Australian "Nazi"-style refugee camps offshore now revealed

Australian "Nazi"-style Refugee Camps offshore now revealed in SMH report (15/11/2013)

 By Ruth Skilbeck

A shocking report in today's Sydney Morning Herald indicates that conditions in the Australian-run refugee camps on Nauru, Christmas Island and Manus Island, may be beginning to resemble the conditions of some of the less extreme Nazi concentration camps in World War 1 (without the deaths).

The detention camp conditions are so bad that a senior executive (who can’t be named for his safety) of a charity commissioned to work with the refugees, said: “I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, worried that one day we may have to face a royal commission and have to answer for the conditions under which these people were treated.” (Quoted in SMH article ‘Abbott’s new world order’ by Julie-Anne Davies, 15/11/2013).

Focusing on the first-person quoted story of a detained refugee in Christmas Island camp whose wife is soon to give birth, and who has been denied permission to accompany his wife to mainland Darwin to be with her when she has their baby, the article juxtaposes first hand stories by inmates of the detention camp and accounts by the staff of the charities who have been deployed to Nauru to work and who find the situation intolerable and deplorable and compromising to their ethical positions.

“Anything is allowed to happen” one young caseworker a woman in her early twenties just finished studying at university, now working in the detention camp of Christmas Island, says. “Everyone is living in tents and there is no privacy.”

Another charity group worker working in the camp on Nauru says: “The mothers are not coping well at all, their children are running amok…Families of five live in one little area of a large marquee divided only by clear tarpaulins so there is no privacy. Husbands and wives can’t have sex, can’t do anything without everyone knowing their business.”

A young child of four has become catatonic and is refusing to eat, but has received no medical treatment or attention for this.

The young detention camp worker further explains the horrific conditions of single men’s conditions, which resemble the conditions of concentrations camps:

350 single men are kept in a small compound in a camp of tents. They sleep on bunks piled on top of each other.

“There are three to four toilets for all these men and they just couldn’t manage. They were soiling themselves and then having to wait in line for hours to have a two minute shower,” the report quotes the female case worker.

 Manus Island, a men-only detention camp on PNG, currently has 1128 detainees, the reporter, writes in the article ‘Abbott’s new world order.’

The charity group worker there continues: “It’s always the same but as time goes by the men are getting more desperate and more sick. They all complain about kidney pain, headache, insomnia, but it takes at least three weeks for a doctor to see a client.”

The maladies they are suffering include malaria, the food is inedible and filled with cockroaches, there are no fresh fruit and vegetable, and requests for medical help are not answered. There are snakes inside the men’s compound.

The report says that there are currently only ten workers for all 1128 detainees, which is not adequate to address their needs.

There has been no coverage in the media in Australia, until this report, about the new policy of enlisting major charities and their workers to work with the refugees in Australia’s “offshore processing” camps: on Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island. Two major charities, Save the Children and the Salvation Army put in bids and were awarded what were presumably sizeable contracts to work with the refugees. But now they are finding that the conditions they have to work are compromising their own ethical codes, and principles.

The workers are all required to sign confidentiality clauses, and cannot therefore be quoted by name. An anonymous spokesperson for the Salvation Army said: “We are opposed to offshore processing and are on public record as saying so. Our preference would be that people are processed in the Australian community, without the need for offshore processing.

“But, we work where there are people in need and where there is the suffering and the vulnerable.”

There seem to be echoes here of the Jewish bodies that were commissioned by the Nazis to run and work in concentration camps.

The people are on the side of the suffering, and vulnerable, the detained yet they are put into the position of running the camps.

This produces a moral dilemma, which takes moral fortitude to resolve, and to oppose the forces of oppression.

That explains the conflict expressed by the senior executive of “one of the charities” quoted in the article in the SMH today, which started this blog article:

“I wake up in a cold sweat, worried that one day we may have to face a royal commission and have to answer for the condition under which these people were treated and which we didn’t have the guts to challenge the government on.”

The question all living in Australia must ask now is: is it fair to put these charity workers into this situation, as well as is it fair to put the refugees into concentration camps??

This is a question that everyone can answer, as we are all Australian citizens.

The answer is a resounding NO, and the government needs to address and change these deplorable conditions – for the refugees and the workers whose integrity and moral being is being compromised and destroyed by the conflict they have been put into – amongst them young women and men who want to have a job helping those in need.

Ruth Skilbeck

15 November 2015

'Abbott's new world order' by Julie-Anne Davies, Sydney Morning Herald, 12/11/2013

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/abbotts-new-world-order-20131114-2xji4.html#ixzz2kfj69Xy7