Iranian refugee in Australian detention centre awarded cartooning prize
While he may be isolated in Australia's Manus Island detention centre, the cartoonist Eaten Fish's powerful images are travelling the world.
The Iranian asylum seeker was awarded the 2016 Award for Courage in Editorial Cartooning for his work depicting life on the island. The award will be presented in North Carolina in September by the Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI), but Eaten Fish's fate in Papua New Guinea remains uncertain.
"Eaten Fish is one of those who's [sic] work as a cartoonist brings to light the horrors that are happening around him," Joel Pett, CRNI's president of the board of directors, said in a statement. "His work pushes through the veil of secrecy and silence and layers of fences in a way that only a talented artist speaking from the inside can."
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Australia's policy of sending asylum seekers who arrive by boat to detention centres offshore in Nauru and Manus Island has been widely condemned by human rights organisations. Though intended to discourage other refugees from making a similar journey, conditions in the camps have been deemed "torture" by World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello and others.
"His work pushes through the veil of secrecy and silence and layers of fences in a way that only a talented artist speaking from the inside can."
The Australian government has also made it difficult for journalists and advocates to visit and report from sites like Manus Island. In many ways, voices like Eaten Fish are the only way outsiders can begin to truly understand the horror and limbo of life in Australia's offshore detention centres.
"CRNI believes that his body of work will be recognized as some of the most important in documenting and communicating the human rights abuses and excruciating agony of daily life in this notorious and illegal prison camp," Pett added.
According to the website Save Eaten Fish, the cartoonist has been living on Manus Island for at least three years. It also says he has been assaulted on the island, and continues to suffer from severe psychological distress.
"He arrived in Manus as a young man who was already quite a vulnerable person and I remember being told by some of the workers there that this guy just doesn’t fit here at all, it's so dangerous for him," his advocate, the Australian writer Janet Galbraith, told the Guardian in June.
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In April, the Supreme Court in Papua New Guinea declared the Manus Island detention centre illegal. Australian Immigration Minister Petter Dutton has said the centre will be shut down, but it's unclear where its remaining inhabitants will be sent, although Dutton maintains it will not be to Australia.
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has denied the allegations of abuse on Manus Island made by CRNI. "The Department currently has no evidence that any of these allegations are true," it said in a statement.
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
