Brutality spurs desperate resistance in Australian immigration camps

26 January 2015. A World to Win News Service. In December 2014 more than 500 people at the Australian-run detention centre on Manus Island, part of the neighbouring country of Papua New Guinea (PNG), began a hunger strike. A number of the detainees sewed their lips together, others swallowed razor blades or toxic cleaning agents. A few combined these measures. On 24 January, witnesses say four men receiving medical treatment at the Darwin detention centre in Australia itself were forcibly returned to the Manus and Nairu centres. Videos sent by detainees to lawyers and the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) show that on 20 January guards in full riot gear stormed the centre attempting to break up the hunger strike. Some detainees were taken to a prison in Lorengau, also in Papua New Guinea. Fifty-eight of the strikers were reportedly beaten and are now being held in windowless cells. It has also been reported that four people have been sent to solitary confinement, including two witnesses to the beating death of 24 year old Reza Barato in February 2014. The Australian and PNG governments have praised security personnel for bringing the stand-off to an end. But detainees say they will continue their protest, and several men remain on hunger strike. The detainees are reportedly protesting against a PNG government plan to move 50 of them, who have received legal recognition of their refugee status, to Lorengau, the capital of Manus province. The Manus Island centre was the scene of deadly riots last February, when guards and local residents entered the facility and clashed with detainees. Barato was killed and at least 70 injured in the assault. The Manus Island centre is home to about 1,000 asylum seekers. "They believe their lives are in danger," Ian Rintoul, a spokesman for RAC said. "This is also upsetting other people [in the detention centre] who fear the same will happen to them." The detainees are said to be afraid that they will be attacked by local people if they are moved to Lorengau. The sister of a 39-year-old Egyptian on hunger strike at Manus told Australia’s ABC that she feared her brother would die. She said: "When he talks with me... I asked him what happened. He said, 'I took razors' and he's sewing his lips. I ask him why… He said, 'I want to die.' 'All my body, it's white and my legs are blue.'" This dire situation has been going on for over a year and a half. Conditions at the centre have been repeatedly criticised by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). Journalists, lawyers and RAC object to the lack of transparency and the difficulty in accessing prisoners to learn the truth of what is happening inside the camp. The Barato murder only became known because a concerned, outraged staff person leaked the information to the public. This led to protests in large and small cities across Australia by people revolted by the government's treatment of detainees. The staff person revealed that employees were required to tell the asylum seekers that, contrary to law, they would never be allowed to leave Papua New Guinea, either for Australia or a third country of refuge, so that they would drop their requests for asylum status – and most importantly, discourage others from trying to enter Australia. Further, she said, the camp "was designed as an experiment in the active creation of horror to secure the deterrence." The young man's death, she explained, was not a result of a "crisis" in the camp's functioning but "an opportunity to extend that logic one step further." (Guardian, 25 February 2014) In July 2013, the Guardian reported on an earlier whistleblower, a former security manager at the detention facility, who said that self harm and suicide attempts were "very common – almost daily." He said "I've never seen human beings so destitute, so helpless and so hopeless before. I took the position with every intent of making the place a safer environment, but it proved quite rapidly to be an impossibility. In Australia the facility couldn't serve as a dog kennel. The owners would be jailed." Admitting to the volatility of the present situation, the Australian government denies that any recent clashes took place. It hypocritically claims that its draconian immigrant policy of denying residency in Australia, even to those who finally get refugee status, is meant to keep immigrants from drowning in rickety boats in the sea and dissuade them from even trying. Those not given refugee status are encouraged to return to their home countries. Some of these, like Iran, refuse to accept anyone returned involuntarily, so many detainees remain in a kind of limbo with nowhere to go. Most refugees to Australia are from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The reasons that drive people to leave their homeland and risk death in the process are multiple but deeply rooted in the functioning of the imperialist system, with its endless genocidal wars and imperialist-dependent repressive regimes, and the globalization of the world economy that has devastated traditional subsistence and local-market agriculture, producing a situation where there is no way to support one's family. Australia's use of Papua New Guinea as a site for its concentration camps is particularly revealing and ugly. This country, comprising the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and smaller islands, was an Australian colony until 1975 and in many ways has continued to be one despite its so-called independence. It provides wealth for Australian and other capitalists through the exploitation of its minerals and other natural resources on an enormous scale while its people live in extreme poverty. The local people, whose traditional way of life and culture is being destroyed along with the environment by the looting of their country, are no less victims of Australia and other imperialist countries than the immigrants imprisoned in PNG. Australia's cruel immigration policies and the racist ideology that goes along with them is part of this kind of oppressive global imbalance.