I have received this disturbing report from Nauru. It is all the more disturbing given that the Republic of Nauru has been boasting on Twitter that the camps there are open, and people are free to come and go as they choose. (see @Republic_Nauru Follow what they say). Note that the suggestion that people held on Nauru are “free”stands awkwardly with the fact that they are not allowed access to phones. That, coupled with the Australian Border Force Act (which threatens people working in the detention system with 2 years’ gaol if they disclose facts they learn while working in detention) shows beyond argument that Australia and its puppet Nauru are determined to make sure Australians do not learn the truth about our detention system.
Here’s the latest report:
“I have heard some very frightening and distressing stories about events last night in women’s detention in #Nauru.
22 February 2016. 1.12 am. Nauru. Women’s tent.
The guards blacked out the women’s tent by cutting the power.
Then fourteen male guards and one female guard entered the tent. Women screamed in terror.
Two women in the single women’s tent were strip searched. They were screaming . One had a phone in her bra. A total of five people in the women’s tent had phones taken. Communications with the camp have been cut.
A woman has been on a hunger strike for 18 days. When she heard the piercing screams, she suffered a heart attack. With no ECG machine available, it is impossible to reliably diagnose or treat cardiac emergencies. She spent some time in IHMS and was sent back to the camp.
A young woman was recently arrested for taking a piece of fruit from the dining room and at the time was seen dragged by her hair and beaten by Nauruan Police, leaving visible injuries. Terrified by the 1:12 am raid, she slashed her wrists and her body. She too was treated by IHMS and sent back to camp.
I know this is a true account of what happened.
Please share widely.”
Later edit:
“Most of the women have histories of serious trauma. They would have experienced extreme post-traumatic stress reactions to the massed invasion into the blacked-out room of sleeping women. Any person would have experienced great terror. I can’t imagine what went through the minds of those women who have already been assaulted, or witnessed assaults, by gangs of men in uniform.
…
The woman who had a heart attack is also severely depressed … so depressed is she, she believes they want to kill her so she won’t leave her room
She is now 32 kg and her BP is so low, she can barely lift her head from the pillow. I am baffled how or why she was sent back to the camp.”
What can we do? What can we do? Despair is creeping in and I feel like I need to do a hunger strike on the steps of Parliament. The sad fact is…this cold-hearted government (and opposition) would be as untouched by my protest as they are by the misery they have imposed on asylum seekers.
Please keep protesting anyway. They are hoping we will give up and go away. Every time you speak out for someone who can’t, you add to the gradual tide of change. It will come.
We are witnesses to some of Australia’s darkest hours. All the stories of detention are deeply troubling and exhibit the cruelty of this and previous governments. #notinmyname Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton.
Every time we think it cannot get worse, it does. Our evil government has an amazing power to think of more evil ways of punishing innocent men, women and children, just because they are exercising their legal right to seek asylum. How can human beings treat other human beings this way? This is the same question we asked when we knew what the Gestapo and the Japanese POW guards (amongst others)did to their prisoners. Now the same crimes against humanity are being committed in our name, by people who are facilitated and authorized by our government to do so. One day those guilty of these crimes against humanity will have to answer for their crimes. Unfortunately it will probably be too late for many of the abused to see their abusers brought to justice.
Australia has so many dark chapters in our past. History is always written by the victors, with a more than liberal amount of airbrushing.
We are living through one of the most vicious, cruel, sadistic, inexplicable eras of Australian government policy right now.
In a little over a month’s time we will commemorate ANZAC Day. National pride, rightly or wrongly, more often seems to be focused on our achievements on the sport and battle fields.
We hold our servicemen and women and our sportspeople up as examples of courage, commitment and bravery.
Not wanting to besmirch the memory of my father, who served in Papua New Guinea, when Australia was under a real threat of invasion, the suffering of the asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus Is., in some instances, is worse than the horrors of war and the POW camps.
All Australian service personnel, with the exception of the Vietnam War, were volunteers. They were well trained and provisioned. They would have been more than aware that they could suffer illness, injury and death on the battlefield and possible capture and imprisonment. They came from a common cultural and language background with a command structure. Even in the horrors of the POW camps they maintained their structure and discipline.
But what sustained them all, even as they were being brutalized, starved and beaten, their friends dying around them, was HOPE.
The hidden radio communications were bringing them messages of the victories by the allies, the progress towards freedom and their eventual return to their families’ loving arms in their home country.
HOPE is what sustained them. HOPE is what made every day worth living. One day it would all be over.
The self harm and suicides in both the Australian-based and off-shore detention centres happen because these innocent people, who were prepared to sacrifice everything, have had their will to live taken from them. They have lost all HOPE. We, the Australian government have taken it from them.
Peter Dutton, in his capacity as Minister for Immigration, produced a video that all of the asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru were forcibly, individually, required to watch.
He tells them that they will never be resettled in Australia.
Under a veil of secrecy and media blackouts he and DIBP work the evil that we condemn in other countries.
I usually attend ANZAC Day ceremonies. I will again, this year, with pride in the service of my father and one of my nephews. I feel a lot of our ex-servicemen and women would be ashamed of current and former government policies. Is that the Australia that they were fighting for?
I will share this news, but what can we do? The treatment of these refugees is cruel and inhumane and it makes me sick tht my country is to blame for this. We shouldn’t have to push out government to do the right and compassionate, humane thing here. The fact we do is evidence that Australians voted in the wrong people to lead us. How can we make our government representatives remember their place, why they are elected, and to truly represent the compassion of Australians and set these people free in Australia, rehouse and rehabilitate them? I am truly devastated to see my country commit such attrocities.
What can we do? GET THE WORD OUT AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE. Shame the politicians: Both major parties are complicit in this. Make it clear to your local Federal MP that you WILL NOT VOTE for them in the electionlater this year, so long as this casual cruelty continues: all hidden away by Border Force.
I keep hearing that these people are not refugees, they are from Nepal, which trip advisor assures is safe, and that if they want or need to leave they are free to travel to other safe countries nearby. Also they are free to leave nauru. Where is the truth?
If you want the truth, avoid listening to the politicians.
New Zealand offered to take people from Nauru who had been accepted as refugees. Australia refused the offer.
Perhaps you should write to your local Federal MP and ask if that’s the fact and, if so, why we refused NZ’s offer.
This is disgusting inhumane treatment of fellow human beings
Australia is shaming itself further….
I lived in Australia for 30 yrs and formed the opinion that it’s attitude and treatment of its Original inhabitants was cruel, repressive and deliberate.
These latest atrocities are just as deliberate
I feel for all the Australians who wish it were otherwise…they need to speak at the polls ..and on the streets…..I know if the refugees were white there would be a very diff outcome
NZ has offered to take some people who were going to be returned to Narau ..but the offer was refused…..why ….because it would show Turnbull and co up…..
What can we do post this in large letters out side the office of every political vermin who makes up our criminal government. Put it on large billboards outside every polling booth and ask people if they are happy their governemnt is destroying their humanity. Phone the offices of the monsters involved and keep phoning them demanding they resign and hand themselves over to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Harass and hound these vermin every where they go. Treat them like the criminal monsters they are.
We have to get these women back to australia. Particularly the beautiful young woman who has dropped to 32 kg and has heart and kidney difficulties. She has depression with psychotic features and cannot eat, highly treatable here but a death sentence where she is. She has had her phone confiscated and is even more isolated. Eating disorder patients frequently die of heart attack here in Australia, from electrolite imbalance, potassium effect on heart muscle etc. Nauru does not even have an ECG She needs expert medical and psychiatric treatment in Australia now. Please share and share.Bring her here Please.
Wow. I pinch myself to see if I,m dreaming but no this is reality. So sad and these LNP lawyers and judges have declared they have the right to bring The Gulags into existence and no law can argue against it. So the idea of Hunger strike on the steps of Parliament seems appropriate, but it would need many many hunger strikers together and the support to stop the LNP hired thugs and mercenaries(security) night time raids and police from disrupting it, along with medical and legal support, no light undertaking in LNP police state Australia.
This is man inflicting inhumanity on man. Animals whom we consider inferior do not behave in this fashion toward their own kind. Only human beings,the so called intelligent life form on planet earth, is capable of torture, murder and genocide. We have a long history dating back millennia of waging war and torturing other groups of humans who do not share our religious beliefs or who happen to come from a different ethnic group. Isn’t it about time Australia the country of immigrants showed the world that it has a heart and this cruelty is put to an end.
At my age ( 60+) I never thought that I would experience such cruelty from a Government in a country that I reside in. NEVER. Its deplorable. It’s inhumane. The Government is abusing vulnerable people, and as they intensify the abuses, then their popularity rises. This reeks of a time in history when a particular Government brain washed the masses, opened concentration camps and tortured and killed innocent people. The people were too frightened to oppose the leader. They retreated into silence and watched the abuses from afar and from the media. The hatred was rampant. People became desensitised and undoubedly convinced themselves that all was right with the situation. It’s a different era. Media are divisive in their reporting based on opinions. Apathy is closing in. Innocent people are being abused. WE MUST CLOSE these camps and treat people with the respect and decency that they deserve.
Australia and Nauru Governments should be reported to the International Human Rights Commission and taken to the International Court and charged with abuse and neglect of these asylum seekers..This is such shameful and inhuman treatment of human beings and comes into the same catogory as people were treated during the second world war by the Hitler Gestapo….
This is such a dire situation and totally unnecessary. I am utterly ashamed of our nation’s lack of basic humanitarian provisions for these people who have already been through so much. I feel compelled to make a stance as not to is to accept what is done to these human beings in our name. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH AND THIS INHUMANE TREATMENT MUST END NOW!!
I would like citizens of Australia to take back control of their country, which is now becoming a police state. when normal people are in control. Then humane treatment of legal refugees can happen. Bringing them to Australia and be given a chance again to live as humans.
Unfortunately, it is not just the government. The majority of Australians still believe the government hype and base their decisions on fear rather than compassion. Until we can educate people and change their views the government won’t feel the need to change theirs. The Fairfax poll currently doing the rounds is showing more than 50% don’t want refugees to come to Australia
This is a disgrace! How can a western nation accept this as ok!? Would our politicians like it if their families had to endure this treatment? This country has plenty of space for all the families in Nauru!
We have to get them out of there, they simply aren’t safe. The staff seem able to do whatever they like to them and witnesses who speak up for them are threatened with gaol time. I don’t know if the government is actually prepared to do that, given the public outcry that would cause, but they constantly hold it over the heads of anyone who might talk.
At least two of these women need urgent, life preserving medical help and the rest are going to need the services of a psychiatrist. They aren’t going to get any of that in detention (no ECG WTF?)
I’m starting to wonder if this is what the government intended. These are crimes against humanity and the government should be tried before the International Court.
Since both Labor and Coalition are complicite in their inhumanity and both have chosen to serve Big Corp and the miners at the expense of the average Australian, it’s time to send them both in opposition at the next election. The Greens and Independants sure can not be worse than what we’ve been lumbered with over the last few years.