As I write this, Australia is sharing a day of organised reflection, at the command of the Prime Minister. He has declared 16 January 2005 a National Day of Mourning and Reflection, in the wake of the tsunami disaster in which 160,000 people lost their lives. Rather than the officially prescribed one minute, I spent most of the day reflecting. It did not make me feel better.
Australia’s response to the disaster has been creditable in many ways. The government initially offered a modest amount of financial aid. The public responded quickly and generously, in part no doubt because many Australians have holidayed in that part of Asia; in part because of the horrifying images which quickly began to saturate the media; in part because a number of Australians were dead or missing. The government quickly increased its aid package in several steps, to a total of $1 billion. Then Howard declared a day of national reflection.
All this would be to his, and our, credit if it did not stand in such marked contrast to other aspects of our record of compassion.
The tsunami struck on Boxing Day 2004. A couple of days later, while media coverage of the event was overwhelming every other news story, the Australian government deported two adults and six children under cover of darkness. The Bakhtiyari family had become a cause celebre, having failed in their attempt to gain asylum here.
If the family had been an ordinary family of failed asylum seekers, their removal from Australia could properly be seen as the orthodox operation of the Migration Act. However the case was not ordinary because it was notorious that the children had suffered terribly as a consequence of their incarceration by Australia and that, on any view of the facts, the children could not be blamed for their plight.
Opinions are sharply divided about the conduct of the parents: one camp says the parents were reckless opportunists, seeking to exploit Australia’s generosity; the other camp says the parents did what any parent would do in order to save their children. There is substantial evidence that the family are genuine refugees; unfortunately, the debate was derailed by journalists onto the largely irrelevant question of whether the family came from Pakistan or Afghanistan. It is not in doubt that the Bakhtiyaris are Hazaras, an ethnic group whose territory runs diagonally across Afghanistan and into Pakistan, near Quetta. The Hazaras have been persecuted in both countries for centuries. Debating which side of the border they come from is as pointless as debating in 1939 whether a Jew came from Poland or Germany.
But whatever view might be taken of the parents’ conduct in bringing the children here, it is clear that the children were vulnerable and innocent.
After three years in detention, Muntazar Bakhtiyari said:
‘I don’t want to be in detention any more. Just bring me a gun and shoot me. You Australians you kill us already, you kill us every day. It’s better to be dead. I tried to cut myself. … I don’t want to be in detention anymore. Without any crime we are in detention. We’ve been here three years. They’ve made us go crazy. Then we have to go back, crazy. Come and kill me. I don’t want my life anymore. I’m sick of my life. It’s a bad life. Nobody wants life like this.’
At around the same time his brother Alamdar said:
‘We are dead person now. We are dead from our inside. We are eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping. … We are dead. Our life is gone now. No-one can help us. Nothing is there. … There is no justice. … My soul has gone from my inside. I feel dead. … Poor people in this world like rubbish on side of road. If they send us back we’ll be like rubbish … ‘
It is chilling to consider that children can be driven to such sentiments as these. It is a matter of record that both boys tried several times to kill themselves.
The mistreatment of the Bakhtiyari family must be viewed on two levels: firstly, the institutional aspects of mandatory detention set against international human rights norms; secondly, the details of the gratuitous cruelty with which the system was applied in their case.
Like many other countries, Australia is a signatory to various international human rights instruments, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In our treatment of the Bakhtiyari family (and many others like them) we have breached the most important of the obligations we undertook in the Convention on the Rights of the Child*.
In addition to the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Australia is in breach of several key provisions of the ICCPR, in particular Article 9 which forbids arbitrary detention and Article 10(1) which provides that ‘All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.’ Test that against the arbitrary and unregulated use of solitary confinement in immigration detention centres; and remember the terrified, crying face of Alamdar Bakhtiyari as he pressed against the silver palisade fence at Woomera: an image which should haunt all Australians.
Unfortunately, Australia does not regard its Convention obligations as having any effect on domestic law, so it is legally irrelevant that the treatment of children in immigration detention breaches so many of our Convention obligations.
Even if we accept mandatory detention as a given, a baseline for our standards, the treatment of the Bakhtiyari family has been marked by conspicuous and pointless cruelty. When Muntazar and Alamdar escaped from Woomera in early 2002 they went to the British High Commission to seek protection from the cruelty Australia was inflicting on them. Their father, Ali, was at that time in Sydney on a Temporary Protection Visa (it was later revoked in retaliation for the public sympathy provoked by the boys’ plight). The boys were taken from the British High Commission to Maribyrnong detention centre in Melbourne. Ali, who had not seen his sons for three years, said publicly that he was coming down to Melbourne to see them. The Department of Immigration chartered a plane to take them from Victoria to South Australia. They got the boys out of Maribyrnong a few hours before Ali could visit them. The whole affair was so public that it is clear the Department acted deliberately to prevent the father seeing his sons.
When Roquia Bakhtiyari was due to be confined with her sixth baby she was held under guard in a hospital in Adelaide, she was not allowed visitors or even flowers; she was not allowed to have a photograph of the baby when it was born.
The final, calculated steps in the Bakhtiyari case were taken at Christmas time: a poor advertisement, it might be thought, for the Christian message of kindness and charity. When all avenues of appeal for the family had been exhausted, the government refused to grant them visas on humanitarian grounds — something it had legal power to do. The family were grabbed in an early morning raid by the department. When the children were woken, the baby had a dirty nappy: Roquia was not allowed to change it. The younger girl wet her pants in fright: she was not allowed to change before the five-hour drive. Eventually the family was placed on a chartered flight in the early hours of the morning. They were sent to Thailand just days after the tsunami devastated the east coast of that country. Later they were transferred to Pakistan. After that, their fate is unknown.
The people smuggling trade has got the message: the boats stopped coming several years ago. Tearing the Bakhtiyari family out of Australia was pointless, heartless and vindictive. It has rid us of six children whose lives we have blighted.
Within a few days, Howard had announced that 16 January 2005 was to be a day of national reflection: a time to remember the victims of the tsunami and our own generous and compassionate response to that tragedy. As a country we fell for it. The Labor opposition, which had been wilfully silent about the Bakhtiyaris, supported the day of national self-congratulation. We saw something similar in the aftermath of the Bali bombing.
Howard’s technique is to assess the public mood, then exploit it to the full. Instead of acting as a leader might (by leading, for example) Howard follows the prevailing mood and thereby lends legitimacy to the sentiment of the mob. Unfortunately, public opinion frequently turns on a skewed or incomplete version of the facts. In any event, moral questions are not decided by majority vote.
Howard’s approach is good for his government because it guarantees majority support. It is dangerous for human rights, because the groups whose human rights are at risk are always unpopular minorities. Human rights discourse makes no sense at all unless tested against the treatment of unpopular groups. Howard’s approach sends an uncomfortable message to all those who might one day be part of an unpopular group — members of ‘élites’, for example; or people whose ideas are regarded as contrary to the public good, or people who criticise the government.
It is here that Howard’s fraudulent posturing on compassion becomes most apparent. Howard’s government has successfully argued for the right to imprison asylum seekers for life, notwithstanding that they are innocent of any offence. His government has argued for the right to throw asylum seekers into solitary confinement at will. His government has disregarded every international criticism of our system of mandatory detention. He watched without concern as an Australian citizen, Mamdouh Habib, was tortured and imprisoned without charge by our allies, the USA. Now that Mr Habib is to be released without charge, Howard’s government says Habib will get no apology and no compensation, but will be placed under surveillance.
Howard’s mawkish displays of compassion ring false when set against his record of institutionalised child abuse and his contemptuous unconcern for Australian citizens held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. His declaration of a National Day of Mourning and Reflection seems rather like the man who would kick a homeless person out of the way on entering a restaurant but leave a generous tip for the waiter.
As 16 January 2005 dawned, I felt in no mood to celebrate Australia’s compassion even though I applaud the help we are giving to the victims of the tsunami. There is something uncomfortable, and deeply embarrassing, about this celebration of our own generosity so soon after our final act of vengeance against a family of innocent children.