News • December 21 2003

A tale of suicide and desperation, the Mount Carmel asylum seekers

Matthew Vella
Police officers guard the nine asylum seekers admitted to male ward one at Mount Carmel Hospital. Seven Palestinians, a Liberian and a Congolese were driven to near insanity with the prospect of having to spend yet more of their days detained at the four immigration camps which today host around 500 asylum seekers.
Tales of medication overdose and cutting of wrists, the nine asylum seekers are reported to have ‘opened up’ to members of the Mt Carmel staff after having been released from their detention camps following suicide attempts. The Congolese inmate has been diagnosed with psychosis.
"The shortest period one of us has stayed in detention is one year," the asylum seekers wrote in a letter to the media earlier this week. "The most was fourteen and fifteen months. There are others who have been in the Hal-Far immigration centre for two years in detention."
"We are not criminals," the asylum seekers write, lamenting the state of their indefinite detention as one that has brought frustration and desperation. Depression has pushed them to stop eating and attempt to cut their wrists, they say, due to the long periods of detention they have had to endure.
"All of us became physically ill and we are slowly deteriorating, asking ourselves every minute whether this torture will ever end. We see our situation like this. The torture is that we don’t even know when the day we shall be released will come. We always ask and the answer is always: ‘I don’t know’."
In their letter, the asylum seekers write that they have been begging for two years to know "at least when [they] will get out or even to know what [their] crimes are.
"We are in Mount Carmel. We have found very sensitive persons here, nurses and doctors. And maybe this is a sign of our being like dead persons in a grave because many who hear about out suffering don’t see us, our souls are detained and our bodies are not living, and maybe we will die before tasting freedom again.
"I say freedom today after more than one year… now we need freedom in any shape, even if you put us again into the sea. Life is host and the human being comes to life born free and worthy of dignity."
matthew@newsworksltd.com