Human Cargo Page 15

  Australia’s new policies had not, of course, come cheap. Between August 2001 and the middle of 2003, Australia was said to have spent $500 million on its Pacific Solution. But it had, in a very practical way, worked. Punishment and deterrence had born fruit. Only three boats arrived in the next three years. The question, people were left asking, was at what moral cost this success had been achieved. What had it all done to Australia itself? And how does one justify locking up people who have broken no laws?

  • • •

  ONE OTHER EVENT, which made little stir at the time, grew later to challenge the whole spirit of mandatory detention as nothing had before. It is the story of an Iranian boy called Shayan. I met Shayan, who is now nine, in a park in Parramatta, a suburb just outside Sydney. He is tall for his age, very thin, with mouse-brown hair cut short. He would look much like any other nine-year-old, fit and brown from the Australian sun, except for the extreme wariness of his expression, which makes him look rather like a startled young animal, and the way he sits, or stands, extremely close to his parents, stirring when they stir, watching their faces. Saeed and Zahra, Shayan’s father and stepmother, drove me to the edge of a small lake in the middle of Parramatta’s green and tropical park, and there in the sunshine, looking out across the water, while Shayan was persuaded to sit in the car very close by and listen to music, they told me his story.

  Saeed is a computer technician, a Kurd who belongs to an Islamic sect, Al Hagh, regarded in Shiite Iran as heretical. He married young, and unhappily, and his wife soon left him, yielding him custody of their only child, Shayan. Saeed remarried a Shia Arab, Zahra, who converted to the Al Hagh faith. In 1999, Saeed became involved in student protests at his university, and though he was not among the many to be arrested, he was already marked down by the police for his religion, and for the fact that he had converted a Muslim, a serious offense under Sharia law. The family fled, arriving in Australia on an Indonesian fishing boat in March 2000. Shayan was almost five and, according to his father, liked watching the flying fish; he was bright, intensely curious, and regarded Zahra as his mother, having scarcely known his own. Zahra was pregnant.

  In keeping with the immigration policy then current, the family was taken into detention and sent to Woomera until its application for asylum could be processed. There were at this time about five hundred refugee children in detention in Australia. The family had been in the camp less than a week when a riot broke out among a group of detainees who had been allowed no contact with the outside world for over three months. A fence was torn down. Guards in riot gear used tear gas and batons to restore order. Shayan watched. Later, he asked his father to explain what had happened. “I had no answer,” says Saeed. “I didn’t know what to say.” Soon afterward, a detainee driven beyond endurance broke a bottle and held it to his heart, threatening to kill himself unless he received some kind of response from the Australian authorities. Shayan watched this, too. “Gradually,” says Zahra, “we were becoming scared about him. He didn’t seem to want to play with the other children, and he seemed easily frightened.” It was at about this time, she says, that Shayan started having nightmares and wetting his bed.

  Woomera, by all accounts, was a desperate place; it was hot and crowded, and when it rained the dust and sand turned to mud. By the spring of 2000, violence had become common. The atmosphere was tense and wretched. One day, a young Iranian climbed to the top of a tree and said that he would jump to his death. There were endless fights between guards and inmates. Fires were lit. Guards often wore riot gear. Shayan watched.

  The center was divided into various compounds. Sierra, a little to one side, was the punishment block, in which unruly people were placed in solitary7 confinement. When a batch of new arrivals was due, Shayan and his family were moved into Sierra to make room for them. This seemed to frighten Shayan out of all proportion: he believed that only “bad” people were sent to Sierra. Apart from his new baby sister, Shubnam, he was the only child in the punishment compound. He refused to eat, saying to his father: “You eat my food. It will make you strong to fight off the guards when they attack us.”

  After eleven months, it was clear to everyone that Shayan had become extremely disturbed. Doctors diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder, and in his report to the authorities, Wayne Lynch, a counselor who had taken an interest in the family, listed “bed-wetting, nightmares, anorexia, insomnia, fearfulness” among his symptoms. Shayan was now six. On March 3, 2001, the family was transferred to Villawood on the edge of Sydney, a detention center generally regarded as calmer and better for children. By now they knew not only that they had been turned down as refugees by the immigration authorities on their first interview, but that their appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal had failed as well. They were running out of options: only the High Court and a direct ministerial appeal remained.

  Villawood proved no easier for Shayan. In fact, he quickly grew worse. He witnessed more violence, more self-mutilation, other suicide attempts. He was taken for observation to Westmead Hospital, where a consultant psychologist, Dr. Timothy Hannan, warned of the consequences of returning Shayan behind bars. His disorder was becoming chronic, he told the Australian authorities, and each return to detention would trigger again all his symptoms. Shayan was sent back to Villawood. On April 30, he watched a detainee cut his wrists and bleed heavily. He stopped eating and drinking; soon he refused to speak. He was taken back to Westmead.

  Under Section 417 of the Migration Act, Ruddock had the power to release the family on humanitarian grounds. An application, by lawyers and doctors, was presented: Ruddock turned it down. Shayan went back to Villawood. “For the next forty-five days, he would not eat or drink or talk,” explains Zahra. She speaks excellent English and is a gentle and quiet young woman. Saeed, whose English is less fluent, leaves the talking to her; he is a slight, short man, with receding hair and a small mustache. Like his wife, he is soft-spoken. “Every four days, they took him back to Westmead and put tubes down his throat and his nose. Then twenty-four hours later, they sent him back.” Shayan lost more weight and there were fears that his kidneys might be damaged. When in Villawood, he preferred to spend his days in bed. One day, as the guards were returning him from the hospital to the detention center, he managed to slip away. They chased him, and as he ran, he shouted: “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back.”

  Shayan’s case was now beginning to attract attention in the medical and legal worlds. Psychiatrists were writing reports and letters to the immigration authorities. Shayan, they warned, was “acutely traumatized.” In August, a video camera was smuggled into Villawood and on the thirteenth—less than two weeks before the Tampa rescue—a national news show put out a film showing Shayan lying in Saeed’s arms, limp and apparently lifeless. Again, Ruddock could have acted. Instead, he let it be understood, speaking on a news program, that there was more to the family’s story than met the eye, and that the fact that Zahra was Shayan’s stepmother was in some way significant. On four separate occasions, he called Shayan “it.” Challenged as to why he was not prepared to show more compassion, Ruddock said that he could not make exceptions to government policy. Were he to let Shayan and his family in, would other families claiming mental illness in their children not demand the same? The Melbourne Herald Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph both carried stories hostile to Saeed, accusing him of having kidnapped Shayan and of deliberately starving him.

  The family, nearly all legal avenues having failed, were told that they would almost certainly have to return to Iran. Meanwhile, Shayan could be fostered in the community. Saeed and Zahra hesitated. Doctors insisted that a child in so desperate a state needed above all to be with his parents, but they worried that keeping him in detention any longer might prove too dangerous: Shayan had by now witnessed three serious riots, four suicide attempts, many acts of self-mutilation, arson, fights, and the repeated humiliation of his parents. One day, while his parents, doctors, and authorities discus
sed what would be best for him, Saeed was led into another room in the hospital. Zahra remained with Shayan and Shubnam. She describes the scene: “Shayan was clinging on to me. A guard came up and said that they were going to take him. He began to pull him away from me. Shayan screamed: ‘Mum, help me.’ What could I do? They pulled him away and locked us in a room and took him away.”

  For the next few months, Shayan lived with a Muslim family in the community. His parents and Shubnam were taken to visit him two to three times a week, for an hour, always with guards who stayed with them even when Zahra went to change the baby’s diaper. Their uniforms seemed to terrify Shayan. He was eating and drinking again, but his foster parents noted that he clung to them all the time, that he could not sleep unless one of them sat with him, and that he was still wetting his bed. At night, he often screamed. After four months, Ruddock granted Zahra, Shayan, and Shubnam bridging visas, which meant that they could live in the community; but since bridging visas do not include financial support, they were forced to live on the charity of friends. Saeed stayed in Villawood for the next eight months.

  In August 2002, the Federal Court having referred the case back to the Refugee Review Tribunal, Saeed and Zahra were found to be refugees after all, on the grounds that they would face persecution on account of Zahra’s conversion if they returned to Iran. Looking back over the long nightmare, Saeed asks: “If we are refugees now, why were we not refugees then?” He and Zahra took their case to the Human Rights and Equal Oppurtunity Commission, which found that their rights had indeed been seriously violated.

  But Shayan sleeps little, has severe nightmares, and wets his bed. When he draws, he draws pictures of people behind bars. He has few friends his own age, saying that they do not know what it is like to have lived inside a prison, but he plays affectionately with Shubnam, who is now three. He will not watch children’s television but prefers to see the news, though when he sees people in uniform, he cries. For a while, Saeed and Zahra hoped that he would get better on his own, in the flat that they have been given on a Parramatta housing estate. But since he seemed to remain so depressed and so fearful, and his screaming fits continued, they agreed to put him on medication. Every week, he sees a psychiatrist, who has told them that Shayan may take a very long time to get over what he experienced and witnessed; and that, possibly, he never will. As for his parents, their difficulties are not over, either. They have been granted temporary protection visas, like all “unauthorized arrivals” who are recognized as genuine refugees. At some point in 2005, they will have to apply to have their visa renewed for a further three years, and it is not impossible that they will be turned down. If they judge it too dangerous to go back to Iran, too likely that one or the other would be imprisoned or killed, then Shayam may once again find himself behind the razor wire.

  • • •

  SHAYAN’S STORY HAD pitted the Australian medical profession sharply against the government. Doctors realized that whatever treatment they might offer their patients was meaningless unless they were removed from the environment causing the trauma. At no time in the past, not even over the “lost generation,” the children stolen from the Aborigines, had the suffering of children been so starkly juxtaposed against political indifference. A Professional Alliance for the Health of Asylum Seekers and Their Children was set up, bringing together 50,000 doctors and health workers from across the country—the largest alliance ever formed on a single social issue in Australia’s history. Drawing on earlier studies from the concentration camps of the Boer War and the Nazi years, and on comparable detention center reports from the United States and various parts of Europe, they began to submit evidence, draft appeals, and draw up statements. Shayan was not the only child to stop eating and become mute. Elsewhere in other parts of Australia, it now emerged that other children in detention had become anxious, anorexic, and agitated; they were wetting their beds and walking in their sleep. One small girl was described as wetting herself every time she saw a guard. Mothers reported aggressive and violent behavior in otherwise placid children. One, anxious about the failure of her newborn baby to thrive as it should, was reported as saying: “I am afraid that she takes in my unhappiness from my milk.” A young boy, deciding that he wished to die, was found digging his own grave. Another, asked why he had burned his hand with a lighted cigarette, replied: “Because I can’t feel anything.”

  I could only talk to Shayan’s parents and not to Shayan himself; he was too wary and too young to speak to strangers. It was from Morteza, another young Iranian already in Woomera when Shayan first arrived, that I heard at first hand what it is like to be a child in the Australian camps. Morteza spent three years and eleven months as a detainee, from early 2000 to his release—as a recognized refugee—on November 20, 2003. He was sixteen when he first saw Woomera. He was flying in low over the desert, after a terrifying and stormy journey by boat with smugglers, and he thought: “Where are we going? There is nothing there.” He was right. Woomera had not yet been completed, and the first detainees lived in huts as the razor wire went up around them. There were soon 150 children in the camp, the youngest a newborn baby.

  Morteza had been there about five months when the 1,500 detainees, who had had no contact with the outside world for a long time, asked for a mobile phone to be brought in so that they could call their families. What started as a peaceful demonstration turned rapidly into agitated confrontations with the guards; tear gas was used; the detainees fought back; the ringleaders were taken to the punishment block. It was Morteza’s first experience of violence, and he joined the ranks of the protestors. His younger sister, Mena, was by now so depressed that she became incontinent and barely spoke; his younger brother, Hussein, was growing thinner all the time. The months passed and the family seemed to have been forgotten. The riots multiplied. There was a breakout and Morteza was among those who got as far as the town of Woomera itself, after which concessions were made concerning phones and the pace of the processing interviews. There were even some releases, but not of Morteza and his family. At some point during this period, Morteza tried to hang himself; later, he joined others on hunger strike; later again, he slashed his wrists with a razor blade. In the right-wing press, those who tried to kill themselves were labeled crazed, selfish, and manipulative.

  In January 2001, the family, the two younger children very troubled, was moved to Port Hedland. By now Mena was writing in her diary: “If suicide were not a sin in my religion, I would have done it already.” One day, Morteza and Hussein watched as a Turkish detainee took out a razor blade and began to cut from his neck downward, across his chest, his hand and arms and stomach. It was his third suicide attempt. Hussein, says Morteza, had a peculiar smile on his face. That night the little boy began to cry and couldn’t stop. He started to wet himself and to stutter. “Please God,” wrote Mena in her diary, “if you want to finish my life, finish it quickly.” In Woomera there had been two girls her own age; in Port Hedland, she had no friend. Morteza spent his time with older boys. One night, trying to prevent his father being taken away by the guards to another compound, he was knocked to the ground and beaten with batons. There were more riots; some of the huts were burned down.

  On May 21, 2001, the family, having had its application for asylum turned down at every stage, was sent to Villawood. In a friend’s room one day, the young men discussed what new tactic they could try; someone suggested sewing up their lips. The three boys did it to one another, carefully pulling the thread through; it caused surprisingly little pain, Morteza remembers, though it hurt a lot when the blood had dried. His mother fainted when she saw him. He agreed to take the stitches out when the family was promised bridging visas in the community. The visas did not come through, and Morteza spent the next nine months under observation, a guard checking on him every two minutes for the first three months. Even so, when it became clear that the promises about the visa had been false, he tried to kill himself by swallowing an entire bottle of shampoo while in the sh
ower.

  In May 2002, his parents decided that they could take no more. They had spent $32,000 trying to make a new life in Australia, and had failed. Morteza’s mother seemed to be aging very quickly, and neither his younger brother or sister was thriving. They agreed to return to Iran. For Morteza, the decision was more complicated. As with Shayan, a smuggled videotape had been put out on television, showing him being beaten by guards, and his case had received much publicity. His father did not think it safe for him to go home. What was more, he had converted to Christianity. And so his parents flew home to Teheran, and Morteza spent another eleven months in detention, ticking off the days one by one on a calendar on his door, before he, like Shayan, was perceived to be a genuine refugee after all, in a way that he had not been three years and eleven months before. He is now living in Sydney, on a three-year temporary protection visa, a friendly, almost jaunty young man of twenty, his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. If he is extremely lucky, his visa will be renewed. But there is no way, as things stand, of seeing his parents, for if he leaves Australia, he will not be able to return. “I look at guys my age and think: I have lost my family. I lost four years of my life. No education, no training. It is like a movie: the action freezes, then starts again. I think: what a terrible waste.”

  Zachary Steel is a psychologist, working for the school of psychiatry at the University of New South Wales, Soon after mandatory detention for asylum seekers was introduced in 1992, he began to explore the possibility of investigating the mental health of the new detainees. Wherever he turned, he was blocked by the authorities. It was not until almost ten years later, in the wake of the Tampa and its repercussions, that he was able to start drawing together separate strands of research, joining forces with Derrick Silove, a psychiatrist from South Africa, whose interest had been kindled as a medical student doing autopsies on political prisoners who bore the marks of torture, and with Aamer Sultan, a physician who had fled persecution in Iraq and was a detainee himself in Villawood. Over eighteen months, Dr. Sultan, who had become a confidant and counselor to his fellow inmates, had watched their mental health deteriorate. It was with his help that the camera had been smuggled into Villawood to picture the listless Shayan lying in his father’s arms.