Refugee activists called for rallies around Australia on Sunday to protest at the government's treatment of asylum seekers as detainees continued hunger strikes and attempted suicides at an outback refugee camp.
An Immigration Department spokesman said an illegal immigrant who had thrown himself onto a razor wire fence at the controversial Woomera detention centre on Saturday was being monitored in hospital but gave no details about his condition.
The detainee who tried to escape from the camp, located under the baking sun of the desert 475 km (295 miles) north of Adelaide, was one of 200 asylum seekers who staged a violent protest at the months it takes to process refugee claims.
"One detainee is in...hospital being monitored by medical staff and receiving appropriate treatment," the spokesman said.
He added that three children had been taken to hospital overnight for observation as almost 200 Woomera inmates continued a hungerstrike for a 12th straight day. Some have tried to hang themselves and others have swallowed shampoo and painkillers.
Refugee groups on Sunday planned to hold demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne in sympathy for the illegal immigrants at Woomera, some 35 of whom still had their mouths symbolically sewn shut with a strand of thread.
"This just shows the level of desperation, these people just got nothing to lose, they are throwing themselves on razor wire," said Judy McVey of the Refugee Action Collective in Melbourne.
She said 200 people would rally outside the Maribyrnonga detention centre in the southern city where dozens of asylum seekers and visa overstayers have staged a sympathy hungerstrike.
In Sydney, activists planned a demonstration outside the Villawood detention centre and detainees there said they would also start to refuse food and water.
The protests have already spread to the Curtin refugee camp in Western Australia as the government's policy of detaining all illegal immigrants spirals into an international embarrassment.
The government has refused to bow to what it calls moral blackmail and insists it will not be at fault if people die.
PRESSURE MOUNTS
But pressure has been mounting on conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who won re-election in November partly on a tough stand against boatpeople, to show more compassion for the asylum seekers, many of whom have fled war and repression.
Saturday was Australia Day, commemorating the colonisation of the Australian continent by the British in 1788, and commentators urged the country to remember it was founded on immigration.
"The Australia I wanted to celebrate yesterday is a fair-minded, tolerant place, where everyone's given a fair go," wrote Sue Williams in Sunday's Sydney Morning Herald.
"Instead, I found myself in a country that a few politicians, through a pungent blend of myopia, thirst for power, idiocy and breathtaking lack of any sort of compassion whatsoever, have been allowed carelessly to poison and trash."
At Woomera, where around 900 illegal immigrants are housed in a camp set up on a former rocket range, security guards on Saturday night ordered the media to move out of sight.
An Australian Broadcasting Corp journalist was arrested when she refused as the government tries to draw a veil over the camp.
The government's hard line, and a policy of intercepting all new boatpeople at sea with warships and shipping them to camps it has paid Pacific islands to set up, enjoys broad public support.
But the first cracks have begun to appear, with opposition centre-left Labor, which had previously backed the policy, on Saturday urging the government to free detained children.
Around 8,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Australia over the past two years, a trickle according to the United Nations.
But the island continent of just 19.3 million people also takes 10,000 refugees a year formally resettled under a UN programme and another 50,000 permanent migrants.
(China Daily January 28, 2002)
