Sydney | Tuesday
DRAMATIC video pictures of desperate asylum seekers smashing their heads against cell walls have been aired by Australia’s national broadcaster.
The 20-minute video, made last June by staff at the Curtin centre in West Australia where armed asylum seekers have defied guards for the last four days, shows Afghan detainees in concrete cells, bleeding after bashing themselves against the walls and screaming to be freed.
Australian Correctional Management (ACM), which runs Australia’s six detention centres for illegal immigrants, recorded the incident for internal purposes but it was leaked to Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV.
An advocate for the detainees said when authorities told hunger strikers they would have to pay for a lawyer they asked if they could sell their own blood to pay the legal fees.
In the video, a bloodied male asylum seeker is released from an isolation cell he shared with another inmate and he continually pleads with guards in Afghani and broken English to explain why he had been detained.
One of the men was heard to threaten to kill himself before he was released from the cell.
ABC said the detainees belonged to an Afghan minority group which had fled to Australia after being persecuted by the former Taliban hardline rulers.
One of the men was heard to scream out, in English, ”open the door” at least 10 times before ACM staff let him out of his cell.
”In the name of God, I will kill myself and someone else as well,” ABC’s interpretation of his claim said.
Footage filmed from outside a building showed another inmate hurling himself into a window, demanding to be set free.
The men had been put in the isolation block because they refused to end a hunger strike.
The scenes were said to have preceded a riot last June which resulted in massive damage to the desert camp.
A man later convicted of four charges in relation to the riot was sentenced to more than five years in jail, ABC said. But most of the group have since been granted visas.
Australia’s hardline stance on asylum seekers will be put to the test next month when the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) sends a team to inspect the six centres which have been the scenes of riots and hunger strikes for the last six months.
The Geneva-based UNHRC approved a new and tougher inspection system on Monday.
Under new measures, a committee of 10 independent experts will be able to make visits to centres without notice as part of the International Convention Against Torture.
Former Australian Labour senator Margaret Reynolds, who was an observer in Geneva, said Australia would have to improve its treatment of asylum seekers.
”People would not be able to get away with the secrecy that currently is between Australasia Correctional Service Management and the government,” Reynolds told ABC radio.
China, Libya, Malaysia and Cuba were among those that voted against the anti-torture protocol.
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock dismissed criticism about the way disturbances were contained by Curtin centre guards.
”What I find is sometimes strange is the concern that from time to time incidents of these sort occur,” he told the ABC from Europe.
”I mean obviously one tries to manage the facilities to provide the utmost dignity for the people who are detained but people don’t like being detained, that’s quite clear.” – Sapa-AFP