Antony Loewenstein

My book The Blogging Revolution was recently released in India in an updated edition. 

Here’s a pretty good review of it by J Jagannath in a leading Indian newspaper, Business Standard:

The little spark that the Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi ignited in December 2010 to torch himself in retaliation against corruption has engulfed the Arab region ever since. It brought the power back into people’s hands and the jitters were felt by the tyrants in Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Libya and, to an extent, Bahrain (apart from Tunisia, of course). That begs the question: would all this have been possible without the World Wide Web? Yes it was the dispossessed and disenchanted who first raised their arms against the totalitarianism, but it’s a stretch to deny the blogs played their part by sowing the seeds of discontent.

You may call Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein a Nouriel Roubini of geopolitics for predicting an Arab Spring sort of thing after his visits to Damascus and Cairo, which are chronicled in a lively manner in this book. The book is a collection of dispatches from Loewenstein’s visits to Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China in 2007 to make sense of the nascent blogging craze in these repressive countries.

In Iran, Loewenstein brings the blogging scene to life in an almost Hunter S Thompson way. He visits nooks and crannies of Tehran to meet the handful of dissenters and brings to life the doings of the Ahmadinejad regime. It surely doesn’t augur well for the argumentative nature of any country if a blogger is detained for revealing that Iran’s presidential staff bought dogs from Germany for $150,000. Even though he touches upon the familiar issues, female and homosexual repression, Loewenstein has many original points to make. He’s spot on about the underground rave party scene, where demure women let their hair down. This is something that was portrayed last year in the gritty Iranian film Circumstance.

Equally illuminating is his reportage from Cairo, the solar plexus of the Arab Spring. Loewenstein chats with quite a few bloggers who raised their voices against the corrupt regime of Hosni Mubarak. Over the course of his trip, Loewenstein unearths blogs and websites that convey the Egyptians’ anguish in a more nuanced manner than the Western corporate media stationed there. Loewenstein’s trip to Syria is also as revealing and it confirms theories that the Arab Spring was in the making for a long time; all it needed was one small push, which Bouazizi provided.

The Blogging Revolution will be remembered for its prescience. A blogger tells Loewenstein in 2008, “If Mubarak lost power, the Islamists would take over and cause trouble.” This is exactly what looks like is happening in Egypt following Mubarak’s ouster. The book lays bare how misguided the perception of blogs being “echo chambers” and “information cocoons” is. This book is a perfect riposte to what Forbes once said blogs are all about: “the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.” The Arab Spring showed how the Goliaths had to surrender before the Davids whose only “weapon” is the Internet.

What pulls back The Blogging Revolution a notch or two is that Loewenstein doesn’t make much headway in Cuba and Saudi Arabia. He’s either seen dithering or the authorities never let him near the actual troublemakers. He builds his reportage more or less on an assortment of articles from various sources. Although it’s laudable that he chose to brave the odds and travelled to Saudi Arabia and Cuba, the author appears as hapless as an upended turtle. In China, Loewenstein casts a wider net and tries to ask the Chinese if freedom of speech means anything to them as long as everything’s hunky dory with their personal lives.

Contrary to what Western media reports, Loewenstein finds out that most people prefer to be insouciant about the Tiananmen massacre. “People just want to get on with their lives. It’s in the past,” tells a source to Loewenstein. Here’s how Loewenstein summarises the attitude of Chinese bloggers, “On their wish lists, a Nintendo Wii comes far ahead of democracy. Free pirated films, television shows and music are their primary concern.” However, at the end of his dispatch he concludes that the Chinese politburo cannot anaesthetise the revolutionary streak among Chinese bloggers.

Another setback for The Blogging Revolution is the way Internet revolution zeitgeist has shifted from blogging to social networking and micro-blogging. The Arab Spring really exploded when people started tweeting about the atrocities being committed by Mubarak during his last-ditch efforts to cling on to power. During the disputed elections in Iran in 2009 when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to clamp down on protests and Twitter quelled his efforts, Economist carried a headline “Twitter: 1, CNN: 0”. These minor gripes aside, The Blogging Revolution is a nice throwback to whatever monstrosities the Arab Spring managed to undo and what blogging can achieve, with its heart in the right place, in the future.

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THE BLOGGING REVOLUTION
Antony Loewenstein
Jaico Books
294 pages; Rs 350

As around 50% of Israelis allegedly support the right of Orthodox Jews to segregate bus lines – what is this, rural Iran? – but a number of women are fighting back against growing intolerance inside the Zionist state. If only there was the same kind of passion directed towards the Palestinians who suffer under Israeli occupation every day:

On Friday, Jan 6th, 2012, a group of 250 women from Bet Shemesh decided to raise their voices against the exclusion of women from the public domain by holding a mass public dance in the city square. The women, residents of the city from all ages and sectors, religious, traditional and secular, gathered together in a flashmob dance, in the city square and started dancing towards a change.

Sigh (via the Guardian):

Iran is clamping down heavily on web users before parliamentary elections in March with draconian rules on cybercafes and preparations to launch a national internet.

Tests for a countrywide network aimed at substituting services run through the world wide web have been carried out by Iran’s ministry of information and communication technology, according to a newspaper report. The move has prompted fears among its online community that Iran intends to withdraw from the global internet.

The police this week imposed tighter regulations on internet cafes. Cafe owners have been given a two-week ultimatum to adopt rules requiring them to check the identity cards of their customers before providing services.

“Internet cafes are required to write down the forename, surname, name of the father, national identification number, postcode and telephone number of each customer,” said an Iranian police statement, according to the news website Tabnak.

“Besides the personal information, they must maintain other information of the customer such as the date and the time of using the internet and the IP address, and the addresses of the websites visited. They should keep these informations for each individuals for at least six months.”

In recent weeks, users in Iran have complained of a significant reduction in internet speed, reported the reformist newspaper, Roozegar, which has recently resumed publication after months of closure. The newspaper said it appeared to be the result of testing the national internet.

“According to some of the people in charge of the communication industry, attempts to launch a national internet network are the cause of disruption in internet and its speed reduction in recent weeks,” Roozegar reported.

Some government websites, however, cited other reasons for the drop in speed.

“If the national internet comes into effect, the internet in the country will act like an internal network and therefore visiting the websites needs permission from the people in charge. Users outside Iran also need permission to visit websites running from inside the country,” Roozegar’s report said.

As the drumbeat for war against Iran grows louder by the day – cheered by the same neo-conservatives, extreme Zionists and hacks who led us into conflict with Iraq – it’s vital to hold to account the commentators who never take responsibility for their war-mongering. A fine piece in Jadaliyya:

This is not another article about Christopher Hitchens.

This may come as something of a relief, given the spilling of ink occasioned by Hitchens’ untimely death last week, with Neal Pollock’s fine parody hopefully bringing this outpouring to an end. After an initial set of hagiographies, it was encouraging to see a number of pieces reminding readers of Hitchens’ role in forcefully and bloodthirstily advocating for the war on Iraq, and for the “war on terror” more generally, as part of a deeply racist and Islamophobic current in his work over the past decade (or more).

What has struck me in the articles that have followed, both those that praise and those that condemn Hitchens’ work, is the recurring use of a phrase to describe Hitchens’ advocacy on behalf of the invasion and occupation of Iraq: he was, we are told by the most perceptive commentators on his work, “wrong on Iraq.” For Hitchens’ defenders, as Corey Robin notes, this was articulated as “Yes, he was wrong on Iraq, but…” For his detractors, there is no “but”: in Glenn Greenwald’s words, Hitchens was guilty of the crime of endorsing “the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud.”

It seems likely that this focus on Hitchens’ support for the war would have been part of these pieces in any case, since it became one of the defining aspects of his writing over the past decade. But given that his death came in the same week as the much-reported withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the connection was inevitable, even for Hitchens’ admirers. For those who accept the fantasy that the withdrawal of US forces marks the “end” of the war, the Iraq War, like the era of Hitchens, could now be given an end date; indeed, on the front page of its website today, the New York Times features a section entitled “Iraq War: 2003-2011.”

This brief re-entry of Iraq into public discourse in the United States—a re-entry that is intended only to clear the way for a final dismissal, since the war is now, according to this narrative of events, “over”—reminds us of the extent to which Iraq has fallen out of the collective consciousness in the US. It must not be allowed to do so, and the notion that the withdrawal of US troops (leaving behind the largest US embassy in the world in Baghdad and consulates in Basra, Erbil, and Kirkuk, along with at least 16,000 Americans employed by the US government—a large percentage of them “security contractors,” that is, armed mercenaries of the sort that have caused so much carnage in Iraq) should be understood as meaning the “end” of the Iraq War must not be allowed to stand unchallenged. It is an opportune moment, in other words, for some remembering, and, if we can make it happen, some accountability.

…

To have been “wrong” on Iraq, if one was a member of the political and/or military establishment that helped to perpetrate the war and occupation, is, simply put, to be a war criminal. If this is not how such figures are currently viewed, this speaks most clearly to the blighted state of international law and institutions, and their inability to hold the perpetrators of the planet’s most horrific acts of violence accountable for their actions.

To have been “wrong” on Iraq, if one was or is a member of the media or the intellectual establishment that argued for, and thus helped to lay the groundwork for, the war, is to be deeply complicit in these war crimes. Again, there has been no attempt to hold any of these individuals accountable for such complicity, although there is a precedent that dates back at least to the Nuremberg Tribunal that would allow for identifying and acting against such media and intellectual complicity in war crimes.

When I wrote The Blogging Revolution in 2007 and 2008, I couldn’t imagine the ever-increasing focus on Western “security” firms working alongside repressive states to censor and spy on their people. I investigated this in the book (and the latest 2011 edition, just published in India, examines the reality during the Arab revolutions).

Bloomberg has released a wonderful series on this very subject, Wired for Repression:

Bloomberg’s series “Wired for Repression” reveals how Western companies provide surveillance systems to authoritarian countries that claim some of the world’s worst human rights records including Iran, Syria, Bahrain and Tunisia. The newest artillery for repressive regimes, the gear allows authorities to intercept their citizens’ e-mails and text messages, monitor Internet activity and locate political targets through cell phone technology. Brandishing transcripts of personal communications and records of whereabouts, officials now routinely use such information to confront, arrest and torture dissidents.

Here’s one striking story:

The intelligence operative sits in a leather club chair, laptop open, one floor below the Hilton Kuala Lumpur’s convention rooms, scanning the airwaves for spies.

In the salons above him, merchants of electronic interception demonstrate their gear to government agents who have descended on the Malaysian capital in early December for the Wiretapper’s Ball, as this surveillance industry trade show is called.

As he tries to detect hacker threats lurking in the wireless networks, the man who helps manage a Southeast Asian country’s Internet security says there’s reason for paranoia. The wares on offer include products that secretly access your Web cam, turn your cell phone into a location-tracking device, recognize your voice, mine your e-mail for anti-government sentiment and listen to supposedly secure Skype calls.

He isn’t alone watching his back at this cyber-arms bazaar, whose real name is ISS World.

For three days, attendees digging into dim sum fret about losing trade secrets to hackers, or falling prey to phone interception by rival spies. They also get a tiny taste of what they’ve unleashed on the outside world, where their products have become weapons in the hands of regimes that use the gear to track and torture dissidents.

“I’m concerned about my calls or Internet being monitored, because that’s what they sell,” says Meling Mudin, 35, a Kuala Lumpur-based information-technology security consultant who takes defensive measures as he roams the exhibits. “When I make phone calls, I step out of the hotel, I don’t use my computer and I also don’t use the wireless services provided.”

ISS, which convenes every few months in cities from Dubai to Brasilia, is the hub of the surveillance trade. In recent years, countries such as Syria, Iran and Tunisia bulked up their monitoring by turning to some of ISS’s corporate sponsors, such as Italy’s Area SpA and Germany’sUtimaco Safeware AG (USA) and Trovicor GmbH, a Bloomberg Newsinvestigation showed.

Business is booming, with annual revenue of $3 billion to $5 billion growing as much as 20 percent a year, ISS organizer Jerry Lucas estimates.

Tablet reports on how blind love for Zionism and hatred of Islam has become a toxic mix:

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Front National has wrapped itself in the repellent rags of traditional French anti-Semitism. The series of outrageous dérapages, or verbal slips, of the movement’s founder and longtime leader Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father—are legion, ranging from his remark that the Holocaust was a “detail” of history to his rhyming of crematory (crématoire) with the name of a Jewish politician Michel Durafour. Thus the question of whether anti-Semitism was incidental or central to the Front National’s ideological essence was, from the perspective of French Jewry, entirely settled.

Until now, that is. Since she assumed its leadership at the beginning of 2011, Marine Le Pen has worked to “modernize” her father’s party—a diplomatic word for purging its most reactionary elements. Nolwenn Le Blevennec, a journalist for the news site Rue89 who reports on the Front National, notes that Le Pen has demoted party figures like Christian Bouchet, a notorious fan of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and expelled Alexandre Gabriac, who gave a Nazi salute at a party rally. She’s also distanced herself from Alain Solal, a prominent anti-Semite previously identified as one of Front National’s intellectuals. Even more notably, by making her father the honorary president of the Front National, Le Pen has effectively made him a figurehead shorn of actual power.

At the same time, Marine Le Pen has made a series of dramatic overtures to the Jewish community. Her trip to the United States in early November largely passed under the radar of the American media, but it was widely covered by the French press. At first, the visit wobbled between the surreal and slapstick. At one point, Le Pen’s handlers tried to bar the pack of French journalists from following her into the U.S. Capitol; once inside, the reporters found that Le Pen’s strenuous efforts to meet with a U.S. politician—indeed, any politician at all—ultimately yielded only a furtive 10-minute chat with Rep. Ron Paul. But then, days later, Le Pen pulled off a coup de théâtre: Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, attended a gathering she hosted at the United Nations. Despite the subsequent announcement from Israel’s foreign ministry that the meeting was based on a “misunderstanding,” all the press releases in the world can’t undo the image of a smiling Prosor standing side-by-side with a beaming Le Pen.

…

French Republicanism—the doctrine that affirms the equality and liberty of citizens and requires that the public sphere be entirely free of ethnic or religious claims—is the crossroads at which the Front National and French Jewry seem slated to either collide or collaborate. Upon their civil emancipation during the French Revolution, French Jews embraced republicanism, particularly its emphasis on a secular society, as their own.

But that might not be the case for much longer. The national debate over immigration and national identity—issues that involve the 5 million Muslims, mostly of North African origin, living in France—seems shriller by the day. The urban riots that convulsed France in 2005, followed by the appalling death of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew tortured and murdered by several youths of North African background, have had an especially powerful impact on French Jewry. It may well be that the community has reached a point no less pivotal than 1967, when the Six-Day War, followed by Charles de Gaulle’s notorious remark that Jews were an elite and domineering race, ignited French Jewish self-consciousness.

According to Jean-Yves Camus, the political scientist, at least 5 percent of Jewish voters will support Le Pen in 2012. While he and other specialists debate the precise number—there are no surveys on the question—they agree that France’s Jewish community has been moving steadily toward the political right and, indeed, to the extreme right. Clearly, a Jewish Le Pen supporter is no longer the oxymoron it once was. Richard Prasquier, of the Jewish council, worries about this potentially tectonic shift, suggesting that French Jews are increasingly “receptive to and tempted by Le Pen’s discourse.” Perhaps the most immediate reason for this evolution is, that “for the first time since World War II, French Jews are afraid,” said the intellectual Alain Finkielkraut.

…

Against this background, Le Pen’s effort to seduce the French Jewish community takes on even greater significance. It is only by channeling popular fear and loathing at Muslims that the Front National has made room under its “republican” umbrella for its previous bête noire: the Jews.

An open and frank debate about BDS against Israel in Australia is long overdue. Crikey blog This Blog Harms invited five people to write 1000 words on the issue. This is my contribution:

The logic of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) didn’t appear to me immediately. When my first book, My Israel Question, was released in 2006, the issue was barely raised, despite Palestinian civil society launching its call in 2005 “against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.”

The vast majority of Israeli Jews claimed to be in constant fear of Palestinian terrorism despite living relatively free lives in a society that increasingly made Palestinians invisible. Palestinians under occupation were disillusioned with their leaders and after more than a decade of fruitless negotiations with Israel, the Oslo period, longed to be free.

But now, with Israel a state that even more brazenly boasts a fundamentalist Jewish minority as representing true Zionism, BDS is an essential tool to harm Israel’s economic and moral fibre. In the words of American Jewish dissident Philip Weiss, founder of the website Mondoweiss, “Israel isn’t good for the Jews anymore.” Most importantly, Palestinians under occupation are making this call, not a Diaspora attempting to impose a distorted vision onto them.

BDS is a key weapon to de-normalise the relationship between both the globalised economy and Israel and the constructed emotional ties that allegedly bond Israel and the West. Witness Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently tell an event sponsored by National Australia Bank that, “We are two countries separated by distance, but united by values. Liberal democracies that seek freedom and peace.”

An ever-expanding 44-year-old occupation is a strange way to crave freedom and peace.

It is the only the New South Wales Greens who are brave enough, despite a year of intense Murdoch media bullying and Jewish community pressure, to maintain in principle support for BDS and examine ways to “actively support the [Federal] Australian Greens position, including that the Australian government halt military cooperation and military trade with Israel.” This is a proudly BDS position, wherever the Greens call it this or not.

Israel/Palestine is not a balanced conflict, with two equal sides fighting over land, rights and dignity. It is, writes leading Israeli publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, “a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid. It ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights and the guarantees of equality enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”

Although he doesn’t mention BDS, it is impossible to undermine daily, creeping oppression with yet more “negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians while Washington remains Israel’s lawyer.

BDS is the non-violent weapon wielded to show Israel and its global backers that business as usual is unacceptable.

BDS makes many Jews distinctly uncomfortable, with wild claims that this is exactly the same tactics used by Nazis in Germany in the 1930s against Jewish businesses. It is nothing of the sort. Jews are not being targeted but businesses that directly support the Zionist state or receive funding from it. Israeli chocolate shop Max Brenner is a legitimate target because it proudly supports the IDF, an army complicit in daily human rights abuses.

Zionist cheapening of anti-Semitism has become endemic from seeing Nazis in inner Sydney protesting outside Max Brenner to American critics of neo-conservative plans to bomb Iran.

Despite these smears, BDS is growing globally because Israeli actions against Palestinians inside Israel proper and the occupied territories is becoming more repressive and outwardly racist. The litany of exclusionary legislation before the Israeli Knesset, some of which are being pushed by so-called “moderates”, rises weekly. BDS sends a message to these Israelis and Diaspora supporters who either remain silent or simply mouth platitudes about a two-state solution. It is designed to make blind backers uncomfortable and defensive.

It’s being grimly amusing to watch liberal Zionists in Australia and beyond express displeasure with BDS, arguing it is too inflammatory and extreme and ostracises potential allies inside Israel (namely Jews, as Palestinian allies are less important in their worldview). In fact, the opposite is true and BDS forces two-state advocates and fence-sitters to explain how their sclerotic process will do anything to advance peace in the Middle East.

BDS is the enemy of the status-quo and liberal Zionists in Australia, including Monash University’s Mark Baker and Philip Mendes, are paralysed in wishfully thinking the Israeli government will suddenly believe the Palestinians are worthy of being given a state. They recoil at BDS because they despise one part of an outcome that aims to bring true democracy for all citizens inside Israel and Palestine – the one-state solution – something a two-state result can never achieve. If not BDS to tell Israel that its Western-backed racism and occupation is illegal under international law, then what tactic? They have no answers, and desperately cling to an emotional claim as post-Holocaust children. This is no way to ensure rights in the 21^st century, if it ever was.

BDS isn’t the answer to all the Palestinian needs. It is one part of a bigger struggle currently underway inside Palestine itself and the Palestinian Diaspora; a worldwide campaign that doesn’t rely on leaders to beg Israel for scraps or a state or rights. Popular, non-violent resistance, BDS and readdress for Palestinian refugees are key initiatives that must be supported to liberate both Palestinians and Israelis.

BDS is causing economic and sociological harm to the Zionist state, and this is something to celebrate. Were enlightened citizens of the world during South African apartheid asked to feel sorry for whites that ruled the blacks with an iron fist? Of course not, and BDS doesn’t aim to comfort the jarred nerves of Israelis or Diaspora Zionists.

It is about addressing a decades-old matrix of control that has only survived because of Diaspora Jewry funding and morally arming the Zionist state.

Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney-based independent journalist and author who has written for The Guardian, Haaretz, The Nation, Sydney Morning Herald and many others. His two best-selling books are My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. He is currently working on many projects, including a book about vulture capitalism, a book on the Left in contemporary politics and another title on Israel/Palestine.

My 2008 book The Blogging Revolution detailed the role of internet censorship in non-democratic nations and Western firms assisting repressive regimes monitor the web. It was released in an updated e-book edition in August and focused primarily on the Arab revolutions.

I’m proud to announce it’s now being released in an updated print edition in India, the world’s largest democracy. One of the country’s leading publishers, Jaico, is spreading the word across the country. Here’s the new front and back cover:

I hope at least one billion Indians take a read (as I feature content about growing internet censorship in their country).

My following investigation appeared in Crikey this week:

The drive from Broome in Western Australia to Derby, the town closest to the remote Curtin detention centre in the Kimberley, is two-and-a-half hours through endless, surprisingly green desert. Mobile phone reception soon dies after the journey begins and from there you see few people or cars for as far as the eye can see.

The roadhouse at Willare, a red, dusty stop close to Derby, has a BBQ, swimming pool and little else. There is overpriced water and food sitting in a bain-marie that looks like it has survived the apocalypse. This is where many Serco staff stay while working at the Curtin detention centre around an hour away — but there is little for them to do except drink and sleep between 12-hour shifts.

Derby has a population of around 3000 people. It is a depressing place, with temperatures close to 35 degrees and Aboriginal men and women catatonic and drunk at all hours of the day lying in parks. There is an indigenous suicide every fortnight in the town. I spent time with an Aboriginal man, living in an abandoned and dirty house on the outskirts of Derby, who told me through alcohol breath that he wasn’t aware refugees were imprisoned down the road but “I don’t like that they’re locked up”.

I recently stayed in the town for four days to visit detainees in Curtin and investigate the role of Serco and the Immigration Department in maintaining mandatory detention. Very few people visit Curtin due to its isolation so the detainees were pleased to see a friendly face and hear news from the outside world.

The federal government’s latest softening of long-term detention should alleviate some of this suffering though the relationship between DIAC and Serco will continue.

Curtin is situated inside an Australian Airforce Base, around 30 minutes drive from Derby, and can only be accessed by prior arrangement with Serco. Each day that I visited the heat reached 40 degrees and the humidity caused everybody to scurry under fans or air-conditioners. The former African refugee who manned the checkpoint into the centre — he worked for MSS, sub-contracted by Serco, and wore khaki shorts, shirt and felt khaki hat — checked our IDs, used a walkie-talkie to call his Serco superiors inside and soon waved us through.

Around 900 men are currently housed at Curtin and there are signs of the mental trauma many doctors and former detainees warned would occur if the Labor government re-opened under Serco management (as interviewees predicted to me in Crikey in May last year).

A recent report about Curtin released by Curtin University human rights academics Caroline Fleay and Linda Briskman, The Hidden Men, details countless examples of asylum seeker suffering mental trauma due to mandatory detention, contractor IHMS not providing adequate medical care and CCTV cameras recording counselling sessions, violating asylum seeker privacy.

The overwhelming sense of futility and bureaucratic ineptitude permeates Curtin. The Serco contract with the Australian government — recently revealed with colleague Paul Farrell in New Matilda  — explained the lack of training required by Serco staff. The profit motive of Serco ensures that the barest minimum of training is given to prospective workers. The company was fined nearly $15 million this month for failing to properly care for asylum seekers.

I saw evidence of this constantly during my time in Curtin. I had requested to visit, with plenty of notice, a number of detainees from a range of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Many have received refugee status by the Australian government but are waiting indefinitely for security clearance from ASIO (a process without transparency or appeal).

One afternoon a Serco employee advised me that it would be possible to see more requested asylum seekers the next day but by morning, speaking to a different Serco staff, I was informed that it was impossible due to “security” reasons. “You should have given us more warning and it could have been arranged,” the manager said. Such stories are legendary, especially in remote centres, and often DIAC and Serco seemingly aim to refuse visitor requests to deliberately upset the isolated detainees. Such refusals, in such a remote location that sees barely any new or familiar faces, are against Serco and DIAC rules.

Curtin is a wind-swept centre with electrified fences and red dirt that seeps into your eyes, ears and shoes. Expansion plans appear imminent, with empty spaces for more compounds on the way. During the heat of the day, it’s virtually impossible to see anybody outside but by late afternoon, as the sun is setting and a cooler breeze hits the dirt, men start playing football and running around a make-shift, dirt mini-oval.

I was told throughout my visit that Serco staff were too busy to find other requested detainees in the various compounds and yet I saw Serco employees sitting around strumming a guitar and sitting in a large air-conditioned mess room, watching quietly with the asylum seekers while I spoke to them for hours daily.

Occasional excursions outside the centre take the asylum seekers to Derby but one Tamil told me that he found it grimly amusing that a proposed location was the Derby jail, hardly an appropriate place for people who are already in jail.

Most of the Serco staff are fly in, fly out — though as one local told me, “fit in or f-ck pff”, such is the feeling towards those who contribute little to the community and force prices up — and the attitude to asylum seekers is very mixed. One man, Brian, said that he had worked in Curtin during the Howard years, lived in Perth and now came to Curtin for short stints of well-paid work. As he walked me to a compound on the far side of the centre to see the asylum seekers, dubbed the “Sandpit”, he told me that: “We treat them better than many people on the outside. We feed them and give them lawyers. It’s us, the staff, who have it tough, having to sometimes be abused and assaulted by the ‘clients’.” This attitude was pervasive inside Curtin.

I spent time with two Tamil asylum seekers, both in their 20s, both proficient in English and both remarkably aware of Australian culture and history. When they arrived on Christmas Island, volunteers taught them about the White Australia policy, Ned Kelly, multiculturalism, Australia Day, the Stolen Generations and the Kevin Rudd apology to indigenous people. One had even seen and loved the Rolf De Heer film set in Arnhem Land, 10 Canoes, while still in Colombo.

Both men told me that every day somebody inside detention tried to self-harm or kill themselves and the mental state of many friends was troubling. They were given no time-line for final decisions on security clearances though in the last few days had both just received bridging visas.

Boredom was an enemy that was fought by going to the gym, downloading movies from the internet or calling home, though this was one of the major factors, one Tamil said, for men to break down because families simply couldn’t understand why their sons and husbands seeking asylum were locked up for endless months.

*Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist currently working on a book about disaster capitalism