White Australia Abusing
Asian Mothers And ChildrenBy Gideon Polya
01 June, 2005
Countercurrents.orgA fundamental social norm for humanity is respect for mothers and infants. For most of us it would be inconceivable that in a rich, democratic society a mother would be held in custody for years without charge or trial and without contact with her child; it beggars belief that having giving birth in custody to a further child, the woman and her new infant would continue to be held in custody for years. Yet that is exactly the "new norm" being established by resurgent racism and paranoid insecurity in 21st century White Australia.
A three year old Chinese, Australia-born infant Naomi and her Chinese Malaysian mother Virginia Leong have just been released from an Australian immigration detention centre. Ms Virginia Leong has been held in "mandatory detention" without charge or trial for about 4 years and has not seen her first-born child for all of that period. Ms Leong gave birth to a further child, Naomi, who has now spent her whole life incarcerated behind razor wire in an Australian "detention centre" (concentration camp). Naomi Leong was born 3 years ago and has spent all her life in prison.
A Sydney psychiatrist who has been examining the imprisoned infant has detailed the dreadful psychiatric impact of the prison environment on the now 3 year old child - "She'd become mute and listless and staring into space and banging her head and has a major separation anxiety problem from her mum. And this has, I guess, been, it's something we notice in children and parents when they've been in detention for years anyway" (see ABC On-line transcript: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1376204.htm).
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (the peak psychiatrists' professional body in Australasia) has renewed calls for the abolition of the policy of "mandatory detention" for asylum seekers because of its awful impact on the mental health of both adult and child prisoners (see ABC On-line:
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1375920.htm).
Now a FURTHER case has arisen of an infant having been born to a Chinese mother in the custody of Australian Immigration authorities; this infant has been imprisoned for 3 years and is STILL in custody. The newly born child of a refugee Vietnamese couple currently in Immigration custody will no doubt also face years of detention in an abusive, violent and traumatizing environment.
It must be stated that many Australians are deeply upset by the continuing gross human rights abuses of refugees and especially of children. Many doctors (including the peak psychiatrists' professional organization) have repeatedly spoken out about the appalling impact of abusive, indefinite imprisonment on the psychiatric health of both adults and children.
White Australia has had an appalling 2 century history of invasion, dispossession, genocide, slavery and cruel human rights abuses of indigenous and Pacific Island peoples. Thus the 19th century saw genocide of indigenous (aboriginal) people, horrible massacres and deportations of Chinese and slavery of Pacific Islanders. In the 20th century surviving indigenous Australian people lived in dire poverty and were subject to enforced removal of tens of thousands of children from their mothers and further gross human rights abuses (they were not even counted as ordinary citizens until after 1967).
The middle 1970s saw the end of Australian participation in the Vietnam War and the repeal of the racist White Australia Policy that had excluded non-European immigrants from Australia since Federation in 1901. However after 2 decades of qualified "decency" the deeply entrenched racism of White Australia re-surfaced in the 1990s with participation in the genocidal Gulf War and the subsequent Sanctions War against Iraq. The 21st century has so far seen Australian participation in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and increasingly paranoid, hard-line policies towards desperate Muslim refugees fleeing the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of adult refugees (and hundreds of children) have been indefinitely incarcerated behind razor wire in "detention centres" (concentration camps) variously located in remote deserts, on remote islands and in several cases in large cities.
This paranoid, racist policy of mandatory detention of refugees has been euphemistically called "border protection", has achieved overwhelming support from a profoundly conservative electorate and has secured 2 convincing electoral wins for the conservative Liberal-National coalition.
Unfortunately the extreme powers given to ordinary Police and Immigration officers combined with a conservative electorate and dishonest media has led to outrageous human rights abuses in Australia in recent years. Thousands of generally Asian and Muslim refugees and hundreds of their children have been indefinitely incarcerated behind razor wire in abusive and traumatizing concentration camps. However it now appears that as many as 200 Australian citizens or residents have been detained "unlawfully" under racist Australian laws in recent years i.e. in addition to the gross abuses of the "natural law" outlined above.
This horrendous collection of "unlawful" abuses has come to light because of media and government investigations into a succession of extraordinary recent scandals. Thus an ill German-origin Australian citizen Cornelia Rau (a former air hostess) was wrongfully and abusively detained for nearly a year, first by Police and thence at a desert Immigration detention centre. An ill Philippines-origin Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon was wrongfully detained in 2001 after sustaining severe injuries in a car accident and deported to the Philippines, leaving behind two children, of whom one was "given away" by authorities; Vivian Solon was only recently found in a Filipino hospice for the dying as a result of media publicity (although it is now known that government officials had been long aware of her illegal deportation).
More recently, a Chinese-origin Australian citizen was illegally imprisoned in a detention centre (despite ample identification on his person) due to refusal of authorities to simply pick up his passport from his home. His lawyer eventually secured his release but warned that all non-European Australian citizens should now carry their passport with them to avoid similar arbitrary detention. Non-European "visible minorities" (mainly Chinese, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and South Asian people) constitute about 6% of the Australian population and indigenous Australians about 2%. "Have you got your passport?" is set to become a standard semi-serious comment within the "visible minorities" in racist White Australia.
Of course the current resurgent racism in White Australia is part of a bigger picture. White Australia participated in 2 centuries of racist, violent and brutal British imperialism on all continents except for the Americas. In the post-1950 era the under-5 infant mortality in countries in which Australia has been involved militarily as a UK and/or US ally (most notably Korea, Indo-China, Iraq and Afghanistan) has totalled about 35 million. The latest UN and UNICEF reports (2005) indicate that the total post-invasion avoidable mortality (excess mortality) in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghanistan Territories has been 1.9 million - and the post-invasion under-5 infant mortality has totalled 1.5 million (for detailed articles see: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html).
All Western civilian deaths from jihadist or Arab insurgency violence (currently totalling about 5,000 for the last 20 years) are assiduously reported in Australia. However the mainstream media of White Australia steadfastly refuse to report the horrendous civilian death toll from Anglo-American imperialism (democratic Nazism) in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories. Peace is the only way. Decent people throughout the world are morally obliged to inform everyone about horrendous continuing avoidable mortality in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan and can also act responsibly by ethically assessing their investments, purchases and other dealings with the countries of the Anglo-American Coalition, including racist White Australia.
Dr Gideon Polya
29 Dwyer Street, Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria, 3085, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html
Day & night telephone: +61 3 9459 3649
Credentials: Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently writing a book on global mortality - numerous articles on this matter can be found by a simple Google search for "Gideon Polya" and on his website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html
