Transcript
ANNA NEISTAT: It's really part of the policy to keep this place secret and completely closed from outside scrutiny. We at Amnesty over the last two years applied six times to get an official visit. We were either denied or ignored, so in the end I had to travel in my private capacity, which worked, and I was able to get access to the island.
DON WISEMAN: So they didn't know?
AN: They did not know I worked for Amnesty International.
DW: So how have they reacted now once the 'Island of Despair' report has been put out?
AN: Well as you can imagine the reaction was not very positive, i think of course the report was much welcomed by multiple groups, especially in Australia, that advocate on behalf of refugees and people seeking asylum but of course the government's response has not been very positive primarily because we went this time as far as qualifying what's happening on Nauru as torture and Amnesty International does not use this term lightly. So we provided a detailed legal analysis in this report as to why both the abuses themselves but also the deliberate nature of this policy and the abuses that are happening on the island can be qualified as torture, it is really not just the suffering, the harm that is being caused to men, women, and children who are stuck on Nauru, mental harm, physical harm, but also the fact that it is being done deliberately with pretty deliberately stated goals of preventing others from trying to reach Australia by boat.
DW: In the report you've talked a lot about the mental state of a lot of these people on the island, how badly affected are they?
AN: I have been covering conflict and wars for the last fifteen years. So I've been to places like Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and Chechnya, and quite honestly as horrible as you can imagine those places are, I can not remember ever seeing, ever witnessing such a level of mental trauma in any of the war zones that I visited. I think there is an explanation to that partially because in a war zone there are some objective reasons, the violence is somewhat objectified and I think it helps people to cope with that and in Nauru part of the problem is there is no reason for these people to suffer, yet you know, they're suffering both physical and mental anguish with no end in sight and that's what also some of the people were telling me, in some ways they would have preferred to die in the sea or to die from a bullet in the country that they fled, be it Afghanistan or Iraq rather than dying day by day on the island. So the levels of mental trauma are very high among both adults and children, almost everybody who spoke to me had visible effects of mental anguish, of different intensity. Even children as young as nine talked to me about having tried to commit suicide and that quite honestly I haven't seen in any other place and spoke to many people who attempted self harm, swallowing razors, drinking washing liquid, cutting their hands, setting themselves on fire, it really goes on there on a daily basis.
DW: Australian authorities have been presented with countless examples of this sort of thing and they've ignored them or discounted them and said they're very often fabricated. What's your response to the way Australia's responding?
AN: Yeah I mean I think it's a combination of denial and pretty pathetic efforts to justify this policy, so on one hand they're saying, no it's not happening which again was made quite easy when nobody could get to Nauru, but when an organisation like Amnesty International with our reputation of dozens of years of conducting these types of investigations comes out with these types of allegations, I don't think the government's denials can be taken seriously. We usually know what we're talking about and interestingly enough, all of these denials are kind of blanket, so there was in all of the responses we got from the government and the media or directly there was never a single instance where the government said 'this you got wrong, you're citing this case or these couple of cases, this is not true, this did not happen to these people'. So there was not a single specific example where they tried to refute our evidence, it was all around, 'no it doesn't happen, no you made it up, no it's not torture', which of course at this point just doesn't pass the laugh test. And of course the other part of it is the effort to justify it, to say that we know it's not ideal but it's necessary to stop the boats to save lives and this argument has been extremely successful with the Australian public, this is part of the problem. But I do think it's high time for the Australian public to question whether it's actually true, to stop taking it at face value, because it's not true, people continue to die, they continue to die at sea, just not at Australia's shores, they continue to die in boats near Indonesia, near Malaysia, wherever the boats are diverted to, they continue to die in countries of transit where they cannot be processed to get to Australia or another place of safety and they continue to die in their home countries that they cannot flee because countries like Australia are closing their borders and they continue to die on Nauru there have been deaths on Nauru, both as a result of suicides and as a result of physical conditions and diseases that have not been treated and on Manus Island the other processing centre as well. So I'm really surprised that the Australian public does not question this rhetoric more rigourously and also that I'm not questioning the attitude towards refugees, it's pretty common around the world and it takes a long time to change how people view refugees and people who need protection but what I do find striking is that Australians do not question this wall of secrecy around Nauru. I think that if your government is doing something and saying it's good it's justifiable, it's necessary, sooner or later you need to start asking the question, 'then why so secret? Why not let journalists see it? Why not let our own Parliamentarians see it?' because even Australian parliamentarians cannot go there, why not let our human rights commissioner go there? So if everything is as good as you say, why keep it so secret?
