Tag Archives: Manus Island

How to Recruit an Ordinary Australian, How to Torment Her, How to Drive her to madness 

By Posted in Asylum Seekers, In Detention, Life, Medical, Opinion, Reviews, Work by Others Tagged , , , , , 5 Comments

Sitting watching Eva Orner’s movie, ‘Chasing Asylum’, I fully expected to be appalled. I anticipated I’d feel the old outrage. I feared I’d see things that would shock me.What took me unprepared was the vision of Australian workers on Manus and Nauru as they disintegrated before the camera. Three in particular found the courage to expose themselves before the slow, careful camera of Eva Orner. Two of the three were young women. The camera never revealed them full face, their names were not mentioned. Like their charges who subsist behind Boat Numbers, these are humans without names. Their voices told us what was happening to the people seeking asylum; but it was their hands that gave them away. Nail-bitten fingers worked continually. A writhing was seen, a slow dance of agony. Voices hesitated, speech fell away as the young women spoke. I watched these young people as they struggled to shed a burden that will never leave them. The third beanspiller was not young. A former prison guard, he was a man in his fifties, a man surely innured by his past experience. He spoke to the camera of what he saw. He recounted carefully and precisely his attempts to bring about change from within the system. How he spoke to superiors, how he complained of wrongdoing, how anonymous threats to ‘shut up’ mounted, until he feared for his life. Finally he fled his island. He returned home and lay low. For some time he did not speak of what he’d seen, what had happened to his detained charges, how he had been threatened and lived alone in fear. Finally he decided he could keep silent no longer: “I was brought up to know right from wrong. I couldn’t live in silence.” The man’s face worked as he spoke. He struggled for composure but grief and pain defeated him as he wept his honest tears.    

Elsewhere in my life I have a colleague, a mental health worker, who has been engaged in the repair of a wounded offshore worker damaged deeply by trying to protect and support detained refugees. Hired by the government, that worker can never safely return to the work that is his vocation, which is to care for vulnerable people. He is now counted among the vulnerable. Innocent casualties, these, like the mates of the former detention worker who told me of two fellow guards who attempted suicide, one successfully.

What are we doing? What have we done.? What price do we demand of our own people? How we disgust ourselves!

When, at some time in the next century, I become leader of this nation I will do some things urgently. Apart from what ever I do to abate our present cruelty, apart from preparing for the Next National Apology, apart from prosecuting the Prime Ministers and their Border Control Ministers for crimes against humanity – apart from all these necessary steps, I will seek out these whistle blowers and offer them honours in the highest echelon of the Order of Australia. But I will not be surprised if they decline any honour offered in the name of a nation that betrayed itself. 
Chasing Asylum is screening now. See it and learn where our taxes are going and what is being done in our name. 

http://www.chasingasylum.com.au/

Should Nurses and Doctors Accept Work in Australia’s Detention Centres?

By Posted in Asylum Seekers, In Detention, Life, Medical Tagged , , , , , , , 6 Comments

In 2010 I worked in an Australian detention centre for short time that felt like a long time. The experience was the worst in my fifty years in Medicine. I signed a confidentiality agreement, sewing my own lips in the process. I saw no atrocity, no wrongdoing, other than torture by impersonal and meandering bureaucracy. Yet the suffering was general; it saw inmates, guards, nurses and doctors all resorting to self-harmful acts. I saw honourable people treating the detained with skill and humanity. I saw them constrained by employers and distrusted and insulted by patients, who felt sure that we too were liars. Yet we did some good. People, whether sick in body or in spirit, were treated with kindness and respect.

For six months after I returned to the mainland I was visited by dreams in which I sat on Tribunals without name, determining the fate of nameless individuals doomed by history and by Australian laws. Captive in these dreams, I doled unequal laws to defeated supplicants. I’d awaken and ask myself, did I really do that? But, inescapably, I knew I was implicated.

My island was a paradise of procedural propriety compared to today’s islands of Nauru and Manus. Doctors and nurses have returned from these places with distressing reports. Some have argued that, knowing what is now known, it is in unethical to work in these places; that the system tortures inmates; that participating is to become complicit in torture. More moderately, all clinicians and observers who return seem to agree that incarceration harms the inmate. The first law of medical ethics being, first do no harm, is not an ethical practitioner obliged to refuse to share in that harmdoing?

A new element affecting the work of a detention clinician is the outlawing of reporting wrongs seen in that work. Offenders face the threat of two years gaol. Nice systematic irony: to protect the liberty of Australians we incarcerate boat people; to protect the integrity of the system we incarcerate truthtellers. Interestingly, the flood of job offers to work in Detention that recruiters used to send to remote doctors such as myself has dried up. Someone, somewhere must have decided Australian clinicians are unreliable.

What then must a nurse or a doctor or a psychologist or a psychiatric nurse do? If offered, may we accept this work? Even if we are forbidden to speak of what we see?

I compare the situation to working with patients in places of dangerous epidemic disease. The first such case I read of was the cholera that broke out in eighteenth century Naples, where a young Swedish doctor left his fashionable private practice in Paris to work with the afflicted. He found himself working alongside a young nurse who was both beautiful and a nun. At any moment the disease might take them. The two work steadily on, afflicted by the losses and by the erotic fever that seizes them both. The drama of the two who risk all for strangers has never left me. The doctor, Axel Munthe, wrote of this in his memoir, The Story of San Michele.

We saw just such heroism played out by Australian nurses and doctors who went to Africa recently to save people from Ebola. We saw it, and -as a nation, as individuals – we prayed for our heroes and we applauded them.

Nothing new here: nurses and doctors work with AIDS, with multi-drug-resistant TB, with Lassa Fever. It is natural to the species to measure the need before the personal risk.

The second precedent is an unhappy one; during the twentieth century doctors working under dictatorships accepted orders, accepted payment, enjoyed promotion and protection, and participated in abuses ranging from imprisoning sane dissenters in psychiatric institutions, to ‘eugenic’ murder, to torture. And being bought, they shut up about it. If clinical ethics learned anything from these abuses it was the imperative to speak out.

In the light of history I see the duty of free citizens, clear and uncomplicated. It is to go to the camps, to do such good work as might be done, and to speak out.

How we Killed Leo

By Posted in Asylum Seekers, In Detention, Life, Medical, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 36 Comments

Leo was an asylum seeker.  Let us put aside that weary term and see what Leo was and how we came to know him. Leo was a Tamil. That means he was born into that minority in Sri Lanka which gave rise to the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers rebelled violently against the Sinhalese majority, earning a reputation for terrorism.
A civil war was conducted over many years, culminating in a government offensive that put down the rebellion and targeted civilians. If I read the story right, both the Tigers and the government were guilty of atrocities.
Leo was a baby when, during the worst of the bombings, his father wrapped him in banana leaves and hid him in the jungle. The family fled to India when Leo was five. He lived there in a miserable camp for twenty years, visiting Sri Lanka once to see family. He was imprisoned and tortured. Why? I don’t know precisely, but the explanation would have to start with the fact he was a Tamil.
Leo became an asylum seeker, a boat person, a “queue jumper”, and made his way to Cocos Islands. After only four months of detention, Leo was resettled near Geelong.
That means the Australian authorities – Customs, Immigration, ASIO – found him to be a non-terrorist. They found that speedily.  Leo was judged not to be a risk to Australia.  He was given a Bridging Visa, which allowed him to work but did not endow him with Permanent Resident status.

We said, “Leo, although you jumped our queue, we are letting you into the country and out into the community. But you are a guest. We can tell you at any time to go back where you came from.”
In the last few weeks Leo learned that a couple of Tamil men with stories similar to his own had been taken back into detention. These two faced the prospect of joining the one thousand Tamils whom we have sent back to Sri Lanka where they face persecution. Leo knew that persecution; he knew it in his tortured mind and in his body.

How did Leo spend his time on the Bellarine Peninsula? He worked two days a week for an asphalting company, cleaning greasy trucks. In his spare time he volunteered in an aged care home, he donated blood, he helped bring aid packages to asylum seekers new to the community, he sent money every month to an orphanage in the refugee camp in India that is still his parents’ home.

Leo became an organ donor. Did he expect to die?
Mister Morrison, our Immigration Minister, declares Leo showed no signs of suicidal intent. We know Mister Morrison, a minister who acts as Ruddock spoke, with icy resolve. Only Morrison doesn’t speak to us much. We might judge from his record his capacity for empathy, for humanity. Our minister said Leo’s death “is a terrible and tragic incident and none of us can know the mind of a person in this situation.”
Here is where I can help the minister. I know the mind of a person in the situation of such parlous existence, endlessly uncertain what his fate will be, of having it determined by the opaque decisions of governments and ministers. I know it by the accident of my unusual experience working among detained people in Christmas Island. I know it too by the not unusual gift of empathy. I know Leo’s death was not an incident – far from incidental – it was our doing and it was in the statistical sense, predictable. We saw that with the Tamil man who burned himself to death a few weeks before Leo.

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