Pearls and Irritations

Tag: Human Rights

  • Elizabeth Elliott. Compassion goes missing on Christmas Island

    When it comes to children in need, most Australians feel compassion.

    Most will applaud today’s announcement that ‘Boat Kids’ will be released into the community. However this decision does not go far enough. It includes only kids aged less than 10 years (excluding many vulnerable teens); only those detained on the Australian mainland (excluding kids on Nauru, Manus and Christmas Islands); and only kids who arrived before July 19th 2013. Furthermore, the number to be released includes kids already living in community detention housing.  

    Christmas Island is a remote tropical ‘paradise’ in the Indian Ocean, over 2600 km from Perth or Darwin. When I visited with the Australian Human Rights Commission in July 2014, as part of their Inquiry into Children in Detention, it was ‘home’ to 174 children, including 26 unaccompanied minors – all boys aged between 14 and 17 years.  Australia continues to detain kids, despite the United Nations Guidelines on the Detention of Refugees that ‘Children should not be placed in detention’ and that ‘Minors who are asylum-seekers should not be detained’.

    Compassion, it seems, has gone missing on Christmas Island.

    ‘Home’ for families in these immigration detention centres consists of a small metal cabin, some 3 x 3 metres squared in one of two rows of similar cabins separated by a wooden walkway. Add a bunk bed and a cot to the rooms and there remains little space for a child to learn to crawl or walk, or for exploratory play. According to the father of a 2 year old boy “the housing is dirty, sub-standard, hard to be there. The child keeps hitting his head on items in the room – the bed, the shelf – because of the lack of space.”

    Cramped conditions, a punishing climate and overcrowded living in close proximity to scores of families make for little privacy and dire health consequences. Childhood infections spread quickly. When we were there many children had a respiratory virus and there had been outbreaks of gastroenteritis. We repeatedly heard the refrain “my kids are always sick.”

    The air-conditioned environment exacerbates symptoms in the many children with asthma. Others have medical conditions requiring assessment, medical or surgical treatment on the mainland – and for some the long wait for transfer had been intolerable.  A two and a half year old with no speech, a 6 year old with deafness requiring grommets for glue ear, a child with a facial abscess needing surgical drainage, a boy with an undescended testes, a child with rotten teeth, a girl with sleep apnoea….

    Of greater concern than signs of physical ill-health, however, are the psychological symptoms we heard of from many children.

    They reflect past and ongoing trauma, including the depression and self-harm many have witnessed in their own mothers. Stress in young children was manifest by onset, in detention, of bed-wetting, nightmares and defiant behaviour. In older children we heard of refusal to eat, separation anxiety, regression of speech, development of stutter, mutism and social withdrawal. Some expressed their stress through their art. A 10 year drew his ‘family home in jail’ and a six year old drew herself behind bars, with the caption ‘I want go out’ . Crying was ubiquitous in these images.

    Conversations with teenagers, who could articulate their predicament, were particularly poignant.

    They became distressed, describing flashbacks of trauma experienced at home, during harrowing boat trips to Australia, and during their time on Manus, where some were sent as a result of incorrect age determination. According to one boy who went to Manus, ‘I saw with my own eyes one boy hung himself in a cupboard – they were taken to hospital.’ They talked of their fear of being returned to Manus when they turned 18. 

    All spoke of feelings of hopelessness, sadness and lack of a future. They talked of frequent crying, families missed, lost expectations, lack of education and feelings of guilt because they had not fulfilled their family’s hopes after more than a year in ‘Australia.’  One boy summed this up as ‘a horrible situation. I feel depressed, preoccupied with my misfortune. I have not smiled or laughed the last few months. There is nothing to make me happy or to tell my family to make them happy.’  Some talked of self-harm and some spoke of death. In the words of one 12 year old girl ’My life is really deth. I don’t know why I’m in the jail realy. I don’t kill any body.’

    Detention of children for lengthy periods is in contravention to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. This states that ‘The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.’ The UN Human Rights Committee reiterates this: ‘Asylum seekers who unlawfully enter a State party’s territory may only be detained for a brief initial period in order to document their entry, record their claims, and determine their identity.’  Most people have now been detained on Christmas Island for over a year and the anniversary of their arrival came as a bitter blow for many.  One man asked ‘Is it the Australian government’s aim to make us all go mad?’

    As victims of a policy that dictates that any arrival by boat after July 19th 2013 will never be settled in Australia, many have accepted their fate of settlement offshore. But their arbitrary detention without assessment for refugee status has left them in an intolerable limbo. One father said ‘If they won’t have us in Australia, find somewhere else for us to go. We can’t go home.’ A mother expressed her anguish, ‘The criminals, at least they know their sentence – we don’t.’ Many felt guilty for placing their children in such a predicament. As one mother said, ‘Even if I did something wrong, coming here, why ruin the life of our kids?’

    As a reflection of their increasing despair and frustration about the adverse conditions for their children, a group of young mothers with young infants resorted to self-harm.

    When we visited 10 such women – deemed at future risk – were under 24-hour surveillance by guards, not nurses. Despite this mental health crisis the centre has no resident psychiatrist. ‘I swear the physical health is not so much a problem. It is the stress and the psychological impact of the detention that is getting to us,’ said one mother of two.

    It is outrageous to keep asylum seekers in the limbo of uncertainty. It is unacceptable to keep children in detention on Christmas Island, and it is unjust to deny children optimal health care and education.  One mother said ‘one of the most important concerns for my baby is he has not received his BCG vaccine – when everyone in the world should receive it. They say ‘we don’t have it’ or ‘later’ – the story changes.’ In the words of one child, ‘I not want to sit in jail? I want to go school….in here no have school everyday. Please help me?’

    Australians might well ask ‘Where is the compassion on Christmas Island?’

    If we are to retain our international standing as a civilised society, we cannot continue to persecute children seeking asylum as a deterrent to others.

    Elizabeth Elliott AM, is the Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health, Sydney Medical School and Consultant Paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Is there light at the end of the dark tunnel?

    In my blog of April 17 I outlined ways in which we might find a way out of the refugee quagmire. It is reposted below. 

    There is speculation that the government may announce an increase in the refugee intake to help the Christians and other minorities suffering dreadful persecution in Iraq and Syria. I hope this turns out to be the case and the beginning of a return to a more humane refugee policy.

    I could almost write Tony Abbott’s announcement. ‘Now that we have stopped the boats and put the people smugglers out of business, we can assist refugees in Iraq and Syria who are facing appalling persecution. By stopping the boats, we can increase our humanitarian intake in cooperation with UNHCR. This will be an orderly and regular program rather than allowing people smugglers to determine who comes to this country.’

    In my blog that I referred to, I suggested that the government should increase ‘regular arrivals from 13,750 to 20,000 per annum. This would be a useful start’.

    After the Howard Government’s pacific solution took effect, the refugee intake was increased from 7,642 in 2000-01, to 12,247 in 2006-07. In those same years, the settler/migrant intake was increased from 107,366 to 140,148.

    In that blog  of  April 17 I suggested  other actions that we could take which would be consistent with an ‘orderly’ refugee program – orderly departure arrangements with Afghanistan and Sri Lanka; alternate migration pathways and allowing asylum seekers on bridging visas in Australia to work.

    If Tony Abbott makes the announcement that I hope he will, it might be an opportunity to start rebuilding a bipartisan approach to refugee policy. 

    Even with the issue of boats off the political agenda, there are a lot of things that we can usefully do to protect the vulnerable and to restore our international reputation. John Menadue.

    Repost from April 17

    Is there a way we can turn this dross into gold, or if not gold, then a valuable metal? Is there a way through the present impasse that is both humane and practicable? I suggest there are some areas where we could have a broader discussion and decide what might be acceptable to the Coalition and the ALP. Surely some area of bipartisanship can be found. I suggest there are six areas which we should focus on.

    1. Action in the latter days of the Rudd Government followed by Operation Sovereign Borders has largely stopped boat arrivals. With so few ‘irregular’ arrivals, I suggest we should focus our attention on “regular arrivals” and increase the humanitarian program from 13,750 to 20,000 pa. This would be a useful start. It would demonstrate that the government is prepared to respond to asylum seekers and refugees in need provided they come through ‘regular channels’. (If today we took the same number of refugees that we took during the peak of the Indochina program and adjusted for population increase, our humanitarian/refugee intake would be about 35,000 p.a.)
      After the Howard Government’s Pacific Solution took effect, the refugee intake was increased from 7,642 in 2000/01 to 12,247 in 2006/07, the last year of the Howard Government. In those same years the settler/migrant intake was increased from 107,366 to 140,148.
      It is clear that having ‘stopped the boats’ as the Howard Government told us, they then considerably increased both the humanitarian and migrant intake. We should do the same again.
    2. Many Australians are concerned about the recent deaths and injuries on Manus and earlier on Nauru. It seems that asylum seekers where attacked by thugs within the Detention Centre on Manus. That is extraordinary and reflects on every Australian. A man has been killed in our name. We have a moral responsibility for any asylum seeker who comes to Australia and then is transferred to another country. To clarify the situation, I suggest that our moral responsibility should be strengthened by establishing a clear legal responsibility as well. We could do this by amending the Migration Act to ensure that there is ‘effective protection’ which is enforceable under Australian statute for any person that we transfer to another country. It would provide a discipline which is clearly lacking at the moment.‘Effective protection’ enforceable in Australian courts would need to be spelled out in the Migration Act to include such issues as non-refoulment, legal status when in another country, humane treatment consistent with the dignity and safety of the individual, and swift and efficient processing of claims. Surely the Coalition and the ALP could agree on ‘effective protection’ when asylum seekers are transferred to another country. The UNHCR should be asked to monitor ‘effective protection’.
    3. We need to address persecution and discrimination in source countries by negotiating Orderly Departure Arrangements with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Many asylum seekers coming to Australia come from these countries. We negotiated an ODA with Vietnam in 1983 whereby 100,000 Vietnamese came to Australia over many years instead of taking dangerous and irregular travel by land and sea. The Hazaras in Afghanistan and Pakistan desperately need our help through an ODA.
    4. We should consider other migration pathways that would reduce pressure on people to flee their countries. The largest number of asylum seekers coming by boat before the clamp down were Iranians.  I suggest that we should look at 457 visas or other migration pathways for young people from Iran. They would be great settlers.
    5. We need to address the issue of 30,000 asylum seekers in our detention centres and in the community whose refugee status has not yet been assessed. Immigration Detention Centres are very expensive and damaging to the individual. More asylum seekers should be carefully released into the community under bridging visas whilst their claims are being assessed. Most countries do this. In 2005 the Howard Government introduced the Community Care Pilot Scheme to assist asylum seekers in the community. Its focus was on case management. This pilot scheme became the Community Assistance Support (CAS) program and has worked well for asylum seekers in the community. Unfortunately a hostile political climate has made governments wary of developing the scheme. CAS should now be expanded.
      Further, as asylum seekers are released into the community, they should have the right to work. It is important both for their dignity as well as being in the interest of the Australian taxpayer. Surely the major political parties could agree on this. We have seen how country businesses like meatworks and fruit picking have welcomed asylum seekers.
    6. The only viable long term solution to desperate people taking risks in coming to Australia is through regional processing in transit countries and particularly in Indonesia with the cooperation of the UNHCR. We must bend our backs to do that. Julie Bishop would have an interest in this as it would help generate good will in our relations with Indonesia. We also need to build better relations with UNHCR.

    Surely we can find some bipartisan common ground in these six areas. Maybe we could find ways of turning dross into gold, or at least silver.

     

  • Kerry Murphy. The persecutions.

    In March 2001, the Taliban dynamited the ancient Buddha statues of Bamian because the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, claimed they were ‘idolatrous’ and idolatry is banned in Islam.  In July 2014, ISIL destroyed the ancient tomb of the prophet Jonah in Mosul for the same reason.[1]  This site was considered a sacred site for Jews, Christians and Muslims for centuries.  Tragically it is not just ancient cultural monuments that are being destroyed by ISIL.  Other accounts refer to smashing of statues in churches and the looting of churches.  What is especially worrying and amazing is their willingness to publicise their war crimes and not merely claim them for themselves, but boast about it.

    There have been Christian communities in the Nineveh plain of northern Iraq for possibly 1700-1800 years.  Some of the Christian communities in Syria and northern Iraq can trace their origins to the early spread of Christianity throughout the Middle East and then Roman Empire.  For nearly two millennia they have survived but ISIL is possibly the most dramatic threat they have faced.[2]

    Initially Christians in Mosul hoped they might be spared the sectarian attacks on Shia by ISIL.  Then on July 14, they noticed the Arabic letter ‘nuun’ ( ن ) for Nasriya (Christian) was daubed outside their properties.  Then ISIL gave the estimated 35,000 Christians an ultimatum to 19 July – convert, pay the jizya tax, or be killed.

    The jizya is a tax levied on non-Muslims in Sharia law.  In ISIL’s case, the jizya was clearly protection money mafia style, and its onerous level was beyond the capacity of many.  This left the Christians with no real option but to flee their homes and abandon their goods.  Some claim they were robbed by militants as they fled, an added indignity.

    ISIL also daubed the Arabic R ( ر ) for rafidah or ‘rejectors’ on the homes of Shia and minorities such as Shabaks and Yazdis and Turkman Shia.  This is a Sunni term used to denigrate those who do not follow their particular religious interpretation.

    More reports are coming out of stoning for adultery, beheading of Shia prisoners (often from the Iraqi or Syrian militaries) and even the execution of the Sunni imams in the main mosque in Mosul, who were seen to be not teaching ‘correct Islam’ and so had to be killed.  One ISIL posting bragged about the execution of ‘rafideh’ for Eid – with horrific pictures of the terrified men in trucks, then kneeling before open pits to be executed.[3]

    It was these type of extremist actions that alienated the Sunni tribes from Al Qaeda in 2007 and lead to the ‘Awakening’ movement whereby Sunni tribal leaders supported the US against Al Qaeda.  It is a disaster for Iraqis that the Iraqi Prime Minister al Maliki has become so sectarian in his policies and actions that the Sunnis feel they are better protected by supporting the Salafist extremists in ISIL than their own Government.  Some Sunnis see Maliki as an ‘Iranian’ and others refer to the ‘good old days under Saddam’.

    The willingness of ISIL to publicise their war crimes – beheading prisoners, shooting prisoners kneeling before ditches and smashing religious icons and statues – is extremely worrying.  They obviously are not afraid of facing war crimes trials for their actions and probably they assumed they are immune from such prosecution may well be sadly right.

    Sadly for the Christians and other minorities of Iraq and Syria, they will not be able to return to their homes for some time, if at all.  The fact that many Palestinians still have their house keys from their homes in Israel which they fled in what they call the ‘Naqba’(catastrophe) of 1948 gives no hope to yet another group of refugees from the Middle East.

    Iraqis tell me that this focus on religion and sect is new in Iraq.  Baghdadi Christians and Muslims would celebrate each other’s religious holidays and exchange greetings and presents for Christmas and Eid.  Intermarriage between Sunni and Shia families was not uncommon, especially in Baghdad.  Now the situation has changed dramatically and sectarianism dominates.  Militias are forcing out such Sunni/Shia couples from their homes, others are being forced to separate just because their spouse is a different sect.[4]

    The labelling of communities with letters designating their status will immediately create fears in our post holocaust world.  We have seen this before.  In an inversion of this, Iraqis in Baghdad and Irbil protested in the streets holding up signs saying things like ‘I am Iraqi and I am a Nasriyan’ or others said ‘We are all Nasriyans’.  There were also protests in London and Paris with people wearing T-Shirts with just the Arabic letter on them, just as it has been seen in the graffiti daubed on homes in Mosul. On Lebanese TV a well-known TV personality wore a T-Shirt with the letter ‘nuun’ ( ن ) and said ‘We are all Nuun’. Others are putting the symbol and letter on Facebook in solidarity with the persecuted. [5]

    Hopefully such intercommunal and intercultural/religious stands will become possible again in Iraq and Syria, though I fear it will take a long time before there is much progress and the extremists are isolated and disempowered.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who practices in immigration and refugee law.

  • Tessa Morris-Suzuki Rare Earth, politics and human rights.

    On 5 July 2014, the ABC’s PM program ran a report which revealed that “a leading Asian human rights activist has urged the Federal Government to investigate a Queensland-based resources company and a prominent Australian geologist over mining deals with North Korea that he believes may breach United Nations sanctions”. (http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2014/s4061381.htm)

    The report looked at a project by the firm SRE Minerals to develop rare earth mines in North Korea. The prominent geologist in question is Brisbane based scientist Louis Schurmann. This scheme has come under attack from Japanese activist Ken Kato, head of an organisation known in English as “Human Rights in Asia”, and in Japanese as the “Asian Investigation Organization” (Ajia Chosa Kiko). Kato, as PM reported, has lodged a complaint with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, stating that Schurmann’s activities may be in breach of UN sanctions because “rare earths are an indispensable material for guided missiles”.

    The activities of SRE Minerals in North Korea should certainly be discussed in the public realm. If this project is likely to contribute to North Korea’s missile program, it is clearly an international problem. On the other hand, UN sanctions do not ban all economic contact with North Korea. Further information and debate is needed to determine the rights and wrongs of this project.

    But that debate must also include a careful look at the background of Ken Kato’s “Human Rights in Asia”. This is not (as one might assume from its English title) a broad based major human rights organisation, but rather a body that targets virtually all its criticism at North Korea, with an occasional barb at China. Kato describes himself on his blog, not as a “leading human rights activist” but as a “conservative lobbyist” (hoshukei robi katsudoka), which is clearly what he is. (see http://kenkato.blog.jp/)

    His organisation exists in the space that emerged following the 2002 revelation that a number of Japanese citizens had been kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Five of these victims have returned to Japan, but an uncertain number – at least eight and almost certainly more – have never returned. North Korea officially claims that they all died, but negotiations between the Japanese and North Korean governments are now underway, and it seems likely that further revelations about the fate of the remaining abductees may come to light in the coming months, and that some may still be alive in North Korea.

    Meanwhile, various groups have emerged in Japan claiming that hundreds of other Japanese missing people were in fact abducted by North Korea, and that Japan must force the DPRK to return them all. Kato’s group is one of these. For the past several years it has been conducting an campaign to “strangle” North Korea until it “spits out” the hundreds of abductees whom Kato believes it is still holding. The campaign involves persuading the group’s members to lobby organisations and foreign governments which, it thinks, are engaged in any activities from which North Korea might earn foreign currency. An article appearing on the Internet under Kato’s name states that the only way to deal with North Korea is to confront its leader with a choice between “being killed in a coup d’etat or returning the abduction victims”. (http://kakutatakaheri.blog73.fc2.com/blog-date-201203.html)

    The activities of “Human Rights in Asia” are not exclusively focused on North Korea. For example, in 2011, under the heading “Save our Sacred Territory”, Kato appealed to his readers to send messages to the New York Times condemning it for publishing an opinion piece in which a commentator (who was otherwise very critical of China) expressed the personal view that China has a viable claim to the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Now, under the heading “We Did It! A Huge Step Forward”, his blog is proclaiming vitory in its Australian campaign.

    The issue of human rights in North Korea is an enormously important one – too important to let it become entangled in such messy nationalist politics. We need a careful and calm debate about the rights and wrongs of economic engagement with North Korea, not a campaign initiated and dominated by self-proclaimed conservative lobbyists.

     

    Tessa Morris-Suzuki is an Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific Japanese history professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow.

  • John Menadue. Suffer the little children to come unto me…

    Well, not so if they are Palestinian children or asylum seeker children in our detention centres.

    At last counting there were 1,230 Palestinians killed in Gaza as a result of 3,000 or more air and artillery strikes. 56 Israelis have died. Close to 1,000 of those Palestinians killed were civilians, including children. Only three Israeli civilians died. Just imagine the outcry of the Israeli lobby if those figures were reversed and 1000 Israelis had been killed… Clearly the Israel lobby and many others don’t regard Palestinian civilians and children of equal value to their own.

    In her article ‘Grief grips Gaza’ in the SMH on August 2, Ruth Pollard tells the searing story of the carnage in Gaza. For link to story, see below.

    http://www.smh.com.au/world/grief-grips-gaza-20140801-3czlw.html

    The Israelis and their apologists around the world, including President Obama and Prime Minister Abbott, say that Israel has a right to defend itself. That is true, but it is only a very small part of the truth. They refuse to honestly admit that the core of the problem in Palestine is that land was stolen by Israel from the Palestinians in 1967. There will be no peace without justice. There will be no justice until Israel withdraws from the land it has stolen from the Palestinian people.

    But whilst this political impasse continues with the support of the Israeli lobby, the people of Palestine are suffering an appalling fate.

    Closer to home we have also had a searing account of the treatment of children in our detention centres. The Human Rights President, Professor Gillian Triggs has told us of the misery and trauma of children in our detention centres. She has been vividly supported by Elizabeth Elliott who is Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health, University of Sydney and Consultant Paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Sydney. She accompanied Professor Triggs to Christmas Island. Professor Elliott has described the mental and physical symptoms of disease of children in detention where they are beyond health and hope. She has spoken of escalating rates of mental ill health. The distress was expressed as overwhelming sadness and hopelessness and manifest most dramatically by the high prevalence of self-harm in young mothers and psychological symptoms in their children.

    Professor Elliott described how the children expressed their mood through drawings. These drawings were bleak and about guns, barbed wire and tears.

    By way of contrast, my wife and I visited the Archibald Prize exhibition last week which featured the ‘Young Archies’ – portraits by 5 to 15 year olds. These beautiful portraits were in such contrast to what Professor Elliott has shown us by children on Christmas Island. The Young Archies of the same age as the asylum seekers drew beautiful portraits of people they loved and who loved them – mainly family. The contrast between the two lots of drawings highlighted very graphically the trauma we are inflicting on children in our care. And to think that Scott Morrison is the legal guardian of these children in detention!

    There is not just institutional violence against children in the Catholic Church and other institutions. It is happening now in our detention centres, this very day.

    For God’s sake, for the children’s sake and for our own sake, stop this inhumanity both in Gaza and in our own detention centres. The tears of the children will not wash away our guilt. At the very least we should stop wringing our hands and do something about it.

  • John Tulloh. The Grief and Pain of Life in Gaza.

    ‘Gaza is a tragic place’, observed John Lyons, The Australian’s Middle East correspondent, the other day. It certainly is. Gaza must be one of the worst places in the world in which to live or at least try to survive. For starters, its population of more than 1.7 million long-suffering Palestinians has to live in an area of just 365 sq km. Compare that with Sydney’s 12,145 sq km. They have no control over their Mediterranean waters or their air space. That belongs to Israel. Israel, along with Egypt, controls who and what come in and out, making it as some see it the occupying power even though it officially disengaged from there in 2005.

    The people of Gaza live under the rule of Hamas which has done little to advance their economic prospects. While Hamas was democratically elected, its leaders have shown scant concern for the well-being of the electorate. They have mounted relentless rocket attacks on neighbouring Israeli towns and other Jewish targets, knowing full well the deadly consequences. The Israel Defence Force website tracks the number of rockets launched. Since Hamas came to power in 2006 the total is a figure many Australians would find hard to comprehend as part of our daily life: 11,687.

    Three times in the past six years, Israel has been sufficiently provoked to go to war against Hamas with punishing and lopsided results for Gazans as we are witnessing at present. For them, that means Israeli shells whistling in from tanks on the sand dunes along the border or warships off the coast or missiles from the air. Homes are destroyed or blown up in an instant. So are what normally would be thought to be safe places for Gazans to seek shelter, such as schools, mosques, hospitals and even refugee camps. Currently, the U.N. says 167,000 Gazans are displaced.

    Israel says it targets only sites which it claims Hamas uses to store rockets or from which to fire them. It tries to warn residents in the vicinity that an attack is just minutes away. While this may be noble in the absence of rules in today’s warfare, the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem says more than half the Gazan dead are innocent civilians. The total Gaza death toll in the current offensive is more than 1350 as well as 56 Israeli soldiers and three civilians. The Gaza Health Ministry says the number of injured is 6000. Who knows what the long-term trauma might be for Gazans, not to forget those Israelis having to live with the constant threat of rockets hitting them.

    Gazans may well hope that the U.S. will arrange a settlement to bring them peace. John Kerry, the Secretary of State, mishandled the talks to try to achieve that, according to many observers. He has virtually walked away from them now, much to the satisfaction of hardline Israelis. President Obama urged Benjamin Netanyahu to cease the Israeli bombardment. The Israeli leader simply ignored him and increased the attacks just as he did with the same plea from the U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. It is yet another example of  Washington’s influence in foreign affairs counting for so little these days, even with one of its closest allies.

    It also must be yet another cause for disillusionment by Gazans. Some may even hark back to the days when Israel occupied their tormented land. The economy was much better then, thanks in part to the 9000 Israelis who settled there. They brought industry and agriculture, creating hundreds of jobs. But the settlers were evicted when Israel relinquished control of Gaza in 2005.

    When Hamas came to power in 2006, the U.S. and the European Union refused to recognise it and suspended direct aid. They regarded it as a terrorist organisation. Hamas had to rely on aid from friendly countries like Turkey, Qatar and Iran.Then Hamas and Fatah, which controlled the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority umbrella, fell out. This led to more distress for Gazans: power struggles and Palestinians (Gazans) killing each other – 600 no less.

    Next, Israel imposed economic blockades in response to Hamas rocket attacks. Egypt, which controlled the south-west border, joined in because of suspected connections between Hamas and terrorist groups operating in the Sinai. All this led to shortages of fuel, urgently-needed medical supplies and cement and building materials. At times the border was closed altogether, preventing Gazans carrying out employment in Israel. At one stage, they had no power for seven weeks. In fact, this week’s Israeli bombardment has knocked out the power station again.

    But Gazans were not without ingenuity. They dug tunnels from Egypt in particular to smuggle in all manner of supplies, including rockets. Emboldened, they also dug a network of tunnels to infiltrate Israel. Given Israel’s record of security vigilance, it is astonishing that the tunnels managed to escape detection. Their discovery further inflamed Israel, resulting in the ferocity of its current action to destroy them along with Hamas’ weapons arsenal.

    The chances of a permanent settlement are remote. Israel says it is determined to crush Hamas and would not consider any deal until its foe was fully disarmed. Hamas says it has no interest in any deal with conditions. Indeed it would be contrary to its whole raison d’être of wanting to drive Israel from occupied land. So for now we can expect a continuation of those distressing images of anguish and tears as Gazans learn of the deaths of their loved ones and return to what is left of their homes and of Israelis as they bury their soldiers and run for cover when sirens alert them of another Hamas rocket on its way.

    The overwhelming military might of Israel and its destructive deeds against its comparative Dad’s Army neighbour have been a disaster for the Jewish state’s international image. It has provoked ugly attacks of anti- Semitism, especially in Europe. But a poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Israelis are in favour of the offensive against Hamas.

    Wars have never brought genuine peace to the Middle East. They never will, given the deep historic, cultural and religious differences. The antagonists have created so much hostility among themselves that the likelihood of any enduring peace settlement is remote and the cycle of violence will continue its terrible toll.

    FOOTNOTE: In 1972, five years after Israel drove out the Egyptian forces and began its occupation of Gaza, I visited the territory. I was amazed to encounter a small factory where Gazans were making Israeli military uniforms. ‘Why not?’ someone said. ‘We need jobs’. Nothing has changed except the relaxed atmosphere in Gaza then is anything but today.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • Noura Erakat. Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza Debunked.

    Five Israeli talking points on Gaza debunked.  Why does the mainstream media keep repeating these false claims?

    Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world’s only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.

    Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

    This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children’s bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza’s shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel’s assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 2008–09. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.

    Below I address five of Israel’s recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.

    1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.

    As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.

    The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel’s responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel’s jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that “no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country” is therefore both a diversion and baseless.

    Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability.

    2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

    Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be “hostile territory” and declared war against its population. Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory’s air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.

    Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank. As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not “get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

    Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.

    3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.

    Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel’s military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region.

    During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days. In November 2012, Israel’s extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians.

    Immediately preceding Israel’s most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas. Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas’s involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It’s these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation.

    4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.

    Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate.

    In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations.

    The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere:

    What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

    Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded “from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.”

    According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets.

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    5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.

    This is arguably one of Israel’s most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.

    International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel’s indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:

    The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel’s] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.

    In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.

    Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, “whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.”

    In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.

    Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel’s end goal? What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Strip—they clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel’s logic, all of Gaza’s 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental. This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do. Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.

    Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and activist, is an Abraham L. Freedman Fellow at Temple University, Beasely School of Law, and a contributing editor of Jadaliyya. 

    This article was first published in Alternet.org on July 28,2014.

     

     

     

  • Ben Saul. The Occupation of Palestine.

    There is very partisan criticism of Hamas for firing home-made rockets into Israel. But the core problem is not rockets. It is the occupation of Palestine by Israel and the imprisonment of two million Palestinians in a sliver of land called ‘Gaza’.

    I often think how we should or could respond if our country was occupied by a foreign power. Surely there would be resistance to that occupation. That is fundamentally what the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians is about.

    In a speech given at Parliament House, Canberra, on July 16, Professor Ben Saul, says

    ‘The root cause of the Israel-Palestine conflict is the near fifty year occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel and the illegal colonisation of Palestinian land. Violence to liberate Palestine is inevitable unless Israel withdraws and complies with international law. Australian governments have failed to understand that there will never be peace unless there is justice.’

    A link to Professor Ben Saul’s speech is below.  He is the Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.  John Menadue

  • Another Israeli massacre of Palestinians.

    One thousand and thirty-five Palestinians in Gaza, mainly innocent civilians, women and children have been massacred and so far the world turns its head away. And the number is increasing by the hour. We don’t want to feel the suffering of the Palestinian people.

    Alongside this 1,035 dead Palestinians there are 42 Israeli’s who have died. Just imagine what the Israeli lobby would be saying if 1,035 Israelis had died.

    We are angry and concerned that 297 innocent people lost their lives when MH17 was shot down by separatists in the Ukraine. These separatists were obviously funded and armed by Russia. That is of concern to us. But the US supports, funds and arms the Israeli army which is now conducting this massacre in Gaza. When will we get the balance right.  But it is not only the US government and the Israeli lobby that must be held accountable for what is happening today in Gaza. The Australian government has consistently sided with Israel against the Palestinians and even wants to deny the term ‘occupied’ which is a way any reasonable person would describe what Israel is doing on Palestinian land. The Israelis are occupying Palestinian land and imprisoning Palestinian people.

    There has been a pattern of Israeli massacres and the Gaza massacre is one of many. Just think of the massacres in  Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982.

    Israel is naturally concerned about home-made rockets being fired out of Gaza into Israel but the response is out of all proportion. What is more, the core reason for the dispute is not these rockets, it is occupation by Israel of Palestinian land. That occupation and colonisation must be ended if there is to be a just peace.

    See below an article this weekend by Robert Fisk for The Independent. It is headed ‘Eight hundred dead Palestinians. But Israel has impunity.’  John Menadue

    ​

    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/eight-hundred-dead-palestinians-but-israel-has-impunity-9629726.html

  • Richard Rigby. Tiananmen 25 years on.

    On the night of June 3-4, units of the Peoples Liberation Army entered Beijing, killing some hundreds of ordinary Beijing citizens as they made their way to their objective, Tiananmen Square, the focal point of massive protests that had begun in late April following the death of former Party Secretary Hu Yaobang. The square was cleared of protestors. Further killings and arrests ensued over following days. A small number of soldiers were also killed. Protests in scores of other Chinese cities were simultaneously brought to an end, with varying degrees of violence. Significant protests in Shanghai were settled largely peacefully. Beijing was the worst. This much is known; although a final, credible death toll has not been published to this day.

    After the event Deng Xiaoping famously said ‘this storm was bound to happen’. Not necessarily. The country wide protests, against corruption, against rising prices, against an array of contradictions between what opening and reform seemed to promise and the realities of daily life, and yes, in the case of some, demands for greater freedom and democracy – these were almost certainly inevitable; but the bloody denouement in the nation’s capital was not. The crucial element here was a serious power struggle at the centre of China’s leadership, a struggle that was both exacerbated by, and in which the contending parties sought to use, the popular protests.

    There were of course other, contingent, elements as well: the sensitive 70th anniversary of the May 4th Movement, the meeting of the Asian Development Bank, and, in particular, the historic visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, which made Beijing the focus of global media attention, quite apart from the events in the square – which also led to the humiliation for the government of having to cancel the official welcome at that site; and there were divisions amongst the student leaders and their supporters too, between those favouring a degree of accommodation with the authorities, with others more intransigent. But in the end it was the hard-liners in the government who won the power struggle, and who, backed by Deng Xiaoping, must take responsibility for the tragic way in which the protests were suppressed.

    It was this same Deng, though, who also ensured that, against the clear inclinations of a number of those on the winning side, this did not mean turning back from the policies of opening and reform that he had himself initiated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in late 1978. He understood, even if not all his colleagues did, that his own dictum that stability takes precedence over all else demanded that those processes, and the resultant economic growth, be pushed forward. The domestic and international shocks resulting from the events of June 1989 notwithstanding, his Southern Tour of 1992 unleashed the second wave of the process of opening and reform that has resulted in the China we see today, with unprecedented levels of prosperity, openness to the world, international standing and influence.

    For one who lived through and closely followed the events of 1989 in Beijing, it is at times hard to realise that a quarter of a century has now past, and that vast numbers of adult Chinese today were only children, or not even born, when those events took place. June 4 means little or nothing to many of them. At the same time, China, and Beijing, have changed beyond recognition, and in terms of people’s lives, in many ways for the better. Millions of Chinese travel overseas on holidays every year, and when the holidays are over, they return home with no greater reluctance than tourists of any other country. Their lives are not bad. They take pride in China’s global standing. For many Chinese, particularly intellectuals and students, the 1980s were a period of unalloyed admiration for the West, but this has been tempered not only by patriotic education and warnings of the dangers of peaceful evolution, but much more effectively by Western failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Asian Financial Crisis, the Global Financial Crisis, the negative examples and unmet policy challenges of the Arab Spring, Israel/Palestine, the Ukraine…the list goes on.

    Of course China has huge problems and challenges of its own, some of which, such as pollution, result from its own successes, while others are more traditional, such as the corruption which now greatly exceeds that which was such an issue in 1989. But while ‘mass incidents’ resulting from particularly egregious and localised causes continue to take place across the country, the idea that the central leadership is vulnerable to challenge by mass protests in the heart of the nation seems inherently implausible. This is not what people want, and even if it were, the range of coercive means – lethal, and significantly, non-lethal –  at the disposal of the authorities gives them a far greater degree of flexibility and effectiveness than was the case 25 years ago.

    And yet, those same authorities are worried. They have not forgotten what happened. Some of them are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of the power struggle that Zhao Ziyang lost and Li Peng won, resulting in the subsequent promotion of Jiang Zemin, still exercising at least some influence despite his advanced age. (It is perhaps noteworthy, though, that Xi Jinping’s father Xi Zhongxun honourably but fruitlessly opposed the decision to use the PLA.) Neither have millions of Beijing citizens who themselves lived through the events forgotten, whatever roles they played or didn’t play, and whatever they thought then or think now. Neither have the parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, friends, of those who died, and the greater numbers injured or imprisoned or exiled.

    June 4, like it or not, is another of those dates, like March 18, May 4, May 30, September 18, and more, that have entered Chinese history, and as such demand an explanation. From time to time an official Chinese spokesperson says, usually responding to a journalist, that this issue has been settled years ago. It hasn’t. Were this the case, the date would not be as sensitive as it is. Every year in late May numbers of people associated with the events of 1989 are encouraged in one way or another to keep quiet, take a holiday, or something less pleasant. This year, a significant anniversary, has already seen a number of arrests, but also newer forms of activism, including a privately sponsored seminar and a series of messages on Weibo, China’s Twitter. The truth is, the issue is not going to go away, and the truth is…the truth. About what happened, and why.

    One may fully understand the desire of the Chinese authorities, faced as they are with massive challenges, to avoid rancorous disputes and whatever runs the risk of undermining China’s hard-won stability and prosperity. One should wish them every success in their efforts to achieve their stated goals for the the ‘two centenaries’ (of the Party and of the PRC), including moderate prosperity for all (2021) and democracy (2049). But sooner or later it should become clear that a truthful accounting should help, not hinder, the realisation of a China that is the stronger for the acknowledgment of its tragedies as well as its stunning achievements.

    Some years ago, invited by two graduate students of my acquaintance from the PRC, I visited the February 28 Memorial Museum in Taipei. I had wondered whether they wished to remind me of the sins of the KMT, but this was not their point. As we walked out, one of them said to me, ‘we wanted you to see this – the day we can take you to the June 4 Memorial Museum in Beijing, we’ll know our beloved Motherland has come of age.’*

     

    Richard Rigby was an Australian diplomat with postings in Tokyo, Beijing (twice), Shanghai (Consul General), London and Israel (Ambassador). He was also Assistant Director General of ONA. 

    May 18 Beijing

    *The February 28 incident occurred in 1947. Martial Law was lifted by President Chiang Ching-Kuo in 1987. The Executive Yuan promulgated a Research Report into the Incident in 1992. In 1995 President and KMT Chairman Lee Teng-Hui issued a formal apology and declared February 28 as an official day of commemoration for the victims. It took a long time.

     

  • Walter Hamilton. When Local Becomes Global

    Why is Vladimir Putin calling down upon himself the ire of the world by failing to help secure the crash site of MH-17 for international investigators? The answer, I think, is pretty obvious. He does not want to demonstrate how much influence, if not control, Russia has over events in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s response has been to blame the government in Kiev and hold it responsible for the situation.

    Since the fall of the Moscow-backed regime in Kiev, it has been Russian policy to destabilize its neighbour so as to discredit and weaken the pro-Western government that has taken over. It has used existing ethnic and religious divisions in Ukraine to hive off the Crimean peninsula and turn a large swathe of territory in the east into a war zone.

    For historical reasons many people living in the east of Ukraine identify with Russia; in Europe, where borders have changed often in the past century, this kind of cross-border allegiance is not unusual. Before now Hitler and Stalin, among others, exploited similar sources of tension. Putin has used pro-Russian Ukrainians––advised, trained and equipped by his own military intelligence services––together with a ‘free corps’ of Cossacks and other Russian mercenaries, some of them veterans of the fighting in Chechnya, to pursue his anti-Western agenda.

    He may have good reason to fear the loss of a satellite state, but his actions only serve to underscore why most of Ukrainian citizens want a future in the EU.

    Putin’s particular approach has been conditioned by a desire to localize the conflict as much as possible, thus avoiding a direct confrontation with member states of the European Union. Until this week he had been partially successful. Although both the United States and the EU imposed sanctions against Moscow following its invasion of the Crimea, there have been signs recently of a split in the trans-Atlantic response to Russia’s aggression. Washington expanded its sanctions regime after it determined that Moscow was supplying ever-more sophisticated weapons to the rebels, including surface-to-air missile launchers, but the EU did not follow suit. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande (who have not been the most outspoken of world leaders condemning the attack on MH-17) are the chief architects of a ‘slowly-slowly’ approach to Putin. Their approach, along with Putin’s ‘localizing’ strategy, has crashed just as surely as the ill-fated Malaysian Airlines plane.

    Local has become global. In an interconnected world, a conflict in the very centre of Europe in which the most sophisticated types of conventional weapons are deployed was never going to remain local for long. International travel is just one way in which humanity is knitted together; we cannot turn our backs on any festering conflict and hope it goes away. The complaint that the aircraft should not have been using air space above a conflict zone (as was done by many other commercial flights) completely misses the point. Whoever supplied and wantonly fired the missile, having failed to even identify the target, bears the whole responsibility.

    Putin has been hoisted with his own petard: if he continues to stand aside from this tragedy he is condemned as irresponsible and ruthless; if he exercises the authority of his office to clear the disaster area for a proper recovery and investigation, he demonstrates the true extent of Russia’s involvement. Alternatively, if indeed he cannot influence the disparate militias that are roving over the disputed territory, it will become clear that he has engineered a crisis over which he has lost control.

    Putin faces an unenviable choice, as far as his own prestige is concerned (and that, rather that the dignified recovery of the remains of 298 innocent people, seems to be the overriding consideration in Moscow). It is hard to imagine how this terrible situation can play out to his advantage. The best outcome, and the best memorial to the lost lives, would be an end to the fighting and a political settlement that respects the sovereignty of Ukraine and the rights of all its citizens.

    Walter Hamilton reported from foreign bureaus for the ABC and AAP for 14 years.

     

     

  • MH 17-Light a candle rather than curse the darkness

    In the horror and sense of evil we all feel about the downing of MH17 how should we respond?  Perhaps out best response is summed up in the above exhortation which is attributed to Peter Benenson the founder of Amnesty International. The candle cycled by barb wire has become the emblem of Amnesty. The quote was also used by Adlai Stevenson in a speech in the UN in tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt

    As a Christian I find such horror and pervasive evil hard to understand or explain. We particularly respond to MH 17 because of the large number of Australians who have been wantonly killed. But at the same time more have been killed in Gaza. And even more are killed almost every day in Syria and Iraq. Evil, violence and injustice are pervasive.

    That evil is personal as well as national and global. We each struggle with our own selfishness and fear.

    But we also have what Abraham Lincoln described as our better angels of generosity and concern for our neighbour. And that internal struggle between good and evil, between our better angels and our darker angels is played out in our wider community and the wider wold. We are affected by what happens even in remote Ukraine.

    Lighting candles seems to me to be best response or perhaps the only way in the long term not just for our own mental and moral health but to shift the balance against violence and injustice. There are many small and perhaps even large things that we can do; helping asylum seekers and our  indigenous people; the homeless; the poor of the world; advocacy for the vulnerable; resistance to the violent and the warlike and support for peacemakers. Cursing the darkness or wringing our hands is not helpful either for us or others.

    My father often told me to “stop complaining and do something about it”. I try to respond that way, inadequate as it is. We must take personal responsibility for the wrongs in the world. I see no other sensible way but to keep lighting candles.

  • Creating a Long-Term Framework for Asylum Seeker Policy

    Last Friday 11 July 2014, I attended a roundtable at Parliament House, Canberra to discuss possible actions that could be taken to find a way out of the present divisive and harsh treatment of asylum seekers. The media release following that roundtable is reproduced below. The roundtable drew on  discussion paper ‘Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders’, prepared by Peter Hughes and Arja Keski-Nummi. That discussion paper can be found by clicking on my website at the top of this page. The paper is described on the website as ‘Final Policy Paper – Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders’.  John Menadue.

    High-level Roundtable held at Parliament House, Canberra

    A diverse group of 35 high-level policymakers and experts, including a former Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, a strategist from Malaysia, and parliamentarians from three of the four major parties, met all day Friday 11 July to discuss a long-term framework for Australia’s asylum seeker policy.

    Jointly organised by Australia21, the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW, and the Centre for Policy Development, the roundtable was conducted under the Chatham House Rule.

    Members of the Steering Committee, Bob Douglas, Jane McAdam and Travers McLeod, said today:

    “This roundtable marked the start of a new conversation about a complex policy area that has been a political hot potato for too long. It aims to be a contribution which is helpful to all sides of the political spectrum and which reflects Australian values.”

    Participants recognised there is no panacea in this debate, and that a focus on politics over policy is unhelpful. They noted that forced migration is a global phenomenon, not something that Australia can control on its own, nor is asylum seeker policy one that should be viewed in isolation from other aspects of national and foreign policy. The ultimate goal was to consider how Australia could facilitate a sustainable immigration policy that balances protection, safety, transparency and prosperity.

    Discussion paper released today

    The roundtable drew on a discussion paper ‘Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders: A Long-Term Asylum Policy for Australia’ prepared by two former senior Immigration Department officials, Peter Hughes and Arja Keski-Nummi, working with the Centre for Policy Development. Released today, the paper suggests pathways to better policy responses for the future. Drawing on lessons from the past, it examines the evidence, including the rate of irregular maritime arrivals and the regional implications of refugee flows, including the way refugee policy has evolved in Australia since asylum seekers first began arriving by boat in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

    Common ground at the roundtable

    Contributions at the roundtable were frank, respectful and constructive. Fresh positions were adopted. Although the participants in this first roundtable did not seek to reach consensus on a new policy, some important areas of common ground did emerge:

    • While emphasising that Australia must respect its international legal obligations, the roundtable also recognised that the community wants reassurance that Australia retains control over who becomes Australian citizens and under what circumstances.
    • Participants stressed the importance of implementing fair, transparent and efficient refugee status determination procedures, wherever processing takes place. They supported raising Australia’s humanitarian intake, perhaps set as a percentage of our annual migration intake.

    Media  Release – 13 July 2014

    • Participants expressed concern at the militarisation of current approaches, and emphasised the need to build regional protection capacity and foster bilateral partnerships built on trust and respect.
    • There was support for extending the rights available to asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their protection claims, including the right to work, and for phasing out mandatory detention.
    • Participants recommended measures to expedite the processing of particular cohorts of claimants, and encouraged new community initiatives, especially in regional Australia, that bring Australians into direct contact with refugees and use their skills to help rehabilitate depressed areas.
    • The participants are committed to creating a ‘second track’ dialogue that will engage the community, policymakers, experts and politicians in rethinking our approach.
    • Finally, it was noted that any new approach must use language carefully, recognising the humanity of those in search of protection.

    A full report on this project will be released later in 2014.

    Attendees

    Paris Aristotle AM,  Adam Bandt MP, Paul Barratt AO, Admiral Chris Barrie AC, Father Frank Brennan SJ AO, Julian Burnside AO QC, The Hon Fred Chaney AO, Dr Joyce Chia, Noel Clement, Dr David Corlett, Senator Sam Dastyari, Professor Bob Douglas AO, Erika Feller, Ellen Hansen, Dr Claire Higgins, Peter Hughes, Associate Professor Mary Anne Kenny, Arja Keski-Nummi, Dr Anne Kilcullen, David Lang, Ben Lewis, Libby Lloyd AM, The Hon Ian Macphee AO, Professor Robert Manne, Professor Jane McAdam, Dr Travers McLeod, John Menadue AO, Right Reverend Professor Stephen Pickard, Reverend Elenie Poulos, Paul Power, Ambassador Wiryono Sastro Handoyo, Jo Szwarc, Angus Taylor MP, Oliver White and Steven Wong.

    Media contacts             

    Bob Douglas
     Australia 21
     Tel: 0409 233 138, email: bobdouglas@netspeed.com.au

     Professor Jane McAdam
    Andrew & Renata Kaldor
    Centre for International Refugee Law
    Tel (02) 9385 2250, email j.mcadam@unsw.edu.au

    Travers McLeod
    Centre for Policy Development
    Tel: 0487 302 927; email: travers.mcleod@cpd.org.au

    About the organisers 

    Australia21 is a non-partisan, non-profit, registered research organisation which seeks to develop and promote new frameworks for understanding and acting on complex questions that are important to Australia’s future.

    The Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW is the world’s first academic research centre dedicated to the study of international refugee law and policy.

    The Centre for Policy Development is an independent and non-partisan think tank which develops and promotes policy proposals to help Australia thrive and lead in a fast-changing global environment over the long-term.

  • Kerry Murphy. The four questions quiz for refugees.

    When Malaysian Flight MH370 disappeared, the Australian Government made a major contribution towards the international search operation.  Almost daily there were announcements by Prime Minister Abbott and other Ministers about new information they were checking and hopes of finding the plane.  Media accompanied the air force on the search and the Australian contribution was a genuine effort as part of an international search mission. 

    What a contrast when a boat or two of Sri Lankan Tamils arrives seeking our protection. Minister Morrison refuses to even acknowledge there is a boat or two.  The refuses to comment on ‘on water matters’.  Then we hear there is a possibility the asylum seekers will be returned to Sri Lanka, after they are asked four questions, three of which are about identity.

    Under international refugee law, the worst possible thing you can do is to return someone to a country where they could be persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group.  That is called the non-refoulement obligation.  The fact that only one question is asked about why they came to Australia, and done in circumstances not conducive to seeking information but ticking a box so we can send them home, is a serious indictment of how Australia adheres to its international obligations.

    We do not know exactly what happened, because it is all too secret.  However some information has come out.  The Labor party have unclean hands on this because they were using a similar process for ‘enhanced screening’ of Sri Lankans in late 2012.

    Many Sri Lankans were returned to Sri Lanka under Labor without a careful and thorough investigation of their case.  There is no way you could simply write off someone just because they give a poor answer to the final of four questions.  This is about our international obligations, not some pub trivia quiz knockout.

    UNHCR has criticised the ‘return oriented environment’ on Manus Island and this process shows the same focus on sending people home and stopping the boats, regardless of the seriousness of the claims.   If someone manages to raise strong protection claims, what happens then?  Are they taken to Manus, Nauru?  Who decides they have raised strong enough claims and what criteria are used?  Is there some checking process to ensure no mistakes are made?

    The four question quiz seems totally inadequate for assessing someone’s claims for protection, and there are no apparent safeguards.  If someone seeks legal advice or help, what happens?  It is all too secret to tell us.

    The Prime Minister then comes out and tells us how good Sri Lanka is now since the end of the brutal 30 year conflict:

    ”But I want to make this observation, Sri Lanka is not everyone’s idea of the ideal society but it is at peace . . . a horrific civil war has ended. I believe that there has been a lot of progress when it comes to human rights and the rule of law in Sri Lanka.”

    Sorry Prime Minister but that is not the correct legal test.   It seems DFAT are not aware it is so calm either. The Smart Traveller website warns against travel to Sri Lanka and says:

    • We advise you to exercise a high degree of caution in Sri Lanka at this time because of the unpredictable security environment.
    • Security forces maintain a visible presence throughout the country. Military and police checkpoints are present along some roads and road closures can occur without warning.
    • You should avoid all demonstrations and large public gatherings as they may turn violent or be a target for politically-motivated attacks. Police have used tear gas in response to protests.
    • In the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, which includes Mannar, Vavuniya, Mullaitivu, Kilinochichi and Jaffna Districts, post-conflict security force activity is ongoing.[2]

    There are reports from Human Rights agencies and UNHCR about serious human rights concerns in the troubled island of Sri Lanka.  These include reports of arbitrary arrest, assault and torture.  It is progress from being shot straight away maybe, but still far from a human rights paradise.

    Australia has shown it is generous when it comes to helping with disasters such as the tsunami in Indonesia, helping find MH370, and many others.  Sadly, when it comes to people arriving by boat seeking our protection we have a major blind spot. Tragically, a country that does have a reasonable record in helping refugees and respecting human rights is trashing its reputation for a three word slogan.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who practices in immigration and refugee law.

     

  • Japan and comfort women.

    In 1993 the Japanese government issued an apology to comfort women who had suffered sexual abuse by the Japanese military during WWII. This apology was called the ‘Kono Declaration’. Kono was the chief cabinet secretary.

    Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been trying to undo the words of the Kono Declaration without officially withdrawing the declaration. In an article published in the Canberra Times on June 29 2014, see link below, Tessa Morris-Suzuki describes how Japan is going about ‘the art of un-apologising’.

    Tessa Morris-Suzuki is an Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific Japanese history professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow.

    The Yonhan News Agency in Korea has just announced that Pope Francis has invited Korean comfort women to a Mass that he will celebrate in Seoul on August 18. Pope Francis is expected to deliver a message to the comfort women in the Mass at Myeongdong Cathedral in central Seoul and to pray for peace on the Korean peninsula.

    Japanese PM Abe who was striving to undo the apology to comfort women in the Kono Declaration will visit Australia next week.

    John Menadue

    http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/japan-and-the-art-of-unapologising-20140627-zsjv3.html

  • Frank Brennan SJ. How the Bishop was forced to resign because he played too much for the local team

    I have followed the Bishop Bill Morris saga closely. My one new insight from reading Bill’s book – “Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three” – is that he was sacked because he was too much a team player with his local church. By sacking their local leader, the Romans hoped to shatter the morale and direction of those who had planned the pastoral strategies of a country diocese stretched to the limits as a Eucharistic community soon to be deprived of priests in the Roman mould.

    He was the consummate team player who planned his pastoral strategies in close consultation with his presbyterate and the various consultative organs he set up in the diocese. As the people of Toowoomba continue to live faithful lives as Catholics, they still hold Bill in high esteem; meanwhile all the people in Rome are now gone. As Peter Dorfield, Bill’s Vicar General says, it was ‘a poor decision based on poor advice’.

    It’s been very difficult to work out why Bishop Morris was sacked. It’s been a moving target. At first the concern seemed to be over the third rite of reconciliation and his failure to drop everything and come to Rome when Cardinal Arinze specified. Bill pointed out that he was due in Rome four months after the specified date, so surely things could wait until then. It seems that over time Bill had mended his ways on the third rite to comply with Rome’s new strictures.

    Then there was his Advent pastoral letter of 2006. We are left confused as to whether Morris was sacked chiefly for what he wrote in that letter, or for what was reported by Archbishop Chaput, now of Philadelphia and then of Denver, who was appointed Pontifical Visitator of Toowoomba in 2007. Or for what was reported to Rome by those sometimes described as ‘the temple police’. The offending section of his pastoral letter was:

    “Given our deeply held belief in the primacy of Eucharist for the identity, continuity and life of each parish community, we may well need to be much more open towards other options of ensuring that Eucharist may be celebrated. Several responses have been discussed internationally, nationally and locally

    • ordaining married, single or widowed men who are chosen and endorsed by their local parish community

    • welcoming former priests, married or single back to active ministry

    • ordaining women, married or single

    • recognising Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church Orders

    While we continue to reflect carefully on these options we remain committed to actively promoting vocations to the current celibate male priesthood and open to inviting priests from overseas.”

    If he was sacked for what he wrote in his Advent letter about the possible ordination of women, married priests, and recognition of other orders ‘Rome willing’, there would have been no need for Archbishop Chaput later to make his visit and his report. And let’s remember that Morris had published a clarification of his pastoral letter on his website saying:

    “In my Advent Pastoral Letter of 2006 I outlined some of the challenges facing the diocese into the future. In that letter I made reference to various options about ordination that were and are being talked about in various places, as part of an exercise in the further investigation of truth in these matters. Unfortunately some people seem to have interpreted that reference as suggesting that I was personally initiating options that are contrary to the doctrine and discipline of the Church. As a bishop I cannot and would not do that and I indicated this in the local media at the time.”

    But then again if he was sacked for matters detailed in Chaput’s report, we are left wondering why Chaput being apprised of the Advent letter and having completed his visit would have told the Diocesan Chancellor Brian Sparksman how extraordinarily surprising it would be if Morris were to be sacked. As they drove back to Brisbane after the visitation, Chaput told Sparksman, ‘I would be astonished if you were to lose your bishop.’

    The matter is a complete mess reflecting very poorly on a Church that prides itself on a Code of Canon Law that provides for the protection of the rights of all Christ’s faithful, including priests and bishops.

    I imagine it is still not possible for Pope Francis to apologise for the wrong done to Bishop Morris and the diocese of Toowoomba. The Roman Curia and its mindset would at least have that much of a hold over him. But wouldn’t it be a grace for everyone, including those who perpetrated the wrong if he did?

    Bill’s book highlights especially through the process suggested by the group in Toowoomba  — that a report be commissioned from retired Justice William Carter and the subsequent canonical report by Fr Ian Waters – that Bishop Morris was denied natural justice. As William Carter said at the Brisbane launch, ‘Scripture abounds with references to justice and to our need to ‘act justly’ in our personal lives. Show me the law or doctrine that exempts the pope and the cardinals three from compliance with this same requirement in the circumstances of a case like this? This is why this book had to be written

     

  • Michael Kelly SJ. The banality of evil

    Denial has many faces. Some of them are necessary. If any of us entertained what might befall us each day and the harm we could come to, we would never get out of bed. But denial also has corrosive and destructive effect if we deny the facts of our experience or refuse to be honest in questioning our own behavior.

    Watching Scott Morrison behaving like an outdated school master in telling asylum seekers what their fate is to be, as reported with the original video in the The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/25/morrison-asylum-seekers-should-go-home-or-face-very-very-long-detention is about as complete an example of one human being bullying and brutalizing others as you need to see.

    But what makes it even worse is the abject failure of the Minister to realize that this is not just Australia’s problem but one shared with many countries in the Asian region which needs a regional solution – something in the Australian Government’s power develop.

    Witnessing such inhumanity is not a pretty sight. It’s not so much that such behavior is the work of some calculating monster. Scott Morrison is just following Government orders and telling Australia’s armed forces and immigration officials to do the same.

    The dehumanization involved in such behavior echoes what exercised Hannah Arendt said http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt when she witnessed first hand the Jerusalem trial the Nazi mass murder, Adolf Eichmann

    A Jewish escapee herself from a Nazi camp in France, Arendt earned the opprobrium of Jews around the world for her assessment of Eichmann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

    She thought that the common understanding of Eichmann had missed the most important fact. What upset most of her critics was her claim that anti-Semitism was not the primary motivation for his villainy.

    After observing Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, she formed the view that the man was a simple mediocrity, a bureaucrat with nothing more than ambition to progress through the Nazi hierarchy to motivate him and a complete absence of any sense of personal responsibility for the heinous acts that filled his days.

    Arendt came to believe that ideologically based interpretations of his behavior and motivation greatly exaggerated his significance and capacity and missed the most obvious fact about Eichmann: he was simply a nobody who became somebody through being part of something which just happened to be the SS murder machine.

    Far from being the monster he was made out to be, Eichmann was an instance of what Arendt called “the banality of evil.”

    His condition is something that extends well beyond the obvious infamy of Adolf Hitler and the determination of Heinrich Himmler to provide the “final solution” to the “problem” of the Jews.

    She explained the conclusion she came to about Eichmann’s banality in terms that she learnt from her professor, lover and mentor, Martin Heidegger, who described human beings as human beings if they can connect head and heart in searching thought.

    The absence of that connection is the abject inability to connect human passion and reflective thought in consciousness. The self-conscious and objective evaluation of actions according to a standard of good and bad, right and wrong defines the difference between humans and animals.

    Eichmann failed the test because, as he repeatedly said, he was “just following orders” and accepted no personal responsibility for the moral quality of the orders. In other words, Eichmann was not smart or even very efficient. He was just a bureaucratic automaton.

    Minister Morrison is getting and giving orders. He is following his orders that come from Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Cabinet. The Coalition endorses them and the Labor Party has complied with them. The military and Departmental officers are implementing a set of orders that consign 30,000 people to life destroying experiences that are justified by being “policy”.

    It’s the banality of it all that fails to raise objections from enough Australians to see the policy and the orders changed. We know what Hannah Arendt would say. But spare a thought for Harold Macmillan a British Prime Minister in the 1950s and ‘60s who observed in the 1930s that when the Establishment is of one voice about anything, you can bet they’re wrong.

  • All at sea again.

    Lt Gen Angus Campbell, the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders is at it again highlighting the policy and political achievements of the Coalition government on asylum seekers rather than sticking to his last, and ensuring that Australian naval vessels don’t stray into Indonesian waters.

    Gen. Campbell says that as a government employee, he doesn’t comment on government policy. But apparently he has no constraint about commenting when it suits him. He declines to comment when there are embarrassing political questions. He then says they are ‘on water’ matters.

    On Tuesday this week at a speech to the Royal United Services Institute of NSW  he made two political points as reported by the Guardian.

    The first was that Australia was among the top three nations resettling refugees, according to the UNHCR. That is technically correct, but it is quite misleading. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

    There is a UNHCR resettlement program which resettled 88,578 refugees in 2012. We were ranked third behind the US and Canada in this program. This is a useful program but it is quite minor when set against the total refugee problem. In 2012 there were 15.4 million refugees in the world. There were another 28.8 million displaced persons. The numbers would have increased since then particularly with the disasters in Syria and Iraq.

    Of the 15.4 million refugees in 2012, the top five hosting countries were Pakistan 1.638 million people, Iran 868,000, Germany 590,000, Kenya 565,000 and Syria 477,000. Australia ranked number 49 in the world in hosting 30,000 refugees. Taking into account our population, we had a world ranking of 62 and on a wealth/GDP basis, we were ranked 87. That is all a long way from the third ranking that Gen. Campbell tells us about. His claim just does not bear close examination when we consider the total problem.

    The second thing that Gen. Campbell said to the Royal United Services Institute was that the policy that he was implementing in OSB had saved lives. He estimated that without OSB, up to 180 more people might have been drowned.

    Is he really suggesting that the purpose of OSB is to stop drownings? It may be a consequence but it is not the objective of OSB. The objective of OSB as Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison cannot help telling us is to ‘stop the boats’. It is not to stop drownings. Gen. Campbell’s public relations gloss is designed to hide immoral and cruel policies. If it was about saving lives at sea, the government would be nominating him for a human rights award.

    The Director General of UNHCR, Antonio Guterres, has recently spoken of our ‘strange’ phobia about boat arrivals when we ignore the 8,000 plus asylum seekers who come by air each year and, in world terms, the few asylum seekers that come to Australia. As with refugees, Australia ranks well down the list in the number of asylum seekers coming to our shores and seeking protection. That is one of the benefits of our remoteness. In 2012 the five top countries receiving asylum seekers were Turkey 325,000, Jordan 136,000, Lebanon 135,000, South Sudan 101,000 and France 98,000. Australia ranked number 20 with less than 30,000 asylum seekers coming to our shore either by boat or by plane. In relation to our population our world ranking was down at 29 and in relation to our wealth/GDP we ranked 52 in the world.

    We are nowhere near as generous as Gen. Campbell suggests in trying to justify the immoral policies which Australia is pursuing and which he is helping to implement.

  • Bill Van Esveld. Dispatches: What’s in a Name? A lot, in the West Bank.

    Is it occupied, disputed, or contested? Some are finding it hard to find the right words to describe the West Bank.

    In a move widely seen as an effort to demonstrate its pro-Israel bona fides, Australia’s attorney general said on June 5 that the Australian government would stop referring to East Jerusalem – which is part of the West Bank – as “occupied” territory. Attorney General George Brandis explained the change was being made because the term is “freighted with pejorative implications,” relates to “historical events,” and is “neither appropriate nor useful” to “describe areas of negotiations” in the peace process. On Twitter, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu welcomed Australia’s statement, calling “eastern Jerusalem” an “area in dispute” and condemning “the chorus of hypocrisy and ignorance of history” around the issue.

    Australia’s announcement sparked substantial criticism in its domestic media. Meanwhile, in the United States, mainstream media outlets frequently choose to avoid the “occupied” label, even though the US government officially regards the West Bank as “occupied.” The New York Times, in an unrelated article on June 6, referred to the entire West Bank as “contested” territory, while MSNBC’s Hardball recently aired a graphic about “disputed” territories.

    Regardless of whether “occupation” and “occupied” are considered pejorative, they relate to a broadly recognized and specific international legal standard. Whether or not a territory is occupied is a legal question determined by facts on the ground: under laws of war dating back at least a century, territory is occupied when a hostile army has established and exercises authority. It is important to get this right because the international law of occupation, codified in The Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, places certain obligations on the occupying power toward the local population and the territory’s resources. Of particular importance in the case of Israel, the Fourth Geneva Convention, which Israel has ratified, makes it a war crime for an occupying power to transfer parts of its population to occupied territory, as Israel has done in facilitating the growth of its settlements.

    The Israeli government’s position is that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to the West Bank, because the territory was not the sovereign territory of a state party to the Geneva Conventions (Jordan) at the time Israel occupied it. However, not only has Israel’s interpretation of the convention been universally rejected, it is also at odds with the convention’s purpose of protecting people under the rule of a hostile military. To our knowledge, every court, foreign government, agency, and international body that has addressed the issue – from the UN Security Council to the International Committee of the Red Cross – refers to the West Bank as occupied territory. In fact, in scores of judgments, Israel’s own Supreme Court has applied the law of occupation to determine the lawfulness of actions by Israeli forces in the West Bank.  For decades, it has ducked review of the legality of Israel’s current settlements policy.

    So when the Israeli government or others assert that the West Bank is “contested” or “disputed” territory, it’s worth remembering that these terms have no recognized legal meaning, and are nothing more than an attempt to avoid the laws that govern Israel’s military rule there. As a general rule, when an occupying power complains that the term occupation doesn’t apply to its situation, journalists and policymakers should take a deeper look.

    Bill Van Esveld is an Israel and Palestine researcher at Human Rights Watch.

     

  • Emily Howie. Australia’s dangerously close relationship with Sri Lanka..

    In March 2014 the United Nations Human Rights Council established an historic and long-awaited international investigation into war crimes and human rights abuses committed during the final phases of Sri Lanka’s civil war. The resolution is widely regarded as an important step towards reconciliation and peace. In addition to establishing a mechanism for examining past violations, including the deaths of 40,000 to 70,000 civilians, the resolution establish critical monitoring of the serious ongoing human rights situation in Sri Lanka.

    Whilst the UK Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed the resolution as a “victory for the people of Sri Lanka,” the Australian government stunned many observers with its vocal opposition to the resolution.

    Australia is not a member of the Council so it could not vote on the resolution. Nonetheless, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, said she was “not convinced that the resolution’s call for a separate, internationally-led investigation, without the co-operation of the Sri Lankan Government, is the best way forward at this time.” She said that the resolution did not properly acknowledge the economic growth and progress in Sri Lanka or the brutality of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

    Bishop’s comments put Australia directly at odds with some of its closest allies – the United States, UK and Canada – who supported the resolution.  Surprisingly, her comments aligned Australia with countries known for their obstructionist approach to the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council.  You could have been forgiven for thinking she was accidentally reading from the notes of the Russian, Chinese or Iranian foreign minister.

    Australia’s opposition to the Human Rights Council’s investigation aiming to achieve justice and reconciliation in Sri Lanka is counterproductive, short-sighted and extremely disappointing.

    Sadly, this position is consistent with Australia’s deteriorating approach to human rights in its foreign affairs with Sri Lanka. The Australian government claims that “engagement” with Sri Lanka, not “isolation,” is the best way forward.

    However, in reality Australia is now so closely engaged with, and dependent on, Sri Lanka to conduct border control, that Australia is increasingly unwilling to criticise Sri Lanka on any account, even when it comes to some of the most serious human rights abuses in our region.  The close relationship puts Australia at risk of violating its international human rights obligation of non-refoulement.

    A dangerously close relationship

    To understand Australia’s unprincipled position on Sri Lankan war crimes it is necessary to consider domestic Australian immigration policy.

    In the last two years over 8000 Sri Lankan people have arrived irregularly in Australia by boat and Sri Lankan authorities claim to have blocked a further 4500 people attempting to leave. These arrivals were just some of the record number of boat arrivals to Australia during that time.

    The Australian Government’s obsession with ‘stopping the boats’ and its reliance on Sri Lanka to help block people from leaving their country is the root cause of Australia’s position on accountability for Sri Lankan war crimes.

    This is nothing new. In September 2013, Australia elected a new, conservative government led by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, however the previous Labor government formalised Australia’s close ties with Sri Lanka years earlier.

    Since 2009 Australia has forged a dangerously close relationship with the Sri Lankan military and police as part of Australia’s measures to prevent asylum seekers from arriving on Australian shores.

    In March 2014 the Human Rights Law Centre published a report, Can’t flee, can’t stay: Australia’s interception and return of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, detailing the way in which Australia encourages, facilitates and resources Sri Lanka to block its people from leaving the country as a part of Australian border control and anti-people smuggling operations.

    Australian Federal Police officers currently work inside Sri Lanka with their Sri Lankan police counterparts to prevent boat departures. Sri Lankan police had no “illegal migration” surveillance capacity at all until Australia established it for them in 2009.

    Australia also provides around $2 million dollars in material support to the Sri Lankan navy each year.  Recently Australia provided two patrol boats to the Sri Lankan navy to assist with on-water surveillance and interception.  Australia also shares intelligence with Sri Lankan security forces to aid the interceptions.

    Mr Abbott now describes Australia as having “the closest possible cooperation” with Sri Lanka.

    Australia’s efforts at ‘stopping boats’ are jeopardising the ability of Sri Lankans at risk of persecution to gain access to safety and asylum. The most recent data on Sri Lankan boat arrivals to Australia indicates that between 50% and 90% of Sri Lankans who flee are found to be refugees.

    Australia’s support for the Sri Lankan security forces’ interceptions increases the likelihood that Sri Lankan people fleeing persecution are exposed to torture and mistreatment. Australia is well aware of the serious human rights situation in Sri Lankan and the brutal track record of its partners. The Sri Lankan Navy is part of the military now being investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. The Sri Lanka Police have a long and well-documented track record of torture and mistreatment in custody, including the rape of men and women.

    Refoulement

    These risks are compounded by Australia’s domestic policy of forcibly returning Sri Lankan boat arrivals in Australia without properly assessing their refugee status or monitoring their safety on return.

    Australia has forcibly returned over 1100 Sri Lankans who arrived in Australia since October 2012.

    Australia’s Immigration Minister has made it clear that his preference is for Australia to return all Sri Lankans arriving by boat.

    This means that despite evidence that the majority of Sri Lankans arriving by boat are genuine refugees, Australia bases its treatment of Sri Lankans on the politically expedient assumption that they are economic migrants.

    Australia uses a so-called ‘enhanced screening process’ for Sri Lankans that arrive by boat. Enhanced screening is a truncated assessment process in which detainees have no access to a lawyer and no independent review of the decision is available. It is a flimsy short-cut and a grossly inadequate way to handle what are potentially life and death decisions. Sri Lankans have a legal right to have their protection claims heard properly – instead Australia subjects them to a less rigorous process and thereby exposes them to harm on return.

    Australia claims that no returnees have been harmed upon return to Sri Lanka, however there is no monitoring of returnees sufficient to allow Australia to make that assessment.

    The Human Rights Law Centre obtained documents through freedom of information that show one instance where the Australian High Commission in Colombo received a complaint that a returnee had been “severely tortured.” In that case the Australian Federal Police officer based in Colombo declined an invitation from the Sri Lankan police to meet with the complainant to assess his well-being.

    This kind of monitoring is woefully inadequate considering the gravity of the complaints made. It also raises questions about the Australian government’s assertions that nobody has been harmed on return.

    Other Commonwealth nations

    Australia is not a member of the Human Rights Council, although it is a candidate for membership in 2018. It is difficult to know what position Australia would have taken if it had been required to vote on the Sri Lanka resolution.

    There was not a unitary position among Council members from the Commonwealth: Botswana and UK voted for the resolution; Kenya, Maldives and Pakistan voted against the resolution, and Namibia, South Africa and India abstained from voting. Abstentions were critical in the result as the vote was 25 in favour, 12 opposed and 12 abstained.

    Abstention may have saved Australia’s relationship with its border security partner, but the new Australian government would have failed to live up to its own human rights standards.  The government’s foreign policy, at least on paper, includes taking a robust and principled approach to human rights abuses in the Asia Pacific region. Denying access to justice to victims of some of the region’s worst war crimes can hardly be consistent with that.

    Emily Howie is the director of advocacy and research at the Human Rights Law Centre. You can follow her on Twitter @emilyhowie.

     

  • Kieran Tapsell. Canon Law and the Truth, Justice and Healing Council.

    In his more than 40 blogs posted on the Truth Justice and Healing Council’s web site, Francis Sullivan, its CEO, has never, until last week, mentioned any difficulties that canon law might have posed for bishops in reporting sexual abuse by clergy to the police or in dismissing them through the Church’s own internal disciplinary systems.

    In his blog of 4 June 2014, Francis Sullivan wrote:

    “Earlier in the week I went to the launch of Kieran Tapsell’s new book Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse. This highly controversial book argues that the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has been occurring since 1922 when Pope Pius XI imposed the ‘secret of the holy office’ on all information obtained through the Church’s canonical investigations. If the State did not know about .the crimes, the Church could treat them as a purely canonical crime to be dealt with secretly.

    Mr Tapsell argues that the following five Popes continued the decree making Bishops powerless to appropriately report clerical sex abuse. I am looking forward to reading this book and getting a better understanding of the issues Mr Tapsell raises.”

    Then on 5 June, there was a media release from the Truth, Justice and Healing Council which said,

    “Francis Sullivan, CEO of the Truth Justice and Healing Council said it appears clear that canonical issues have struggled to keep pace with the realities of how to deal with clerical sex abuse cases in Australia. ‘One thing does need to be made very clear: there is nothing in canon law that stops priests or bishops reporting the crime of child sexual abuse to the police in Australia,’ Mr Sullivan said.”

    It is going to be interesting to see what evidence and argument the Church produces to support Sullivan’s assertion. The pontifical secret, a permanent silence on all allegations and information about child sexual abuse by clergy, is imposed by Art. 30 of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela as revised in 2010, and by Secreta Continere of 1974 that is specifically incorporated in footnote 41. Secreta Continere allows only one exception to the pontifical secret: the accused priest can be told about the allegation if it is necessary for his own defence. One might have thought this was implied, but canon law leaves nothing to implication with the pontifical secret. There is no exception for reporting to the civil authorities.

    In 2010 the Vatican announced that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would henceforth instruct bishops that they have to comply with all civil laws requiring reporting.  Francis Sullivan’s statement ignores the limitations on that dispensation. If there is no civil law requiring reporting (as in the case for most complaints of sexual abuse in all States and Territories, apart from NSW), the pontifical secret still applies. Dispensations under canon law have to be strictly construed.

    From 1997 to 2002, the highest members of the Roman Curia confirmed that the pontifical secret prevents reporting to the police. After the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, when accusations were made of his involvement in the cover up, the standard response by the Church was that the pontifical secret “only applies to the Church’s internal procedures”. Of course it does, but that is and was the source of virtually all its information on child sexual abuse.

    Francis Sullivan’s statement would be correct if something was added to the end of it:

    “… there is nothing in canon law that stops priests or bishops reporting the crime of child sexual abuse to the police in Australia if they saw the sexual assault on the minor.”

    Their knowledge of the matter did not then derive from the Church’s “internal procedures”, but from their own observations. But how often would that happen? Eminent canon lawyers, like Professor John P Beal, Professor Nicholas Cafardi, Monsignor Maurice Dooley, Fr Tom Doyle, and the spokesman for the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference, Martin Long, and the Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi have confirmed that the strictest confidentiality applies to the Church’s internal proceedings. Professor Beal is on record as saying that the permanent silence of the pontifical secret is so strict that it prevents the bishop from telling anyone if the priest has been found guilty or innocent. Fr Lombardi even said in 2010 that reporting to the civil authorities under the instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith must be carried out “….in good time, not during or subsequent to the canonical trial.” That may mean that if in the course of a canonical trial (which includes the preliminary investigation) the priest admitted to murdering one of his victims that could not be disclosed to the civil authorities even if there was a law requiring reporting. The Australian canon lawyer, Rodger Austin told the Maitland Newcastle Special Commission that a member of a Church tribunal would have to be dispensed from the obligation of confidentiality if required to give evidence in a civil court of what was learned in that process. Such a dispensation under canon law would have to come from the Holy See. If there was no prohibition on revealing that information, why is there a need for a dispensation?

    In his blog of 11 June 2014, Francis Sullivan wrote about preparations for the next case study and said, “The Church continues its honest and upfront approach in responding to the Royal Commission.” It remains to be seen how honest and upfront the Church is going to be about the pontifical secret when the issue of reporting is dealt with by the Commission, and what evidence it will produce to contradict senior Cardinals in the Roman Curia, five of its most eminent canon lawyers, the Irish bishops’ spokesman and the Vatican spokesman that anything disclosed in the Church’s “internal procedures” is to be kept strictly confidential.

    Kieran Tapsell is a retired lawyer with degrees in theology and law and is the author of Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse (2014 ATF Press).

     

  • Frank Brennan SJ. Why I am not just “getting over” the boats stopping.

    Some people keep saying, “The people have spoken.  The Abbott government is right.  The boats have stopped.  So just get over it.”  I am getting a little weary of this populist refrain.  I am quite prepared to accept that the majority of Australians want the boats stopped.  Then arise the questions: how can this be done ethically? How can it be done respecting the rule of law and the sovereignty of parliament and the separation of powers?  Even the second question should be of concern to all citizens, and not just lawyers.

    The historical perspective is important. The High Court struck down the Malaysia solution. Both sides of Parliament agreed that they did not want the High Court scrutinising this sort of deal again.  So it was agreed that the scrutiny would be applied ‘with a light touch’ by both houses of parliament being able to disallow any future arrangement.  At no time did anyone suggest that it be done by the Executive with no scrutiny other than the three year ballot box which is not the rule of law but populist rule of the mob.

    Both houses waved through the resurrected Pacific solution.  A year later, Kevin Rudd then decided that he could use the existing designations for Nauru and PNG as temporary offshore processing countries as the basis for a completely new arrangement for permanent offshore resettlement countries – an arrangement which has never been scrutinised by Parliament.  Imagine if Sarah Hanson Young had stood up in the Senate back in 2012 and opposed the designation on the basis that it opened the door to permanent relocation of refugees to Nauru and PNG.  Many senators and commentators would have told her to stop being so shrill and to stop following her wild imagination and that she should get back to the matter at hand.  Presumably the government thought that the High Court was locked out.  I am still not certain about that.  And time will tell no doubt when a challenge is ultimately brought.

    But meanwhile we have an arrangement designed and put in place by the Executive without parliamentary approval and without the opportunity for parliamentary disallowance.  This is a serious democratic deficit particularly when community leaders including all our bishops (and the Pope!) are questioning the morality of what is in place.

    There is an added public policy reason for seeking the parliamentary review.  The boats have now stopped.  The Abbott government is confident that the smuggling racket is smashed and that the Indonesians are now basically on side.  So the boats will remain stopped whether or not there is any one left on Nauru or Manus Island.  So what ethical or political imperative is there for keeping people locked up in such inhumane circumstances?  When the inevitable royal commission on all this is ultimately convened, we would all save the taxpayers many millions in compensation if we could terminate the gulags as quickly as possible.  If we were serious about looking after those people, we would have sent in our own military rather than contracting the matter out to inexperienced, profit seeking corporations and the well motivated Salvos.  It is imperative that our Senators on the cross benches take a long hard look at this once they are all in place next month, for the good of the detainees, and for the good of our democracy.

     

  • Persecution of Tamils.

    Last weekend Tamil asylum seeker Leo Seemanpillai committed suicide in Geelong. His colleagues are bereft as a result. They believe that he feared deportation back to Sri Lanka and would suffer persecution. Tamil refugee advocate Aran Mylvaganam said ‘the particular area where Leo is from you are automatically branded as a Tamil Tiger sympathasiser if you get deported back to Sri Lanka and Leo had genuine fears of being tortured by the Sri Lankan army and possibly even getting killed … if he was sent back to Sri Lanka’.

    The Human Rights Law Centre released a report last month in which it expressed serious concerns first about the actions of the Sri Lankan government, supported by Australia, to stop Tamils fleeing from Sri Lanka. The second concern was that Australia’s ‘enhanced screening processes’ was denying Sri Lankans access to proper refugee status determination. The report by the Human Rights Law Centre can be found at this link:

    http://hrlc.org.au/report-launch-australias-cooperation-with-sri-lanka-to-intercept-asylum-seekers-is-in-urgent-need-of-rethink/

    John Menadue

  • Mark Isaacs. The Salvos on Nauru.

    Judging the Salvation Army’s role in Nauru is difficult. Their job was to provide humanitarian support to asylum seekers in a detention centre that was established to deter desperate people from seeking protection by subjecting them to cruel conditions. The contradictory nature of the Salvation Army’s position meant they were damned by the government if they assisted the asylum seekers, and damned by their staff if they didn’t. Despite this the employees of the Salvation Army, my colleagues, showed utmost care for the asylum seekers we worked with and implemented a wide range of programs that alleviated some of the mental pressure placed upon these people This justified the need for a humanitarian organisation to act as a service provider within detention centres.

    Having said that, my introduction to Nauru highlights several issues in the Salvation Army’s implementation of their contract in Nauru that were not confined to my initial experiences, but rather became consistent, systemic failures.

    I was hired by the Salvation Army in September 2012 to work in the Nauru Regional Processing Centre as a support worker, or ‘mission worker’. The camp had been established just two weeks prior.  The Salvation Army were desperately hiring people to fly out to Nauru on four week contracts. Accounts from members of the Salvation Army suggest that the organisation wasn’t expecting the camp to be opened so quickly, that they thought they had more time to prepare.

    I was hired without a job interview and without training of any kind. I was given no concept of what work I was about to become involved in. There was no job description or mission brief provided to staff in these early days. There was no idea of what the Salvation Army hoped to achieve by accepting the contract to run the centre. There were no clear directives to the staff in how we could meet these mysterious goals of the mission that one would assume the Salvation Army had discussed before accepting the contract. There was no education provided on the type of men we would be working with; where they came from, their cultural sensitivities, the types of stories we might hear, or why they were coming to Australia. I was given no guidance on how to work with traumatised refugees, or mentally ill clients who could be, and some proved to be, suicidal. The only advice given was to ‘go out and help the men’. My experiences were not isolated. In fact, in the first deployments, the most common characteristic of the Salvation Army support workers was an inexperience in working with asylum seekers and refugees.

    The Salvation Army have since responded to these claims by stating that the role of a support worker was to ‘fulfil unskilled duties in support of the provision of basic needs for transferees’ and that ‘support worker roles typically do not require individuals to have particular skills or experience’. The Salvos also refute my claim that I wasn’t interviewed prior to being offered a position in Nauru, suggesting that a phone interview was conducted before deploying me. I would assert that this brief phone conversation was not a sufficient format through which to assess my skills for a role as important as a support worker for asylum seekers. Having said that, the role I was taking did not require me to have ‘particular skills or experience’.

    I believe that, although the Salvation Army’s motives were admirable in accepting the brief to assist some of the world’s most desperate people, the inexperience of their managing staff in working in the refugee sector was detrimental to the well-being of the men they were contracted to care for and the workers they employed to enact this task. The statement mentioned above, provided almost eighteen months after my initial deployment, either demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the needs of asylum seekers in a place such as Nauru, or an equally complete disregard for the workers’ and the asylum seekers’ welfare.

    I believe that from day one there emerged a trend of the government pressuring the Salvation Army into submission. It was a commonly accepted view amongst my colleagues that the government would argue points of contention by threatening to ‘tear up the contract’, and the Salvation Army management would toe the line. Often this was at the expense of the asylum seekers well-being and that of Salvation Army staff. Greg Lake, former head of the Department of Immigration in Nauru, states that the Salvos were contracted by the government as the lead agency in the Processing Centre. The ramifications of the Salvos inability to assume the lead agency role meant that the humanitarian care for the men suffered.

    I can support all my claims with a number of examples, but in this blog I have only space for one.

    It took the Salvation Army over a month to hire their first professional case managers whose role it was to monitor the men’s well-being, a responsibility that we were led to believe was one of the Salvation Army’s contractual obligations. Prior to this Wilson Security assumed the responsibility of welfare services. The first two Salvo case managers were expected to establish case management practices in a camp that housed over two hundred men, the numbers increasing weekly. The impracticality of my colleague’s workload became apparent when one of her clients became involved in a prolonged hunger strike. The Department of Immigration demanded a file be presented on the client, a file that did not exist. Rather than support my colleague, Salvation Army management demanded she write a case file retrospectively.

    I believe the Salvos did not do enough to defend the human rights of the asylum seekers, and that this was a disservice, not only to the men imprisoned in Nauru, but to the Australian public who could rightly assume that the presence of a humanitarian organisation in Nauru would mean that human rights would be upheld and if those human rights were being abused, then the Salvos would voice their concerns.

    In summation, I believe that although the original motives of the Salvation Army were admirable, the implementation of the ‘Nauru mission’ suffered due to inexperience, poor preparation, and the Salvation Army’s inability to defend the asylum seekers’ human rights and handle government pressure. This resulted in a far more oppressive atmosphere for inmates that could have been avoided. Furthermore, the lack of respect shown to their own employees has left many embittered against the organisation and the experience of working in Nauru.

    Having recently been employed as a case manager for an asylum seeker settlement service in Sydney, I see how organisations can work in this intricate political space of advocating for clients while still being contracted by the government, reinforcing my belief that the role of humanitarian support in these camps is essential to the asylum seekers’ welfare.

    Mark Isaacs also wrote a guest blog which was posted on March 28 – ‘Deterring boat arrivals’.

     

    Mark Isaacs is the author of ‘The Undesirables: Inside Nauru’

     

    www.markjisaacs.com

    https://twitter.com/MarkJIsaacs

    https://www.facebook.com/isaacsmark1

     

  • Hugh Mackay. Immoral acts – that’s one way to stop the boats.

    “No boats have arrived for 36 days!” That was the recent proud claim of our immigration minister, Scott Morrison, delivered in a tone that suggested we should all cheer such a wonderful accomplishment.

    In fact, given the strategies employed to achieve this result, we should hang our heads in shame. We are living through a dark period in our cultural history where politicians like Morrison are actively encouraging a dulling of our moral sense by appealing to that most dangerous moral principle of all: “The end justifies the means”.

    It’s not just this government, of course: the stain on our national conscience has been spreading for years, through the life of several governments from both sides of politics. And an odd things about this situation is that our leaders – normally so timid in the face of the polls – are seriously out of step with the majority of Australians (who, according to two reputable national surveys, favour rapid, onshore processing of asylum-seekers’ claims).

    We can tip-toe around this and speak of “human rights abuses”, or a lack of compassion, or a failure to honour our international treaty obligations. But why mince words in the face of the intentional brutality – psychological and physical – being inflicted on asylum-seekers imprisoned on Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island, by an elected Australian government? Why not call our asylum-seeker policy what it is: immoral.

    It’s immoral because it treats people who have committed no crime as if they were criminals. It’s immoral because it fails to honour that most basic of all moral principles: treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated. Even if we add the caveat “in the circumstances”, the principle doesn’t go away.

    There are many situations in which we are bound to treat people more harshly than we would wish to be treated ourselves: we do it with criminals; we do it with enemies; we do it with people we’re retrenching, or lovers we’re abandoning. But even in situations like those, members of a self-proclaimed civil society are obliged to treat everybody with appropriate dignity and respect – two ingredients glaringly absent from life in an Australian detention centre.

    Our asylum-seeker policy is also immoral because it involves bad behaviour in the pursuit of a “good” goal. Given the vast scale of the world’s refugee crisis, it’s arguable whether stopping the boats is, in fact, a morally praiseworthy goal, but let’s accept, for the moment, that it is (and stopping rapacious people-smugglers is undeniably good). Precisely because it is a good goal, everything done in pursuit of that goal must be good. If not – if we fall for the mad idea that we can behave badly in pursuit of a good goal – then we have compromised our own integrity and tarnished the very values we are claiming to uphold.

    If you embrace the idea that the end justifies the means, then you’ll be stuck with accepting torture as a legitimate way of extracting useful information. You’ll accept that bribery and corruption are justifiable ways of achieving political or commercial goals. You’ll endorse assassination as a legitimate tool of the political struggle.

    Is that us? Is that the moral framework Australians want our governments to adopt when dealing with hapless souls who arrive here, by whatever means, as asylum seekers? Are we so committed to the sloganistic ideal of “stopping the boats” that we think it’s morally okay to incarcerate such people – men, women and children – in conditions deliberately designed to dehumanise them, rob them of hope and destroy their faith in the future (including their faith in Australia as an honourable, civilised, compassionate society). Do we seriously believe this strategy can be justified on the grounds that it might discourage others from trying to come here?

    Do we think it’s morally acceptable to condemn authentic refugees to the crushing uncertainty of temporary protection visas, and to deny them the right to work here? (Economic stupidity, as well: fancy deciding it’s better to support them than to encourage them to support themselves and, in the process, make a useful contribution to our economy.)

    We have become participants in a tragedy that will attract as much opprobrium in the future as the “stolen generations” and White Australia do now. Having chosen to behave immorally, we are setting ourselves up not only for international condemnation, but also for massive compensation claims in the future and, no doubt, yet another hollow apology to the thousands of people we have abused because we adopted that tacky mantra “whatever it takes”.

    If we really want to stop the boats, we should demand that our politicians, diplomats and aid agencies find morally acceptable ways of doing so. To pursue such a difficult goal in a state of moral blindness is hazardous in the extreme.

    There’s an ironic little twist to this tale. Many Australians who support the present brutal policy seem to think they are defending “Christian values” against an invasion of infidels. But isn’t the very essence of those values that we should show kindness to strangers, offer support to the weak and disadvantaged, and succour to the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed who come knocking at our door?

    Hugh Mackay is a social researcher and author.

     

  • Elaine Pearson. Cambodia: A poor choice for Australia’s refugee resettlement

    “It’s not about whether they are poor, it’s about whether they can be safe,” Australia’s Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said in defence of Australia’s plan to resettle refugees currently housed on Nauru to Cambodia. It appears Cambodia and Australia are in the final stages of signing such an agreement.

    But is Cambodia a safe place for refugees?

    Not if you’re from China. In 2009, under pressure from China, Cambodia forcibly deported 20 ethnic Uighurs back to China. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had already issued “persons of concern” letters to the Uighurs—most had fled China for Cambodia after July 2009 protests in Urumqi that the Chinese authorities brutally supressed. We know some of those returned to China have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

    Not if you’re from Vietnam. Human Rights Watch has long reported on the forced return of Khmer Krom activist monks straight into the hands of Vietnamese security services. Cambodian authorities have used the threat of forced return to Vietnam to stamp out any activist activities, preventing monks from forming, joining or meeting with local Khmer Krom groups, distributing bulletins, or participating in protests.

    Cambodia is not particularly safe if you’re Cambodian. Freedom of expression, assembly and association are under regular attack, while corruption is rampant. Let’s hope no resettled refugee end up in Cambodia’s courts, where matters are decided by bribes and political influence, not law and facts. Decades of authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Hun Sen have empowered Cambodian security forces to commit abuses such as killings, torture, and arbitrary detention with impunity. Those especially vulnerable include government critics, activists, journalists, and those living on the margins.

    Human Rights Watch has documented the arbitrary arrest, detention and mistreatment of “undesirables” housed in squalid detention centres run by the Ministry of Social Welfare, where beatings and rapes by guards continue with impunity. Where will the refugees Australia sends away be housed, and which Cambodian ministry will be responsible for their care and integration? What freedoms will these asylum seekers have to live where they please and get education or find jobs?  How long before the authorities might consider them “undesirables” as well?

    These are among a long list of questions that the Australian government has avoided, stonewalling on the specifics of what the agreement will entail.

    Another key question is what has the Australian government offered Cambodia in return for agreeing to resettle refugees? Cambodian officials deny being offered money, though it is hard to believe there will be no economic benefit to Cambodia.

    When Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison made recent visits to Cambodia, they failed to speak publicly about the serious human rights concerns there. Hun Sen, in power for 28 years, has not of late had to worry that Australia would be a regional critic of his series of flawed elections and a coup and a long history of human rights abuses.

    Australia sold out human rights in Sri Lanka, appeasing the Rajapaksa regime and protecting it from international criticism rather than trying to protect Sri Lankans from abuses by their government. Ostensibly, this was in order to “stop the boats” of Sri Lankans coming to Australia, and ensure Sri Lanka’s cooperation in sending Sri Lankans back home.

    Australia should not make the same shameful mistake with Cambodia. Hun Sen may have maintained a grip on power for decades, but opposition is growing. Australia should not discount the voice of the opposition which has strongly condemned using Cambodia for Australia’s refugees.

    Cambodia is one of the few Asian countries that is a party to the Refugee Convention. Yet it has long made a mockery of its refugee commitments.  Australia should help Cambodia become a rights-respecting, safe and stable place — but the best way is by holding the government to account for its abuses while providing capacity-building assistance.

    Australia needs to stop setting a bad model for the region by shirking its obligations. What incentive is there for countries in the region to ratify the Refugee Convention, when they see Australia and Cambodia render signatures meaningless through their actions? Australia’s policy of sending asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea and Nauru for months on end with no long-term prospects has been bad enough. When detainees are considering “voluntary returns” to war-torn Syria, then we know how limited their options are.

    Australia needs to end the suffering and indecision on Manus and Nauru, but not by sending people to Cambodia. Rather, it should do what’s fair and right by abiding by the long-standing principle that refugees are deserving of a durable solution. Australia should take the responsibility to examine asylum seekers’ claims, return those found not to be in need of protection, and integrate refugees who cannot return to their home countries.

    Australia, not Cambodia, has the capacity to restore their rights and enable them to become productive and self-sustaining contributors to their host country.

    Elaine Pearson is Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. 

  • Michael Kelly SJ. Why Protestants are more popular than Catholics in China

    Questions abound over the recent vicious actions of the Chinese government towards Christians in the prosperous Zhejiang Province just south of Shanghai. The actions of the government during the fortnight after Easter against both Protestants and Catholics are unprecedented in recent decades and, justifiably, have received world attention.

    As with all actions in a country as vast as China, whose government could never be accused of transparency, it is difficult to discover who is making the decisions and what they hope to achieve. But one issue that has surprised many people outside China is both the size of its Christian population and the ruthlessness, born only of fear, that the government’s violence displays.

    A recent claim by a US-based Chinese academic to London’s Telegraph newspaper – that China would have the largest Christian population in the world by 2030 – was not only exaggerated but also factually wrong. Will Brazil (200 million Christians) and Nigeria (85 million Christians), for example, simply stop producing Christians in the next 15 years?

    The reality is that no one knows how many Christians there are in China. In fact, there’s good reason why Christians do not declare their growth. Just look at what’s happened in Zhejiang in the last fortnight, where the growth of the Christian community has been declared “unsustainable” by the authorities who have command of assessments of the “sustainability” of faith communities.

    Put your head up as a Christian in China and it will be cut off. Catholics have maintained a standard figure for their own numbers for three decades. It was 12 million in 1980, 12 million in 1990, 12 million in 2000 and – surprise, surprise – it was 12 million in 2010. No one in any religion declares real figures in China. It only attracts government attention and then persecution.

    That there is a massive growth spurt among Christians in China is indisputable. What has not been addressed is what has made the exponential growth among Protestants possible, far outstripping the growth among Catholics.

    But it’s not something the officials know anything about because they have such a rudimentary and uninformed view of what Christianity is that they are the last to know what’s happening. For example, only the Chinese government thinks that Protestants and Catholics are separate religions.

    They are two of the five it recognizes along with Buddhism, Islam and its homegrown religion, Daoism. No one else in the world thinks Protestants and Catholics are anything but parts of Christianity.

    Whatever one is to make of the uninformed view that the Chinese authorities have, Protestant Christianity is growing far more quickly and extensively than Catholicism. Why?

    Maybe the Chinese authorities have something to tell us. After Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949, China was established along lines that the Communists learned about from their then friends, the Soviet Union, and the real maker of 20th Century Communism, Vladimir Lenin, the founder and first father of the Soviet Union.

    The Chinese Government manages religious groups through the Religious Affairs Bureau, a department of the Communist Party’s United Front organization for controlling the country’s disparate movements, groups and institutions such as Protestants and Catholics.

    The Catholic Church in China, divided as it remains, is caught: its strength is its weakness. Everywhere in the world and with local variations in China, its universality (with an accepted pattern of worldwide relationships), its institutions (parishes, seminaries, welfare services, publishing houses), its statuses (clergy and religious) and its ceremonies (the sacraments) are visible and remain the continuous and coherent identifications that draw or repel membership and participation.

    In a Communist country, they are an easy target for a Leninist administration intent on detailed control. And then, when some comply with government structures while other Catholics see those acting in such a way as cowardly and cooperating with the enemy, many form the view that rather than complicate their lives, they leave the established and regulated Church well alone.

    The same applied to Protestant denominations and was institutionalized through the three self- movements (self–government, self–financing and self-propagation; or no foreign missioners). This approach run through the United Front’s Religious Affairs Bureau captured the attention and controlled the practices of Protestant Christians throughout the People’s Republic.

    But the recent explosion in Protestant Christian numbers has happened outside this rubric. Most of the buildings, churches and Christian gathering points have been built on local initiative without government authorization. And most of the communities around the often triumphalist buildings that have been damaged or demolished in recent times in China began life as small communities of little more than a dozen people – gathering in friend’s homes outside the net of government supervision.

    Protestant Christianity, in contrast to the institution-based approach to community building familiar to Catholics, has thrived on its nimble, light-footed and adaptable response to local opportunities. In China, it has grown out of small communities sharing prayer, Bible study and videos at home or in a work place. At times, Christian businessmen and manufacturers have workplace Christian groups that form and meet for prayer and Bible study on their business premises.

    Meeting all over Eastern China in clusters of no more than 12, groups gather for what Catholics would call primary evangelization. Two-hour Bible study programs conducted over two to three months and often aided by a Chinese version of the Alpha Course provide a neat and compact way to introduce Christianity. The Alpha Course is a 12-part video series first created by an Anglican priest in London, Nicky Gumble, that has gone worldwide and has a Catholic version.

    These groups are unencumbered and unregulated by the Religious Affairs Bureau. Multiply the dozen members of these groups by thousands of such small groups in homes and work places and you reach hundreds of thousands pretty quickly. But when you get to that scale, as China has in the last 20 years, it’s not long until you need a larger, dedicated building – a church. That’s where these emergent communities have run into the brick wall of the Religious Affairs Bureau and the fear that the entire Chinese political leadership has had of any group, especially a religious one, that it can’t control.

    Fr Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com and is based in Bangkok.

  • Refugees to Cambodia

    ​The Australian government appears to have struck a deal with Cambodia to house 100 refugees in exchange for a massive increase in foreign aid. But Cambodia is far from a safe place to settle.

    (more…)

  • Simon Rice. Racial vilification, social values and humility

    I have spent a professional lifetime trying to get people to know about (let alone respect) anti-discrimination law, and suddenly everyone knows about ‘section 18C’.  For all the wrong reasons.

    A right reason for knowing about 18C would be because it is offers guidance on what can fairly be said and done on the basis of race.  A wrong reason would be because it is characterised as an unwarranted limit on ‘free speech’.

    For close to 20 years, the limits imposed by 18C have been unremarkable. The Australian Human Rights Commission receives and resolves complaints about conduct that exceeds the limits, and the federal courts decide cases when the complaints cannot be resolved.

    As with any legal regulation, awareness of 18C, and understanding about how it works, has grown over time. But most importantly, 18C, as with any legal regulation, stands as a statement of public values, a declaration by the government, on our behalf, of what is and is not acceptable in society.

    For close to 20 years we have told ourselves and the world that an Australia value is to not tolerate race-based words that cause harm.  Brandis has declared that not only we will tolerate such words, but we will encourage them.  So the 18C debate is about much more than the unremarkable exercise of setting limits on free speech.  It is, as well, about the role of our representatives in articulating public values and, relatedly, about the place of legislation in expressing those values.

    Public values change, and law needs to change with them, though it often lags behind. When there is sufficient public momentum a government acts to reflect popular will by making, amending or repealing a law.  In the current racial vilification debate, ‘free speech’ has been promoted as an Australian public value that is overly-limited by 18C, and that should now be given greater prominence.

    Has the time come to resile from the values that are expressed in 18C? It is hard to see anything that suggests that Australian values have reverted to a time when racial abuse was permissible.  Despite the Attorney-General’s notorious defence of our right to be bigots, there is no evidence that a large number of us actually want to express bigotry any more than 18C allows.

    The ‘free speech’ rhetoric is, in fact, a claim to ‘free racist speech’, and the Racial Discrimination Act allows a great deal of free racist speech; persistent reference to 18C overlooks the wide exceptions available in 18D.  We are very free to engage in race-based speech in Australia; as Richard Ackland asked ‘what is it that these people really want to say about race, colour, etc, that they are currently chilled from saying by the anti-free-speech RDA?’.

    The one celebrated case when someone wanted to say something about race, but failed to do so within the exceptions in section 18D, was Andrew Bolt’s.  If it was not for that case, and News Limited’s determined attack on 18C as a result, we would not be having this debate, and our racial vilification law would have continued doing its work.

    Senator Brandis invites us all to engage in racist speech.  When your child comes home from school dismissing ‘boongs’ as lazy and ‘towel-heads’ as terrorists, she can say that Senator Brandis told her that she has the right to be a bigot.  This type of ‘leadership’ is unworthy of an elected official, let alone Australia’s first law officer.

    Specifically, Brandis’s amendments to 18C invite anyone to say anything about anyone, under the guise of ‘public discussion’.  Perhaps it is the contemporaneous announcement of the reintroduction of knights and dames that makes me wonder whether Brandis’s idea of public discussion is still in the 19th century: a town hall meeting or a Hyde Park soap box.  These days, very little is not ‘public discussion’.  Media such as websites, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and tweets enable the public promotion of ideas and opinions as never before.

    The contemporary unregulated, unbounded world of public discussion gives the lie to those who disdain government regulation and would rely instead on the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a way of regulating speech.  The brave new world of public discussion is undiscerning in the relative prominence it gives to speech: in the absence of any guiding principles, vicious and hateful opinion is as ‘valid’ as that which is respectful and affirming.

    There is, therefore, no ‘exchange’ as there might be in a market, no mechanism for evaluating opinion; online, everything has a claim to credibility.  There is no ordered exchange of opinion.  Opportunities for debate are limited, most of what ‘said’ remains untested and unchallenged, and it is implausible to claim that opinions will thrive or fail on merit. 

    This unregulated space suits those with the capacity to exploit it, to make the loudest noise, and to dominate.  Politicians and news media corporations have that capacity, and 18C stands in their way.  They attack it because they can, and they (wilfully?) fail to see and respect the power they have. Without the quality of self-restraint, they are able to say that something should be done simply because it can be done. Without the quality of empathy, they are able to say that causing offence doesn’t matter. And without the quality of humility, they are able to decide what level of racial abuse people should live with.

    While politicians and news media corporations have the power to dominate public discussion, racial minorities do not.  Although the backlash against Brandis’s proposed amendment of 18C has been substantial, it comes largely from those who receive 18C’s protection – that is, from those who are on the receiving end of race-based conduct, particularly migrants and indigenous peoples.

    Our social minorities, who look to the government for protection in a majoritarian ethos, now find that their government promotes a right to oppress them.  In this perverse situation, it is vital that members of the majority stand against their colleagues, and stand by the state’s obligation to protect the vulnerable who are under its care.

    Simon Rice teaches law at the ANU. He is the Professor of Law, Director, Law Reform and Social Justice, ANU College of Law. He is also Chair of the ACT Law Reform Advisory Council. 

  • Michael Sainsbury. Tables have turned on China’s ex-security chief

    The imminent purge of Zhou Yongkang, China’s security chief from 2007 to 2012, brings to mind that wonderful Chinese expression: “The fish rots from the head down”.

    Since the major clearout after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Zhou is now the most senior Communist Party official to be fingered by its internal affairs division, the Central Discipline Committee. He is the first former member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) to be cast out by the Party. His case has implicated a reported 300 allies and relatives with total assets of US$14.5 billion.

    Zhou is the star victim of Chinese leader’s Xi Jinping’s showy, constantly publicized anti-corruption campaign. Zhou’s trial will be all about money and corruption, designed to showcase that Xi Jinping the reformer – who has promised to catch ”tigers” like Zhou as well as “flies”(lesser officials) is cleaning house in a ruthless and spectacular way – and at least officially – for all the right reasons. His campaign is the biggest in China’s history, yet it is destined to head precisely nowhere without political reform.

    China must start at the very beginning with the establishment of rule of law, independent institutions such as the judiciary and financial regulators, as well as de-politicizing the police force and armed services. But Xi has already very clearly ruled that out.

    Really, this is all about politics. In one way Zhou, the stony faced veteran of the oil and gas industry – his power base – was unlucky to be on the wrong side of the ledger when Bo Xilai, the former Politburo chief, went down in a mess of lurid tales of infidelity, poisoning and – yes – more corruption. Zhou wanted to back Bo into his old job but Xi cut it from the PBSC, which he trimmed from nine under Hu Jintao to just seven.

    Yet Zhou’s fall has, more than many who have simply fallen to internal politics, been apposite. He was the prime mover behind the overriding policy of the Hu regime’s “stability maintenance”, a euphemism for crushing protest and dissent by any means possible.

    Simply put, Zhou is a mass murderer. On his watch, thousands of people were executed by China’s pretence of a legal system, where judge, jury, prosecutors and police are presided over by the Communist Party’s Legal and Political Bureau, which he chaired during Hu’s regime.

    We will never have any clue as to how many more Chinese citizens were knocked off by the country’s terrifying State Security Bureau, the country’s feared secret police who operate in a government-sanctioned zone of extralegal kidnapping, torture, evidence fabrication and murder.

    Zhou has fallen victim to the same due process-free sham. He was last seen in public on October 12, after which Xi is reported to have ordered an investigation of him and his cronies. Under Zhou’s leadership, countless people were jailed without fair trial, and on the basis of flimsy or doctored evidence and with pre-ordained results. Let’s see how he likes it once he is on the other side of the fence, handcuffed and manacled – guilty until you are found guilty.

    It’s interesting that Jiang Zemin, who backed Xi as leader and was the man at the nation’s helm for 13 years (1989-2002) as China’s crony capitalism flourished, was reported in the Financial Times this week to have urged Xi to tamp down his anti-corruption drive. No surprises there. After all, no one wants the other old blokes in their weekly card game in some swanky state-owned palace locked up.

    Another of Zhou’s notable achievements in his reign of terror was presiding over the oppression of minorities and government critics. Together with Hu Jintao, Zhou was chiefly responsible for the post-July 2009 campaign of terror and oppression (and cultural destruction) waged against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. It continues today – as does the ongoing oppression and cultural destruction of Tibet.

    Zhou persecuted without fear or favor campaigners for all manner of basic human rights. Just to take a couple of examples, religious practitioners – in particular, “underground” evangelical Christians – and people living with HIV caused by government officials knowingly buying infected blood and supplying it to hospitals.

    Zhao locked up Chen Guangcheng, a blind advocate for the ending of state-sanctioned forced abortions and sterilizations. As soon as he came out in protest, he and his family were put under particularly oppressive house arrest until his miraculous escape to the US embassy in Beijing and later his emigration to the US.

    More generally, Zhou presided over a system that persecuted any advocates for peaceful and gradual change of a system that allows all of the above (such as incarcerated Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo). Anyone operating in that dangerous grey zone could get that knock on the door from one of Zhou’s boys any time, any day. It was not just these people that Zhou set out to destroy but their partners, children and parents.

    Thousands of hard working business people who had the misfortune to cross the financial interests of a Party member suffered helplessly as years – sometimes decades – of hard work was destroyed or confiscated, all on Zhou’s say-so.

    On Zhou’s watch the size of China’s domestic security surpassed at least officially that of the People’s Liberation Army. That in itself speaks volumes about both the repression in Communist China and how long the Party can hold on.

    By pulling off this long expected but as yet not officially announced removal of a Party member previously considered untouchable, Xi has stamped himself as China’s most powerful leader since at least Deng Xiaoping. He’s made some progress (The destruction of Zhou is not progress; in fact, quite the opposite. It is reminiscent of Mao’s own purges.) but the jury is still very much out on whether he will wield power wisely.

    For all of Xi’s boasting about the campaign against corruption, as long as the Party remains in control it will continue on its paranoid, willful and violent way. Zhou in many ways is the ultimate product of a system whose biggest threat is the very system it created.

    The vilification of Zhou will be directed by the Propaganda Department in China’s state-run press, which once lavished Zhou with gushing praise. Now when you read eye-popping tales of 30-car garages, bulging Swiss bank accounts, villas worthy of America’s antebellum South and the endless stream of perfumed mistresses decked out in designer Versace, remember that Zhou, like others who were singled out for destruction before, was hoisted on his own petard.

    Then spare some time to think about his victims – casualties of a rotting Party that encourages and sanctions evil people like Zhou Yongkang in order to continue to serve more of the same. Don’t for a moment think that this has anything to do with the people.

    Michael Sainsbury is a Bangkok-based journalist and commentator who writes for www.ucanews.com