Deaths A Necessary Part Of Border Policing
AUSTRALIA - Wednesday, December 3, 2000.
Australia's border policy this week claimed more lives. Reports have
emerged that over 160 people are likely to have drowned as two ships sunk
in cyclonic conditions off the northern coast of Australia. Only four
people from one of the ships have been found, saved by the crew of a
Japanese tanker.
Speaking to reporters, the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, rose
to the occasion by declaring that these deaths were a consequence of
attempts to enter Australia "illegally" despite the fact that the legal
status of arrivals is only determined after they are released from one of
Australia's internment camps whereupon they are deported or granted only a
three-year stay.
The Minister went on to insist that this was a vindication of the media
campaign his Department had instigated across Asia and the Middle East
that, amongst other things, depicted death and extreme suffering as the
result of entering Australia without the necessary papers.
What reporters refused to ask is why, if the Minister or sections of the
Government had been told by Indonesian authorities a week ago that two
boats were heading for Australia, and it was known that a cyclone was
active off the north coast, did the Government not send out a vessel to
pick them up. Why was it left to the crew of a tanker to find those who
had managed to stay afloat?
Instead, these deaths are paraded as a central plank of Government border
policy and the penal industry that it makes possible.
It is no longer implicit. The death penalty has been declared a useful
and acceptable means of deterring undocumented migrants.
Unlike the deaths of citizens and non-citizens in tourist spots here and
elsewhere -- which is to say, those who's movements act as transports for
sums of money -- there will be no state-funded funeral attended by
parliamentarians in a show of 'national unity'. The people who died
this week will not be officially mourned here. They are sacrificed as a
way of illustrating the inescapable power of the nation-state's borders.
In 1999, over 350 people died off Australia's coastline as they tried to
make to make their way to asylum.
For the local audience, the announcement of these deaths was meant to
serve as a vindication of the Government's "get tough" policy against
asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, despite the fact that the
Minister knows full well that the moderate increase in undocumented
arrivals by boat from the Middle East in 1999 was a direct result of the
closure of the UN office in Pakistan and the move to wholesale
deportations from refugee camps in Jordan back to Iran and Iraq.
The Minister prefers to depict the impetus for arrivals in terms that
serve to flatter the local audienceand themselves, depicting the border as
a necessary wall against what would otherwise be a 'flood'. It is
proffered as axiomatic that 'everyone' would come here were it not for
this wall of violence and internment. No doubt there is mileage for any
Government in presenting life in Australia as attractive and 'the
Australian way of life' as something which others, and in particular the
otherly-complexioned, will naturally covet.
Fact is that recent documented migrants are leaving Australia within the
first two years of their stay in unprecendented numbers and the numbers of
undocumented arrivals, even at the 1999 peak, have always been remarkably
insubstantial by comparison with almost all other countries in the world.
Angela M.
www.antimedia.net/xborder/
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