{"id":82029,"date":"2016-10-31T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T12:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=82029"},"modified":"2016-10-28T16:41:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T15:41:08","slug":"nauru-refugees-and-the-australian-torture-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/10\/nauru-refugees-and-the-australian-torture-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Nauru, Refugees, and the Australian Torture Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

19 Oct 2016 – <\/em>Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners<\/em> program covering the fate of refugees in the detention facility on Nauru, known euphemistically as a \u201cprocessing centre\u201d costing $35.3 million a year to the Australian tax payer.<\/p>\n

The Four Corners<\/em> program was, in turn, informed by a significant Amnesty International report, aptly titled Island of Despair<\/em><\/a>, which was released on Monday [17 Oct] night. That report examined the rather ghoulish extent the Australian government, with its Nauru satraps, has been going about the business of \u201cprocessing\u201d boat arrivals.<\/p>\n

In the sobering words of the report, Australia\u2019s government had furthered \u201ca policy to deter people arriving by boat\u201d calculated to inflict \u201cintolerable cruelty and the destruction of the physical and mental integrity of hundreds of children, men and children,\u201d an approach \u201cchosen as a tool of government policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the author and research director for Amnesty, Anna Neistat, noted<\/a> attendance by refugee children in local schools was poor for one obvious, abysmal point: \u201cNo matter how horrible the detention was \u2013 and the conditions in detention were \u2013 quite a few families and children themselves told me that now they\u2019re in the community, they feel less safe because they\u2019re subjected to attacks by the local population.\u201d<\/p>\n

Material had also been supplied by the contractor, Broadspectrum, formerly of Transfield fame, to an Australian Senate select committee citing 67 allegations of child abuse in Nauru, 12 of which found their way to the Nauru police.\u00a0 The police, true to form, have dragged their feet on the issue.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s morally impervious Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, remains rigidly opposed to any suggestion that Nauru has become an exemplar of torture for refugees, a continuum that stretches from the camp itself to the community that despises them.\u00a0 \u201cI reject the claim totally,\u201d claimed the prime minister<\/a> in fully rehearsed Newspeak.\u00a0 \u201cIt is absolutely false.\u00a0 The Australian government\u2019s commitment is compassionate and it\u2019s strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turnbull, along with his counterparts in Parliament, has taken a vaccine against refugee processing on Australian shores.\u00a0 The vaccine operates across the board, against incriminating reports, against ghastly revelations, and, generally, against any alternative that is not purposely cruel.\u00a0 The point is not to save lives but make the lives of the living unbearable.<\/p>\n

The Republic of Nauru, bought and complicit in the entire venture, decided to attack the entire premise of the investigative report, using its propaganda arm (the \u201cmedia and public information\u201d unit) to argue that the children had been \u201ccoached\u201d and interviewed in a \u201cstage-managed\u201d way.<\/p>\n

What the statement from the same unit insisted upon was the conclusiveness of appearances, the triumph of embalmed truths.\u00a0 What you saw was what you, without doubt, got.\u00a0 \u201c[V]iewers could clearly see that the refugees were well dressed, well-groomed and healthy.\u201d\u00a0 Where, went the suggestion, was the squalor, the degradation, the hostility?<\/p>\n

A closer look at the spectacle that is Nauru\u2019s processing facility suggests a few illusions which the propaganda preachers have been at pains to engender. The pedantic will draw upon the point that those in the facility are not technically detained, being allowed, like protected animals in an enclosed safari park, to wander around \u2013 within reason.<\/p>\n

Nauru authorities have insisted that the children are not held in any case, being allowed to live with families in appropriately safe accommodation, close to shops and decent amenities, including a new school and the \u201cnew $27 million state-of-the-art medical facility to which refugees have unrestricted and free access\u201d. The environment is near idyllic, free of violence, or at any rate less violent than Australia.<\/p>\n

With insistent smugness, the statement goes on to sociologically dump on Australian conditions, a reverse psychological approach that deems Terra Australis<\/em> the place of nightmares: \u201cThere are fights in Australian schools on a daily basis and there is crime in Australia.\u00a0 The Australian news shows acts of crime each night that are far more violent than anything Nauru has experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having raised the Nauru wilderness to the status of a welcoming refugee utopia, the unit statement goes on to aim at the Four Corners<\/em> program, which it claims \u201cshould be campaigning for no refugees to be allowed into such a violent society as Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n

With cruel perversion, an indigent, pseudo-colonial entity like Nauru becomes more appropriate than the funder of this grandiosely macabre vision, the Australian government.\u00a0 The journalists of Four Corners<\/em> had refused to play along, instead falsely portraying \u201cNauru as an unsafe nation, which it is not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nauru had, effectively, been taking up a heavy, dark man\u2019s burden, while in the mind of its officials, a scurrilous ABC had been promoting \u201cbiased political propaganda and lies\u201d disseminating a report that was, \u201cFrom start to finish\u2026 denigrating, racist, false and pure political activism.\u201d<\/p>\n

While this turn of the comic absurd will make some in Canberra squeamish, disturbing the odd conscience, the points on this clownishly brutal episode are clear: the torture facility that is Nauru is here to stay, a defiant reminder that humanitarianism towards the stateless and the fleeing is a fiction advanced by those who trumpet it as they deny it.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 dissidentvoice.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Four Corners program was informed by a significant Amnesty International report, aptly titled Island of Despair, which was released on Monday [17 Oct] night. That report examined the rather ghoulish extent the Australian government, with its Nauru satraps, has been going about the business of \u201cprocessing\u201d boat arrivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}