Gitmo for Christmas
With the bizarre announcement yesterday that the US and Australian Governments have reached an agreement to, on an annual basis, swap 200 people interned, respectively, on Christmas Island (or Nauru) with those held on Guantanamo Bay, rumours that have been doing the rounds begin to seem more like explanations.
More on that in a moment. For now, some background: the very existence and planning of the almost-completed, exhorbitant internment camp on Christmas Island, capable of holding 800 people, has perplexed anyone with some fleeting knowledge of undocumented migration to Australia.
The building of the facility anticipates a huge (at least by Australian standards) rise in those destined for detention. But this, in itself, seems inexplicable. First, there have been very few and dwindling boat arrivals for some years - and undocumented boat arrivals are the only persons automatically interned.
Secondly, the Australian Government have been engaged in overtures to the Indonesian Government to allow for an expanded and formal processing of asylum seekers in Indonesia; among other things that would suggest that there was little requirement for such a facility. And, there are many detention camps already built in Australia, including the hi-tech facility at Baxter, built in 2003.
That said, the specific explanations for this recent announcement of a US-Australian agreement make no sense whatsoever. The Minister for Immigration has suggested it will act as a deterrent for ‘people-smugglers’ - but it’s impossible to see how a route to the US, via Australia, might accomplish that. Indeed, it’s laughable.
And not a few noticed that while the camp was the very latest in internment design, it had no detainees: “Asked if an influx was expected, the department said: ‘People movements are unpredictable.’” True enough, but do governments spend 400mAUD on the offchance that 800 people should be detained in the same period?
So, onto the rumours, initially sparked by a visit by US military officials to Christmas Island in November of 2006.
Some people have spoken of Christmas Island as ‘Australia’s Guantanamo Bay’. In one regard, the parallel has been more than accurate, given that the Australian Government has the capacity to excise territories (such as this island) from the ‘migration zone’ - that is, to place them in an extraterritorial limbo, legally speaking.
But I’ve been reluctant to assume the metaphor beyond this, insofar as both excisions and Australia’s internment camps well predate the more spectacular aspect of Guantanamo. And it’s important, I think, to insist that it was not the ‘war on terror’ which prompted a recourse to the legal forms of the excision and the proliferation of the camps, but the movements of migration which preceded this.
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to see what function Christmas Island ever hoped to serve. And this ’swap’ agreement - with the US Government under pressure to close Guantanamo, and the AU Government under pressure to close Nauru - seems the only plausible, if still uncomfirmed, explanations.
Christmas Island as global subcontractor of internment services? Maybe some other states could book some cells too.
Re the Guantanamo parallel, which probably has its political effect, it is right to point out that the excisions and Australia’s detention camps preceded the labeling of the war we find ourselves in as ‘against terror’.
It’s also important to remember that Guantanamo also has a history that precedes this labeling, and that this history includes its use as a detention camp - for instance, to process the waves of people who left Haiti after the 1991 coup.
It wasn’t until May 1992 that the US Coast Guard began to intercept and return vessels directly to Haiti - a Bush directive that violated UN directives and was continued under Clinton (despite election promises). Then, some 275 Haitians interned on Guantanamo had their asylum applications stalled on the basis that they were HIV positive, making it the world’s first prison camp for HIV positive people.
Not surprisingly it was only a few months later, in September 1992, that Australia’s Labor government, on the back of this step by the US, introduced a program of interception and mandatory detention. So, in a certain sense, it was the situation in the Caribbean that opened the possibility for the Australian camps (at least in terms of violation of UN directives).
I also think it’s important to think about how the Pacific Solution relates to the changing role of the US in the Pacific (Okinawa, Guam, etc.) as well as Australia’s unilateral global policing in the region (which in some way also finds its justifications in the humanitarian war/failed state rhetoric that began to circulate with Kosovo).
Given this cross-hatching, I think the Guantanamo parallel has some weight, although it has be used very carefully. At least, I don’t find these developments so surprising, although it may only be a coincidence that it was only days before this announcement about Christmas Island that Howard proposed to refuse all HIV positive migrants.
It’s also worth noting that the rhetoric coming from some in the institutional left (Camp Xmas is a waste of tax payers money because there are not enough people to put into it), only fuels the impetus to populate the camp by whatever means necessary.
This is a very dangerous position, as it encourages the global subcontracting of internment services you predict: the camp as contributor to budget surplus.
Brett [April 20, 2007 @ 2:27 am]
And on that last point, it’s not just the institutional left which has grounded its criticisms on fiscal nationalism - indeed, much of the problem with a superficial Guantanamo parallel has been that it slips right into a nationalist ‘antiwar’ perspective, plus a strange kind of forgetting/opportunism … As if there are no other camps in AU, as if the largely nationalist indignancy at the internment of David Hicks in Guantanamo can be re-routed to opposition against the camp on Christmas Is, as if nationalism can be the basis for opposing the internment of foreigners …
s0metim3s [April 20, 2007 @ 11:23 am]
While those might be explanations, or partial explanations, of the construction of this oddly large camp, there are other ways in which this scene could develop, and other thoughts that could be animating these decisions. While undocumented boat arrivals are the only people automatically interned now, I don’t find it too unimaginable that there could be, over time, a creeping of the lines, a shifting of the categories of people to be interned, even without or in addition to subcontracting detention for other states or helping empty Gitmo.
For example and if we wish to think down certain dark paths, a use, or a planning for possible use, of such a camp for people who, boat or no boat, are said to combine in their presence issues of border control and ’security’. Or, perhaps more simply, people who arrive on visas and by means other than boat but who are said to have done so with the “dishonest”, queue-jumping intent of attempting to claim refugee status when they arrive. Disincentive for these people: send them to Xmas Island.
I’ve actually heard a lot of people claim the Gitmo deal is bad because it will encourage people to come here hoping to end up in the US. True or not, that is the most repulsive criticism I have yet come across.
benjamin rosenzweig [April 22, 2007 @ 1:00 pm]