Refugees condemn government policy

BY LYNDA HANSEN

BRISBANE — "I would like to ask immigration minister Philip Ruddock, do you know what it is like to be a refugee? No, of course you don't, you do not care about refugees!", Latin American solidarity activist Rafael Pacheco told a forum on globalisation and refugees here on June 12, before describing the federal government's treatment of refugees as "mean and intolerable".

Pacheco explained that he was part of the popular movement in El Salvador during the civil war of the 1980s. He was pursued by the military, his house was raided and he received so many death threats, he wonders how he is still alive. Eventually he fled to Costa Rica and then to Australia.

Following Pacheco, Kerri Woodrow from the Refugee Claimant Support Centre spoke of the difficulties that refugees face even when they are not in detention, and called for a broad public eduction campaign to increase understanding of their plight.

Dod Roshanbin, from the Democratic Socialist Party, spoke about the social disintegration where he grew up in the Iranian capital, Tehran. He explained the conditions for women in Iran and Afghanistan, where women can be beheaded, stoned or have their throats slit for committing "adultery".

"We have to build a movement that embraces refugees and to stop the racist scapegoating", he said, "We need to demand the closure of detention centres, that no more constructed and, more than that, build a socialist alternative to the rotten system of the capitalist driven process of globalisation that makes people's lives a misery".

The forum was sponsored by Green Left Weekly.

From GLW issue 452