Sewing lips together a final plea for help

It’s the 19th of January 2002 and there is news of 58 asylum seekers in Woomera having sewed their lips together in protest of the delays in processing their refugee applications. We fast forward to the 19th of November 2010 and news breaks of 10 people seeking asylum who have sewed their lips together on Christmas Island in protest at delays in the processing of their refugee claims.

The response of the government is the same now as it was 8 years ago, indifferent, unmoved and proffering that such actions are ‘inevitable’ and will not alter the course of their refugee process. There is a blind acceptance by government that people will have to suffer and when they reach such horrifying extremes they are just bringing it upon themselves. All that remains unscathed is the system not the person.

Just like back in 2002 this government is not asking what kind of monster have we created that damages people so profoundly that it drives them to this point of despair and self – harm? It is an obscenity that the government response is that people are freely choosing to sew their lips together when the reality is that it’s their system of mandatory detention that has driven asylum seekers to this point.

Back in 2002 I personally knew a number of the men who sewed their lips together, one that stays with me forever is of a 15 year old boy who did so. I was initially horrified just by having to imagine such a thing. What kind of person would do this I asked myself?

Then I meet this boy from Iraq, he had recently sewed his lips together for a week. He was a boy who had already spent 3 years in detention, exposed to endless acts of self – harm around him, locked behind razor wire, in remote places where the only thing that grew was despair. This system had broken and damaged this boy beyond repair.

When I asked him why he had done such a thing he responded in a solemn tone with: ‘They have taken everything else from me and my family…I sew my lips together because my words mean nothing anymore, no one will believe me. I will speak no more with words, my body is all I have left…’

Asylum Seekers who sew their lips together do so now because just like in 2002 they know they are trapped in a system that is morally bankrupt and driven by political imperatives rather by what is just and far. When their claims for asylum fall on deaf ears because it’s not in the government’s interest to hear the truth, they will turn to self – harm because they feel it’s their only avenue left.

We already have a four – fold increase in self – harm in detention in the last year. What is horrifying to me these days is not that people sew their lips together but rather that my country proudly creates and runs a detention system that is deliberately built to damage people, to denigrate them and destroy all hope. This is the natural end product.

When all hope is gone, what worth are words anymore?

Kon Karapanagiotidis
CEO
ASRC