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The Hate Boat

Detention Centres Are Terrifying - And Other Depressing Facts About Seeking Asylum

In this week's cheery asylum seeker round up we have a new nation possibly willing to take our refugees, more information on the Manus Island detention centre riot, and the four-legged refugees who may just jump the queue.

Image by Ben Thomson

As each day passes, more depressing news about Australian asylum seeker policy comes to light. And as the media continues to chip away at the government’s operational silence, we gather the pieces for you in one depressing and convenient post. This week we look at the Government’s new bestie in resettling refugees—Cambodia, hear a recount of the Manus Island riot by an Australian security employee, and examine the $46,000 lifeboat that’s the government’s latest weapon in the political pissing contest that is Operation Sovereign Borders.

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– The Abbott government has added another name to its line-up of neighbouring countries willing to take on Australia’s responsibility for asylum seekers. This week Cambodia was added to a list that already includes Papua New Guinea. This time at least the country in question is a signature on the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, although that doesn’t mean as much as you’d hope. Cambodia raised concerns in 2011 with an incident where members of a Vietnamese minority tried to claim refuge and were returned to where they came from without their cases being heard.

It’s not just refugee rights concerns that are causing angst over the Cambodian deal with economic, health and political concerns also causing backlash. With a population of 14 million people, just over a fifth of the country lives in poverty and almost half of all children are malnourished. The results of an election held in the middle of last year, which the incumbent government won, is still contested by the opposition to the point they’ve boycott parliament proceedings. This is topped off with a culture of government brutality and corruption is rife, with incidents of forced evictions, and freedom of speech concerns including the assassination and intimidation of journalists.

The biggest question raised by the Cambodia deal remains—where to next? Foreign Minister Julie Bishop recently visited Cambodia in a trip that also included the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Get acquainted, these countries could soon be coming to an asylum-related headline near you.

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– Information regarding the Manus Island detention centre riot that left Reza Barati dead continues to slowly revealed. An anonymous Australian employee of G4S, the security company who ran the Manus Island Detention Centre, has given a harrowing account of the events.

The employee recounts that after the second night of rioting the G4S staff asked to withdraw from the centre and hand over security to PNG police. Police acted by firing warning shots, but then stood back as enraged Manus locals, some of whom were employed by G4S, poured in to the compound over a back fence.

“We saw them going in with machetes. They had anything they could pick up: rocks, sticks, the poles from the exercise weights. Once they knocked people to the ground, they were stomping on their heads with their boots. A day later you could still see guards and staff and cleaners walking around with blood on their boots.”

While a PNG police report described the conflict as exclusively between detainees and detention centre workers, the Australian G4S employee claims police did not nothing to control violence and some even joined in.

“The police went from room to room as well and held guns to people's heads and said, 'If you don't give me your cigarettes, we're going to shoot you.’”

The expat employee reports that detainees are now so intimidated and fearful of Manus locals that when the centre tried to bring in local cleaners after the incident another riot almost erupted. As tensions continue, concerns of another riot is high.

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– An Egyptian asylum seeker who was turned back to Indonesia has revealed details of the government’s turn back process using lifeboats. The bright orange, disposable, and unsinkable lifeboats were purchased by the government as a part of Operation Sovereign Borders. Omar Ali and 27 other men were travelling on a boat towards Australia and were intercepted near Christmas Island. Australian Border Protection officers tried to recommission the old wooden boat the men were travelling on to no avail. The asylum seekers were then transferred to an Australian Customs ship where they remained below deck for a number of days. Later the men were forced on to one of the orange lifeboats in view of some land with just enough fuel to get to it. When the men arrived on land they found that it was in fact Java.

Ali described travelling inside the lifeboat as sickening, with little room and barely any fresh air. “We are very sick. We have no oxygen. We are very sick,'' says Ali. ''It's like animals. Animals [cannot be treated] like this.''

– Freedom of information laws continue to pester the government’s silence over asylum seeker matters with The Guardian obtaining information on medical procedures and force feeding. A controversial regulation introduced in 1994 gives the secretary of the Immigration Department extraordinary powers to approve medical procedures if the detainee’s condition is serious, even when the patient has expressly refused consent. The Immigration Department has approved medical treatment on people in detention centres without their consent ten times since 2005.

The two most recent applications to the department both related to asylum seekers who had gone on hunger strike. Protesting through hunger strikes regularly occurs in detention centres in Australia and offshore, with asylum seekers on Christmas Island beginning a hunger strike just last week in protest of Reza Barati’s death on Manus Island.

– And finally, the government continues to do nothing to stop the flow of four-legged asylum seekers particularly in relation to these queue jumpers from South Africa, who could potentially land in Sydney sometime this year.

@MitchMaxxParker