Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  Louw was thrilled, despite being a staunch ANC supporter. Seeing police arrest dozens of foreigners made her “fall in love with this city Johannesburg,” she wrote giddily to the anti-immigrant WhatsApp group. “Herman Mashaba has won my hearts admiration by refusing to baby sit these alliens [sic]. He has proven … that he is committed to drive them out of this city,” she gushed. “Finally someone commits to do something instead of labeling us as xenophobic. I salute the mayor’s initiative.”40

  Foreigners in Louw’s view do not deserve the rights enshrined in the constitution, such as the freedom of expression she holds so dear herself. In another message to the group, she alerted her friends that immigrants were protesting at the mayor’s office and urged all members to “put an end to their madness, … otherwise these people will take over our country by force.” She went on to call for sit-ins at asylum reception centres and even temporary tent cities built to shelter immigrants already driven from their homes. Like the PEGIDA and AZC-Alert protesters in Holland, their goal is to find foreigners and intimidate them.

  When politicians in Africa’s richest country condone anti-immigrant violence or use xenophobic rhetoric toward refugees from poorer nations, it does not receive the same scrutiny as the pronouncements of neo-Nazis and Islamophobes in Europe. Seen through a Eurocentric lens, where xenophobes must be white and the oppressed immigrants dark-skinned, it doesn’t compute. But the problem, and the threat to the country’s liberal constitutional order, is just as grave.

  A savvy political organizer, Louw drew a lesson for her beloved ANC after Mayor Mashaba’s surprise move. “If we fail to deliver, those who previously had confidence in us will seek assistance from the opposition parties and we cannot blame them,” she wrote. “If we continue to babysit and nurse foreigners in our midst, on the basis that they kept our leaders in exile, someone else will deliver with deportation that will win the admiration of many SA citizens.… Someone will take over parliament as a brand new party to run the country come 2019.”41

  Mary Louw is not a minister or a mayor, and her outraged missives and political commentary are read by just a handful of other angry inner-city residents at the lower rungs of the ANC’s party structure, but her xenophobic views are not unique; they are widely shared. And if one day, the party follows her advice, her fantasy of expelling all foreigners could come true.

  15

  WILLKOMMENSKULTUR VS. GUANTÁNAMO

  South African xenophobes entertain the fantasy of sending all foreigners back to where they came from. Australia is unique among modern Western democracies in having actually tried to do this—if not sending them home to danger, then morally and legally outsourcing responsibility to remote Pacific islands.

  It represents the opposite of the policy adopted by German chancellor Angela Merkel at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis: a clash of visions and values between the Refugee Convention and Guantánamo Bay—on one side a foundational text of the postwar international order and on the other the post-9/11 fantasy of creating extralegal spaces, where people deemed undesirable can be detained indefinitely beyond the reach of the law and in some cases sent back to war-torn homelands despite ongoing threats to their lives.1

  Over 51,000 asylum-seekers arrived in Australia by sea between 2009 and 2013, the equivalent of over 750,000 arriving in a country the size of the United States. It was a time of media frenzy and a “boiling point” within the immigration department.2 Bringing back control of the border was the political mantra of the day.

  In 2011, Australia’s Labor government struck a deal with Malaysia. Under the proposed agreement, Australia would send eight hundred asylum-seekers who had arrived by boat to Malaysia in exchange for four thousand people already certified as refugees by the Malaysian government.3 Human rights lawyers successfully challenged the government on the grounds that Malaysia wasn’t a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and couldn’t guarantee legal protection. Their victory buried the deal, pulled the rug from under the Labor Party as elections approached, and arguably paved the way for something much worse.

  Despite his lefty tendencies, the Australian éminence grise John Menadue believes it was a mistake to kill the Malaysia deal. “My good friends in the NGO movement torpedoed it,” he says politely. “They wanted a three-course meal when only one course was available.”4

  The Labor Party tried to get tough just before the 2013 election by foreclosing any possibility of boat people ever reaching Australia.5 The party was hamstrung. They were being squeezed like European Social Democrats by a shrinking working-class base that abandoned them for the far right and the cosmopolitan urban left was starting to leave them for the Green Party. Labor was hemorrhaging in both directions.

  Kevin Rudd, the Labor prime minister, responded with a policy of talking tough but humane. He wanted to do both. The stated target of the policy was now people smugglers. “It was a subtle but actually very important shift,” says Waleed Aly, Australia’s young television superstar, beloved by millennials on the left and detested by many on the right. “It meant that harsh asylum-seeker policy suddenly became recast as compassionate.”6 The right quickly seized upon this politically popular argument.

  Self-styled compassionate conservatives began to cast the smugglers as villains and the asylum-seekers as pawns who needed to be saved. They were conflating two separate problems, as Aly pointed out. “Is it the nature of the journey that concerns us, or the fact that the boats often arrive on our territory?” he asked. “One approach is about protecting the rights and well-being of asylum-seekers; the other is about protecting ourselves.”

  Today’s right in Australia has reached “a point where debate proceeds on the basis, real or feigned, of compassionate concern for the fate of asylum-seekers. It seems the boat people must be stopped not for our sake, but for their own,” Aly wrote.7 And that meant recasting draconian policy as benevolent. The shifting humanitarian argument was best captured in a political cartoon. The old version read “Fuck off, we’re full.” Now it was edited to read “Fuck off, we are very worried about you drowning.”8

  Two Syrians, Ahmed and Marwan, had the great misfortune of arriving in Australian waters in the middle of that policy upheaval, on a cursed winter day in late 2013. Ahmed, now in his forties, is a university-educated accountant who had worked in Syria before escalating violence forced him to flee. He fled the country for Australia, where he has relatives who are citizens, planning to send for his wife and children later. He and his fellow detainee, Marwan, both claimed they were inspired by Australia’s criticisms of the Syrian government for violating human rights.

  While they were at sea on a small boat from Indonesia to Christmas Island, Australia’s government changed the rules. Henceforth, all “illegal maritime arrivals,” a euphemism for anyone arriving by boat without a visa, would be barred from ever being resettled on Australian territory.

  Some asylum-seekers on the boat they traveled on received temporary visas, permitting them to remain in Australia. Ahmed and Marwan were not so lucky. Instead, the two were sent to Manus Island, a remote part of Papua New Guinea, under the new law. “I don’t know the news because I am in the ocean,” Marwan recounts in broken English. By the time their boat reached Australian waters, the new law was in effect and their fate was sealed. At the time we met, Ahmed’s family remained in an ISIS-controlled part of Syria, and his daughters had been in hiding for more than a year for fear of being raped by ISIS soldiers.9

  The new policy was a shock even to those on the right. Not even they had proposed so draconian a measure yet once that step was taken, they willingly left it in place—a policy that has stranded men like Ahmed and Marwan in detention and laid the groundwork for years of harsh policy because once in power the right had no incentive to roll it back.

  After people are sent away, Australia conveniently wipes its hands and claims that because no one is shooting or torturing them, it has committed no sin. But the safety of refugees is not in fact a foregone co
nclusion. Local islanders were not uniformly thrilled about the arrival of the asylum-seekers. In February 2014, Reza Barati, a twenty-three-year-old Iranian detainee, was killed during a riot when asylum-seekers tried to escape from the detention centre on Manus Island and local residents and police stormed the facility. As with the cases of Somali refugees who fled war only to be assaulted and killed once in South Africa, many lawyers believe it’s valid to argue that Australia has violated the Refugee Convention if locals pose a new threat to the refugees sent to Manus Island or Nauru, the other Pacific island Australia uses for offshore detention.10

  Melissa Parke, a human rights lawyer and ex-politician, contends the new policy was premised on a bogus argument. “If you really cared about saving lives, you’d care about what happened to people whose boats were turned back. Do they drown?”11 The assertion that the refugee problem has been resolved when boats stop coming is as misleading as a hospital turning away every ambulance and then claiming that no one in town is sick or injured.12

  Australia’s entire stop-the-boats debate boils down to an argument about utilitarianism. The television host Aly offers an example that tests the moral and economic commitment of the faux humanitarians. He asks seriously, if they care so deeply and would spend whatever money it takes to save lives at sea, then why not charter a cruise ship and assess asylum claims on arrival? No one would opt for the rickety boats of the smugglers. “We become the people smugglers; all lives are saved,” he says. It is also cheaper.

  To prove the point, he and a friend calculated how many asylum-seekers could fit on a luxury liner and booked every cabin at the full commercial rate per passenger. “We had enough money left over to have a budget every week for a concert on board from the Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Radiohead. And then we still couldn’t spend all the money that we’re currently spending,” he says with a laugh.

  The real question, then, is whether the policy’s goal is actually to save lives or simply to stop refugees from sharing the wealth of Australia’s welfare state. For Aly, it’s about keeping foreigners out and preserving generous benefits for “us.” And when that’s the case, he argues, economics don’t matter.13

  For all the talk about the rule of law, Australia is pushing the boundaries of what one expects from a liberal democratic nation. In 2015, it enacted laws threatening whistle-blowers with prosecution if they went to the press rather than voice their complaints internally through the immigration minister, including in cases of child sexual abuse in detention centres.14

  It is not the only questionable legislation. Gillian Triggs, the president of Australia’s human rights commission, is one of the right’s favorite punching bags and the person in charge of ensuring that international human rights treaties are not violated.15 The fact that United Nations agreements aren’t enshrined in domestic legislation makes her work difficult. Australia was a prime mover in negotiating and signing almost all the UN’s original human rights treaties, but today’s leaders, fearing being held accountable, have deliberately avoided codifying them in local law so they are immune from charges of violating international legal norms. In 2015, the government passed legislation striking references to the Refugee Convention from domestic legislation.16

  Then, when legal challenges forced parliament to admit that no existing law permitted the state to fund or facilitate the detention of people not accused of a crime, Australian lawmakers found a solution: they simply passed legislation and applied it retrospectively, an increasingly common practice when the government finds its policies running into legal hurdles. The most Kafkaesque result of the Australian government’s penchant for passing retrospective laws is that babies born to detained mothers inherit the status of their parents—an illegal maritime arrival. “Our law says they arrived on a boat even if they were born in a Melbourne hospital and never set foot on a boat,” explains the human rights lawyer Daniel Webb, an intense man who wears dark-rimmed glasses and speaks in full paragraphs. “It would be laughable if it didn’t trigger such serious consequences,” he adds. The immediate result of the law was that Australian-born babies risked being subject to mandatory detention and removal to remote Pacific islands like Nauru or Papua New Guinea.17

  It was lawmaking based on the political whims of the moment with no regard for enduring principles or values. “I think that we have become inured to it,” says David Manne, another human rights lawyer who has sued the government over offshore detention. “It’s become normalized. The nation hasn’t flinched.” To Manne, Australia is on a slippery slope when groups who are marginalized and in need of protection have come to be seen as a threat. “People, including children, babies, can be politically expendable.… The real threat is to the life of our nation under the rule of law,” he warns.

  As we sit in a trendy restaurant in an area packed with students, hipsters, and yuppies, Manne muses, “If you asked most people here to lock up children indefinitely, I think they would be outraged about the idea,” but few know that it’s happening so close to home, he adds. “It’s actually only eighteen kilometers up the road it’s going on.”18

  The Villawood detention centre on the western outskirts of Sydney is a far cry from the mosquito-infested detention camps of Nauru in the South Pacific. The centre is modern and colourful. Apart from the heavy security presence, x-ray machines, and heavy iron doors, the public areas resemble those you’d find in an elementary school or children’s hospital. Visitors bring food and drinks and sit on brightly coloured faux leather booths alongside the detainees; the bathrooms are shared by everyone. But among these men (and a few women), there are several who have come from a much darker place, often for just a few weeks of medical treatment before being sent back offshore.

  Down the street are several small brick houses. This is where families in detention live. An Iraqi family was relocated here after spending several years in Nauru. About two years ago, their teenage son started having psychological problems—“fighting with himself” as his parents put it. He was put on various medications and became jittery and began resisting the security guards, who slapped him and detained him in the local jail, sometimes for a few hours and another time for a whole day.

  To avoid being accused of detaining people illegally, Australia’s government suddenly declared in 2015 that no one was being detained on Nauru because the camp was “open” and asylum-seekers technically had the right to leave. “At first, a lot of people were afraid to leave the camp,” says the father, because of the native Nauruans. “They’re all big … they look at you walking in the street.” For the final two months in Nauru, with the right to move freely, the father worked for a wage of A$2.50 per hour (a fraction of Australia’s minimum wage) doing carpentry for the Nauruans for twelve to thirteen hours per day. “The Nauruan people have good hearts,” says the father, but alcoholism is rampant. “They drink a whole carton of beer per day, and then they fight. They come bang on your door in the middle of the night, and in the morning, they’re your best friend.”19

  A Rohingya man in detention at Villawood who wishes to remain anonymous told me he fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2007, going first to Thailand, then Malaysia. He tried to work there, but police arrested illegal employees and demanded bribes from them—mostly money but sometimes their shoes. He would have stayed in Malaysia, he says, if he had been able to work without the threat of arrest hanging over his head. “I had to come here,” he says. But when he arrived in Australia by way of Christmas Island, he was immediately flown to Nauru. He still has no right to work there, and the Nauruan police, he claims, constantly ask him for bribes.

  In his view, Myanmar’s much-celebrated move toward democracy has meant nothing for people like him. When asked about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s emergence as a leader, he is dismissive. “It’s all bullshit.… People are still being killed. If anyone tries to leave the village, you get shot.” He was in Villawood for medical treatment, and the Australian immigration authorities planned to send him back to Nauru. He’s eve
n asked to be returned to Myanmar, a solution that Australia usually encourages. “I’ve been asking them for two years to go back,” he insists, “but they said, ‘No, it’s too dangerous. You have no papers and are stateless.’” Rohingyas like the man in Villawood have been stranded on a small island they had never heard of and never sought to reach. “I have no alternative country,” he says, “not Australia, not Myanmar, only Nauru.”20

  For refugees of other nationalities, even when they are fleeing ongoing wars, the Australian government has no qualms sending them back into danger. It is framed as voluntary but in fact is far from it. “We are returning refugees to refugee-producing countries,” argues the human rights lawyer Webb. Australia is essentially telling legitimate asylum-seekers to pick their poison—human rights violations at home or on Nauru and Manus Island—while immigration officials engage in an Orwellian twisting of definitions. “The more you understand about the conditions in which we are keeping people,” he says, “the more you understand that it is not a voluntary choice.”21 When circumstances in detention become so terrible that detainees begin to think they have no choice but to go back, Webb insists, “it’s like standing on the edge of a cliff and holding a gun to someone’s head and saying, ‘Jump or I’ll shoot you.’ And then when they jump, saying, ‘Well, I’m not responsible for your death because you chose to jump.’”22 The metaphor may sound violent, but he is adamant that the government is “deliberately forcing people to choose between two deeply harmful and dangerous scenarios.”

  Rahul, a Sri Lankan asylum-seeker who eventually made it to Australia, was detained in Nauru for over three years and dealt with this conundrum daily.23 He was told it might take five to six years to process his case. It was an effort, he says, to convince people to go home voluntarily with the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM). Money was offered on the condition that they leave before their refugee applications had been processed. If they were rejected, the offer of money was off the table. According to Mark Isaacs, a young Australian who worked for the Salvation Army in the Nauru camp, Australia was “attempting to create an environment in Australian-approved centres that was worse than the oppression the men had suffered in their home countries, and then used IOM to offer them ‘voluntary’ repatriation.”24