Woomera detainees end protest
By KIRSTEN LAWSON
The Canberra Times
More than 200 asylum-seekers at the Woomera detention centre abandoned yesterday a 16-day hunger strike and threats of suicide after talks with an independent team sent in to break the deadlock.
The deputy head of the government-appointed Independent Detention Advisory Group, Ray Funnell, said detainees had stopped their protest after a resumption of visa processing, and because they had gained widespread publicity for their cause.
Also called off were threats by nine Afghan teenagers at the camp to commit suicide if they were not freed by 5pm yesterday.
Fighting back tears, Mr Funnell said the breakthrough came after five hours of negotiations with representatives of the hunger strikers and the teenagers yesterday afternoon following talks on Tuesday which proved fruitless.
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said yesterday that the Woomera detainees had accepted his promise to keep them better informed about their applications after a freeze on visa processing was lifted last week.
Mr Ruddock admitted the Government could "in hindsight" have handled the hunger strike better by providing more information to detainees in the first place.
But he said the Government had had little room to move given the need to discourage further boat arrivals.
"The approach I have to take in relation to these matters requires a degree of firmness, which sometimes people think demonstrates a lack of humanity.
"But I think your humanity has the greater potential to be evil than if you remain firm," he said.
"The greater potential evil has always been that tragically more people could lose their lives in circumstances where people want to involve people smugglers to travel across oceans in very, very fragile and inappropriate vessels.'' The breakthrough came as Labor Leader Simon Crean held out the possibility that his party would abandon its support of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers, and new evidence emerged of the depth of Labor's split over the issue.
Migration agent John Young, whose company represents about 60 Afghans at Woomera, returned to Woomera yesterday to prepare updated claims after the Government decided last week to resume processing.
Mr Young rejected Prime Minister John Howard's insistence last week that Afghans should consider returning home now the Taliban had been overthrown.
He said it was not safe. Most of the asylum-seekers were from the Hazara ethnic group which had been persecuted for years by the Taliban and, despite the regime's demise, they feared former Taliban who may have switched sides and the warlords now battling for control.
He said the Refugee Review Tribunal had backed his view, overturning the Immigration Department's rejection of a claim from a Hazara last week.
Mr Young also hit out at the Woomera lawyers' group which has been strongly pushing the detainees' cause in the past fortnight, saying they were partly to blame for the falsehoods over the past fortnight about conditions there.
His company had heard no complaints about conditions, with people frustrated not about the camp but about their visas, he said.
Mr Young is managing director of Melbourne company Australian Migration Program and Investments, one of four companies contracted by the Government to represent asylum-seekers.
Meanwhile, Mr Crean insisted that Labor could be both tough on protecting boarders and compassionate in the way it treated people, saying once they made it to Australia people were entitled to ''basic human dignities''.
Asked whether Labor stood by mandatory detention, he said he had not yet seen a compelling argument to end the policy, but would be guided by the experts.
Labor immigration spokeswoman Julia Gillard said everything was on the table in Labor's policy review other than last week's announcement that Labor wanted children and their mothers released and high-risk people separated.
''There is always going to be a need for a mandatory detention process involving identity and security and health checking . . . but we have got an open mind,'' she said.
Their comments came after an adviser to Labor MP Duncan Kerr said Labor was deeply split on the issue, with the ''yawning schism'' between ''xenophobes'' like Mark Latham and ''compassionates'' like Carmen Lawrence clear since before the election.
Adviser Natasha Cica said if Mr Crean and Ms Gillard did not lift their game the schism would ''irreparably damage Labor's dwindling ability to lead Australia to a better place''. She said that by June last year an alternative policy to release children and mothers had been prepared. It was not adopted till last weekend.
The Refugee Review Tribunal overturned three government decisions on Afghan asylum-seekers in the week before Christmas, saying in one ruling that the claimant was at risk of serious harm despite the overthrow of the Taliban because the claimant was a Shia Muslim and a Hazara, whose traditional enemies, the Pashtun majority and opponents in the United Front, were vying for power. Hazaras had traditionally held low status in Afghanistan and in the last decade had been targeted by both sides of the political spectrum, it said.
Detainees at other centres remained on hunger strike yesterday.
And an Afghan at Sydney's Villawood centre, Dr Shahmohammad Rahim, said he asked to go home more than two months ago but had not received a response, and was now appealing directly to Mr Ruddock.