hurt a lot when the blood had dried. His mother fainted when she saw him. He agreed to take the stitches out when the family was promised bridging visas in the community. The visas did not come through, and Morteza spent the next nine months under observation, a guard checking on him every two minutes for the first three months. Even so, when it became clear that the promises about the visa had been false, he tried to kill himself by swallowing an entire bottle of shampoo while in the shower.

In May 2002, his parents decided that they could take no more. They had spent $32,000 trying to make a new life in Australia, and had failed. Morteza’s mother seemed to be aging very quickly, and neither his younger brother or sister was thriving. They agreed to return to Iran. For Morteza, the decision was more complicated. As with Shayan, a smuggled videotape had been put out on television, showing him being beaten by guards, and his case had received much publicity. His father did not think it safe for him to go home. What was more, he had converted to Christianity. And so his parents flew home to Teheran, and Morteza spent another eleven months in detention, ticking off the days one by one on a calendar on his door, before he, like Shayan, was perceived to be a genuine refugee after all, in a way that he had not been three years and
eleven months before. He is now living in Sydney, on a three-year temporary protection visa, a friendly, almost jaunty young man of twenty, his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. If he is extremely lucky, his visa will be renewed. But there is no way, as things stand, of seeing his parents, for if he leaves Australia, he will not be able to return. “I look at guys my age and think: I have lost my family. I lost four years of my life. No education, no training. It is like a movie: the action freezes, then starts again. I think: what a terrible waste.”

Zachary Steel is a psychologist, working for the school of psychiatry at the University of New South Wales, Soon after mandatory detention for asylum seekers was introduced in 1992, he began to explore the possibility of investigating the mental health of the new detainees. Wherever he turned, he was blocked by the authorities. It was not until almost ten years later, in the wake of the
Tampa
and its repercussions, that he was able to start drawing together separate strands of research, joining forces with Derrick Silove, a psychiatrist from South Africa, whose interest had been kindled as a medical student doing autopsies on political prisoners who bore the marks of torture, and with Aamer Sultan, a physician who had fled persecution in Iraq and was a detainee himself in Villawood. Over eighteen months, Dr. Sultan, who had become a confidant and counselor to his fellow inmates, had watched their mental health deteriorate. It was with his help that the camera had been smuggled into Villawood to picture the listless Shayan lying in his father’s arms.

Gathering information where they could, these doctors, psychologists, counselors, and therapists throughout Australia put together an alarming but altogether convincing picture. The asylum seekers, they observed, were arriving with backgrounds of torture, violence, grief, and extreme fear, and were thus at great risk for psychological trauma. They believed that the Australians would treat them kindly and with sympathy. Instead, they entered a world of horror and indifference, in which they were confined, seemingly indefinitely, behind rows of razor wire, with multiple daily musters and head counts, sometimes in the middle of the night; they were subjected to
a constant barrage of orders over the loudspeaker system that they could not understand; they were handled harshly and moved suddenly, without warning, from one camp to another, in handcuffs. Referred to by the guards by number rather than by name, they were subjected to room searches and solitary confinement. They witnessed violence and self-mutilation; their guards wore riot gear, and there were periods when they were locked up for a long time in their rooms, denied access to the phone, to mail, or to visitors. As it became clear to them that their futures depended on the credibility of their claims, and on how well they handled their interviews, they became highly anxious about what to say, particularly as, like asylum seekers all over the world faced by immigration interviews, they felt confused and uncertain about their memories. Many, believing that they would be judged by how they were behaving in detention, were unsure of their every move.

In this new world, so different from the one they had expected to find, the asylum seekers, as Dr. Steel and his colleagues noted, behaved in a number of characteristic ways. Their initial shock and dismay were replaced, when they received news that the immigration authorities had turned down their first applications, or simply when months had passed with no news of a result, by guilt about the people they had left behind, by depression, and sometimes by aggressive and confrontational behavior. Many had arrived in Australia already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and the symptoms most commonly associated with this illness began to emerge: extreme anxiety, sleeplessness, fear of others. Some never left their rooms; others slept by day and paced by night. Rejection by the Refugee Review Tribunal usually comes between six and eighteen months after arrival. At this point, acute depression was common, with feelings of doom and self-obsession, paranoia, hallucinations, sometimes even repetitive rocking and aimless wandering. The rate of suicide among detainees was ten times that of the normal population.

Papers and reports of these findings began to appear. One study, described in a keynote speech delivered by Dr. Steel and his colleagues
before the Congress of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in May 2003, concerned ten families, consisting of fourteen adults and twenty-two children between the ages of three and nineteen, with an average stay in detention of two years and four months. Using a wide battery of internationally accepted tests and criteria, the doctors found that a third of the adults had resorted to some form of self-harm; that every adult could be diagnosed as suffering from a depressive disorder; that all the children showed signs of at least one psychiatric disorder, and 86 percent of them had multiple disorders. More than half the children spoke of killing themselves. Five had slashed their wrists or banged their head violently against a wall.

Another study, carried out by Dr. Sultan in Villawood, looked at thirty-three detainees, twenty-eight of them men, the other five women. All had been inside at least nine months. Nineteen, Dr. Sultan discovered, had arrived in Australia having been tortured, and nine had seen relations murdered or disappeared. In Villawood, all but one reported sleep disturbances, nightmares, loss of libido. Nineteen were on anti-depressants. Thirteen suffered from paranoid delusions; thirteen had begun to stutter; twenty-three admitted to suicidal thoughts. All spoke of feeling helpless and despairing and of being unable to concentrate or to remember simple things. It was clear to Dr. Sultan that there was a strong degree of correlation between length of time spent in detention—waiting to hear, not knowing what would happen—and the level of distress and disturbance. It should be noted that it is not unusual, under Australia’s current policy, to wait two years for news; some people have been in detention for over five years.

When I met Zachary Steel, his verdict on the system was clear. “I simply no longer believe,” he said, “that it is possible for anyone to be kept in this kind of environment of coercive control, threat, uncertainty and fear without developing severe psychiatric consequences. Detention of this kind is a situation that cannot be rendered meaningful by anything. Even political prisoners, kept in similar circumstances, know why they are there. The asylum seekers
know that they are innocent people, and no aspect of the current structure has any care or compassion. On the contrary they feel that they are hated, and that the authorities will do everything in their power to return them back to where they fled from.”

It has long ceased to be a source of surprise to Dr. Steel when he hears that teenagers in one center have sewn up their lips, or that young men in another have gone on hunger strike. Morteza’s repeated attempts to hurt and kill himself are familiar symptoms. The culture of self-harm has become so prevalent in the detention centers that it is impossible to prevent people from mutilating themselves.

When the first studies appeared, Dr. Steel assumed that action would follow. Instead, the Department of Immigration announced that it was not aware of any “independent” scientific or rigorous research to “support claims that mental illness is endemic among detainees held in immigration detention.” Psychiatrists and other doctors redoubled their efforts to produce more research, in the process putting Australia at the forefront of current medical knowledge of the effects of detention on asylum seekers. The Department of Immigration labeled the work flawed and full of preconceptions, and Ruddock declared that it was far from certain, in his view, that you could in fact “regard depression as a mental illness.” And so it has continued, says Dr. Steel: more research and more rebuttals, at times accompanied by personal attacks on the researchers. It makes him feel that he was once very naive. It is true, as he acknowledges, that efforts have been made to get children out of the centers and into the community, and that under Amanda Vanstone the numbers remaining behind the razor wire have dropped substantially.
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His protests, and those of his colleagues, achieved at least this. But, as he sees it, the adult detainees who remain are getting sicker and sicker. It is a tenet of psychiatry that past traumas, dealt with in safety, can be mitigated and eased. In detention centers, they are only exacerbated. The environment, far from curing the pathology, is both creating
and perpetuating it. “The trauma,” Dr. Steel has written, “is not past, but present, and extends indefinitely into the future.” His words have a forlorn air: “Our ethics require us to prevent what harm we can and to document what we cannot prevent.”