Tag: Human Rights

Murder on Manus

whistle-blowers risk careers to broadcast
asinine liberals heave blameless sighs
colonial deniers abuse the outcast
seduced by dog-whistling shyster lies.

little learned from past but how to forget
racist wheel turns, has lost its brakes
we are deformed by all we have met
this banal society banality makes.

Jinjirrie, February 2014.

Related Links

If G4S is to blame for Manus violence, the government has blood on its hands

During Question Time on Monday, Scott Morrison insisted that Papua New Guinea was ultimately in control of the Manus Island detention centre. The implication is clear: the Australian government is attempting to distance itself from G4S and from the reports of what occurred there. But the fact is that G4S is on Manus Island thanks to a contract with the Australian government. It is being paid with Australian taxpayer dollars, in furtherance of an Australian government policy.

Reza Barati’s family: ‘We want answers. What did they do to him?’

Australia’s obscene cruelty toward refugees which it stores out of sight in its gulags overseas cannot be ignored and must be stopped. There’s no real dentist on Manus Island, says whistleblower Azita Bokan.

“Put it this way, the very simple things – everyone is in a queue hoping that maybe one day there will be a miracle and they will get a dentist there. Everyone is having massive pain. They are beside themselves with pain and all that’s been done is they take them to the guy that calls himself a dentist and all he does is he pulls teeth out. And most of them, their tooth has been pulled out – teeth that could have been saved. “

PNG police prelim report: Refugee Reza Barati was murdered by multiple head injuries.

A Manus Island migration agent has turned whistleblower, saying the whole asylum seeker processing system there is ‘fake’.

In today’s Guardian, Ant Loewenstein rightly advocates the use of UN sanctions to pressure the Australian government to end its regime of terror against hapless refugees corralled in offshore detention camps. Sanctions would make Australians, their racist government, the Australian media and the world sit up and take notice and apply punitive pressure to end Australia’s disgraceful treatment of refugees.

Western leaders live under the belief that they can behave as they like to the powerless and invisible. Asylum seekers are essentially voiceless, reporters are barred from visiting where they’re warehoused in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and the daily drumbeat of dishonest rhetoric wrongly accuses them of being “illegal”.

Even the threat of sanctions against Australia would enrage the Abbott government and its backers. Australia is a democracy, they will claim. Australia’s decisions are checked and approved by lawyers, they may argue. Australians can vote out recalcitrant regimes, they could state.

And yet transparency over asylum seeker policy has arguably never been more absent.

The shared impunity which the US delivers to its fellow settler colonial human rights abusers is an insult to justice. This impunity must end in order that criminals who abuse human rights of others can be brought to justice. The West has no credibility unless it makes an effort to adher to the values it claims it represents when its orientalists laud it over others.

The Australian government feels invincible, protected under America’s security blanket and selling its dirty coal to the world. We are sold the myth that building remote detention camps will protect us from the “hordes” trying to enter our promised land. It’s impossible not to conclude that Australia, a colonial construction, doesn’t see itself akin to Canada, the US and Israel as countries struggling to cope with people various officials call “infiltrators”. That bubble must be burst, and the threats of sanctions will be the required shot. Until Australia and its defenders appreciate the necessity to treat asylum seekers with dignity and respect, they should feel the world’s opprobrium.