In the case of countries supposedly priding themselves in the lotteries of exaggerated freedom, the influence of this carceral mentality is less obvious but still significant.  In Australia, where offshore processing of naval arrivals and its own offerings of gulag culture were made, six years has passed since Nauru and Manus Island became outpost of indefinite detention.

During the years, legislation has been passed encasing these outposts in capsules of secrecy, superficially protected by island sovereignty. 
Whistleblowing has been criminalised; concerned doctors have been expelled; suicides, sexual assault and psychological mutilations have been normalised in the patchwork monstrosity that involves compromised local officials, private security firms and funding from the Australian tax payer.

A most obvious consequence of this is the cultivation of a thuggish lack of accountability.  Australian politicians keen to visit the handiwork of their government have been rebuffed.  Greens Senator Nick McKim had been trying to splash out some publicity on the anniversary, paying a visit to Manus Island.  He noted a deterioration in conditions since his 2017 visit.

On Thursday, he was approached by two immigration officials who informed him that he would be deported.  He had been attempting to see East Lorengau camp, was denied entry, and his passport confiscated.  To SBS News, he expressed his disappointment “that they are threatening to deport me because I am here to expose the truth about the treatment of refugees, to lift the veil of secrecy that’s been draped over Australia’s offshore detention regime.”

A mistake is made in assuming clear dates of commencement in terms of a distinct Australian approach.  Australia was, after all, itself a penal colony, an experiment in distant punishment and obsessive control.  It made, in turn, prisoners of the indigenous population.  Brutally, its various authorities relocated individuals to missions, camps and compounds.  A paternal mentality, one that has never left, took hold: we know what is best for you, be it the Bible or the dog tag. Infantilism, exploitation and dispossession thrived as mentalities.

Despite being an active participant in the post-war movement to establish an international refugee regime protecting human rights, Australian approaches have remained, as immigration law specialist Mary Crock puts it, “controlled and highly selective.”  For decades, Australian administrators and decision makers remained unperturbed by jurisprudence relevant to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951.  The country’s isolation, its continental expanse, and not sharing land borders, have offered governments an unparalleled luxury: “the ability to achieve near perfect control of immigration.”

During the 1960s, Manus Island was set up to take refugees from West Papua.  Salasia Camp, located near the current Lombrom detention centre, was established to isolate a certain number of West Papuan notables who had irked the Indonesian state’s efforts in claiming the former Dutch New Guinea colony.  Australia, not wanting to aggravate their Indonesian counterparts in providing safe havens for West Irian rebels, kept matters quiet, sometimes turning back refugees while offering “permissive residence” visas to others.

Not that the officials of Papua New Guinea were thrilled: thousands of West Papuans who made their way fleeing conflict between the rebels of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (West Papua Freedom Movement) and the Indonesian military were left without PNG citizenship for five decades.

The arrival of Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing in the aftermath of the country’s re-unification in the 1970s saw Australian officials flirt with variants of offshore processing.  The 1978 system established in response to these arrivals ensured a monopoly on the part of the immigration minister to determine the refugee status of arrivals. Lawyers and advisors were given a distant second billing in the role.  In the words of Professor Crock, “The regional processing regime established right across Southeast Asia was predicated on an offshore processing-type idea; stopping asylum seekers where they are, processing them there, and distributing them in an orderly fashion.”

There was the Tampa-Pacific solution orchestrated by Prime Minister John Howard in 2001; there was the re-commencement in fits and starts under dysfunctional, catty Labor governments: the Gillard administration reinstated offshore processing in 2012, while Kevin Rudd added his icing by insisting that no asylum seeker arriving by boat would ever be settled in Australia.  But the earth had already been disturbed, the mind oriented, towards cruelty in the name of necessity.

While refugees tend to be the fodder of periodic periods of demonization, there are many reminders about a condition that Australia has made its own.  Some of this features in the talismanic, urgently desperate writing of the Iranian-Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani.  In 2018, Hoda Afshar snapped a picture showing Boochani as a Christ-like figure, seemingly awaiting crucifixion.  Her subject chose to see it differently.  “I only see a refugee, someone whose identity has been taken from him.  Just bare life, standing beyond the borders of Australia, waiting and staring.”

The Australian Book Review has offered a Behrouz Boochani Fellowship worth $10,000, funded by lawyer and philanthropist Peter McMullin.  In of itself, it suggests the absurd condition that is offshore processing, a state of mind that now draws funding for analysis, for commitment, for understanding.  Having become as ordinary as the insufferably ugly Australian Hills Hoist, or bountiful cask wine, it will not be leaving any time too soon, itself a disfigurement rendered natural.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Courtesy: Counter Current

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The loose drama at such events is often hard to detach from the firmly rooted substance.  Trump’s relationship with the accurate is tenuous and free flowing, so we have little to go on.  Ahead of the meeting, the White House was busy sending various signals designed to baffle and confuse friend and foe alike.  The president was keen to praise the “special relationship” with Kim, the sort of term reserved for gatherings such as those between the UK and US.

At the end of January, Stephen Biegun, designated special representative for North Korea in the US State Department, suggested that Pyongyang had made a commitment in pre-summit talks to eliminate uranium and plutonium enrichment facilities for a price.  His mood seemed to jar with the more bellicose stance taken by national security adviser and pro-bombing enthusiast John R. Bolton and fellow belligerent companion and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

In carefully chosen words, the representative noted how, “Chairman Kim qualified next steps on North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities upon the United States taking corresponding measures.”  Biegun was optimistic at the time, drawing upon themes of flexibility and novelty. “Neither leader is constrained by traditional expectations that might doom their teams to try the exact same approach as in the past, with no expectation of anything but the same failed outcome.”

The president’s preliminary chats over dinner with Kim prior to the formal summit did not give much away.  “Great meetings and dinner tonight in Vietnam with Kim Jong Un of North Korea,” he tweeted.  “Very good dialogue. Resuming tomorrow!”  Those aching for detail were left disappointed.  By breakfast the next day, things had cooled.  Cancellations of a working lunch followed.

The smoke has yet to clear, and may be hovering for some time yet.  But Trump was impressed by Kim’s offer to dismantle the enrichment facility at Yongbyon in its entirety (though it is clear that the totality of the DPRK’s capacity goes beyond it).  The discussion and proposed transaction list seemed somewhat threadbare; a total lift of sanctions for Yongbyon’s dismantling?  According to Trump, “Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that.”

The response was not long in coming.  Ri Yong-ho, North Korea’s foreign minister, suggested another version, somewhat more nuanced, less absolute: that only some sanctions be lifted in exchange for the permanent and complete dismantling of the main facility, verified by US experts.  “Given the current level of trust between North Korea and the United States, this was the maximum step for denuclearization we could offer.”
Prior to the summit, there was a transfixed terror that Trump was going to give all earthly concessions, and a good number of goods on gold platter, to the North Korean leader.  A bemused Trump simply deemed it “false reporting” on his “intentions with respect to North Korea.”  Both parties would “try very hard to work something out on Denuclearization & then making North Korea an Economic Powerhouse.”

This was far from the case.  As Joel S. Wit and Jenny Town note with some accuracy,  “It’s ironic that while most pundits and the media kept up a steady drumbeat that he was going to give away the store, he did just the opposite, holding out for a better deal.”

The issues at stake here on the Korean Peninsula seem monumental, but when seen together, constitute the pieces of a jigsaw.  Any comprehensive talks will have to address these, and this summit was evidently not going to do that.  To only see one or two pieces in isolation (abductees, for instance, or the issue of exclusive, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation) is to ignore the numbers of steps in the entire affair.

Trust needs to be restored, a peace treaty neutering the war status of the Peninsula signed, undertakings against the use of force and hostile intent made with heft, and ultimately, an understanding that the parties at the negotiating table aren’t going to bump you off.  Pyongyang is being asked to relinquish its highest grade insurance in the face of a superpower which has shown more than an unhealthy tendency to inflict regime changes with catastrophic consequences.  Brinkmanship and theories of managed lunacy in the diplomatic realm will only get you to a point.

With Trump being advised by the likes of the gun slinging Bolton (known in North Korean circles as the paternal inspiration for Pyongyang’s nuclear program) and Kim ever mindful about the vulnerabilities of his regime, more walkouts are bound to happen.  As Jeffrey Lewis rightly noted, the old guard (Bolton and company) represent “the cold wind” and “pretty much the rest of the government bureaucracy.”  The warmth of reform in securing peace on the Korean Peninsula, spurred on by the fanning of South Korea’s Moon Jae-in and the likes of Biegun, act as counters.  This walkout, at least, means that each can live to talk another day, though it will keep their respective public relations teams busy.
As matters stand, there will be no resumption of North Korean ballistic and nuclear testing, and a promise for more negotiations.  The chatter will continue, and channels will remain open.  As for Trump itself, “This wasn’t a walkaway like you get up and walk out.  No, this was very friendly. We shook hands.”

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Courtesy: Counter Currents
 

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Human rights remains as much fashion and political statement.  In Australia, the idea that such rights have truck with the political classes is a very flimsy notion indeed.  A country that praises itself constantly as a paragon of freedoms and liberties is bound to find common ground with those people’s democracies who insist on keeping political prisoners and confining individuals indefinitely.  Australia’s record on matters regarding the UDHR remains abysmal: indefinite detention regimes outsourced and funded on tropical Pacific islands; permitted, open-ended control regimes for those who have served their time in prison yet still remain a matter of interest to the state; and various infractions committed after September 11, 2001 in anti-terrorist operations.

Rights documents, be they the universal declaration itself or a charter that might embed those provisions, is also politically difficult to sell. When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd received the report from Father Frank Brennan on having a Human Rights Act he insisted, rather uncharitably, that he had been served a shit sandwich.  (Scatological references were a favourite theme with him.)  Despite going through the exercise of having such a consultation committee, the project for a human rights act would be shelved; the sense that Australia remains resistant to such abstract notions as free speech and privacy remains strong.  Many thanked their stars that the decision by Rudd had essentially set back the discussion of rights in Australia by a generation.

The Charter of Rights movement is yet another grouping of human rights activists and lawyers in Australia attempting to encourage the country’s citizens to embrace something tantamount to a Bill of Rights. It uses the bland measures of advertising and mild condescension, more in the hope that citizens will succumb to the sheer power of persuasion.

But even these advocates cannot, nor want to see the implications of having a firm, entrenched civil and political rights document immune from the predations of Parliament.  Shen Narayanasamy, Human Rights Campaign director at the lobby group GetUp!, managed a sneer at the idea of free speech, largely because it was the sort that might be embraced by affronted conservatives and self-satisfied bigots.

Lee Carnie of the Human Rights Law Centre, a fellow panellist, argued that any charter would necessarily have to be subordinate to the wishes of Parliament.  The “legislative dialogue model”, as it is termed, still privileges the role of that all-powerful, and often erratic body, one that can imprison, separate from the judiciary, any citizen or resident who supposedly impugns and impairs its functions.  Parliament, notably one run by majoritarian instincts, remains a constant threat to the liberties of the citizenry.

Such views seem to come from the harsh bottlebrush of Australian suspicion: we have rights, but these are revocable by the whim of the legislature; we have rights, but these are susceptible to modification by judicial and parliamentary fiat. The result is a rather meagre appreciation for the very idea of rights, one stifled by process.

What, then, are Australians left with?  The Universal Declaration, or what lawyers suggestively term “soft law”, comes to mind.  As “soft” law, it should not be treated as irrelevant and without utility; its crawling influence has been significant and long lasting, even if removed from any direct enforceable mechanism.  It is not the stuff to make black letter lawyers swoon; in some cases, it causes them considerable bowel disruptions of discomfort.

In the words of Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “It has withstood the tests of passing years, and the advent of dramatic new technologies and social, political and economic developments that its drafters would have foreseen.”  As the United Nations information site claims, “the UDHR has inspired a rich body of legally binding international human rights treaties.”  With confidence the organisation insists that “more than 80 international human rights treaties and declarations, a great number of regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills and constitutional provisions” have been birthed in that vortex of inspired drafting.

Scepticism and criticism of it remain.  It has been accused of ethnocentrism, Western-oriented tendencies and presumptuousness.  Ajamu Baraka sees the document as nobly inspired but hopelessly applied, historically bound and shackled to bad habits of history.  “The historic project temporarily diverted by the war as a result of the German bringing the horrors colonial domination unleashed by the European invasion of what become the ‘America’s’ in 1492, back to Europe, and applied to other Europeans.”  (He avoids any mention of Japanese brutalities and the World War undertaken in the East which had its own variant of domination at play.)  His suggestion is one of decolonising the declaration.

Aspirational gloss has always been central to such a document; application continues to be, if not poor, then non-existent in some cases.  We are left with the imperfect callings of soft law, one that seeks to move and germinate, rather than becoming, in of itself, an enforceable document it can never hope to be.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org
 

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To be guilty is a spur for works that supposedly highlight those nagging reasons for feeling guilty.  You might supply donations.  You can become a philanthropist.  You can join a charity.  Obscenely, you can become a creature of mocking persuasion, a person of pantomime: you can assume the position of a poor person, a homeless person, and pretend to be him.  And let it be filmed.

“When I was given the opportunity to spend 10 days experiencing different forms of homelessness for an SBS documentary, I jumped at the chance to understand more about a crisis that now sees more than 116,000 Australians homeless on any given night.” So go the words of veteran thespian Cameron Daddo, a person who never explains how understanding Sydney’s poverty leads to results, other than spending time on the screen and proving rather awkward to boot.

The individuals involved in the tawdry Australian spectacle Filthy Rich & Homeless have various reasons for participating.  They have a chance, not merely to appear before the cameras, but to explore another part of Sydney.  What matters for Skye Leckie is the anger of authenticity.  Socialite that she is, she does not believe that her participation in the venture is “poverty porn” despite being the very same creature who benefits from having a good quotient of poor around.  “Those who say it’s stunt TV are being totally ignorant to the homeless situation out there.”  This is a delicious way of self-justification, a positioned blow to excuse how her exploitation of a social condition is entirely justified by a mysterious, holy insight.  Her pantomime, in other words, is heralded as genuine.

Benjamin Law, author and very much an identity beacon (those things help these days), played the cool cat.  In such ensembles, it’s always good to have the confidently composed, the person who won’t fall for the pathos of the show.  “I went to Filthy Rich and Homeless being adamant that it was only 10 days, and that I wasn’t going to cry – I felt it’d almost be insulting to people who were actually homeless.”  So goes his justification for actually participating in the project: he would hold firm, stay calm, keep his tear ducts dry.  “But when it’s demonstrated that this could easily be a family member, and someone you love, I couldn’t not be affected.”

The show is sugary fodder for social media masturbation, an ever so prodding tease for those who feel pangs of stirring guilt.  Nonsense about “genuine compassion” and “empathy” whirl through the chattersphere, with a disconcerting gurgle of approval at the program.  The implication is clear: like true porn, it produces a release, an orgiastic sensation.  The poor are sociological wank fodder.  In the aftermath is the little death, or should be.  Such programs float on the froth of sentiment, and last longer than they should.

There are shades of the carnivalesque, as Michael Bakhtin called it, in this exercise.  The tradition of the carnival, he explained, suggested alternate worlds, inverted ones where social orders might, just temporarily, be suspended.  The performer, and the audience, would become one.  Communal dialogue might emerge.  But the participants will eventually go home; the nobility will revert to their high standing, and the poor will undress and return to their squalid, putrid existence.

Feudalism and tribalism may have made their official exit in the historical textbooks, but we still find stirrings of old custom in the media industry.  The poor are there to be mocked; the vulnerable are there to be, in some form, exploited.  Gone is the exaggerated chivalric code, as meagre as it was (keeping people in place), and the presumption of charity.  In its place is the clawing, scraping urge of the media moguls and networks keen to capitalise upon a condition, a disability, a drawback.  Poverty is visual and lucrative for all – except the impoverished.

An obvious flaw in this project – several wealthy members of society burying themselves in the poor underbelly – is contrived anonymity. The monarchs supposedly travel incognito amongst the slums.  The participants supposedly become unknown for a time.  The King and Queen scrap around the hovels.  But who recognises them?  Presumably everybody.  Not having a home, or living in indigence, doesn’t mean not having access to the saturation coverage called the World Wide Web.  The camera crews might be a giveaway, the very reality of which produces distortions in the interviews.

The grotesque scene uncovers itself, and the tears, spilling on cue, supply catharsis.  “Most interesting,” noted the Sydney Morning Herald, “is just how little time on the street it takes for them to be reduced to tears.”  To be fair, they only had ten days, so the performance clock was ticking.  The filthy rich feel justified – they acknowledged pain and desperation.  The poor, their role achieved, can simply go on living.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org
 

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Juraj Vrdoljak of Telesport was convinced.  “I think half the population didn’t show up to work on the morning after the win against England.” The victory had inspired early shop closures, a feeling of rampant escapism. “Croatia is a country with a deep economic crisis.  Every day, life is really hard.  It’s full of bad stories and tough times.  There is lot of poverty.  A lot of people are emigrating.”

Members of Croatia’s football team have become national talismans of endurance, the shock troops of resilience and hope.  Ivan Rakitić, when he takes the field against France, will be playing his 71^st match of the season, the most than any top-flight player this year.  Luka Modrić remains unflinching in the midfield as the team’s general.  Domagoj Vida has been granite in defensive solidity.

Football teams can be held up as mirrors of the nations they represent. This sociological gazing can always be taken too far, a scholar’s fruitless pondering, but Croatia’s national side is instructive.  It was Dinamo Zagreb’s Zvonimir Boban who stirred matters with his heralded assault on a police officer engaged in a violent scuffle with fans in a match against Red Star Belgrade.  Croatian football was fashioned as a vehicle of protest and dissent against what was seen as a Serb-dominated federation.

In time, football kicks became shells and bullets in the murderous dissolution of Yugoslavia.  To this day, a legend stubbornly holds that the truculent Bad Blue Boys of Dinamo and the countering Deljie of Red Star precipitated the first shots of that war.

Starting with its current inspirational captain, the link between social ill and patriotic performance can be seamless.  When he finishes the tournament in Russia, Modrić will have to turn his mind back to his relationship with mentor and former Dinamo Zagreb executive Zdravko Mamić, a towering figure who finds himself facing a six-and-a-half year prison sentence for corruption and fraud.   From Bosnia and Herzegovina, he does battle with the authorities, attempting to avoid extradition after fleeing Croatia.

A bursting feature of the case mounted against Mamić involved claims of ill-gotten gains from transfers of Modrić from Dinamo Zagreb to Tottenham Hotspur in 2008 and Dejan Lovren to Lyon in 2010.  Modrić, it seemed, was implicated in signing an annex to his Dinamo contract, suggesting a 50-50 split of any future transfer fee.  What was significant was the timing – 2015 as opposed to any earlier dates.  Through his tenure, suggestions that Mamić had conducted a “silent privatisation” of the club were rampant, producing inflated transfer prices and a cult of acquisitiveness.

Modrić, having been billed as a star witness who initially supplied anti-corruption investigators with gold dust on Mamić’s penchant for cooking the accounts, notably in terms of pocketing millions of euros of the transfer fee, froze in the dock.  His memory, it seemed, had failed him; the contract annex was not signed, as he initially claimed, in 2015 but 2004.  This testimony was effectively rendered worthless.  Croatia’s captain now faces the prospect of a perjury charge that carries a possible sentence of five years in prison.

The Croatian Football association, in an official statement in March, was not having a bar of it, unsurprising given the powers that be within the country’s football hierarchy.  The body insisted upon “the principle of innocence and considers every person innocent until proven otherwise.”  It was also “deeply convinced of the correctness of Luka Modrić’s testimony before the court in Osijek, and especially because of Modrić’s behaviour since his first appearance for the Croatian U-15 team in March 2001 to date.”

While every inch the commander in the field, with his team keen to impress in their following, not all Croatian supporters are in the Modrić tent of fandom. The Bad Blue Boys have found themselves split in loyalties over the years, with some, such as Juraj Ćošić, forming a breakaway team, Futsal Dinamo. “Zdravko Mamić,” claims football sociologist Ben Perasović, “is a typical member of the new rich class.”  It is a class that continues to afflict Croatian football with their depredations, a looting tendency that is only now being reined in with mixed success.

The other team members have also shown this side to be rather prickly. Vida, and the now sacked assistant coach Ognjen Vukojević, were caught on film making comments supportive of Ukrainian nationalists in the aftermath of the side’s defeat of Russia in the quarter-finals.  FIFA’s benevolence prevailed, and the centre-back was permitted to play in the semi-final against England.

Such a background adds more than a touch of complexity, with all its discomforts, to the World Cup final against France.  Croatia’s team will not merely be facing their opponents on the field in a battle of wits and tenacity. Off it, pens and knives are being readied and sharpened, with prosecutions being prepared.

Even now, the team is being written off by the smug pundits of football orthodoxy, though with less disdain than before.  Three matches on the trot into extra-time suggest imminent exhaustion, a possible overrunning by a more refreshed French team. But desperation, in meeting talent, can be the most potent of elixirs.  This Croatian team has pushed the sceptics to the edge, and threatens to leave them there.  And with players like Modrić, adversity remains their closest companion.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org
 

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