BY SARAH STEPHEN
The forced return of Alamdar and Montazar Baktiyari to the Woomera immigration prison — which dramatically unfolded on news telecasts on July 18 — has horrified millions of people across Australia and the world. It was a graphic illustration of the cold-hearted inhumanity of the Australian government's treatment of refugees.
Both children, held in the desert prison for 18 months, had voluntarily taken part in two hunger strikes. Alamdar, the older of the two Afghan asylum seekers, had attempted suicide twice. The two boys escaped from Woomera detention centre during the Easter break-outs, and again on June 28.
According a lawyer acting for the boys, their request to the British government — made at the British consulate in Melbourne on July 18 — was to be granted asylum from Australia, on the grounds that they had been treated inhumanely.
After only eight hours' deliberation, the British Labour government's home secretary Jack Straw refused to consider the distraught boys' claims. Straw's decision was timed to avoid action by a high-profile team of British lawyers, who were standing by to challenge the British government's rejection of the boys' application when the courts opened in London. Straw's decision cut short all legal avenues.
The federal government's swift return of the boys to Woomera, and the British Labour government's open support for Australia's anti-refugee policies, provoked outrage.
Speaking to the ABC's 7.30 Report on July 18, lawyer Eric Vadarlis, who represents one of the boys, said: "The system stinks... Any government that locks up kids like these two children here, locks them up for 18 months [with] no prospect of release in their most formative years has to be sick. Absolutely sick. And that has to change."
Speaking at a July 19 press conference in Melbourne, Victorian Trades Hall Council secretary Leigh Hubbard said the Baktiyari boys were "the human face of a really despicable policy by the federal government".
Hubbard praised those who had harboured the children: "I'd like to take my hat off to whoever has been looking after these kids... I'm not one of those who advocates tearing the fences down but if people happen to have escaped, I'm sure, after this case has been exposed, there will be many thousands of other people, many of them in the union movement, who would be prepared to do some form of civil disobedience to support those refugees ... Philip Ruddock has got to be a bit careful because ... a law is not worth much if people don't consent to actually abide by it."
Melbourne lawyer and refugee advocate Julian Burnside told Green Left Weekly: "These kids have been locked up in intolerable conditions. They did what any Australian would do: they fled in desperation."
Referring to the government's harsh treatment of the boys, including their removal from Melbourne only minutes after their father arrived to see them, Burnside said: "The government seems to have forgotten the obvious fact: they are kids. They do not look like a security risk. Why must they be locked up like criminals? All this at the hands of a government which says it stands for family values. They are contemptible hypocrites."
Referring to the powerful message of the boys' brave action, Phil Griffiths from the Canberra Refugee Action Collective told GLW, "the impact of their action was electric. I had five calls from the media within an hour. One producer working for a 'shock-jock' station was moved to ask: 'Where are we, Nazi Germany or somewhere that people feel they have to do this?'"
The Baktiyari boys' treatment was hot news in the British newspapers on July 19. The Times ran an article titled "British diplomats turn away boys claiming asylum", while the Guardian headline was "Government accused of breaching rights". The Independent declared: "Britain turns away refugee boys who trekked 600 miles across Australia to claim asylum". The Independent argued: "the Australian government's policy towards asylum seekers has been so harsh that it constitutes a form of persecution in itself".
The Baktiyaris were poor peasants in southern Afghanistan, forced to flee after persecution from both the Taliban and rival Northern Alliance gangs. The family of seven walked most of the way to Pakistan.
Their father Ali arrived in Australia in 1999 and was held in Port Hedland detention centre for six months before being granted refugee status. The rest of the family followed a year later, arriving in December 2000.
Roqiah, Ali's wife, and her children's claims were rejected by the immigration department and the Refugee Review Tribunal when she was unable to identify Afghan currency and some of the villages surrounding the one she lived in. Her lawyer, Nick Poynder, explained that Roqiah had never left her village, and goods were bartered rather than being exchanged for money.
Pip Hinman from Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific told GLW that the Baktiyari family's case highlighted "the extent to which the government tries every dirty trick in the book to catch people out. It's obvious that the government appointees who hand down these decisions have little or no knowledge of Afghanistan. They don't understand that a patriarchal society like Afghanistan imposes severe limits on the role of women."
Roqiah and her five children are in the process of challenging their rejection through an appeal to the Federal Court.
On July 18, immigration minister Philip Ruddock announced that the government would revoke Ali Baktiyari's temporary visa because it believes he was a plumber from Pakistan and not an Afghan farmer. The boys' father believes the government's decision to review his visa is an act of revenge. The claim that Afghans are really Pakistanis is a favourite tactic of the immigration department.
Many Afghan asylum seekers languishing in detention, the bulk of them from the Hazara minority group, have had their claims for refugee status rejected on the basis of the results of widely criticised linguistic tests which the immigration department claims proves they speak a Pakistani dialect and therefore cannot be from Afghanistan.
According to Dave McKay from the Woomera Refugee Embassy, "Traditional enemies of the Hazaras are used almost exclusively as translators", some of whom don't even speak their language. "There are genuine Hazara translators available, but the government says that they are not appropriate, because they would be prejudiced in favour of the Hazaras... The Baktiyaris were given a Tajik translator when they appeared before the Refugee Review Tribunal."
From Green Left Weekly, July 24, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.