BY SARAH STEPHEN
The Curtin detention centre, in the far north of Western Australia, was the scene of a mass protest by detainees on April 19 after an Iranian asylum seeker, stressed and agitated, went to the school building before dinner and damaged some computer equipment.
Australasian Correctional Management's response to this asylum seeker's actions was deliberately provocative. Dressing in riot gear and using batons, ACM guards beat other detainees indiscriminately. Reports indicate the guards also used tear gas.
Stephen Khan, a Kashmiri asylum seeker in the Perth detention centre, told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly about a conversation he had with a Palestinian detainee who was transferred from Curtin to the Perth detention centre on April 23 before being deported from the country.
While language barriers prevented Khan from gathering detail about the April 19 incident, the general picture was very clear — unnecessary overreaction by detention centre staff to an individual act of frustration, a disturbingly common occurrence in the detention centres.
The government's explanation of the incident is a combination of partial information and lies. According to a government source, the "riot" was triggered by Iranians upset by immigration minister Philip Ruddock's visit to Iran to negotiate their forcible return. There was no mention of ACM guards' unprovoked and brutal attacks on detainees who were not initially involved in the disturbance. The federal government claimed that guards used "reasonable force" to stop a "riot".
The Palestinian man told Khan that he had requested six months ago to go back to Syria. There are another 20 Palestinians and some Iraqis who have also agreed to be deported, either to Lebanon or Syria, yet still they are left waiting for months or years.
The government's policy of systematic cover-up and flagrant misinformation about the treatment of refugees in detention was further exposed with the screening on April 22 by the ABC's Lateline program of a leaked ACM video from June 1, 2001.
Afghans who were "screened out" of the refugee determination process, and therefore unable to lodge a claim, were shown knocking themselves unconscious by throwing themselves against the walls of their cells. One of the unconscious men was dragged by the feet by a staff member. These events led to a riot, but the circumstances which provoked it weren't revealed by the government at the time.
What compounds this particular scandal is that all the Afghans shown in the video were eventually found to be "genuine" refugees and released from detention.
Lateline ran a discussion forum following the video footage. One of the participants, Professor Richard Harding, the inspector of custodial services in Western Australia, was scathing about what the video revealed: "There is no proper external scrutiny of what is going on there, and so accordingly, the government is able to claim that it's bad apples, troublemakers, ringleaders and so on, responsible for this. This is not the case. When you have a riot in a closed institution, it is always because the bulk of the population find what is going on unacceptable.
"I went to Curtin about three or four weeks after that event and two people shined up a tree and put ropes around their necks, threatening symbolically to hang themselves, and it was expressed to me that this was because nobody would listen to them, nobody would give them the time of day. Of course, I wanted to give them the time of day, and I found 100, 200 people who surrounded me, polite, considerate, non-threatening, simply because I was trying to listen, and clearly, these people are at the end of their tether because they are in limbo, they are in Gulag conditions."
Speaking about the lack of independent scrutiny of detention centres, Harding commented: "If these sorts of things were happening in a Western Australian prison, my team would be moving in instantly with free and untrammelled access. We would have our videos with us and our camera and our tape-recorders. People would be obliged by law to speak to us. If anyone interfered with those who in fact wished to speak to us, that would be a criminal offence."
Harding related one incident where a Curtin official had said to a detainee "I'll get you, you bastard" when the detainee began talking to Harding. If a WA prison official had said this to a prisoner, that official would have been charged with a criminal offence, Harding added.
Ruddock, predictably, dismissed concerns about the April 19 Curtin "riot". Speaking from Europe, he told ABC radio on April 23: "What I find is sometimes strange is the concern from time to time [that] incidents of these sort occur. I mean, obviously, one tries to manage the facilities to provide the utmost dignity for the people who are detained, but people don't like being detained, that's quite clear."
Sam North, who is responsible for selecting which letters to run each day in the Sydney Morning Herald, decided not to print any of the numerous letters of shock and outrage the SMH had received following the May 22 Lateline program. He emailed the author of one letter with the explanation that not all readers of the SMH would have seen the program and, besides, the paper had already "gone out on a limb" on the issue of asylum seekers.
Within days of the Curtin incident, another protest was triggered at Port Hedland detention centre on April 24 when, according to the immigration department, an Afghan man fell out of a tree onto his head. The department maintains that this triggered a "riot", but this is a lie.
Khan knew the Afghan man during time he had spent in the Perth detention centre. "The media say he fell, but I am sure it wasn't an accident", Khan insisted. The man had pre-existing injuries to his head which could have made this fall fatal. "He was badly hurt, bleeding from nose and ears."
According to a Port Hedland detainee, the Afghan man was mentally unstable and suicidal as a result of three years in detention. Three doctors had recommended his removal from the centre. When he heard about a possible visit by an official delegation, he requested to speak to the delegation, but his request was ignored.
In frustration, he climbed a tree, eventually jumping. After being taken to hospital, there was a lock-down which trapped detainees in different parts of the detention centre, a common practice after an "incident". In protest, detainees banged fences and chanted "freedom". Their protest was peaceful. There were no escape attempts. There was no damage to property, and no attempt to injure guards in any way, as the immigration department has alleged.
ALP immigration spokesperson Julia Gillard was on a tour of detention centres with some other Labor politicians and advisers. She didn't speak to any detainees.
According to ABC news, Gillard said she did not meet with detainees at Port Hedland because there were already signs of a small disturbance."When it became apparent there were going to be some security issues then I left Port Hedland", Gillard said.
According to Khan, Gillard had visited the Perth detention centre but the detainees had not been told that she was the "opposition" immigration spokesperson.
"She said 'Hello, how are you?'", Khan recounted. "I was on phone at the time, and just said 'Not very good'. She didn't speak to detainees about their conditions and experiences, and was only there for five minutes.
"Just like some people go to the zoo and feed the animals a banana, she just wanted to smile and say hello, not talk to us about our experiences", Khan added. He told GLW knew who she was, and later told other detainees. They were very angry that they hadn't been informed by detention centre staff.
No doubt the "small disturbance" at Port Hedland was the commotion among detainees when they realised that Gillard was someone with access to the media, who — if she had wanted to speak to them — could have publicised the detainees' experiences. The Afghan man knew who Gillard was, and the anguish of being prevented from talking to her was too much for him to bear.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 1, 2002.
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