dreamer_easy | Entries tagged with suicide

Good news, sort of! Australia agrees to take seriously ill refugee girl from Nauru as case reaches court (GA, 5 July 2018) | Court orders Nauru refugee and son, both ill, to be flown to Australia (GA, 13 July 2017). The judge ordered they not be separated and not be returned to Nauru. As columnist Ben Doherty reminds us: Each time Australia delays bringing a sick child from Nauru, the stakes get higher (GA, 11 July 2018). Crikey argues that Australia has weaponised suicide and Peter Dutton just admitted it (25 June 2018).

Unsurprising news from the US: Detaining Immigrant Kids Is Now a Billion-Dollar Industry (Snopes.com / AP, 12 July 2018). As Down Under, so Up Over.

Definitely good news: Brisbane mum granted 12-month extension from deportation (SBS, 27 June 2018). "A ministerial intervention has stopped the deportation of a Brisbane-based Filipino mother who was facing separation from her eight year-old son." This isn't a refugee story, but in a world full of cruelty, every small kindness is to be celebrated.

Manus Island: I found a horrific 'living graveyard' (news.com.au, 9 July 2018). An extract from Asylum Seeker Resource Centre founder Kon Karapanagiotidis's book The Power of Hope.

'They are breaking him': the stateless refugee Australia may never release (GA, 4 July 2018). A Kurdish refugee from Iran arrived in 2013 at the age of 16 and is still in detention.

Asylum seeker detainees can keep mobile phones, federal court rules (ABC, 22 July 2018)

'I didn’t know how to survive': the refugees and asylum seekers hit by Coalition cuts (GA, 12 June 2018)

Kurdish asylum seeker Fariborz Karami took his own life on Nauru last week. He was 26. A badly traumatised victim of torture, he had been appealing for mental health care for years. His wife, mother, and brother are still on Nauru. He is the third detainee on Nauru to die by suicide. Email your Labor senator to push for a Senate inquiry into offshore detention.

A terminally ill Hazara refugee on Nauru has been given the option of a fearful death there, without adequate medical care, or dying alone in Taiwan with no-one who can speak his language or perform appropriate funeral rites. More than 800 Australian doctors have signed a petition asking for him to be brought to Australia for palliative care.

Immigration detainees onshore are also subject to serious medical neglect, including being left untreated for Hepatitis C.

While Australia routinely separates refugees from their loved ones, the US is turning family separation into a conveyor belt process. A Facebook post by an immigration caseworker explains the situation asylum seekers find themselves in. This Tweet chain contains numerous practical ways to support refugee families crossing the Mexico-US border. Here's a powerful comment on the whole vicious business: The Language of the Trump Administration Is the Language of Domestic Violence (New Yorker, 11 June 2018)

By now you've probably heard that a refugee took his own life on Manus Island yesterday. He was a Rohingya, had been found to be a genuine refugee, and had epilepsy, for which he had not received treatment for two years despite urgent requests from the medical community. In my view, the Australian government is not just responsible for this man's death; they are responsible for his murder.

In an odd coincidence, I had just finished reading the following article about the Rohingya when I logged on to share the link and read the news from Manus: Murderous Majorities (New York Review of Books, 18 January 2018). It positions the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar in the context of majoritarian politics in South Asia. I think it contains a warning for the West: "Majoritarianism insists on different tiers of citizenship. Members of the majority faith and culture are viewed as the nation’s true citizens. The rest are courtesy citizens, guests of the majority, expected to behave well and deferentially." That idea, that some Australians are more equal than others, is strikingly familiar.

More on the Rohingya:

Understanding the Rohingya Refugee Crisis (MSF, 2 January 2018)

Explainer: Who are the Rohingya Muslims? (SBS, 24 October 2017)

The Genocide of Rohingyas in Myanmar from the Australian Migrant Prison on Manus Island (Funambulist Nov/Dec 2017), reproduced by Manus refugee Imran Mohammad in his Facebook.

Faces of the Rohingya (SBS, n.d.). Interviews with Rohingya people living in Melbourne.

On an unrelated note, my ego swelled at the discovery that a letter of mine to the paper (almost certainly the Sydney Morning Herald) about the Tampa was reproduced in a 2007 thesis about Iranian immigrants and refugees. Letters to the editor - especially if they're concise and factual - are an excellent way to get pro-human rights viewpoints in front of readers.

Landmark report reveals a woman dies every week due to Australia's domestic violence crisis (ABC, 28 February 2018). That report is: Family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia, 2018

What if we knew domestic violence was a cause of suicide? (SMH, 6 November 2017). "A new report by the NSW Domestic Violence Deaths Review team shows a connection between those who take their own lives and who have also experienced family violence as a victim, a perpetrator, even a witness. Just under 40 per cent of all the suicides in the study were known to police because of domestic violence. Nearly half – and that proportion held true for men, who are mostly the perpetrators, and for women, who are mostly the victims."

The #MeToo survivors we forgot (USA Today, 19 April 2018). "A Me Too-style movement could help debunk common myths about domestic abuse, as well as pressure the criminal and legal systems to make things easier for the victims, not the abusers, advocates say."

Change The Course: National Report on Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment at Australian Universities (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2017)

Sexual Victimization by Women Is More Common Than Previously Known (Scientific American, October 2017). (Importantly, this isn't an attempt to discredit feminism, nor to shift the spotlight away from female victims of sexual assault.)

"Abyan" is the pseudonym of the Somali refugee who was allegedly raped on Nauru, flown to Australia, then flown back to Nauru, and now will be once more flown to Australia. Australia ignored three requests from Nauru medical staff to bring her here for a termination; presumably it was only when her situation became public knowledge that the government allowed her to come her on the first yo- of her Pacific yo-yoing. (Coincidentally, I learned this week that even Australian citizens may have to travel internationally to obtain an abortion.)

I hope she sues their dicks off.

Lateline (ABC 21 October) revealed further distressing details of the treatment of Nazarin, another rape survivor, whose entire family is now at risk.

The husband of a diabetic pregnant woman pleaded for her to be sent from Nauru to Australia because of her serious medical issues, with no success.

A seriously mentally ill asylum seeker frightened of being sent back to Iran took his own life at Brisbane airport. His is the latest in a series of suicides by asylum seekers on bridging visas.

Transfield given $1.5bn over three years to manage Nauru and Manus centres: "Report by No Business in Abuse says operator paid $1.4m a day and point to 47 violations of international law at the detention centres since Transfield took over." (GA 27 October 2015)

Use of force on detainees in onshore immigration detention soars (GA 30 October 2015) (Today I read a fascinating blog posting from someone who routinely defuses conflict with mentally ill youths without anyone getting hurt. Remarkable what you can accomplish if you train your staff.)

Buying silence? "Charities [including the Red Cross and Save the Children, who just got raided again] were asked to pay multimillion-dollar bonds that could be forfeited if they spoke out against government policy, as the Coalition sought to maintain secrecy over border protection." (SMH 30 October 2015)

Australian officials paid asylum seeker boat crew, Amnesty investigation alleges: "all of the available evidence points to Australian officials having committed a transnational crime". (GA 29 October 2015)

Tony Abbot finally said it out loud: stopping the boats is about race, not water safety: "it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever."

Sydney doctors walk off the job in protest at detention of children: "We think it's torture." (SMH 29 October 2015) | Healthcare workers around Australia protest against 'child abuse' of detention (GA 30 October 2015)

Up to 100 asylum seekers on Manus Island struck by food poisoning (GA 30 October 2015)

'Dad, why are we here?': No money, no life and a baby on the way at Nauru (SMH 26 October 2015)

The two Australian girls and their mother living in 'jail' at Villawood detention centre (SMH 27 October 2015)

After being given the flick by the Philippines, the government is considering sending offshore refugees to Kyrgyzstan - a country I can still just about find on a map after explaining repeatedly on Usenet why refugees from Iran and Afghanistan do not try to settle there. (Nobody seems keen on Papua New Guinea, either, for some reason. Two Rohingya refugees will be sent to Cambodia, lowering the price of our deal with that nation to $11 million per person. Another Rohingya left Cambodia for Myanmar.)

Finally, enjoy a little schadenfreude at the expense of Nauru's PR manager.