On December 26, the city of Bam in south-eastern Iran was hit by a massive earthquake, destroying around 80% of the city's buildings. By January 2, Iranian authorities had estimated that the quake had claimed the lives of 26,500 people — a quarter of Bam's inhabitants — and left up to 60,000 people homeless. Up to 3000 injured survivors have been flown to Tehran for hospital treatment.
The December 27 Washington Post reported: "Video images from Bam ... showed a vista of desolation that appeared to extend for miles. On residential streets lined with the city's trademark eucalyptus trees, whole blocks of homes had collapsed onto their square lots, loose bricks spilling over sidewalks where bodies lay neatly tied in fuzzy blankets. The city was without water or power. Loved ones squatted beside the corpses, weeping and brushing dust from the faces of the dead."
The nearby town of Barazat, with 20,000 inhabitants, was also devastated by the quake. In a widely quoted comment, Italian rescue official Luca Spoletini said of the town: "There is nothing any more. Not one single house, not one single building stands upright. It is like the Apocalypse. I have never seen anything like that."
On December 27, Prime Minister John Howard announced that his government — which was able to immediately find $645 million to support the criminal US-led invasion of Iraq that slaughtered up to 55,000 civilians — would allocate $2 million to aid the quake's victims.
The Australian Red Cross announced that it planned to send $15 million. By January 2, Australian aid agencies announced that individual Australians had donated $1 million to help survivors of the Bam earthquake.
"Our thoughts today go out to the victims of this disaster and the families and loved ones of those who perished", Howard declared on December 27. Such thoughts, however, have not led the Howard government to end its policy of deporting Iranian refugees. More than 100 of the 184 Iranian asylum seekers in Australia — most of whom are imprisoned in the Baxter detention centre — are under threat of deportation according to refugee advocates.
Rural Australians For Refugees spokesperson Rose Wauchope told the Melbourne Age the organisation was horrified by the government's stance. "The whole country has been in turmoil", she said. "To send people back is just inhumane."
There is a consistency between the meagre amount of aid money allocated by the Howard government and its policy toward the Iranian refugees and other "illegal" asylum seekers from Third World countries. For the Howard government and its big business masters, the impoverished masses of the Third World are simply a vast pool of cheap labour from which to make above-average profits.
Howard and his ilk want to limit, as far as possible, expressions of human solidarity with the people the Third World by working people in the rich First World countries like Australia. They worry such solidarity will develop into demands to end the entire system of imperialist exploitation of the Third World and to compensate its peoples for centuries of colonial plunder.
Such solidarity is attacked by demonising victims of this exploitative system who seek to find a better life by fleeing to First World countries. They are detained in remote concentration camps and then secretly deported back to the countries from which they fled.
The government's refusal to meet with 40 asylum seekers on hunger strike in the Australian-financed refugee prison camp on Nauru demonstrates that it will go to any lengths to maintain its brutal policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers.
The cold-hearted bastardry that Howard government displays toward Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers is simply a reflection of the venal callousness of the corporate ruling elite in the First World toward all of their victims in the Third World.
From Green Left Weekly, January 14, 2004.
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