Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network recommends video and interview on trauma in Australian detention centres
Published: 1 Jul 2016
Dear all,
Advocating for an immediate end to the horrors of the immigration detention of people in need of protection is one of APRRN’s core areas of work.
Paul Stevenson, a psychologist and traumatologist, has spent 43 years helping people make sense of their lives in the aftermath of disaster, of terrorist attacks, bombings and mass murders, of landslides, fires and tsunamis. However, he says that in his entire career he has never witnessed more atrocity than he has seen in the incarcerated situations of Australia’s off-shore detention centres in Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. In an interviewand video for the Guardian newspaper, he says that the Australian government is deliberately inflicting upon people the worst trauma he has ever seen. The article has generated 1,132 comments to date.
Although it makes for extremely difficult reading and viewing, I would urge everyone to please read his interview and watch the four-minute video, and ask your friends and colleagues to do likewise. Paul Stevenson has lost his job for giving this interview which exposed (yet again) the atrocities committed in Australia’s off-shore detention camps.
The full article can be found here.
Depressingly, back in 2002 a Dutch psychiatrist contracted to work with IOM in Nauru, gave his professional opinion on the system at that time, which appears to have improved not a bit in the last 14 years. A translation of the feature article published in a major Dutch newspaper (The NRC Handelsblad) on 12 January 2003, follows here:
“When the Dutch psychiatrist Maarten Dormaar (63) set off last summer for the island of Nauru in the western Pacific Ocean, he thought he would be able to put his knowledge and experience to good use in lending assistance to hundreds of Afghan and Iraqi boat refugees staying there. But four months later he returned a bitter man after completing his contract with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). “As my Norwegian predecessor had already observed, you go there with the best intentions of helping refugees, but you quickly conclude that you are participating in a system that only makes people sicker.”
The “system” which has so embittered Dormaar is the Australian policy of locking up asylum seekers in detention camps while they wait for the decision on their asylum claim. Various hermitically sealed camps are located far away from the inhabited world, in desert- like areas in western and southern Australia , but for more than a year also on Nauru and Manus Island, which is part of Papua New Guinea.
At the end of the 2001 financial year, Australia made an agreement with the governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea to take the asylum seekers. In February last year, there were about 1,500 refugees, now about 400. The so called “Pacific Solution” was determined after the incident with the Tampa, a Norwegian container ship which, at the end of August 2001, rescued about 400 Afghan refugees from a sinking Indonesian fishing vessel near the Australian coast. Despite distress signals and in spite of great international pressure, Australia refused to let them land. Refugees are welcome only by invitation. Boat refugees who dare to make the crossing on their own initiative, since the Tampa, are refused entry into Australia and are immediately turned back or locked up in detention camps outside Australia.
As a psychiatrist contracted to the Antonius Hospital in Sneek [in the Netherlands], Dormaar has years of experience in the reception of asylum seekers in the Netherlands. The critical difference in the Australian approach is the total isolation of the predominantly Afghan and Iraqi refugees on Nauru and elsewhere, he says. “Dutch camps also have refugees with adjustment disorders, and these become greater the longer they are detained and dwell in insecurity about their refugee status. But on Nauru, where refugees and treated like prisoners, the mental health problems are much greater and deteriorate much more quickly because people are locked up for longer. Twenty to thirty percent of adult men have acute complaints, especially depression and anxiety. People complain of problems sleeping, they worry about their future and the problems of their family in Afghanistan. They become listless and fall into lethargy. That is also no wonder, given that there is barely an opportunity to be purposefully busy. They aren’t even allowed to cook their own meals, they stay close together in container-like barracks with tin roofs, in tropical temperatures and they are not permitted to leave the camp. They are forced to do nothing.”
Nauru with 1,100 inhabitants on an island slightly smaller than Schiermonnikoog, is ecologically laid waste by past Australian phosphate mining. Bare coral rocks decorate the desolated landscape. There is no economic activity of any significance and the government is pretty well broke. “The irony is that medical provisions for asylum seekers are much better than for the Nauruans. The local hospital is short of medical provisions, let alone modern equipment. Medical staff in the refugee camps are well rested/not overworked but unable to do anything about the root cause of the sickness: the forced detention.”
The detention camps on the Australian mainland are operated by a particular prison business. On Nauru and on Manus Island management is in the hands of IOM, a Geneva- based international organisation with more than 90 member states. IOM has been concerned with immigrant issues since 1951 and is involved with the reception and movement of migrants throughout the world. That was why Dormaar decided to take the posting with IOM. But now, to put it mildly, he has mixed feelings.
“The IOM has allowed itself to be sub contracted/hired by the Australian government for the implementation of its hardline policy. Now that I have seen the situation on Nauru, I have concluded that IOM has become implicated in the maintenance of a system which makes people sick. IOM had better give some more serious thought to its role. The Netherlands as a member state should ring the alarm bell.”
Best wishes,
Helen Brunt
Programme Officer
Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN)
888/12, 3rd Floor
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Bangkok, Thailand
Tel: +66(0)2-252-6654
Website: www.aprrn.info