From one hell to another, life at Woomera Detention Centre

The harsh regimen endured by Australia's asylum-seekers is provoking mounting protests but, as ALAN TENNANT reports, the political dividends are high.

Sweltering under a 40 deg C sun in a place so remote that only razor wire separates it from the desert, this small compound in the middle of the Australian Outback has been likened to a concentration camp.

Inmates are known by number and solitary confinement comes to those who fall foul of guards. Fresh in everyone's mind are the scars of riots and mass breakouts.

The inmates are not hardened cons - the men, women and children are the beneficiaries of a hardline policy that incarcerates people whose only crime is to have fled persecution and tyranny.

But the welcome mat has long been absent from the only developed country in the world to automatically detain all asylum-seekers while their refugee status is assessed.

Woomera Detention Centre is one of a handful of detention facilities scattered around the continent and is said to be the bleakest of them all. In recent years it has been the scene of frequent rebellions, and this week tensions exploded again. More than 200 detainees, mainly Afghan, went on hunger strike. Dozens, including one minor, sewed their lips together. At least seven men tried to poison themselves by drinking shampoo and detergent. Others attempted to hang themselves.

To Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, it was another manipulative attempt to force the Government's hands over their visa applications. Refugee activists called it a desperate cry for help.

This month child psychiatrist Dr Michael Dudley made the long journey from Sydney to the former missile testing range, a collection of buildings more than 50km north of the nearest city, Adelaide.

"Some children asked us why there are no flowers in Australia," he said of the harsh desert environment that has become their home.

Dudley, head of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry faculty at the Royal Australian College of Psychiatry, was part of a team inquiring into the conditions of the refugees. After interviewing three families, he left appalled.

Detainees were subjected to night raids and room trashings, he said. Families regarded as troublemakers were broken up and their children put in solitary confinement, allegations the Government rejects.

He said the centre's private operator, Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), a unit of US prison operator Wackenhut Corrections Corp, treated the residents like criminals, referring to them by numbers rather than their names.

"I find that extraordinary," he said. "They are not tattooed on the forearm but you just wonder about that. They are not death camps in the sense that people are not trying to kill anyone. But the analogy is accurate in that there is quite a lot of institutional violence, if I can put the term that way.

"What I am referring to is the tendency to use coercive management and behavioural strategies such as tear gas, room trashings, children being put in solitary confinement, separated from their parents, made to stand out in the hot sun, being called various things like terrorists and queue-jumpers.

"All in all it's pretty dreadful. It's inhumane, dehumanising and medically and morally wrong."

Controversy has engulfed detention centres since they were set up by Paul Keating's Labor Government a decade ago.

Riots, breakouts, hunger strikes and claims of neglect, violence and sexual abuse prompted a series of damning independent reports. The Catholic Church claimed they were verging on prisoner-of-war camps. Some claim that German and Japanese POWs were treated more humanely.

Criticism reached new levels last year when the Norwegian freighter Tampa rescued more than 400 asylum-seekers in the Indian Ocean. The decision by Prime Minister John Howard to refuse the boat people entry to Australia and send them to Nauru as part of his new "Pacific Solution" drew worldwide scorn, yet revived the fortunes of his struggling Government.

The issue dominated November's federal election, with Howard repeatedly maintaining that Australia was a compassionate world citizen that allowed significant numbers of refugees in through official programmes. But, he said, it couldn't be seen as an easy touch for people-smugglers bringing in illegal immigrants.

His hardline stance won huge public support and helped the Liberal coalition to a stunning victory that just a few months earlier had seemed unimaginable. Yesterday, as the hunger strikers continued into their 10th day, he remained implacable, telling Channel Nine: "I want to make it very clear that we don't intend to abandon the detention policy.

"Nobody likes the present situation. We don't like having to detain people but there is no alternative if we are to keep control of the flow of people into this country."

As events unfolded at Woomera this week it was clear public backing for the policy remained strong. Sixty-three per cent of callers to talkback radio shows supported Ruddock, with some callers saying he should be named Australian of the Year.

Sydney shock jock Howard Sattler summed up the mood of many of his callers when he declared: "Every day that they have their hunger strike, we save money."

But the voices of unease are growing steadily louder. A host of senior political, cultural and religious leaders have condemned the treatment of asylum-seekers as xenophobic and inhumane, and accused the Government of preying on people's worst natures.

This week the medical community, headed by the presidents of the 12 specialty colleges, joined forces to attack the Government's policy. And one of Ruddock's most senior advisers on immigration, Neville Roach, resigned from his roles as chairman of the Government's Business Advisory Council and the Council for Multicultural Australia.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, Roach said the Government's rhetoric had severely damaged Australia's multicultural fabric, increasing prejudice against not just asylum-seekers, but the wider Islamic community and others of Middle Eastern appearance.

"[The asylum seekers] have been labelled queue-jumpers, illegals, possible terrorists and people intimidating our decency, whose values are so alien to us that we wouldn't want them here," he said.

"In the process, compassion seems to have been thrown out the door. A father, here on a temporary protection visa, whose three children drowned on their way to Australia, was not assured of re-entry if he left to see his wife, who was in Indonesia. Nor was the mother given permission to enter Australia to join the father. What great risk did they pose to Australia? Was the Government afraid that future asylum-seekers might contrive such horrific circumstances?"

The Government says 80 per cent of applicants receive a "primary decision" within 15 weeks, but Amnesty International estimates that the average detainee is locked up for eight months. Around 80 per cent of Australia's unauthorised arrivals are found to be genuine refugees.

In Woomera many detainees have been held for more than a year, and the latest hunger strike was started in protest at the freeze on Afghan asylum claims after the Taleban were overthrown.

As the hunger strike was due to enter its 11th day today lawyers representing the detainees warned someone would soon die. And there are grave concerns over the long-term wellbeing of the asylum-seekers, particularly the children.

Of the 2700 people in detention in Australia, almost 600 are children, more than 50 of whom are unaccompanied. Most of those - 37 -are at Woomera. In most cases their families have raised money to pay a people-smuggler in the hope they will find a better lifer, says Dr Graham Thom, Amnesty International Australia's refugee coordinator. They arrive confused, sad, helpless.

"Recently we've had quite a few young Afghan boys whose families were terrified they would be drafted by the Taleban," he said. "I know of one Iraqi boy and girl whose family paid a people-smuggler to get them here, they arrived and simply did not know what was going on."

Although there is limited evidence of the effect of incarceration on refugees, an article published last year in the Medical Journal of Australia offered a revealing insight.

Kevin O'Sullivan, a psychologist at the Villawood detention centre in Sydney, and one of the Iraqi detainees, Dr Aamer Sultan, studied 33 long-term inmates who had all been through traumatic experiences before fleeing to Australia. Their conclusions painted a depressing picture of of psychological breakdown.

They found that every long-term inmate experienced insomnia, recurrent nightmares and chronic feelings of helplessness and bitterness towards authority. Two-thirds frequently contemplated suicide. About one-third began to stutter or suffer paranoid delusions.

They believe detainees go through four distinct stages. Initial shock at imprisonment is mitigated by unwavering hope of release.

As those hopes recede fear of repatriation or indefinite imprisonment take hold and the inmates succumb to depressive disorders. An overwhelming sense of injustice also prompts involvement in acts of resistance.

In the third stage depressive illness deepens and active resistance turns to passive non-compliance. Finally fully psychotic symptoms appear. Half of Sultan's long-term fellow inmates had reached that stage.

Dudley says incarceration will have severe long-term implications for children and could damage their brain development.

"The children tend to be very depressed and withdrawn," he says. "Younger children are often mute or not eating or sleeping, have night terrors and bed-wet. Unaccompanied minors need to be out of these places. Other children should be out with their parents. We can't have a a stolen-generation-type situation where the state decides what's good for the children without asking them or their parents."

Amnesty International says the incarceration of children is in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Government maintains its policies comply with all UN conventions.

The announcement this week that processing of Afghan asylum claims would be restarted offered a glimmer of hope, but Ruddock continues to insist the protests will achieve nothing.

Robert Manne, an associate professor of politics at Melbourne's La Trobe University, says there will be no major policy changes while Ruddock remains in charge. He believes the Government will take advantage of the asylum-seeker issue at the upcoming South Australia state election in the same way it did at the federal poll.

"He [Ruddock] is one of the most inflexible, dogmatic figures that I have ever encountered in politics in Australia," says Manne. "He cannot even conceive that he is wrong."