Lockdown viewed as house arrest
Huge public housing complex in Australia becomes prisonlike
MELBOURNE, Australia— In the late afternoon of July 4, dozens of police vehicles pulled up at a public housing tower in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city.
It was, witnesses said, like a scene from an action movie — but instead of responding to a terrorist threat, the officers were responding to a coronavirus spike.
Minutes earlier, Daniel Andrews, the premier of the state of Victoria, had announced expanded stayat-home orders that would begin just before midnight. For one group, though, the lockdown would be immediate, and far more restrictive. Hence the sudden police presence at the north Melbourne tower and eight others, housing 3,000 people in all.
While most Melbourne residents could leave their homes briefly to exercise andshopfor necessities, the residents of the towers were effectively placed, without warning, under house arrest for up to 14 days. Authorities said the towers had “explosive potential” because of their population density, but the concentration of infections was not out of line with rates in other areas of the city, and private residential towers were not treated with similar alarm.
To the public housing residents, many of them immigrants, it felt like discrimination. Complaints flooded the ombudsman in Victoria, who is conducting an investigation.
Melbourne’s broader lockdown — one of the longest and strictest in the world— ended Oct. 28 after 111 days. But while the rest of the city celebrates its freedom and what many
see as a triumph over the virus, the residents of the towers are still contending with feelings of trauma, anger and confusion.
Here are some of their stories.
Ebyon Hassan, 32, was still foggy from a nap when she peered out the window after receiving a frantic phone call fromher sister.
“It was like a nightmare,” Hassan, who is originally from Somalia, said outside her building in early October. “There were so many cop cars. They had taken over the car parks. There were so many lights. And you think, ‘What have I done?’ ”
Hassan’s father was out for his afternoon walk. He was healthy at the time, though prone to pneumonia. “So we had been very vigilant,” she said.
Still, by July 7, three days after the lockdown began, he had tested positive.
“No onecameto check on him until the 16th,” Hassan
said. He was given the optionof leaving their apartment and being isolated elsewhere. But he kept thinking about his best friend, who had never returned after contracting the virus and being removed fromhis home.
“My father was a very spiritual man, and so afraid of dying alone,” Hassan said. “He refused to go.”
On July 23, a few days after the building’s strict 14-day lockdown lifted, he finally agreed to go to the hospital. He died a week later. Hewas 62.
Hassan is devastated by the loss of her father, but she is also reeling from a sense of betrayal at the way she and her community were treated. (Government officials declined requests for interviews.)
“It lookedlike cages, like a prison,” she said.
Almost immediately after the police arrived, Hiba Shanino, a 21-year-old legal practice student whose par
ents are fromEritrea, began to hear from people inside her building who were panicking.
Some had run out of medication. Others had no food, or were receiving items thatwere not halal, or in some cases expired. The state health and human services department was not providing information or help.
Mohammed Yousef, the father of a toddler and an 8-month-old, said the surprise of the lockdown didn’t allowfor parents to prepare.
“We didn’t have time to get the supplies we needed, like diapers or formula,” he said. “It was a shock. There were 500 police surrounding us, like we were criminals.”
Shanino, who was not at home when the lockdown began, decided not to return. She turned to others in the community who were looking to fill the gaps, and a local mosque soon began organizing deliveries of food
and other necessities to the towers.
She said that no one she knew argued that there should not have been a lockdown of some sort. “But it’s how it was done,” she added. “The people who were making the decisions had never been to this place before. Why did they treat us that way? Whywas it so disorganized? Why were we given no notice when the rest of the city was treated fairly, with respect?”
“They think we’re incapable,” she said, “but really it was the community itself that rallied and made sure people were looked after. We did it ourselves.”
BarryBerih, 26, whowas born in Australia to Eritrean immigrant parents, said his motherwas atwork when the lockdownbegan.
“At about 7 p.m., she called me and said, ‘I can’t get back into the house. The police won’t let me in.’ ” Her driver’s license still had
a previous address on it, and shewas denied access.
“She couldn’t get her work clothes or anything. I wasn’t allowed to bring them down to her,” said Berih, whoworks as a youth counselor. She was not allowed back in the building for twoweeks.
Another resident, Noah Abdullahi, 18, said that his two brothers, both university students, also were not home at the time of the lockdown, and that police wouldn’t let them back in.
“They both spent two weeks sleepingonthecouch at my auntie’s house,” he said. Neither was able to study because their aunt did not have a computer.
Early in the lockdown, Berih’s brother tested positive for the virus. “For my mum, she was very worried,” he said, “not being able to be there for us.” Everything that people in the building knew about the prevalence of the virus came viaword ofmouth.