Crying for the children of Nauru
Janet Galbraith
operates an online writing group for people within Australian
immigration detention. She has been speaking with people in Nauru over
the past 4 days and has written this piece incorporating their voices,
in response to Scott Morrison’s announcement that they will never make
it to the Australian mainland.
In the early hours of the 26th of September 2014, I began receiving
messages from asylum seekers incarcerated on Nauru in one of Australia’s
benignly named Off-shore (or sometimes Regional) Processing Centres.
Many of the young teenagers who are in immigration detention alone,
without family, had begun a peaceful protest after receiving Scott
Morrison’s message that they would not be given TPV’s like their friends
still held in Christmas Island detention centre. Repeated again was the
Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s mantra: ‘You will
never see the Australian mainland’. They, along with all asylum seekers
and refugees on Nauru were told their choices were to return to their
homelands, stay on Nauru for at least 5 years and then be settled
somewhere other than Australia, or go to Cambodia for ‘settlement’. Soon
those in the family compound also joined the protests. As Friday dawned
and Saturday came, more and more people joined the protests – those
incarcerated in the Regional Processing Centre and those who had been
recognised as ‘real refugees’ and ‘settled’ in Nauru.
On that day I also received a poem titled ‘Nauru also cried for its
children’, a response to the pain portrayed in the images I was
receiving from people on Nauru. This poem is written by a person who is a
refugee, formerly detained in Australia’s detention industry but now
living in community. As I facilitate an online writing group with people
affected by the Australian immigration industry it is not unusual for
me to receive poems, however this poem spoke to me strongly in a way
that nothing else expressed that day had, and so I too began to write.
Photo taken of protests on Nauru 26th
September 2014. Photographer’s name withheld. Previously published in
The Guardian, 26th September 2014. Nauru also cried for its
children. The image above is the voice of children, mums, dads and
asylum seekers staying in Nauru. They have sat in front of the
immigration. The news of Nauru is sad and upsetting.(The Poet)
September 2014. Photographer’s name withheld. Previously published in
The Guardian, 26th September 2014. Nauru also cried for its
children. The image above is the voice of children, mums, dads and
asylum seekers staying in Nauru. They have sat in front of the
immigration. The news of Nauru is sad and upsetting.(The Poet)
Nauru also cried for its children
O rich senators!
Good spring day, right?
Don’t you want to give a smile,
a kind message, a listening ear,
a parental look and tear
to the children of this ‘green hell’?
In what way do you define humanity?
Where is humanitarian greatness?
Grant these children, their right.
I just see humanity in the little hands of these children.
– The Poet (real name withheld)
Translated from Persian to English by A.P
- نارو هم به حال کودکانش اشک ریخت *
تصویر زیر…ندای کودکان, مادران, پدران و پناهجویان ساکن نارو است. آنها روبروی ایمیگریشن تحصن کرده اند…!!
خبرهای نارو غم انگیز و دردناک است…!!
سناتورهای کاخ نشین…روز زیبای بهاریتون بخیر…
دوست ندارید یک نوازش, یک لبخند, یک پیام محبت آمیز, یک گوش شنوا, یک نگاه
پدرانه, یک اشک مادرانه ….به این کودکان ساکن ” جهنم سبز ” تقدیم کنید…؟!!
شما انسانیت را در چه ” معیار بشری ” تعریف می کنید…؟!! کرامت انسانی کجاست…؟!!
حقوق حقه ی این کودکان را به آنها عطا کنید…
من انسانیت را فقط در دستان کوچک این کودکان می بینم…
As Nauru ‘cried for its children’, Scott Morrison and his cohort
toasted with champagne, laughing and joking at a reception held to
‘celebrate’ an ‘Agreement’, signed between himself and the Cambodian
government, that would see refugees on Nauru sent to Cambodia[1]. While Scott Morrison drank champagne in Phnom Phen and Tony Abbot dined with Rupert Murdoch in New York[2]
, in Tehran, Hamid Khazaei’s family buried their young son and brother –
a young man of 24, who died as a result of the cruel and inhumane
treatment of asylum seekers in Manus Island RPC. On that sad and sacred
day, Nauru announced that the Islands’ funds had been frozen and that it
would soon be without enough money to operate generators to provide
water or medical care for its citizens or the refugees and asylum
seekers deported there by Australia. On the 26th of September, 2014,
there was a disturbing meeting of linked and loaded moments – their
effects symbolised by a tray of champagne filled glasses smashing to the
ground, with Morrison continuing to sip from his glass, smiling and
toasting to empty handed ‘dignitaries’ , and embodied by children in
Australia’s gulag on Nauru where young girls were drinking poison
(washing liquid) and young boys cutting open their bodies.
On the 25th of September 2014, asylum seekers and refugees on Manus
Island and Nauru had been shown a video recording of Morrison announcing
that:
Processing and resettlement in Australia will never be an option
for those who have been transferred to regional processing centres
because they have arrived in Australia illegally by boat[3].
This had led to despair, fear, and anger and had resulted in peaceful
protests begun by the children in the ‘unaccompanied minors’ compound
on Nauru. By morning 6 children had ‘self-harmed/attempted suicide’, and
families within the RPC, as well as those ‘recognised refugees’
‘settled’ in Nauru had joined the protests. Messages and images from
these people were beginning to arrive in Australia. Some of the messages
I received were:
- ‘The new option is Cambodia and that made people very upset. This is sheer cruel and unjustice’.
- ‘We are in a dangerous and very scary situation’.
- ‘I am very sad about my friend who try kill herself. We don’t know if she is good or not. She is only 15 years old’.
- ‘So far 6 people tried to suicide’.
- ‘I am in Nauru and remember no-one is safe here’.
- ‘I don’t know where my friend is. Where they take her?’
- ‘More than 11 UAM’s tried to kill theirself now’
- ‘100 anti-riot police with tear gas and armed are in OPC 3. We scared’.
- ‘They have isolated the UAM’s camp’.
- ‘14 year old girl stitch her lips’.
- ‘wifi now cut to our camp’
O rich senators!
Good spring day, right?
Don’t you want to give a smile,
a kind message, a listening ear,
a parental look and tear
to the children of this ‘green hell’?
Many of these children (erroneously referred to as Unaccompanied
Minors – UAMs) had come on the same boats as those who are imprisoned on
Christmas Island. They had been told that those on Christmas Island
will see the mainland – will be given TPVs. Those who had been deported
to Nauru will not.
Morrison’s video statement continued:
You may have heard that temporary protection visas
are to be reintroduced. This policy does not apply to those who are on
Nauru or on Manus Island or have been transferred there….This recent announcement does not apply to people in the regional processing centres in these countries[4].
Such arbitrary and cruel decisions are the hallmark of the current
immigration industry – or as Ray Jackson of the Indigenous Social
Justice Association has called it: ‘no-migration department’ – and works
to separate people from each other producing internalised feelings of
guilt and fear in those who are ‘chosen’ to come to the mainland, and
despair in those who are not.
A young boy writes from CI: ‘this is bad idea that the government
made for our friends in Nauru we are both have right to be free from
this jails’[5].
A few weeks ago I had calls from Nauru. People were dancing,
celebrating, believing that the TPVs that Morrison was proposing would
mean they would get to Australia. Teens under 18 years who had survived
harrowing boat trips together believed they would be reunited on the
‘mainland’ with their friends who remained on Christmas Island. Mother’s
believed their children would have some medical care, enough clean
water, a chance at education. Young men and women began to see a future.
Along with many others I attempted to explain what these TPVs would
mean – that they would also deny their basic human rights. However, the
thought that they would get to Australia was enough for these people
imprisoned in such unliveable circumstances in the detention camps and
in the areas designated to ‘recognised refugees’ ‘settled ‘on Nauru.
In contrast to Morrison’s message in which the humanity of these people is effectively denied, the writer of Nauru also cries for its Children
speaks of the power and possibilities of shared humanity. Morrison, as
guardian of many of these children, and the wider Australian government
are reminded of their responsibilities:
Don’t you want to give a smile,
a kind message, a listening ear,
a parental look and tear
to the children of this ‘green hell’?
….I see humanity in the little hands of these children.
I too. But I see very little humanity in Morrison’s blood soaked ones.
excerpt from ‘There will be no exceptions’:
Catatonic and incarcerated
the four year old child
will take nothing more into her body-
neither food nor sound.
Her screams too are frozen.
Bitter brutality slices
her psyche into thin slivers
petrified
they adorn Scott’s blood-soaked soul[6].
A poet imprisoned in Manus Island RPC writes of the lived effects
that define current immigration policy and it’s policies and practices:
’It is the loss of your own humanity we are seeing’[7].
This, to me continues to become more and more evident.
Australia-as-nation is not only denying people refuge and punishing them
for enacting this international right, but is selling them. Morrison is
selling people. He has paid 40 million dollars to the corrupt and
complicit Cambodian government – blood money for people who have sought
refuge in Australia. As some of the young men who have been assigned
refugee status and ‘settled’ in deplorable conditions in Fly Camp on
Nauru have said: ‘They see us as animals for sale, they are selling us’[8].
The growing immigration detention industry has productively misnamed
the centres on Nauru and Manus Island as Regional Processing Centres. In
these unliveable camps ‘processing’ is presented to the public as an
organised means to assessing asylum claims rather than being allied with
the understanding of ‘processing’ as indicative of the production of
goods. These gulags are well understood by those who survive within
them. A man detained on Christmas Island calls them ‘processing centres
for the production of mental illness’, and a man detained on Manus
Island names them as ‘torturing centres’. One of the men in the aptly
named Fly Camp on Nauru writes of Australia’s vision of him and his
friends as goods for sale:
What they want to do with us
they are doing.
Where-ever they want to sell us
they are selling. (JK)
On the 26th of September there were also protests in the capital city
of Cambodia against the signing of this ‘Agreement’. The ABC reports
the President of Cambodia’s Centre for Human Rights, Virak Ou, said:
’the newly-inked deal was “shameful” and “illegal”’. Cambodian
Opposition Leader, Sam Rainsy ‘warned “very little” of money exchanged
under the deal will filter down to the refugees. “It will be pocketed by
corrupt government officials,” …”I think it is not right on the part of
Cambodia to accept this deal, because refugees are not like any
ordinary goods that can be exported from one country and imported by
another country. They are human beings”’ [9].
As the details of the The Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014
introduced to parliament on the 25th of September 2014 emerge – the
extent of the harm this Bill will impart is slowly being revealed. This
Bill re-writes the Refugee Convention in the interests of a racist
neo-colonial Australia. Babies born in Australia to parents seeking
refuge will be classed as ‘unauthorised arrivals’. When a loving father
and poet announces the birth of his son: ‘Behind the Fences a new life
began at 10.51 yesterday’[10],
the Australian government classes this baby’s birth as ‘unauthorised’.
Children born to people deemed ‘“transitory persons” either in Australia
or in a regional processing country are also to be deemed transitory
persons for the purposes of the Migration Act. Any visa application made
on behalf of these children will now be deemed to be invalid’[11].
In what way do you define humanity?
Where is humanitarian greatness?
Grant these children, their right.
I just see humanity in the little hands of these children.
Signed under an opulent chandelier, journalists kept at a distance
behind a gold rope and with the fitting sound of smashing champagne
glasses falling from a tray Morrison signed the deal and left without
answering any questions from the press. Although the statement left
behind after Morrrison’s hurried exit says that Cambodia and Australia
will work with the UNHCR to implement this deal it has been reported by
the Guardian that ‘UNHCR press officer Vivian Tan later clarified that
they were not involved in the deal. “Our position remains unchanged – we
do not have a role in this bilateral agreement.”’. In fact ‘UNHCR
condemned the deal, expressing deep concern at the precedent it sets’ .
‘“Refugees are persons who are fleeing persecution or the
life-threatening effects of armed conflict. They are entitled to better
treatment than being shipped from one country to the next”’ António
Guterres[12].
‘We are not your football,’ writes one man detained for more than 5 years in Australia’s immigration detention industry[13].
As images of the Island of Nauru filtered through to me, the
landscape reminded me that the persecution of refugees and asylum
seekers on Nauru cannot be understood in a vacuum. Nauru, an island
populated by Nauruans with a distinct language and cultural history,
battered and mined by colonial relations, and now complicit in, and
enacting the human rights abuses and tortures that are an integral part
of the Australian detention industry, has long been deeply inscribed by
its utility to Australia. Having dug up and sold the guts of this small
island, Australia once again exerted its colonial violence through
exporting and ‘selling’ people seeking refuge in Australia to the island
in exchange for ‘aid’ in 2001. What we are witnessing and what is being
played out on the bodies and psyches of many is also a part of this
‘long history of colonial exploitation[14]’.
As Australia’s neo-colonial arms reach Cambodia, ‘Nauru also cried for
its children’ – those born of Nauruan ancestry and those forcibly
incarcerated on their island. An island that has become a repository for
multiple violence aimed at re-configuring borders, and shoring up false
claims to sovereignty of the stolen lands, named by their invaders:
Australia.
Days later, reports continue to come in of more people attempting
suicide, more extreme distress, more lips stitched, and the organising
of rolling protests as well as the DIPC’s unsafe and reactionary
measures. As I write the word ‘suicide’ and contemplate the notion of
‘self-harm’, as I look at the histories and practices that ensure harm,
and listen to the distressed and exhausted voices of those who are
telling me these stories, sending me these poems, I am reminded again
and again that these acts of resistance, despair and overwhelming
psychic pain must be named for what they are. They are a response to
unbearable pain and injustice in a situation where all control over an
individual’s life has been stripped. As I have written elsewhere: ’Those
who are oppressed are constantly mis-named as the problem [as] the
actions of states are dis-placed onto … individual bodies and psyches’.
It is important to remember the power of displacement and mis-naming for
to ‘call this self-harm displaces the responsibility for the effects
of torture and trauma onto the individual bodies of those who are being
actively and deliberately harmed by successive Australian governments,
and by those in Australia who acquiesce to, or actively encourage, their
policies and behaviours’[15].
In the early hours of the 27th of September I received another
message from a person, a refugee on Nauru. The writer asked for her
statement to be released to the Australian media:
‘After the immigration’s meeting yesterday, the camp is
out of control. Lots of people committed suicide [attempted suicide],
lots of UAM’s [unaccompanied minors] did self harm and hundreds of
people in detention gathered around in a huge protest. 100 anti riot
police are in the camp to control people. They are armed. 14 year old
girl stitched her lips and her father cut his neck vein. Security guards
kicked all Save the Children staff out of the camp and isolated the UAM
camp. We are about to see another incident like what happened in manus
island’.
-Name withheld
As I contemplate the killing effects of this neo-colonial regime and
the suffering it imposes. I join with the writer of ‘Nauru also cried
for its children’:
O rich senators!
Good spring day, right?
Don’t you want to give a smile,
a kind message, a listening ear,
a parental look and tear
to the children of this ‘green hell’?
In what way do you define humanity?
Where is humanitarian greatness?
Grant these children, their right.
I just see humanity in the little hands of these children.
(Janet Galbraith)
[1]
Lauren Cruthers and Ben Doherty, Australia signs controversial refugee
deal with Cambodia, The Guardian, Friday 26 September, 2014
[2] http://www.afr.com/p/national/after_meeting_world_leaders_abbott_she1AR2RN2A1oiuX9vWb1L
[3]
see full transcript of video recording at the end of this article. One
young writer reminds us all ‘we did not come by illegal way/we are not
illegal’One Strong Woman to Another thearrivalists.tumblr.com
[4] excerpt from Morrison’s video message to asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus Island
[5] private message to writer
[6] excerpt from unpublished poem ‘there will be no exception’, Janet Galbraith, 2013
[7] Squad of Death, http://www.borderlands.net.au/Vol13No1_2014/galbraith_writing.htm
[8] from private conversation with the writer
[9] http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-27/unhcr-deeply-concerned-by-australia-cambodia-refugee-relocation/5773242
[10] Private message
[11]
thank you to Siobhan Marren for her Analysis of The Migration and
Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy
Caseload) Bill 2014 posted on Facebook on 25th September 2014. http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2014/June/High_Court_ruling_on_capping_visas_for_refugees
[12] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/26/australia-signs-refugee-deal-cambodia
[13] unpublished poem. Poets name withheld.
[14] https://newmatilda.com/2013/06/21/does-nauru-owe-australia-anything
[15] ibid
Janet Galbraith is a
poet. Her collection of poetry ‘re-membering’, published by Walleah
Press, 2013. Janet is the founder and facilitator of Writing Through
Fences.
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