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Politik

Australian's Manus Island Detention Centre have 'Gulag Claim'

SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA) - Australia's detention centres on remote Pacific islands have been labelled "gulags", amid reports of rape and abuse of asylum seekers committed under the watch of Australian officials.

A former employee of the British security company G4S on Manus Island has given his account of what he said were repeated abuses.

Rod St George said asylum seekers had been sexually assaulted and tortured by other detainees but immigration staff at the centre in Papua New Guinea had turned a blind eye.

He said acts of self-harm and attempted suicide were occurring "almost daily" and that the facilities in Australia "couldn't even serve as a dog kennel - the owners would be jailed".

'Words can't describe," told SBS Television. "I've never seen human beings so destitute, so helpless and so hopeless before."

 The revelations have done little to restrain an increasingly heated debate in Australia about refugees, as the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, upped the ante and pledged to call in the military.

In a startling policy announcement ahead of a general election later this year, Mr Abbott said Australia required drastic measures to prevent the arrival of boat people and was in the grip of a "national emergency on our borders". He pledged to alter Australia's chain of command and that a joint taskforce would be headed by a three-star general who would answer to the immigration minister rather then defence chiefs.

 "This is one of the most serious external situations that we have faced in many a long year," Mr Abbott said. "It must be tackled with decisiveness, with urgency, with the appropriate level of seriousness." The new plan, labelled Operation Sovereign Borders, followed the disturbing claims of rape and abuse under the watch of Australian immigration officials at its detention centre on Manus Island, off the north coast of Papua New Guinea.

Following the claims, 32 current and former Salvation Army staff from Australia's centre on the island of Nauru publicly said that a weekend riot there – which caused £40 million damage – was "shocking [but] inevitable".

 "These really strong men, who've been through so much, just get degraded and downtrodden by this stalling and this bureaucracy," said Mark Isaacs, a spokesman for the staff.

A former Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, said Australia's detention centres were "Soviet-style gulags" and called for a royal commission.

"What has happened on Manus is not new, it has been going on for months and months," he said. "The [immigration] department has known that, and it's only public exposure that has brought it to light."

The claims of abuse came as a blow to Mr Rudd's "hard-line" pledge last week to transfer all boat people to offshore island detention centres. The plan was embraced by the opposition but dismissed by aid groups as cruel and by legal experts as a breach of international law.

Boat arrivals have soared in the past three years, with more than 15,000 arrivals so far this year. Most of the recent arrivals have come via Indonesia from Iran, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. The boats are frequently unseaworthy and often fail to make the voyage, with at least eleven dying on a boat that capsized in Indonesian waters this week.

Mr Rudd dismissed Mr Abbott's new military approach as "Operation Sovereign something-or-other".

"Mr Abbott doesn't have an alternative, he has a three-word slogan," he said.

The plan also came under criticism from former defence officials, who expressed concerns about involving the military in a civil law enforcement problem.

"We tend to use the military for short-term help to the government in emergencies," said Neil James, from the Australia Defence Association, a defence think-tank.

"It's certainly a national security problem - whether it's a defence problem is a separate argument It's an unusual situation the country is facing at the moment." [TheTelegraph| Reuters]

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