Manus Island: The door of death
By Abdul Aziz Adam (from Sudan, now a Manus Island detainee).
It will please me to let you know about our psychology in the prison camp of Manus island. The greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability of cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us the four ways or steps of the minds which is everyone been through for the last three years under this cruel policy.
Fist is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When the a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious, or you hear traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the minds way of protecting itself from pain. But for us is not exciting any more, hard for us to sleep without pills or drugs, hard for us to distinguish between traumatic news or good once. Our sleeping experience during the night we shared rooms with rats, cockroaches, lizards, spiders and crabs. whats a nice experienced.
Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly, all our memories are simply painful. They saying time heals most wounds is false, the wounds remain in time the mind protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessons. But it’s never gone.
Third is the door of madness. We have been through this way many time, many people feel happy to talk with their body by cutting or harm.
There are a times when the reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.
Last is the door of death, the final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead or so we have been told. Must of us were waiting for this moment which is three of our best went through. We are jealous the way they are happy without us. We are jealous the way they are reached their final destination without us, we have came together and they left us behind.
Rest Rest Rest in peace brothers …
Manus prison camp
Aziz
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Return to home pageI am currently working as an Australian volunteer in the South Pacific Islands. It is a dreadful indictment of the Australian Government franchise for the mark they are leaving on Manus Island. The hypocrisy and dreadful example we are setting to the people of the South Pacific Islands will take years to erase!
No hope of wounds healing while such pain continues to be inflicted. Everyday. The same. Without hope.
Hope being a tool that is used as a weapon against further boats setting sail.
The ends justifies the means according to our federal government on both sides of the house.
After the excellent ABC Four Corners, I expected our PM to do a Captain’s call and take the remaining asylum seekers still in Nauru and Manus and bring them to Australia; these people did not drown, so now we are punishing them for NOT drowning.
How hard have we become, we have lost our humanity, I feel ashamed for our government’s behaviour…
What a despicable government and a callous conservative voter and donor base who all stand condemned, every damned one of them. The conservative politicians responsible for the continuation of these hideous camps know exactly what their policy is doing and allowing to be done, will face prosecution. This is inevitable. It may be in an international jurisdiction or domestic and it will include the court of public retribution. The political perpetrators will never, as long as they live, be free from the shame of their politically inspired crimes against the refugees who reached out for help. Damn the LNP, damn every bloody one of them, and damn their donors, and damn their mindless voters.
The detained men on Manus have become Australia’s political prisoners. The government calls them ‘ illegal arrivals’. Under international law however, what they have become after more than 3 years incarceration on Manus, is political prisoners, nothing less. Let’s begin to call them that.
Additionally, they are political hostages, imprisoned on Manus, so that the LNP can gain domestic political traction by scaring the Australian electorate that these same refugees represent the vanguard of millions of others who will descend ‘ illegally’ on our country, if we don’t have these degrading and punishing off-shore detention practices. This is simply lazy and dishonest policy-making matching the government’s depraved practices.
While the Manus men are used as means to achieve an end of effectively deterring other would-be refugees,
the LNP cynically breaks every UN Human Rights Convention to which it is a signatory, but has not the courage to do a BREXIT from the U.N.
The government’s extravagantly expensive policy of systematic de-humanisation and carefully promoted stigma generation towards asylum seekers arriving by boats, is also matched now by a contempt towards their interfering ‘advocates’ ( Minister Peter Dutton, a morally bereft politician now uses this term as a disparagement quite frequently)
Meanwhile, Australia’s selfish neo-colonial attitudes towards both Nauru and Papua New Guinea, throughout this mess are well and truly on display just as they are with the border dispute with East Timor.
Oh to see the perpetrators of these policies (Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison and Dutton ) forced to front the International Court of Justice, as serial and serious violators of the human rights of stateless peoples !
Aziz,
I have mixed feelings about reading your article.
First, I immensely appreciate that we witnesses are seeing what most of us are fighting for on this supportive AIM Network site and that is continued recognition of your plight on Manus and your compatriots in the Nauru blackhole.
I have never suffered your plight and I feel shame for not being able to personally alleviate your pain.
But I do want you to know that I have fought and continue to fight for your freedom within my capacity.
Please don’t give up. My sisters and brothers want you to live and thrive, as well as your loved-ones.
Pingback: Manus Island: The door of death — The AIM Network – law260
Here we have a brief version of what could very well become a true story called “One Day in the Life of Abdul Aziz Adam” by Abdul Aziz Adam. And you cannot get more authentic than that.
It would be placed alongside the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi, Arthur Koestler…and dozens of others.
It, like all the other reports and revelations coming out of Manus and Nauru, puts this government to shame.The Coalition ignores the criticism of the UNHCR , Amnesty International, the statement of the PNG government that Manus is illegal and unconstitutional,and all those reports and revelations – claiming the camps are not in their jurisdiction, and that anyway they are being cruel to be kind by saving this “human shield” from drowning. You know, just as Arbeit macht frei.
I think it is time that Labor and others come out and disassociated themselves from this conservative rabble with three military ministers and a militant minister for immigration. Bring the refugees to Oz.
Enough is enough!
On Q&A, Arthur Sinodinos tried to excuse the Coalition’s tardiness with resettling refugees out of Manus and Nauru because the Coalition has difficulty finding third countries to take them – precisely the same problem Labor faced and for which it was roundly criticised and 1200 people drowned.
That people have not drowned under the Coalition does not justify the treatment of people, including children, in those camps.
I was pleased with Robert Manne, he was advocating what I said last week: take them all in, Oz is hardly an over-populated country.
Thank you, Aziz. Some of us are actively trying to have you freed. I’m so sorry we are doing this to you.
Johnny Howards Liberal party was the first to use off shore detention as a “tool”