Forced migration and Australia’s shame
Let’s never forget what Australia has done, and does to people leaving conditions that Australia had a hand in creating.
His is tiny body is a speck in the vast ocean that has just swallowed his life. A body that never got to walk on land again, a life never able to grow old. His body was washed ashore with the waves lapping like they would a discarded plastic bag, or a chip packet. A life rendered surplus to the needs and desires of the haves. No one gave him or his family a chance.
His life fell through the wide cracks of modernity.
These photos went global. Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian boy who died when the boat carrying his family capsized[i].
His mother who also died, had promised him a better life as they fled from the Syrian war. Yet safe routes out were closed off, backs turned on their desperation, and her promise was never realised.
Alan was found washed up on the coast of the Greek island of Kos, but it could have been any shoreline in the Global North.
People have been trying to come to Australia for a better life too.
Desperation gets turned inside out to be framed as opportunism.
We are also part of the system that has systematically and cruelly turned our backs on people in need.
A few years ago, 39 migrants, including thirteen children, drowned off the coast of Java on a boat headed to Australia from Indonesia. Reports from survivors claimed the Australian coastguard was unresponsive to their distress call for 24 hours before the sinking. This a consequence, no doubt, of the Abbott administration’s draconian policies regarding boats headed for Australian shores.
Abbott also controlled the information being released to the public regarding boat arrivals, which made finding out the extent of what had happened difficult. Still, Fairfax media was able to quote a survivor speaking about the ordeal:
“I called the Australian embassy. For 24 hours we were calling them. They told us, ‘Just send us the position on GPS, where are you?’ … We did, and they told us, ‘OK, we know … where you are’. And they said, ‘We’ll come for you in two hours’. And we wait two hours, we wait 24 hours, and we kept calling them. … We don’t have food, we don’t have water for three days, we have children, just rescue us. And nobody come[ii].”
The then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott refused to comment on why their distress calls weren’t met with safety. The then immigration Minister Scott Morrison also didn’t comment, as he was too busy trying to dismiss the claim that a distress call had been made from the sinking boat. He would go on to become Prime Minister of Australia himself and placed a trophy on his desk (self-awarded) because: “I stopped the boats”. Prime Minister Morrison is a self-confessed churchgoing person who claimed that presiding over decisions such as indefinitely detaining people in Manus and Nauru had bought him to his knees in tears.
Australia’s offshore regime is notoriously cruel and has been subject to two parallel class actions against the Australian government for subjecting asylum seekers and refugees to torture, crimes against humanity and the intentional infliction of harm over much of the last decade. Already in September 2017, an Australian judge approved AU$70 million in compensation to almost 2,000 current and former Manus Island asylum seekers and refugees. This was for their illegal detention in dangerous conditions. It was Australia’s largest human rights class action, settled because the government didn’t want the details of their brutal regime, notoriously kept under a veil of bureaucratic secrecy, to reach the eye of the public.
For seeking refuge, people have been detained on Manus and Nauru, even though most of them have been found to have a legitimate claim for asylum and granted refugee status. Regardless, human beings have been subjected to dehumanising conditions including poor living conditions and poor healthcare – where officials systematically delay and block the transfer of people whom doctors said required urgent medical care. Many people have died during the time of this regime, including from suicide, untreated medical conditions and murder. Many more are suffering and attempting to take their lives as the dehumanising process of the regime takes its toll. The evil ideology governing this regime is one of deterrence – make the conditions in detention worse than what people are fleeing from in order to encourage people to ‘go home’ and to stop people getting on the boats in the first place. This issue is of course, people often don’t have a safe place to return to, and the boats don’t stop coming (Australia just turns them around or people seek safety elsewhere).
The Australian Border Deaths Database compiled by researchers from Monash University estimate that since 2000, 2026 people have died due to Australia’s border regime including people forced to return from where they have fled and those who were not rescued or recovered and feared drowned[iii]. Maintaining the offshore detention facilities costs the Australian taxpayer more than AU $400,000 per year per person detained – mostly paid to private companies that get rich while overseeing the cruelty. The number is higher if you include the money spent through the military budget to enact so called operation sovereign borders on the seas. Perhaps the hardest pill to swallow is that this evil regime is Australian made: administered through our bureaucracy, by people of our society, paid for by money we generate in tax, overseen by officials we elect and using deterrence rationalities present in liberal thought.
People are still detained by Australia in indefinite detention. As Mardin Arvin a Kurdish Iranian refugee detained since 2013 by Australian authorities writes:
“I always think to myself, what crime did I commit that I have to pay with this form of punishment? I am a simple person who just wants to live my life. I want a good life. But after what I have gone through I now have to spent months confined to a single floor, in a hotel and in a room with a few people; my world is limited to the narrow corridor of the third floor of this hotel”[iv].
Mardin was imprisoned in Manus Island 2013-2019, then moved to Port Moresby in 2019, and then to a Melbourne hotel room awaiting to be moved again to who knows where.
An evil that seems to be excused because it is legitimised as it is passes through bureaucracy and Australian law (but not international human rights law).
Often not part of the bigoted political commentary in Australia is how forced migration is endemic to globalising capitalist systems. In a world where insecurity is rife, people are always forced to move. They have little other choice. A reframing of the whole debate centralising this would be not only helpful, but be necessary in any attempt to move forward.
Forced migration is a global issue that reflects the structural inequality of the world we live in. When our world is moulded by war, trade liberalisation, economic inequality and climate change, instances of people being displaced will continually increase. Australia, like all industrial countries, has a hand in creating these conditions. We support international policies that promote inequality, we allow our companies to accumulate while dispossessing, we consume while the makers of these products suffer and we take part in wars that kill, maim and destabilise societies. We have more than a responsibility to care. We cannot turn our backs on people whose misery we had a hand in creating.
Continuing to support the racist notion of ‘stopping the boats’ through policies such as offshore processing shows a fundamental failure to conceptualise the global economic structures that contribute to push people to migrate. The inconvenient truth remains: the model of development celebrated is the same model that continues to oppress, dispossess and exclude. While a few get rich, the climate is changing at an irreversible speed. The development industry has tried to present itself well through participatory regimes, empowerment and inclusive growth. Yet still, development as catch-up has failed.
The politics of deterrence that characterise Australia’s border policies misses the point that people will continue to seek better lives, not only because it is their fundamental human right to do so, but more importantly because the global structures we endorse haven’t given them much other choice.
Originally written 2019-2020 (some updates included)
[i] Smith, Helena (2015), Shocking images of drowned Syrian boy show tragic plight of refugees, The Guardian, September 3 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees
[ii] Michael Bachelard and Bianca Hall, "Australia Ignored Boat Rescue Call, Survivor Claims," Sydney Morning Herald September 28, 2013, no. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-ignored-boat-rescue-call-claims-survivor-20130928-2uku2.html (2013).
[iii] Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber, "Australian Border Deaths Database " Monash University (2020).
[iv] Arvin, Mardin, (2020), From Manus Island to Melbourne: we do not even know what we are being punished for, The Guardian, August 8 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/08/from-manus-island-to-melbourne-we-do-not-even-know-what-we-are-being-punished-for?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other