Detainees trying intimidation PM
The Age
Friday 25 January 2002
Hunger strikers at the Woomera Detention Centre were trying to morally intimidate the Australian government, Prime Minister John Howard said today.
About 200 detainees are hunger-striking and another 60 protesters have sewn their lips together to draw attention to government delays in processing their visa applications.
" ... it has to be said again that people are engaging in self harm, it is being done to morally intimidate the Australian people and the Australian government into changing a policy," Mr Howard told Melbourne radio 3AW.
"I mean that is the objective, this is moral intimidation."
He said authorities would try to prevent the hunger strikers starving themselves to death.
"I don't want to make dramatic statements about what we're going to do but self evidently we will do everything we possibly can to stop people effectively taking their own lives."
However he said scrapping the mandatory detention policy was not an option.
"We would wish that we didn't have this problem to grapple with but in the absence of there being both a humane and also policy effective alternative we will pursue and continue to pursue the policy of mandatory detention."
Mr Howard said there was evidence children had been coerced into taking part in the protests.
Five unaccompanied children were removed from the centre in outback South Australia after they were considered most at risk from ongoing protest action.
"There is evidence and this is why the child welfare people acted as they did in South Australia, there is evidence that children have been, as it were, coerced or involved or used in situations," he said.
"Just how many I can't tell you."
" ... children in the proper, positive care of their parents don't sew their lips together, do they?" Mr Howard said.
"I think all Australians, as an exercise in common sense, understand that and that is presumably what motivated the South Australian child welfare authorities to do what they did."
AAP