Culture

Greece Is Shutting Down Its Detention Centres And Freeing Asylum Seekers. Why Can’t Australia?

A year on from Reza Berati's death, other countries are doing what Australia won't.

by Alex McKinnon  17 February 2015

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Today marks a year since the death of 23-year-old Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati, who was murdered during an attack on the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre by locals, police and detention centre staff, after a riot by detainees inside the camp.

An independent report into the riot found that Berati had been kicked and beaten by multiple people before having a large rock dropped on his head. While two men were arrested and charged with Berati’s murder back in August, their trial has not yet started. Another 69 people were injured in the riot, including one man who lost an eye and another who was shot in the buttocks by riot police.

Since then, Australia’s policy of mandatory indefinite detention for asylum seekers has caused hundreds more instances of harm, including at least one death. 24-year-old Hamid Kehazaei died in a Brisbane hospital in September after sustaining a cut on his foot on Christmas Island that went untreated, and a 33-year-old Iranian man being held in a Darwin detention centre has been on a hunger strike for over 90 days, and is believed to be close to death. He has been joined by another fifteen Iranians in the Darwin centre, and a similar hunger strike was embarked on by hundreds of asylum seekers on Manus Island earlier this year.

More recently, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s report on children in detention found widespread abuse and mistreatment of kids in Australia’s offshore detention centres, including 233 assaults involving children, 27 incidents of hunger strikes involving children, and 33 reported instances of sexual assault, “the majority involving children”. The government has claimed the report is “a blatantly partisan politicised exercise”, said the HRC should be “ashamed of itself”, and pressured HRC President Dr Gillian Triggs to resign.

As it turns out, it’s not just Australian detention camps that cause harm to the people inside them. In 2012, the conservative Greek government introduced its own hardline detention policy to deter asylum seekers and immigrants from arriving in Greece by boat, Operation Xenios Zeus — ironically named after the ancient Greek god of travellers and guests. 

One of the centrepieces of Operation Xenios Zeus, the Amygdaleza migrant centre in northern Athens, has encountered very similar problems to those regularly seen on Manus Island, including reports of inadequate food and overcrowding, hunger strikes, and the kind of detainee riots that led to Berati’s death. Most strikingly, Amygdaleza has seen the deaths of four migrants in the last year, including a 28-year-old Pakistani man who hung himself with a towel from his bunk bed earlier this week.

Now, it seems, the similarities between Greece and Australia’s detention policies have ended. In January the left-wing SYRIZA party won government in Greece promising to shut down camps like Amygdaleza, and the latest suicide has prompted Deputy Interior Minister Yannis Panousis to visit the centre and declare its closure a matter of priority for the new government.

“I am here to express my embarrassment. We are done with detention centres,” Panousis said at a press conference during his visit. “I’m here to express my shame, not as a minister but as a human being. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I really could not believe it. This must change and it must change immediately.”

It feels unimaginable that an Australian government minister would ever say such things about our own detention policy, which was until recently so similar to Greece’s. A year on from Berati’s death, the government is pursuing mandatory detention with ever more vigour, with Tony Abbott recently pledging to ensure all asylum seekers without proper documentation have their claims for asylum rejected.

As Australians commemorate Berati’s life today by writing Kickstarter-funded demands in the sky for the Manus Island detention centre to be shut down, it’s important to recognise that calling for the end of mandatory detention is not the hopeless exercise it sometimes feel like. Governments can change, camps can close, people can be freed. If a country that sees more than 15,000 undocumented boat arrivals a year can work out a better solution, Australia is more than capable of doing the same.

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Feature image via Unaligned Individuals/Pozible.