(http://www.smh.com.au/news/0108/18/text/opinion1.html)
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD, Saturday August 18, 2001
Cowardice all round over a child called "it"
By Mike Carlton
Alas! Poor Ruddock. Never a fellow of infinite jest at the best of times,
the Immigration Minister seems now to have shrunk to a grey, bloodless husk,
a talking skull, incapable of even the smallest flicker of emotion as more
of the horrors of his gulag archipelago are revealed.
The misery plumbed new depths on Monday with the Four Corners depiction of
six-year-old Shayan Bedraie, a pale, wasting Iranian child so traumatised by
what he has seen in the concentration camps that he no longer speaks or eats.
Struggling to explain this on television the next evening, Ruddock bizarrely
suggested that the boy's mental collapse stemmed from being cared for by a
stepmother. Chillingly, he persistently referred to Shayan as "it".
But this case is not unique. Far from it. The clinical psychologist Zachary
Steel, a regular visitor to Villawood, told me on Wednesday of four Iraqi
children, aged from 17 to six, now being held there behind the razor wire
while their parents remain in Western Australia. The oldest boy has
attempted suicide twice. The next boy, 15, recently tried to sew his lips
together with needle and thread, but was saved by an Iraqi doctor also
detained in the camp. The oldest girl has retreated into the same silent
terrors as Shayan.
Whatever the claims of these boat people to asylum, it should be plain by
now that we are committing institutionalised child abuse in these camps. But
not many people seem to care. Shamelessly pandering to the vocal Hansonite
rabble, Ruddock and his adherents in the media have successfully demonised
the refuge seekers as hordes of diseased Islamic queue-jumpers and criminals
storming ashore to rape and pillage.
When he is confronted with evidence of abuse in his system, the minister
responds with political doublespeak, narrow legalisms, cold statistics,
rules and regulations, manipulating all the cogs and fidget wheels of the
administrative machine. It is the historic response of authority to
inhumanity, recalling what the philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described
as the banality of evil. Dispatching his trainloads of the damned to
Auschwitz, Adolf Eichmann saw not the Jewish final solution, only a
scheduling challenge.
But it would be unfair to load Ruddock and the Government with all the
odium. Where is the great Australian Labor Party as the disaster unfolds? On
Tuesday, Labor's shadow justice minister, Duncan Kerr, gave a brief
early-morning interview to Radio National to say that he had been sickened
by the plight of Shayan Badraie. He called for a judicial inquiry.
By mid-morning he had apparently been gagged, would make no further comment,
and the matter was henceforth to be handled by Con Sciacca, Labor's shadow
immigration minister. Guess what. Sciacca was nowhere to be found. "He's
out on a boat with his father and can't be contacted," said his minders,
brusquely, and that was that. Gone, vanished. Perhaps he is still there for,
despite the rising controversy, he has not uttered a peep all week. At
least Ruddock has had the guts to front up.
The appalling truth is that, beyond some empty posturing at the policy
margins, the Opposition wholly supports the indefinite imprisonment of
asylum seekers in the concentration camps. With the Federal election in the
offing, terrified of arousing the Hansonite vote against them, Labor's
heavies cower mutely in the face of the gross abuse of the human rights of
children. The party that would see itself as the champion of social justice,
as the keeper of Chifley's light on the hill, behaves with abject moral
cowardice.