International

Brexit poses so many practical difficulties that it will not happen

Institutionalised abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory

Global capitalism frees private owners from the social controls that sovereign States alone are strong enough to impose on them

On July 25th 2016, Australia’s ABC network broadcast a documentary from its ‘Four Corners’ series that was to shake the country’s reputation. ‘Australia’s Shame’, exposed the conditions and practices of the Northern Territory’s Don Dale youth detention facility in Darwin, and revealed the harrowing circumstances in which children were being kept. Of the detainees incarcerated at Don Dale, 98% were Aboriginal children, some as young as ten. In CCTV footage obtained from 2014 onward it was clear that children were being held in isolation cells for up to 24 hours a day, sometimes for weeks on end in a detention block that reeked of urine and faeces. Children had to eat meals using their hands, losing track of time and not knowing when, or if, they would be released back into the main detainee population. A child is seen being dragged away from a phone by one of the guards – apparently for spending too long using it, kneed in the stomach, punched in the head and knocked to the ground. The child is then dragged out of the common room with the help of another member of staff. From accounts given by some of the Aboriginal children, such abuses were commonplace. In another scene, reminiscent of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, a half-naked child is bound by the ankles and wrists to a ‘mechanical chair’. The boy’s face is covered with a ‘spit hood’ – a brown cloth sack – and he is left alone in the room for close to two hours. This, according to ‘Four Corners’, was common practice in Don Dale. What really discomfited the public, however was the ‘tear gas incident’ as shown in the documentary. Caught on CCTV, a child held in the isolation wing is seen leaving his cell, which had mistakenly been left unlocked by one of the guards. The child, disorientated, confused and having been left there for days, begins striking a door with a light fixture. How the guards reacted was reprehensible. This time recorded on an officer’s handy-cam, one officer is heard saying: “Go get the fu*kin’ gas and gas them through”, after which the cell block is sprayed ten times with tear gas. A news release falsely asserted that six boys had escaped from their cells and guards told police it was a “riot” but it involved, as shown on CCTV, just one detainee. The incident saw the remaining locked cells, housing five other boys, engulfed with the gas for a total of eight minutes. Children were pictured cowering beneath blankets, scared for their lives and struggling to breathe. After the eight minutes, the children were then marched outside, wrists bound, thrown face down on the ground and their heads sprayed with a fire hose. Guard laughter intersperses the recording. Lawyer Jared Sharp, who works with the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency and contributed to the ‘Four Corners’ documentary – has represented many of the children of Don Dale. He has been scathing in his criticisms of the brutal and at times barbaric conditions there. He told Village: “In 2014 I went to Don Dale with some of my colleagues and we were taken on a tour of the facility. As part of the tour, we were taken to this back area, which could only be described as a dungeon; it was damp, dark and actually pretty medieval looking. There were no immediate signs of life, but as we were being shown through the area we heard noises. I said to the guards: ‘there aren’t kids in there, are there?’. They said there were, and it raised alarm bells straight away. When we looked we saw that these boys were being kept locked up in these tiny little cells. There was no natural light, no air-conditioning and no running water. Some of them had been kept there for weeks. It was after we found out who these boys were that we began to document the conditions they were being kept in and then to try to advocate for them to get out”. Jared wrote to the then Corrections Minister demanding these issues be addressed. In his letter he highlighted the physical conditions in which children in solitary confinement were being held, and said that the most striking thing was the “removal of all hope” – how the children were left feeling they were being detained for an indeterminate period of time, without any hope of being returned to the main part of the detention centre. When a satisfactory response wasn’t forthcoming, Jared wrote to the Children’s Minister, and an investigation was immediately launched. However, questions were raised about the independence of the investigation, since it was conducted by a superintendent of a New South Wales youth detention centre who was known to the Corrections Commissioner. The investigation was also conducted over a very short period so that there were serious questions as to how rigorous and detailed its analysis was. However, as a result of it, a damning report of the practices at Don Dale was made, along with a list of recommendations. Despite this, abuses continued to happen at the centre: “Since the tear-gassing incident we’ve seen many incidents of young people being treated below the standards that any reasonable person would find acceptable, and beneath the standards that international law requires. Things like use of force, use of restraints, use of isolation and being kept in a facility that is really not fit for purpose. The children are currently being kept in a facility that was an adult prison, and was decommissioned because it was deemed no longer suitable to hold adults. This is the same facility where some of these children have had family members incarcerated, some of whom have committed suicide, so it’s a facility that’s associated with enormous despair and anguish amongst the Aboriginal community”. One glaring omission of the 2014 investigation concerned children who suffered self-harm/ suicide ideation. A child who displayed signs of self-harm/suicide ideation was accorded ‘at risk’ status.

Nationalism, nativism, populism are in the air these days. Their relation to democracy is widely seen as problematic. Can political philosophy help? I offer Village readers this ABC of the so-called “national question”: A. For democrats and progressives internationalism, not nationalism, is the primary value. We are internationalists out of solidarity as members of the human race. As internationalists we seek the emancipation of mankind. The human race is divided into nations. Therefore we stand for the selfdetermination of nations. The right of nations to self-determination was first proclaimed as a collective human right, a democratic principle of universal validity, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution. It is now a basic principle of international law and a core principle of modern democracy enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Internationalism does not mean that one is called on to urge people of other nations to assert their right to self-determination, but that one respects their wishes and shows solidarity with them if they do that. It is as true of the life of nations as of individuals that separation, mutual recognition of boundaries and mutual respect based upon that – viz. legal and political equality, neither dominance nor submission – are the prerequisites of free and friendly cooperation between the parties, of internationalism in other words. Good fences make good neighbours. B. Nations exist as communities before nationalisms and nation States. Some nations are ancient, some young, some in process of being formed. Like all human groupings, for example the family, clan, tribe, they are fuzzy at the edges. No neat definition will encompass all cases. The empirical test is to ask people themselves. If people have passed beyond the stage of kinship society where the political unit is the clan or tribe, they will know themselves what nation they belong to. This is the political and democratic test too. If enough people in a nation want to establish their own State, they have the right to do that, for normally political democracy exists only at the level of the national community and the nation State. C. To analyse nations and the national question in terms of ‘nationalisms’ is philosophical idealism, looking at the mental reflection rather than the thing it reflects. Nationalism developed as an ideology legitimating the formation of nation States in the 18th century, although its elements can be found centuries before in some of the world’s oldest nation States – Denmark, England, France, China, Japan. Nations evolve historically as stable, long-lasting communities of people, sharing a common language and territory and the common culture and history that derive from that. These generate the solidarities, mutual identifications and shared interests that distinguish one people from another. Such features characterise the demos, the collective “We”, that constitutes a people possessing the right to national self-determination. D. Nationalism, properly understood, is the complement of internationalism, not its opposite. The word nationalism can refer to very different things. Hitler and Mussolini are stigmatised as nationalists in their countries. Gandhi and Mandela are praised as nationalists in theirs. Pearse and Connolly in ours. Nationalism can mean imperialism, xenophobia and chauvinism in one context, or patriotism, love of country and support for its political independence in another. If policy discussion is to be fruitful, one should indicate the sense in which one uses the word. E. As there are different social classes in every nation, national movements are normally multi-class. If the political Left does not stand for a country’s national independence and democracy, the political Right will. The Left then often stigmatises movements for independence as ‘right-wing’. That is the main reason why much of the Left in Europe today is truly “left “- namely left high and dry, wanly contemplating developments it cannot influence or control, bereft of the capacity for ideological hegemony. Ireland’s James Connolly taught that the Left should above all else be national, but Connolly has had small influence on the evolution of Ireland’s “Left”. F. Mankind is still at the relatively early stage of the formation of nation States. Only a dozen or so contemporary States are more than a few centuries old. The number of States in the United Nations has gone from some 60 in 1945 to a little under 200 today. European States have increased from 30 to 50 since 1989. This process has not ended even in Western Europe where people have been at the business of nation State formation for centuries. For example Scotland, Flanders, Catalonia. It has scarcely begun in Africa and Asia, where the bulk of mankind lives, where large numbers of people still belong to clan-tribal societies based on kinship, and as yet have only an embryonic national consciousness. The world is almost certainly moving towards an international community of 400 or more States. G. Multinational States, whether unitary or federal, must respect the right to selfdetermination of the nations that comprise them if they are to be stable and endure. The right to self-determination does not require that a nation seek to establish a separate State. Nations can co-exist amicably with other nations inside a multinational State, as for example the English, Welsh and Scots have done for centuries inside the British State, or the many Indian nationalities inside India. They can do this, however, only if their national rights are respected and the smaller nations do not feel oppressed by the larger ones, in particular culturally and linguistically. If this condition is not observed, political pressures are likely to develop to break up the multinational State in question. H. Shared civic nationality is the political basis of multinational States; shared ethnic nationality the political basis of nation States. In both cases, if the State is a democratic one, all citizens will be equal before the law and the rights of minority nationalities in multinational States and of national minorities in nation States will be equally respected. I. Internationalism and supranationalism are opposites. Internationalism, from Latin “inter”, “between”, refers to co-operation