REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN
Following Them Home: the Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers
By David Corlett
Black Inc Books, 2005
220 pages, $24.95
"The Australian government has long declared that it owes no duty of care to those asylum seekers it deports, even after the deportees in question have spent years in our detention system. This duty of care has been boldly assumed by David Corlett. His book becomes a necessary humanitarian account." — Tom Keneally.
Following Them Home is an extremely moving and compelling read. For me, someone who has campaigned for many years against mandatory detention and the suffering of refugees at the hands of punitive government policy, it was a deeply disturbing eye-opener to read such a personal and detailed account of the broken lives of the asylum seekers who have been deported from Australia.
Most people who are sent home simply disappear from public view. The government has no concern for their safety; the corporate media doesn't follow their stories. There are many confirmed reports and unconfirmed rumours of some being re-imprisoned, tortured or killed.
Author David Corlett travelled to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Thailand, and interviewed dozens of asylum seekers who had spent time in Australia's detention centres before being sent back to the countries they had fled from.
Who were sent back?
Some 30 Iranians have been returned, most of them forcibly. A small number of asylum seekers from countries such as Pakistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Syria and Sudan have also been deported.
The largest group of asylum seekers to be returned were Afghans, and most of them were in detention on Nauru. Some 800 Afghan asylum seekers, according to immigration department (DIMIA) figures, returned between 2001 and 2005. Around 500 of those took the "reintegration package" of $2000, offered as an inducement to return voluntarily (the Afghan government wouldn't accept forced returns).
DIMIA refers to the return of Afghans as voluntary, because they signed a consent form. But the story of Reza is one of many that illustrates just what the government means by "voluntary". Corlett met 23-year-old Reza in Kabul, who had fled Afghanistan when he was 18. He was one of hundreds of asylum seekers imprisoned on Nauru.
"Reza maintains that he was forced to return to Afghanistan", Corlett writes. "Every week on Nauru there were meetings with the leaders of the camp encouraging people to return and telling that if they didn't, Australia would use force. If they didn't believe that Australia would do this, there was a precedent, they were told. In the mid-1990s, 53 Chinese nationals had their hands and feet bound and were carried onto a plane and sent back to China. 'At that time we became compelled', Reza said. 'A lot of people signed.'"
Robert Manne comments in the foreword to the book on "the near-universal lack of curiosity about these several hundred asylum seekers we have successfully driven away".
"It is an interesting fact that while the editors of the Age and the Australian commissioned journalists to travel to Afghanistan to check on the bona fides of one famous asylum seeker, Ali Bakhtiyari, not one journalist from the mainstream media seems to have reported on a question of far greater human importance — the fate of Australia's Middle Eastern and Central Asian returnees."
The first important documentation of the fate of returned asylum seekers was in fact carried out by the Edmund Rice Centre. Deported to Danger, released in October 2004, drew together the results of interviews with 20 returned asylum seekers and exposed some of the underhand and illegal methods the Australian government was using to get people out of the country. It also documented the circumstances that asylum seekers returned to.
Following Them Home documents in detail the stories of those whose lives have been shattered. It brings home to the reader the human impact of the government's policy with horrifying force.
Take, for example, the story of Baqir, a Hazara returned to Afghanistan in April 2003. Because of his secular, socialist views, Baqir had always been at odds with the Islamicists. When he returned, he found that he continued to be discriminated against, even by the UN. "Baqir did not want people to know that he was back — not even close relatives", writes Corlett.
"He had not returned to his home village because the people from whom he had fled years ago remained in power there. Even in Kabul he restricted his movements; his life consisted of travelling between his work and his room. He was no longer involved in political activities; he said that he was now too afraid to do this because he had seen, through his experience with the Australian system, that 'all the doors have been closed'. He knew that if his activities put him in danger again, he would not be able to find protection anywhere. Baqir said that although he was back in his motherland, he was 'not living as an independent human being'. Rather, he lives, he said, 'like a hidden man'."
I asked Corlett if he had been prepared for the level of suffering he found when he tracked down some of the broken men who had been deported from Australia. Corlett said he had been visiting people in detention for a long time, and had seen their suffering in that environment, so he had some sense of what he might find. Nevertheless, he said it was "harrowing" to sit and listen to people's stories.
He was struck by a feature of social withdrawal that many asylum seekers suffered upon return. "No-one can possibly understand the experience of detention in Australia. Australia is a liberal democracy. In places like Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, this country is viewed not only as a country of freedom, but also of wealth. There is a sense that it is a decent, humanitarian country. How, then, do you explain that you have never seen the place, that you only saw the desert and water cannons and tear gas and 'management'? and how do you convey that you spent three or four years in what is effectively a jail and that the scars of this experience remain? And then, why would people in Afghanistan or Iraq, countries in which violent conflict is a daily staple, even be interested in what has happened in wealthy, liberal-democratic Australia?"
Corlett poses some thought-provoking ideas in the final section of his book, where he reflects on the implications and conclusions he drew from his travels and interviews. He draws on the notion of an "ethics of proximity", a term coined in the essay Sending Them Home, which he co-wrote with Robert Manne — "the obligation that Australia has to those who have arrived in Australia and sought our protection — in contrast to the millions of refugees who remain beyond our reach".
He continues: "The analogy we used to shed light on this notion was that of a woman who arrives at your door fleeing domestic violence. You have a responsibility towards her regardless of the fact that she might have arrived in an unlicensed taxi and despite the fact that there might be millions of others like her throughout the world who could not even have afforded the taxi fare. The obligation that you have to this woman is that she is at your door and has asked for your assistance."
Corlett also challenges the notion that Australia has no obligations to those it returned, because they were not considered to be refugees. "Once a person has been so damaged, the question of persecution ceases to be the central issue. The question becomes one of moral responsibility. That many such people have left Australia and are therefore outside Australia's sovereign territory does not alter Australia's responsibility. Australia should now actively seek these people out and if possible make amends for the damage it has done. This might come in the form of financial compensation or in providing the opportunity to resettle in Australia."
Perhaps this is a call that the refugee-rights movement could take up. Following Them Home is an important contribution to our appreciation of the scale of human suffering the Coalition government's mandatory detention policy has caused.
From Green Left Weekly, December 7, 2005.
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