Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  It was in the 1980s that things changed, he says. Less-skilled Vietnamese with questionable refugee claims began to arrive. Unlike today’s see-no-evil supporters of sending people home to danger, Ruddock had the honesty and curiosity back then to go investigate the situation on the ground. He went to Vietnam. “I wanted to satisfy myself that people being returned were going back in situations in which they were going to be safe,” he tells me. Instead, he met a local Communist Party chief who told him about his children waiting to be resettled in the United States. That was the beginning of his skepticism. There was also the case of the Lebanese, whose admission Ruddock regards as a huge mistake. “We essentially got a very poorly educated, underskilled migration that came over five or six years … and has left us with a major and continuing problem,” he argues. Finally, came the Chinese boat arrivals of the 1990s. Ruddock claims that today’s detention regime initially arose out of law designed for handling stowaways.

  The law was changed, he says, so that “if a person came into Australia without a valid entry permit, they would be detained until such time as they were either granted a visa or removed from Australia.”43 It passed with bipartisan support and became the basis of the mandatory detention regime that still exists today.44

  Ruddock’s innovation was to move it offshore, away from the view of journalists, citizens, and the review of Australian courts. According to the historian Klaus Neumann, Ruddock started in 1999 by making onshore camps “really inhospitable places,” hoping to send the message to Afghans and Iraqis that it wasn’t worth the trip. “That obviously didn’t work,” says Neumann, so Ruddock upped the ante with Manus Island and Nauru, broadcasting that “these are really hellholes, and you know, don’t try to come here, because that’s where you end up.”45

  When challenged about the ability of all the world’s refugees to find their way safely to a UN-administered camp and patiently wait for resettlement, Ruddock is defensive. “Your view is that those who’ve got no money and can’t pay a smuggler and who have to wait in a refugee camp, even if their claims of persecution are far more heinous, should take second place to somebody who’s got the money to pay,” he asserts, assuming that no one seeking to pay a smuggler might face persecution or have a legitimate claim. “Look, we’re not going to take every refugee in the world. There are sixty million now. We’ve got a population of twenty-two million; we’re not taking sixty million. Okay?” he erupts.

  I ask Ruddock what Australia owes asylum-seekers with legitimate claims, if anything. Calming down, he argues, “They’re entitled not to be returned to persecution, and as far as we’re concerned, we’re not prepared to have them here, and we have arranged that they can be elsewhere where they are safe.” He is deeply suspicious of the many documented claims of abuse in the offshore detention centres. “If you’ve paid to come to Australia, your objective is to get to Australia, and you will say or do anything that will help pursue that objective in my view,” he insists. “I don’t necessarily accept at face value all the claims that are made.… I’m not convinced that the majority of it is true.”46

  There are many Australians who have similar doubts about Ruddock’s commitment to the truth. Their skepticism stems from an infamous incident known as the Children Overboard affair.

  In October 2001, just after the Tampa drama and one month before a national election, a boat under tow from the navy broke apart, and many asylum-seekers were left flailing in the water. The government’s leading officials, including Ruddock, went public with the story before verifying the details. They pushed a narrative of parents throwing children overboard to force a rescue; it fit the campaign theme of opportunistic and criminal asylum-seekers nicely, even though the navy told government officials soon after the incident that no children had been thrown into the water.

  Ruddock tells the story differently, though he does admit, in a roundabout way, that he misled the public. “There were people in the sea they believe jumped overboard in order to ensure that the vessel was taken … and it was reported to the naval headquarters in Darwin that there were children being held up and that they were being thrown into the water,” Ruddock explains to me in his suburban Sydney office. Those reports, he now concedes, “were inaccurate in that the children were not dropped into the water. Other people went into the water, presumably adults.”47

  But at the time, Ruddock acted on the initial, unverified information. “Bear in mind, we’re in the middle of an election campaign. I was having a major press conference,” he says in his defence. His aides received reports that children were being thrown overboard and briefed him. “I had to make a judgment,” Ruddock tells me. “Do I say this is happening? Or do I sit on it?”

  It was just over a month before the election, and Ruddock chose to go public. The prime minister then repeated the false reports, and the defence minister even released photos of children in lifejackets to bolster their claim. The event became a major trope in the heated campaign. After the election, there was an inquiry that determined what Ruddock and his colleagues had stated as fact was false.

  I ask Ruddock whether he or Howard felt a need to retract. “Once you establish what the facts are, you accept the facts,” he replies obliquely. When I ask whether it served a campaign purpose, he becomes defensive. “It wasn’t contrived. It was an issue that arose in the campaign, which you had to manage,” he insists. “I reported accurately what I was told.”48 If there is anyone to blame, he contends, it’s the defence officials in the radio room when the reports came through, not the cabinet officials like him who repeated it to the world before verifying the details.

  Chris Kenny, a columnist for Rupert Murdoch’s paper, The Australian, is one of the only journalists to be granted a visa to visit Nauru—it costs $8,000, and there’s no refund if the application is rejected. Kenny’s exceptional success in getting a visa is something his critics chalk up to his right-wing politics. This outrages Kenny. Barring all journalists, apart from the friendly ones like Kenny, is an integral part of the government’s policy, the Guardian reporter Ben Doherty argues. Even the foreign editor of Murdoch’s Australian was scathing on this point: “The media has been consistently denied access to the refugee centres lest it actually report on the harrowing stories of these people and, by humanising them, generate some sympathy for them,” he wrote.49

  Kenny doesn’t call it sympathy; for him, it’s all lies. Like Ruddock, he believes that many of the doctors and NGO workers on Nauru have a political agenda and are fabricating stories of brutality, rape, and deprivation. “They just report what people tell them,” he says of doctors and NGO workers. “There’s a massive incentive for people to talk up hardship,” he argues. “Are people being systematically abused and maltreated on Nauru? Obviously not.”50

  Those who criticize him are, he declares, “mealy-mouthed, tendentious, lying, left-liberal journalists trying to suggest that I tell lies.” He challenges them to come up with “one fact I got wrong in the thousands of words I wrote.” The problem with such a challenge, of course, is that his reporting can’t be gauged against other journalists’, because most others haven’t been permitted to visit.

  When challenged on the morality of their rousing humanitarian defence of the stop-the-boats policy, conservatives like Kenny refuse to consider that refugees might go and die elsewhere or be returned to persecution. To him, the central moral question is of secondary importance. “I see it as, like, a debating point,” he tells me over coffee at a posh café in a Sydney suburb. “I mean, it’s actually not what happens. If there are refugees in Indonesia, they’re in camps; they work out what they’re doing,” he says, apparently unaware of the precarious existence of many refugees who live as illegal immigrants in a country that is not a party to the UN refugee convention. “If people are fearful for their lives in whatever country they’ve fled, they’re not going to go back,” he tells me breezily. “Most of them are not fearing for their lives; they’re looking for a better future,” says Kenny.
“If you were turning back boats, and people were going back to be executed somewhere or to die in some other voyage, that would be a terrible thing. Who’s come up with the example of that happening? It is just a hypothetical that hasn’t occurred.”51

  According to the Afghan refugee Mohammed Baqiri, who spent a bit more time on Nauru than Kenny, the camp authorities regularly tried to convince people to go back to Afghanistan and offered large compensation packages and promises of jobs. Many detainees accepted. “Out of those people, over twenty people have been killed by Taliban,” says Baqiri. Such offers do not necessarily discourage future journeys, something that should give defenders of the policy pause. Among those who took the money, several of those who survived tried to come back to Australia twelve or thirteen years later, this time with their families.52 Kenny had little to say when thousands of files from Nauru, detailing medical reports of injuries and abuse, were printed by the Guardian in mid-2016. Bizarrely, for someone who thinks abuse is vanishingly rare, he could only muster “nothing new” on Twitter.

  Andrew Bolt, the best-known right-wing journalist in the country, is even more outspoken on refugee issues. Unlike Kenny, he does not try to put a socially respectable face on his harsh views. “I don’t give a shit about international refugee conventions,” he told me over coffee one morning. “People at the UN are determining what citizens of countries should decide. That’s for us to decide.”

  Bolt is a great admirer of Jean Raspail and often sounds like the protagonist in The Camp of the Saints. “Immigration is increasingly colonization,” he warns. The West today, he argues, has lost the “will to protect European civilization.” Rather than defend the Western project, Bolt laments, “the West is wallowing in the sentimentality of wanting to seem good, not actually doing good,” he told me. “Part is self-hatred. The left has got to bloody wake up.”53

  Australia’s conservative journalists who defend the offshore detention policy rely heavily on the notion of queue-jumping. For every Syrian trying to make it by boat, Kenny argues, there are thousands waiting in Jordanian refugee camps because they can’t afford smugglers. If someone with money manages to come by boat, he argues, “they’ve jumped that queue.” Kenny concedes that requesting asylum is not illegal, but he comes very close to equating the crime of the smugglers with the actions of asylum-seekers themselves. “They’re complicit in an illegal trade,” he tells me.54 Whatever horrors they’re fleeing are secondary to the sin of paying a smuggler.

  Refugees who have the money to pay smugglers are often more successful at reaching safety; it was true of many German Jews who fled in the 1930s. But the refugee convention does not discriminate based on one’s income or mode of arrival. In the queue-jumping argument put forth by Ruddock and Kenny, a refugee who has been tortured or raped but happened to have the money to pay a smuggler has no legitimate claim in Australia, but the middle-class doctor who suffered no persecution and fled to the nearest camp when the bombs started falling is a viable candidate for asylum because he played by the rules.

  Australia, for all the stereotypes of its laid-back surfer culture, is a society obsessed with rules and fairness, and the queue-jumping argument resonates perfectly with a population primed to think in terms of orderly regulations and where most people have never faced desperation, state-sponsored violence, or war crimes. By this logic, whether you have had your hand chopped off doesn’t matter if you broke the “rules” to get to Australia.

  Unlike Bolt, who is ideologically opposed to admitting foreigners, especially Muslims, Kenny, who once served as chief of staff to the foreign minister, seems more concerned about the optics and PR impact. He is adamant that they should be forced to stay in Nauru or go somewhere like Cambodia. “It’s not a first-world welfare state like Australia; sure, we all understand that, but if your real problem is persecution and lack of freedom, you couldn’t start a life in Cambodia?” he wonders. He even took his baby there on holiday, so it can’t be all that bad, he insists.55 So far, a grand total of seven asylum-seekers have accepted resettlement there at a cost of two million Australian dollars (£1.2 million) and another fifty-five million (£33 million) in payments to Cambodia.56

  Andrew Wilkie, an independent senator from Tasmania, regards offshoring as carefree spending on a policy with no direct economic benefits and one that keeps out needed workers in some industries and regions. “We’re a rich country; governments can afford to spend absurd amounts of money to pander to that xenophobia,” he says. “Bizarrely, the feedback I get in my office from people in the community, it’s not that tens of millions of dollars were wasted in Cambodia; it’s whether or not an asylum-seeker might be able to access welfare in Australia.” Some of his constituents genuinely believe refugees are getting free cars and homes and call the office to complain.57

  Kenny dismisses concerns about the huge expense. It would cost much more to host them in Australia, he insists, questionably.58 “The offshore processing is the critical factor, because it denies the product—that is, getting into Australia—and access to not just our welfare but also our legal system,” a clear statement that, in his view, there are certain rights refugees deserve to be deprived of.

  Kenny admits that not allowing those who have been admitted to work was a mistake. “If you go into regional Australia, places like vineyards and fruit orchards and whatever, growers have enormous trouble getting people to pick fruit,” he says. But the issue is not economic, it is cultural. “I’ve spoken to the government, and they’ve thought all these things through,” he confides. “They really want to make it clear that if you get on a boat, come across that water, you will not get to Australia.”59 The lesson was not lost on Denmark’s government.

  Søren Espersen of the Danish People’s Party has clearly studied Australia’s Pacific Solution in detail, so I push him: Where would your Nauru be? “Morocco is a very good example of a country that would possibly do it for an amount of money,” he claims. And Danish staff could run the camps. “We would do it ourselves. We would run the things ourselves and pay the Moroccan authority a fee. We would also make it possible for their local grocers or butchers to come and deliver goods.”

  I point out that it sounds quite different from Australia’s notorious centres where hunger strikes, suicides, and attacks by hostile local islanders have become the norm. “That’s not our style. We don’t do it like that here,” Espersen insists. “We would not treat refugees in that way. We would do it completely differently. There will be excellent service, I can assure you.” In Denmark’s offshore paradise, there would be education, too. Nobody will be “living in ratholes,” he promises. “We’ve even got schemes here if somebody wants to go home. We help them with money, and these families, they can maybe come home with 10,000 pounds so that they can start a new life.”60

  The architect of the Australian model, Ruddock, doesn’t think that European governments will be able to replicate it so easily unless the Syrian conflict is resolved. He also hints that a more humane approach might undermine the much-vaunted deterrent effect. “Our approach is not a menu; it’s a recipe. It’s not a matter in which you can pick and choose what you want to do. You’ve got to do it all. And that means the offshore processing, the return of boats, the mandatory detention, the temporary protection visas,” he insists.61 To him, it does not matter if people are bona fide refugees fleeing an ongoing war; they still don’t deserve asylum in Australia.

  Back in Copenhagen, Espersen openly questions many Syrian refugees’ claims and whether they need asylum at all. “Why is it that they don’t want to go home? That’s a question you have to ask them. Why don’t you want to go home to your country and help [with] rebuilding it?”, as if there’s an opportunity awaiting them tomorrow in the Aleppo construction trade.

  Speaking in April 2016 before some of the harshest bombing of that city and Assad’s second round of chemical attacks, he confidently asserted that with Russian aid “the war will stop. I believe in Syria it will stop before w
e know it.” He also questioned the legitimacy of refugee claims, mentioning one family that was interviewed on television and asked why they waited so long. They replied that they had to sell their house first. “They come with wealth,” Espersen insists.62

  It is an assumption that Danish former refugees like Rabbi Melchior reject. People who own homes also need to flee bombardment, and they may need to sell their property to afford a perilous journey.63

  Espersen imagines a world in which refugees are mostly fakes and face no danger to the point that they will happily move home to the lands they fled and draw a Danish pension. An Australian-style solution to Europe’s crisis is already taking shape in the form of deals with Turkey to send back migrants arriving in Greece, while a more aggressive form of offshoring, as Espersen advocates, could be on the horizon, especially if parties like his eventually gain enough power or influence.

  The rapes, suicide attempts, beatings, and riots that have characterized Australia’s experiment with offshore detention are not appealing to him; the economic and political logic is.

  6

  TERROR AND BACKLASH

  Just before 11:30 a.m. on January 7, 2015, Cherif and Said Kouachi stormed into the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper. They forced an employee at gunpoint to key in the security code, shot a maintenance worker, and sprayed the assembled editorial staff with Kalashnikov fire, calling out the editor Stéphane Charbonnier’s name before shooting him and eleven others. The cartoonist Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, survived with a bullet wound to the shoulder.

  The Kouachis also gunned down a Muslim police officer on the pavement outside before fleeing the city. The brothers, who were born in France to Algerian immigrants and were orphaned at a young age after their mother’s suicide, drove north as a nationwide search began. The manhunt continued for forty-eight hours as the brothers hid in a forest, hijacked a series of cars, and eventually hunkered down in a warehouse near Charles de Gaulle Airport. On January 9, two runways were closed as police and soldiers descended on the suburban office park and placed it under siege, taking directions via text message from a warehouse employee hiding inside a cardboard box. Later that afternoon, after explosives were set off, the Kouachis emerged, guns blazing, and were shot by police just as their comrade-in-arms, Amedy Coulibaly, took hostages at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris. He demanded that the Kouachis not be harmed and then killed four people before police raided the building and shot him.1