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
