World
Police attacked asylum seekers on Manus Island: rights group
Sydney: Police officers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) physically attacked and arrested two Iranian asylum seekers during New Year’s Eve celebrations, said refugee advocates on Monday. The Refugee Action Coalition said the two men suffered broken bones in the incident, and supplied photographs showing the pair with cuts and bruises on their faces, Efe news reported. The attack was allegedly launched because the asylum seekers were outside the detention centre. In a statement Monday morning, the NGO reported that the pair were released by police after more than 36 hours in custody.
Australian Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton, meanwhile, accused activists of using the incident to attack Australia’s immigration policy. The policy includes the processing of asylum seekers in detention centres on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, and the island nation of Nauru. “If people have had an interaction with the PNG police on a new year’s eve night, I would wait to see the full facts of that case before I’d make any comment to say that they were targeted because they were refugees or because they were part of the Manus Island population,” Dutton told a radio station here.
The Australian government said an investigation into the incident was the responsibility of the Papuan police, but activists believe that such incidents are part of systematic abuse against the undocumented immigrants in Australia’s South Pacific detention centres. Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul urged the Australian government to provide “oversight on the role of the PNG police and the attitude of the PNG police” because it was “ultimately responsible for all the people who are held on the island”, according to Australian broadcaster ABC.
The alleged police attack follows the death of a Sudanese asylum seeker, who collapsed in the Manus Island detention centre, shortly before Christmas. The UN and human rights groups have repeatedly criticised the existence of these detention centres and labelled the precarious living conditions as “inhumane”. Many of the migrants detained in Nauru and Papua New Guinea have fled conflicts in countries such as Afghanistan, Darfur, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria.
While others have escaped discrimination or the status of being stateless persons, such as the Rohingya minorities in Myanmar and Bedoon from the Persian Gulf region. They were detained before arriving on Australia’s coasts and sent to the offshore detention centres where their refugee applications were processed.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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