BY SARAH STEPHEN
Only 40 of the 327 Afghans on Nauru who have had their claims processed have been accepted as refugees. "The rest may have perfectly rational fears of famine, lawlessness and postwar devastation, but they don't count", declared the June 14 Sydney Morning Herald editorial.
This callous comment reveals that the biggest flaw in the narrow definition of a refugee under the UN convention, and governments' even narrower application of this definition, is that signatories are compelled to provide sanctuary to those who fear for their lives due to political or religious persecution, yet those who face death from starvation or generalised war are condemned to suffer their fate.
While just 12% of Afghans assessed on Nauru were granted refugee status, all 131 Afghans taken from the MV Tampa by New Zealand were accepted as refugees. Few of the successful applicants are likely to reach Australia, the June 13 Melbourne Herald Sun reported. "Possible new homes include Sweden, Switzerland and the tiny African nation of Burkina Faso."
While the UN High Commission for Refugees has drastically narrowed its assessment of those Afghans it considers refugees, it has also repeated its warning against forced repatriation. The June 14 Melbourne Age reported comments by UNHCR spokesperson Marissa Bandharangshi that "when people do return, it should not be to situations that [are] so bad they are forced to ... become refugees again". She was referring to the severe drought, continuing ethnic persecution and war between warlords in different parts of Afghanistan.
Immigration minister Philip Ruddock has continued to try to bribe Afghans with $2000 to leave. He has repeatedly pointed out that this is 10 times the average annual income in Afghanistan, implying that any Afghan who doesn't accept it must be ungrateful. The June 13 Herald Sun, in an article titled "Take the cash and go, refugees told", called it a "golden handshake".
The June 14 Sydney Morning Herald reported that 13 Afghans on Nauru had joined another eight in signing consent forms to take the bribe and return to Afghanistan.
The Australian government's "Pacific solution", which has so far imprisoned 1500 asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, has not simply been a financial disaster. It has also been a human rights disaster. Asylum seekers have been denied the most basic legal rights. Those Afghans who have had their initial applications rejected are, in theory, entitled to a judicial review of the decisions, but only with the assistance of a lawyer. Yet many lawyers, along with journalists and many human rights advocates, have been refused visas to enter Nauru.
Foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer argues that the government's hardline policy has been "vindicated" by the UNHCR because it proves the asylum seekers rescued by the Tampa were "illegal immigrants". Far from being "illegal immigrants", they are victims of an outrageous, deliberate and unjustifiable delay in processing their claims for asylum.
When they were rescued by the Tampa in August, they were refugees. Now, nine months later, the only argument for refugee status that the Australian government is willing to accept — persecution by the Taliban — has gone.
(The Australian government has done a similar thing by delaying the processing of claims lodged by 1600 East Timorese asylum seekers, in some cases for up to eight years, until East Timor won its independence.)
Australia and New Zealand have passed laws to further erode the rights of asylum seekers, using the pretext of a boat rumoured to be making its way to one of the two countries. The Australian government passed regulations on June 12 to excise more islands from Australia's "migration zone", a move which seems certain to be overturned by the Senate.
The corporate media have dutifully regurgitated government statements. An article in the June 12 Sydney Morning Herald was titled "The rickety old boat that scares Canberra".
The lack of analytical journalism on this issue is an outrage. The government doesn't fear the arrival of more boats — it welcomes them! It needs them to continue its campaign of demonising asylum seekers, and in so doing, destroying the sympathy and solidarity many Australians feel for the struggles of people in the Third World.
Meanwhile, the Senate inquiry into the "children overboard scandal" has revealed that the Indonesian fishing boat which sank on October 19, drowning 353 asylum seekers, was in international waters and its condition was known to the government, and possibly the navy. Yet mainstream journalists are not making the link that the same thing might happen again.
Margot Kingston, writing in the June 15 Sydney Morning Herald, noted: "The [people-smuggling] task force minutes of October 23, a day before Mr Howard's claim [that the boat was in Indonesian waters], detail an Australian Federal Police intelligence report from Indonesia that the vessel was 'likely to have been in international waters south of Java'." Kingston notes that defence minister, Senator Robert Hill, "also claimed in March that 'all indications are that the refugee vessel sank in the vicinity of the Sunda Strait', which is well within Indonesian waters". Both Howard and Hill were lying.
On June 13, Hill stopped a witness, Admiral Raydon Gates, from giving evidence to the Senate inquiry. Gates had been reviewing all intelligence reports received by the navy before the boat sank. The government clearly has something nasty to hide. Kingston, writing in the June 14 Sydney Morning Herald, reported that the people-smuggling task force decided not to inform Australian search and rescue when, on October 22, they lost sight of its location.
The Australian government was complicit in the deaths of 353 asylum seekers, yet such a ghastly revelation is being reported as if it were just a minor detail.
From Green Left Weekly, June 19, 2002.
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