Ben Saul has written an article for the New York Times about the imprisonment of 52 people in Australia for up to nearly five years without trial. Secret evidence has been presented against them. They have no prospect of release.
Read the full article from the New York Times by following the link below.
Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.
John Menadue
http://sydney.edu.au/news/law/
The recent decision by the NSW Government to evict pensioners and low-income tenants from the Rocks in Sydney highlighted for me the importance of mixed communities and shared experiences.
We all benefit in society when we have shared experiences. We can then get to know other people’s aspirations and their problems. We invariably find that we have much more in common than we think. We benefit both as individuals and as a society.
Why should only one part of society, the wealthy, enjoy harbour views? Why should a mixed community that has lived for so long in one area be destroyed with low-income tenants forced out whilst the wealthy join other wealthy to enjoy harbour views and the attractive lifestyle that goes with the Rocks.
In shared experiences we are drawn in two ways. One inclination is to live in pleasant and attractive areas that are often composed of people like ourselves with the same incomes and even the same ethnic backgrounds. But we also know that we benefit from shared experiences with people who are different. Our most important shared and common experiences are in times of natural disaster – bushfires and floods which tear away social class. We are in the emergency together and we find great satisfaction in banding together. Many older Australians recall the common hardship of the Depression, the War and rationing. For Britishers, the bombings and air raid shelters brought people to a ‘common experience’. Despite the hardships and the danger, there was satisfaction in those common experiences. The fabric of society and trust in each other was strengthened.
As Ian McAuley in ‘Dissent’, November 2012, has pointed out, the British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall wrote in 1949 about ‘common experience’ as an essential ingredient for good citizenship. This common experience is a richer notion than social inclusion. Unfortunately social exclusion by the wealthy is becoming as serious a problem as social exclusion of the poor.
It is not just the Sydney Rocks that is being pulled apart. Our health and education institutions discourage the mixing of social groups and denying common experience.
Ian McAuley points out that government subsidies to private health insurance discourages the well-off in the use of public hospitals. Because PHI, particularly for people on the high tables, is used almost entirely to fund treatment in private hospitals, government policy subsidises a form of social exclusion and discourages common experience. It also encourages many articulate people to opt out of support for public hospitals knowing that when they need hospitalisation, they can turn to private hospitals.
The trend in the denial of common experience is even more obvious in education. In the 1950s, 75% of Australian children attended public schools. Most of the other 25% went to Catholic schools which had a similar social, if not religious, mix as public schools. Now only 65% of students attend public schools. This trend is even more pronounced in secondary schools where just over 60% of secondary school students are in public schools. This proportion is even lower in early grades of secondary school. And this trend away from common experience in public schools is accelerating despite the fact that there is no evidence that private education secures better outcomes. It will take many decades of Gonski to reverse the unfortunate and divisive trends that are occurring. Common experience in schools is being eroded.
As more and more middle class and articulate parents opt out of public education, a tipping point will arise where it will be hard to ensure public support for public schools. That tipping point is approaching
Just as the government subsidies to PHI has driven social exclusion in hospital use, so in education government funding is being skewed in favour of the privileged in private schools. The concept of common experience is being steadily eroded.
We are also seeing this denial of common experience in our built environment. In my blog of November 28, 2013 “there goes the neighbourhood” I drew attention to the way that some communities are being sundered by the wealthy excluding themselves from common experience. They have private pools within minutes of superb public beaches, private entertainment systems, high walls,roller doors and CCT to keep themselves from a common experience with neighbours. Even when public transport is reasonably available, children get driven to school in private cars.
It is claimed that these developments in our health and educational institutions and in our built environment is justified on the grounds of choice. But choice is often a one-way street available only to those with high incomes. What choice do the low income tenants in the Rocks have about where they are going to live?
We all know that common experience in national disasters and volunteering brings a sense of togetherness, community and shared humanity. We must nurture institutions that promote sharing and common experience. The most critical is shared experience in schools and education.
We need institutions and a built environment that cut through social class. That is the path to shared experiences.
The more we turn our back on common experiences the more our citizenship and society is impoverished.
It was sad and painful, and no satisfaction, sitting at home in front of a computer, watching a senior prelate stagger around, wounded and bleeding. I sat glued to the screen, mesmerized, fiercely proud of our legal system, and watched a prince of the Church in humble street-clothes being tormented.
George Pell, Cardinal Archbishop, sat there day after day, an image of King Lear, a broken man, weary, slow and incompetent, a man who had spent his life climbing the greasy clerical pole, now at the tail-end of his life, being forced to answer questions and to confront his conscience, summoning hollow logic to assist in his defence, thrashing about blaming others, constructing academic distinctions, trying to exculpate himself and deflect the load which will inevitably be heaped upon him. His private secretary, Dr Casey, Mr John Davoren, the elderly man and ex-priest who used to be in charge of the healing service of the archdiocese, and Monsignor Brian Rayner, his former chancellor – all muddlers, all incompetent and unable to provide an accurate version of events, while he was macro-managing the show with his hands off the wheel. The board of any public company would have long since called for the resignation of its CEO.
His time in Sydney was at an end and the cardinal was heading off to the Vatican to take control of a bank in trouble and of the finances of a giant, international organization. Let’s hope he asks more questions over there than he did at St Mary’s. He was in charge. He was the boss. The orchestra was under his direction. At the beginning of the hearing, even years before, Pell should had put his hands in the air and confessed. “I made bad choices. Very bad. Me. I received bad advice and accepted it. I allowed wounded people to be tormented. They were my mistakes – and they have had truly awful consequences.”
As the days wore on and the archbishop grew tired, I began to understand a little of how the man’s brain worked. Slowly. Some confusions. Circles and dead-ends. Non sequiturs. Fending off blows, protecting himself. Appeals to trivial logic in the face of catastrophe. I could see how he came to be a man-made climate change denier, why over the years he had not given a lead on the many ethical and moral issues which were confronting our nation, why he had led the English-speaking world back to the old, fossilized and awkward formulae of the Mass, why he had not even mentioned the name of Father Ted Kennedy when he opened the Jesuit school for aborigines in Redfern, why he was unable to comprehend that his placement of Neo-Cats in Redfern had been a mistake and needed to be remedied, why he had not inspired his Sydney brethren to faith and action, why he had failed to engage the general community and had preferred to identify with the conservative, reactionary forces of times now past. He was dull. Colourless. Distant. Pugnacious. Yesterday’s man. Some might even say dumb. Now, for a few days, we were able to look behind the figure on the plinth, observing a king without his finery, seeing the man behind the frills and furbelows. It was frightening to see how the system worked – and riveting.
Not so long ago, the cardinal had been on television complaining that his Church was being singled out, treated unfairly by the mass media, picked on and persecuted, and stating that in comparison with other institutions, his organization was not doing so badly in the pedophile stakes. He quoted figures and percentages. Until recently, he just hadn’t got it. Maybe he still hasn’t. But in the witness-box, he was prepared to criticize his blind brothers in the Vatican. They were even slower and duller than their clerical counterparts in Australia. The team in Rome, against all advice, still thought that the pedophile scandal was largely a conspiracy perpetrated by enemies and haters of the Church. In the end, one can only conclude that the guys in Rome must be really dumb if they are thicker than the ones we have been in charge here.
From his evidence, it was clear that Pell was desperate to regulate the outflow from the Church’s financial dam of assets. He wanted to remain in charge of the show. After all, the Roman Catholic Church was different – powerful, independent, international. A history going back centuries. Its own language, structures, legal system, customs and practices. Tax exemptions and immense political influence. She has always been treated as special.
The cardinal thought that the proper tariff for something like the effects of pedophilia was somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars. A hundred thousand was far too much. The $750,000 later being claimed by Ellis in his court case was simply ridiculous. Let’s keep this in perspective, and in our own back-yard. We can contain the damage. One of his major jobs was to conserve the assets of the Church.
But the complaints, the claims and the outrage was always going to break out into the real world. It was naïve and silly to imagine that this scandal, causing profound and lasting damage, was not going to find its way into the public arena. Wait until the secular courts of the real world begin to make just awards in the millions. Whoever advised Pell of the appropriate tariff for these claims was a buff-head.
I was amused to watch the interplay between the secular and the sacred, to see a member of the judiciary and his foot-soldiers enforcing the values of compassion and justice on one of our religious leaders. The archbishop was insisting on the Church’s rights before the law, on proper legal process, on legally acceptable avoidance mechanisms, on forensic niceties, while the secular, judicial arm of government kept taking him back to the message of Jesus and the Temple money-changers. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world…..” A hard lesson to learn at the top-end of one’s life, confronted with a message you had preached for years from the pulpits of two major cities. The institution and the prelate in charge were on the rack, quizzed by the state’s Torquemada as he explored the implications of the message of Jesus and of a life well lived. The red slipper was supposed to be on the other foot.
But what should the archbishop have done? How could he have redeemed himself just days before he was abandoning his flock to take up a cushy appointment in the Holy City?
It would have been difficult and humiliating, especially for a cardinal, but the moment he entered the witness-box and swore the oath to tell the truth, he should have looked the viewers, the commissioner and all Sydney-siders in the eye and told them that he was truly ashamed of what he had done, of the choices he had made, the instructions he had given and leadership he had provided.
“I am truly ashamed. I have proved to be a slow learner, as my brother bishops also have been. I have neglected my duties, grievously. I turned my back on the needy. To the wounded, I failed to show understanding and compassion. I was deaf to the message of the Gospel that I preach. The damage had been caused by my Church. It was my responsible to do all I could to support the victims and remedy the scandal. I failed. Even now I am just at the start of a troubling journey. Insight is beginning to dawn. So late. I am beginning to get it, but for me it has been a slow and painful process, and my mistakes have compounded the damage. Before leaving my people to continue my life in Rome, I want to spend the remaining few days exploring the possibility of reconciling with the Fosters and with Mr Ellis who have suffered unspeakable heartache. I am hoping they will show more compassion, more generosity to me than I was prepared to show them. I want to go to them humbly, cast myself on their mercy and seek their forgiveness.”
Maybe he can do it. Sincerely, I hope so, for their sake, and for his. But the signs were not favorable. When he left the box at the end of his evidence on Thursday, the archbishop walked past Ellis without even a friendly glance of recognition.
Pell exposed himself before the commission as the prize muddler par excellence. A tragic figure. I positioned myself at the back row of les arenes, and watched the commissioner and his cool, analytical counsel-assisting teasing the witness, delivering wounding blows at will, drawing blood, playing with their prey, delaying to the end their final thrust into the very heart of an old bull already mortally wounded, standing beaten and defense-less in the centre of the ring.
Farewell George Pell. We wish you well in Rome, in the twilight of your career. I am sure that Sydney was not exactly what you had expected, and that there is still more to come before you’re finished.
Chris Geraghty is a retired NSW District Court Judge and formerly a Catholic priest.
“So we convince ourselves every cruelty we’ve inflicted – beginning with sabotaging boats along the Malaysia coast under Malcolm Fraser – isn’t a reflection on us. It’s tactical.”
I was surprised and disturbed by this sweeping statement from David Marr in theguardian.com on 5 March. It unfairly casts a pall over the great success of Australia’s Indochina refugee program led by the Fraser government and the role of the immigration officials involved.
From 1978 to 1980 I was based in Malaysia as Coordinator of Australia’s refugee resettlement programs in South East Asia. Prior to that fulltime roll I lead several short term missions to Guam and the East coast of Malaysia to offer resettlement in Australia to Vietnamese refugees. I have also served as private secretary to Ministers for Immigration in the Whitlam and Fraser Governments.
From this vantage of involvement at the highest levels of government and at the coal face of refugee selection and resettlement, I am confident that no directions to sabotage boats were given to Australian immigration officers by people in authority and that no boats loaded with refugees were deliberately damaged by our officials. Though, I believe we may have disabled several empty boats to prevent their reuse to “push off” people who had already arrived on other vessels.
I understand why some people may be confused on this point because we often spoke publicly about the need to “stop the boats”. But far from resorting to sabotage as a tactical response, our strategy was to conduct a sizable, caring and efficient resettlement program under a Comprehensive Plan of Action with the countries of SE Asia in co-operation with the US, Canada, France, the UK, New Zealand and ourselves.
From the start, all resettlement countries wanted to discourage refugees taking very long and risky journeys across open seas in unsuitable craft. We all wanted refugees that were fleeing Vietnam on small boats to be landed in neighbouring first asylum countries into the care of the UNHCR. Australia and other countries had already agreed to treat all such people as refugees. This meant we could offer resettlement without first having to determine individual status under the UN Convention.
From the fall of Saigon in 1975 until the first half of 1978, those setting out from Vietnam to cross the South China Sea were mostly rural ethnic Vietnamese. They travelled in small owner skippered fishing boats that were usually reasonably seaworthy.
If our immigration officers came across any of these people as they arrived along the Malaysian coast they would try to counsel them to disembark and await an offer of resettlement. Most heeded that advice, but a few pressed on. At the same time, some local Malaysian officials would insist they keep going if their boat was seaworthy and in some instances resorted to towing them back to international waters.
Being owner fishermen and competent seamen the Vietnamese were very reluctant to disable their own boats and would keep going if pushed off. Some made it to Darwin but most broke down en route and ended up in makeshift camps in Indonesia. It is difficult to believe them allowing Australian officials to sabotage their boats. Indeed I have been unable to corroborate such a suggestion among surviving officials who served in Malaysia during this period.
All this changed rapidly from mid 1978 as arrivals increased dramatically. This next, far larger wave of departures consisted of urban people who paid corrupt officials and middlemen for their passage. They were predominantly ethnic Chinese who were crowded into vessels in numbers that made their journey highly dangerous. For example, a small vessel that would have carried 15‑20 Vietnamese could be packed with 100-130 ethnic Chinese in appalling conditions. Understandably they were almost always desperate to disembark at first landfall, be that in Thailand or Malaysia. Their wretched, cramped conditions and not infrequent encounters with pirates en route fuelled fears about being forced back to sea, which in turn encouraged them to scuttle their boats as soon as they reached coastal waters or if they were intercepted by Malaysian patrol boats. In any case, very few boats were able to withstand the coastal surf and most broke up within hours of beaching.
UNHCR was very slow to gear up as arrivals skyrocketed and this created great frustration within the Malaysian Government, which was increasingly worried by the growing concerns evident among Malays living in kampongs along the east coast. Malaysia soon reacted by closing all mainland camps (except for the transit centre in Kuala Lumpur) and designating Pulau Bidong, an uninhabited island, as the site for a major holding camp for arriving refugees. This created huge logistical difficulties for all resettlement countries, made worse by continuing UNHCR shortcomings.
Malaysian patrols were also subsequently increased with orders to stem numbers landing in Malaysia by intercepting boats further offshore and deflecting them south. This led to a rapid build-up of refugees landing in the Indonesian Anambas Islands where the local population was quickly overwhelmed as more and more makeshift camps developed. Australia was among the first countries to organise resettlement from these new remote camps.
Far from calculated cruelty, our approach to people leaving Indochina was generous and fair. It certainly did not include sabotage of small boats crowded with refugees.
Despite the many difficulties, we made a significant contribution through resettlement. It was made possible through close cooperation with regional countries in a strategy that balanced their requirements and the demands of refugees with our own need to maintain public support at home.
Whatever has happened since then, at the time of these policies it was a watershed for Australia. As John Menadue said in an earlier blog, “in accepting 150,000 refugees from Indochina …… Malcolm Fraser broke the back of White Australia”. Australia is a better society for it and I am grateful I had a role helping achieve that outcome.
Wayne Gibbons was the Co-ordinator, Australian Indo-Chinese Refugee Resettlement Program. He was later Deputy Secretary, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and Deputy Secretary, Department of Employment, Education and Training. He was also the CEO of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Azita Bokan was on Manus Island as an official Iranian interpreter during the recent violent clashes. What follows is an edited version of her interview by Richard Glover on ABC Radio Sydney on 21 February 2014.
I came to Australia some 27 years ago and am a proud Australian. My father was a writer and had a newspaper of his own. He was imprisoned in Iran as a political prisoner for his anti-government views. I escaped Iran and was forced to wait three and a half years in Turkey for my turn to migrate to Australia. At the time Turkey was unsafe and dangerous, rife with smugglers, drug dealers and organised prostitution but I had to wait there alone as a little child without a family. I was very grateful to Australia for rescuing me as a refugee which was why I recently enlisted to assist the Department of Immigration in its efforts to protect Australia’s borders.
I was previously in Nauru and it is bad, but the situation on Manus is simply horrendous – the heat, the physical conditions, the malnutrition [mostly raw red meat without any vegetables] leading to diseases of many different kinds, and so much more. Oral hygiene is almost completely absent and what dental treatment is available results not in remedial attention but in the detainees having their teeth pulled out without anaesthetic. Most upsetting of all is the absence of anything for the inmates to do day after day and the fact that they mostly sit in dirt looking out to the surrounding fences, which have resulted in personal suffering with deep mental conditions which I can only describe as psychological numbness. When I became aware of this situation, my immediate reaction was that I would prefer to be dead than to live in a camp like this for a day.
Until the recent troubles, I saw and heard no unruliness or misbehaviour still less violence on the part of the detainees. In fact I could not believe their calm patience, waiting seemingly for better days to come. They told me that they had been warned by departmental officials that if they misbehaved in any way or that something goes on their files suggesting that they were or might be troublemakers, their cases would not be processed and they would not be allowed access to lawyers.
Then on the Sunday morning, with all of them holding onto the hope that they would one day get out of that hell, they were told by departmental officials that they will never see Australia, that no third country was volunteering to take them, and that because if its awful economic situation PNG would never be able to assist them.
Despite the fact that most of the Iranians were well educated and their leader was a PhD who was against any protest or uprising, that news became a catalyst for the first real reaction among the inmates. Two guys climbed a fence even though there are many fences, each one further away than the others, and absolutely no chance of escape. The men had no weapons so they threw fruit at the guards, mostly peaches. The response of the guards was to use rocks and metal legs of dismantled tables destined for junking to attack the detainees. Some of the detainees may have thrown back the same rocks at the guards.
On the Monday morning, we interpreters were told that there was no work for us as no lawyers were being allowed to enter and only the medical team was being admitted. After some delay, some of us were in fact allowed in to assist the medical team and from a distance of 6 or 7 metres, I saw one detainee pushing another guy in a wheelchair. The wheelchair guy was “brain dead” – his mouth was distorted, one arm was hanging down and he could not pull it back up. One of the guards called out to the man pushing the wheelchair – “Get out, get out!!!” The guy pushing the wheelchair held tight to the wheelchair and refused to let go. In very broken English, which I did my best to translate, he said that the guards had killed his mate the previous night and he did not trust them with the wheelchair man. He said he was going to stay with him in the medical room to wait for his turn with the doctor.
Because of my efforts to interpret, the guards turned on me and accused me of interference and of sticking up for the detainee. This was nonsense as all I was doing was interpreting what he was trying to say. The man said to me that he feared the guards would kill the wheelchair guy if he left him. I offered to the guards that I would push the wheelchair or that they could get someone from the medical team to do so. There were many guards there at the time and one or more of them pushed me away and jumped on the guy pushing the chair. He was strong and would not let go of the wheelchair until 7 of the guards threw him to the ground and held him down. I pleaded with the guards to stop the violence but they and others in the pay of the Government turned against me.
When my attention was again drawn to the guy in the wheelchair, I could see there was blood all over him. There was a needle in his arm as if for a drip but his arm was bleeding and there was no drip attached to it. No nurse would have done something like that. His head was injured, he had no eye movement and his mouth was hanging to one side. He was just hanging like a piece of meat. Any human being would want to help a person in that state.
I remonstrated with the guards. I said that you cannot do this to people to whom you owe a duty of care. These people paid everything they had to a people smuggler, they put their lives on the line coming through a difficult journey. Many of them lost loved ones on the way yet they somehow got to Australia. Now you shift them to the most dangerous place in the world away from the media and from the eyes of good hearted Australians. I cannot believe that Australians support what you are doing to these people. You are killing them.
This outburst had me escorted out and treated worse than a criminal. I knew I would lose my job but I refused to let them do such awful things in silence in the name of Australia so that people elsewhere can think of Australians as a violent people intent on killing innocents.
While I was sitting in the interpreters’ room waiting to be deported myself, I heard the sound of shooting and a lot of noise and disturbance. So I went up on the roof where I saw some horrendous things. There were many people badly injured. I saw one man who had no brain, and nothing on his neck. His skull was crushed. Another man had his throat cut and a doctor was trying to push a tube through the hole in his neck but there was too much blood coming out. He could not find the man’s lung to get the fluid out while telling someone else to pump air in. I actually heard the doctor say that he was very tired after three days of constant work. I come from a country that went through a violent revolution. I have been through a war. But I have never seen anything like this. It was barbaric.
I am for stopping the boats and the people trafficking but I want Manus and Nauru closed and the people treated properly. Australian taxpayers are paying a fortune to the Governments of Nauru and PNG to have these terrible camps in their countries. People who cannot pay their mortgages are funding these other Governments for this sinful activity. Bring them to Darwin or other places on the Australian mainland where we have ample facilities to house them. Those who are found not to be refugees should be sent back to their homes. But those who are genuine refugees should be introduced gently to the Australian way of life and culture and then into the community.
The politicians do not like to admit they are wrong but they have made the wrong decisions here. I appeal to them – please be honest with yourselves. You have children and families. What would you do if your brother’s throat was cut? What if your children were starving, without water or showers, and standing in 50 degree heat? What if they are dehydrated, have diarrhoea vomit every day? Where are your consciences?
In April 2009 Dr Fan Yafeng was sacked from his job as a legal researcher at a prestigious think tank, China Academy of Social Sciences.
It’s not that he was no good at his job – to help the country’s government formulate its constitutional and religious policy. Rather, it was that he was an openly proselytising Christian, a member of a Protestant house church and signatory of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for fundamental changes in China including an independent legal system, freedom of association and the elimination of one-party rule.
Fan was sanguine about this turn of events when I met with him a few weeks later. Sadly his optimism was misplaced. In December 2010 he was detained by police and eventually released into “house arrest”. Since then none of his friends have been allowed to speak to him, and he has no telephone or internet access.
Fan was a victim of the increasingly tough “social stability” policies of China’s Communist Party, instituted under past leader Hu Jintao – who cut his teeth quelling riots in Tibet.
Since Hu was replaced in 2012 by Xi Jinping, a man feted around the world as an economic reformer, the environment for independent-minded Chinese keen to improve their country has actually deteriorated.
In almost three years Fan has not been charged with any crimes, yet he is treated like a criminal, stripped of any right to associate or move freely. He remains trapped by the state, in a particular form of hell.
Fan is but one example of countless people across the country who have the temerity to stand up for their beliefs. They are under one of many forms of house arrest, Fan’s being one of the most severe, held in custody for months and sometimes years on end, or put on trial in a system where rule of law is a joke and secretive Party committees tell judges how to act.
When Xi ascended to the country’s top job, Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, he promised to end the endemic corruption that he and his predecessors have said is the biggest threat to the Party’s future.
Xi also cut the number of people in the very top echelon of leadership, the Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, from nine to seven, in the process removing the Party’s top security chief.
At the time, these moves were seen as encouraging and Xi, together with Wang Qishan, a widely respected Politburo member who was named chief of the Party’s Central Discipline Committee, has waged an ongoing battle against corruption inside the party.
Extravagant gifts and banquets have been banned and – living up to his promise to get “tigers” or senior officials, as well as “flies” or junior cadres – many senior officials have been arrested.
Yet the campaign against Party corruption is increasingly seen as Xi crushing dissent to his rule inside the Party. Among those arrested is former Politburo Standing Committee member and security chief Zhou Yongkang, along with many of his inner circle, most of whom were senior executives in State Owned Enterprises in the energy sector, removing one clique presumably to be replaced by another.
Zhou was close to Bo Xilai, a disgraced and jailed former Politburo member, leadership aspirant and one-time colleague of Xi’s.
Just how truly self-serving and hypocritical Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has quickly become is writ large in the case of Dr Xu Zhiyong, a “rights defence” lawyer, known in Chinese as weiquan, who is now serving a four-year jail sentence for “gathering crowds to disrupt public order”.
I met Xu, a sharp minded, friendly young lawyer with a PhD in law from Beijing University, in 2009 only days before his previous arrest on dubious tax evasion charges directed at the organization he then ran, the Open Constitution Initiative. Despite being bundled into a car after a knock at his door at 5pm on July 29, 2009 and kept in detention for almost a month, Xu was undeterred.
After admitting to the tax charges he was released – some reports claim after pressure from US President Barack Obama during his visit to China – and he began working away on a bigger project, the New Citizens Movement, that he founded in 2012.
Of his trial Professor Jerry Cohen, one of the world’s experts on the Chinese legal system, said this in the South China Morning Post on January 29:
“Was Xu’s trial ‘in accordance with law’? Certainly not. In many respects, it violated the ‘law’ – but not the practice – of China. Indeed, it made a mockery of the recent speeches by President Xi Jinping and leaders of the Supreme People’s Court emphasizing the need to prevent further wrongful convictions by requiring verification of evidence in open, fair court hearings.”
While Xu is perhaps the most high profile case of the increasingly rough justice meted out to those the Party fear, he is far from alone. Scores of people have been rounded up under Xi and there is now no doubt that censorship has been ramped up and “dissent” is being crushed ever more ruthlessly from every angle.
There is a method to the madness of the Chinese “justice” system. Organizations with strong and often opaque networks that run across provincial and social/economic lines, with networks that may be co-opted for political purposes, reduce the CCP to a state of paranoia.
This is why religious organizations and those who promote them like Dr Fan continue to be targeted. The wildly popular, and ultimately too well organized, quasi-religious Falun Gong with their penchant for mass meetings, was another to fall foul of the CCPs fears.
Xi and the Party’s aim in targeting people like Fan and Xu is not a Maoist-style pogrom, it’s just the latest in a long line of bullying tactics meant to enforce the primacy of the Party and increasingly, the powerful families – such as his own – whose interests are now intertwined with the organization. The age-old mix of money, power and politics have lead many observers to describe China as a “mafia state”.
In a new book, exiled Chinese writer Yu Jie has taken this to its logical conclusion. The man who ridiculed former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in his 2010 book Wen Jiabao – China’s Greatest Actorhas turned his pen to the current leader in a new book Godfather of China, Xi Jinping.
The New York Times recently reported that one Hong Kong publisher, Yiu Mantin, was arrested while on a visit to the mainland late last year and subsequently declined to be involved in printing Yu’s book in the supposedly independent city, while a second has abandoned plans to publish after threatening phone calls.
You get the idea.
Michael Sainsbury is a freelance reporter who worked for five years in China with The Australian and now writes for www.ucanews.com.
The idea of Cambodia as a so-called offshore processing centre is not new. For a nanosecond I recalled the former government contemplated Cambodia as a likely candidate for an offshore processing centre. Thankfully saner heads prevailed, although to their discredit they did also contemplate East Timor.
The scramble to avoid doing the decent thing and accept our responsibility to process asylum seekers quickly and fairly is mind-boggling. This government is following in the questionable footsteps of the former government in shirking decency for short-term political gain.
Just consider the countries we are using for off shore processing or the one, Cambodia, now being considered.
According to the CIA publication The World Fact Book 2013, Australia’s population of 22.2million has a life expectancy of close to 83 years, a GDP per head of $US 42 000 We have 3.85 doctors available for each 1000 people and by international comparisons negligible poverty. Compare this with PNG which has a GDP per head of $US 2700, a life expectancy of 66 years, where 37% of the population live below the poverty line and where there are only 0.05 doctors per 1000 .In Cambodia the statistics show the following for a population of 15.2milllion: life expectancy 63 years, GDP per head $US 2400, and where there are 0.23 doctors per 1 000 population and where 20% of the population live below the poverty line.
We live in different worlds. Not only should we be embarrassed. We should be ashamed to think that this is even considered.
If we were truly serious about regional security and building a sustainable and dynamic regional economy and societies then we would not be offshoring our responsibilities for a small proportion of the world’s asylum seekers. We would not be decreasing our aid efforts in poverty alleviation, health and education as we have done to the tune of $250 million in the Asia Pacific region while “bribing” poor, politically unstable countries to take asylum seekers for an unknown number of years.
The Foreign Minister cited the Bali Process as justification for the approach to Cambodia. It is a disingenuous characterization of the Bali Process to see an arrangement with Cambodia as consistent with recent Bali Ministerial communiqués that endorsed the concept of regional processing centres. It would do the government well to know how such arrangements worked in the Comprehensive Plan of Action under the Indo China program to understand how regional governments might view such arrangements now.
It would also diminish the Bali Process if the Government uses it as merely a people smuggling forum and not actively support the development of the broader regional arrangements that Bali Process governments have endorsed in recent years and which address in a more holistic way both the people smuggling dimensions of population movements as well as protection and support arrangements for displaced people. Admittedly such arrangements are not “quick fixes” but in the long run are more sustainable and realistic. The pity is that Australian governments seldom have a long-term strategy in mind and are limited by their lack of imagination, the political cycle and fear of an electoral backlash.
In 2012 there was an answer in the proposed arrangement with Malaysia that the Abbott Opposition rejected because it suited them, not because they really believed it was wrong but because they did not want the former government to succeed in “stopping the boats”. Well, now that the Abbott Government has succeeded in that they should be big enough to revisit the Malaysia arrangement. It should see if it can be salvaged, make the necessary legislative changes and get on with the job. That arrangement was sound, it was humane, it was supported by the UNHCR and importantly it addressed the issue of displacement “in situ” unlike the arrangements on Nauru, PNG or indeed if it happens Cambodia. None of these are countries of transit or in any appreciable way countries of first asylum. Indeed with the current arrangements we are exporting those problems to them!
If the two parties were really serious they would do what two previous Governments, the Fraser and Hawke governments did when faced with similar issues and talk to each other, agree on a way forward and show leadership by dealing with these issues not as a political free for all that creates social disharmony but rather as a responsible and humane approach to address the circumstance of vulnerable people displaced by war and civil unrest.
Arja Keski-Nummi was First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship from 2007 to 2010.
An asylum seeker who comes to our shores must be protected. We cannot offload that responsibility onto another country. We continue to carry a responsibility for that asylum seeker whatever happens in Manus, Nauru or even Malaysia.
I have not always held the view that those who come to Australia could be transferred and processed in another country. I changed my mind on that partly because of the rapid increase in boat arrivals after the Agreement with Malaysia fell over in2011. The large number of boat arrivals was reducing public support for a generous and humane refugee program. I came to the view that what was important is that asylum seekers are treated with humanity and that the process is fair and just. The issue of where that processing occurred was a secondary issue.
I also supported the proposed Malaysian Agreement for two other reasons. I saw it as part of an important building block in regional cooperation. Secondly, the UNHCR was actively supporting the proposed arrangement with Malaysia. The UNHCR does not support the transfers to Manus (PNG) and Nauru and the processing in those countries.
Unfortunately the agreement with Malaysia was made impossible by the combined support of the Greens and the Coalition in the Senate to block amendments to the Migration Act. The action of the Coalition in the Senate was supported by refugee advocates across Australia. It was quite extraordinary to hear Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison along with refugee advocates criticising human rights abuses in Malaysia. No country is perfect, including Australia in mandatory detention, but the position of asylum seekers in Malaysia would have been a long way ahead of what is now unfolding in Manus and Nauru.
The collapse of the Malaysian arrangement was the turning point. We have been on a slippery slide ever since. Boat arrivals quadrupled as a result of the High Court decision and the collapse of the Malaysian arrangement. Policies by the Labor Government and the Coalition since then have been punitive and cruel. The result has been Manus and Nauru.
In my blog of January 14, I pointed out that the UNHCR has a long history of support for the transfer of asylum seekers in appropriate circumstances. Late last year the UNHCR issued a ‘Guidance Note on Bilateral and Multilateral Transfer Arrangements of Asylum Seekers’. It set out clear conditions, including important issues of non-refoulment and protection of the rights and the safety of asylum seekers in the country to which they were to be transferred.
In the Melbourne Age on 13 December last year, Arja Keski-Nummi and I outlined a system of ‘effective protection’ that should govern any transfers of asylum seekers in our region. We set down several important criteria.
Clearly few of the conditions have been met in the arrangements with PNG and Nauru. Importantly, the UNHCR does not support our arrangements with either country.
Just as importantly, the Australian Government is failing to accept its responsibilities to asylum seekers that we have transferred to PNG and Nauru. We cannot offshore our responsibilities for ensuring effective protection and safety for asylum seekers. After demonizing asylum seekers for so long I don’t think the Coalition Government cares about the human rights of asylum seekers. Their rights, even their lives are just unfortunate and embarrassing collateral damage
The horror on Manus is only one part of the havoc that Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have wrought. They have badly damaged our relations with Indonesia. Their actions have resulted in the collapse of the rule of law in Nauru. And they are responsible for the release of details of 10,000 asylum seekers that will now be eagerly accessed by security agencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. What an opportunity it will be for those security agencies to now hunt down the families of asylum seekers who have fled to Australia from oppressive regimes in those countries.
How ironic it now is that China is rebuking us for our abuse of the human rights of asylum seekers.
One thing the ALP in Parliament should do immediately is move to incorporate the principle of “effective protection ” in the Migration Act. It would clearly express the responsibility we have for persons transferred to another jurisdiction. We could then not shirk our responsibility by passing the buck to others.
It is now over thirty years since the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew described Australians as the “white trash of Asia”. The barb stung and is still recalled with shame and hurt by Australian politicians as then Prime Minister Julia Gillard did in 2012.
But the term has reached a new level of accuracy with the current Australian Government led by Tony Abbott who has degraded Australia’s relations with China, Indonesia and Timor Leste close to their lowest points in decades with one piece of diplomatic ineptitude and insensitivity after another.
White trash is a derogatory American English term referring to poor white people, especially in the rural South of the US, suggesting lower social class and degraded standards. The term suggests outcasts from respectable society living on the fringes of the social order who are seen as dangerous because they may be criminal, unpredictable, and without respect for authority whether it be political, legal, or moral
While the deafening “stop the boats” mantra of the Abbott Government, with muscle supplied by the defence forces in Operation Sovereign Nation, gains all the media attention in Australia and throughout the Asian region, a policy shift introduced by the Government on refugees and asylum seekers has gone almost unnoticed.
By accident this week, and despite the Government policy of “no speaks”, I discovered something new – to me anyway. Almost since the day they arrived on the Treasury benches, the Abbott Government has found a new way of persecuting victims.
In Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s armory now is a rule that anyone who arrived by boat in Australia is unable to sponsor any other refugee or asylum seeker.
Thanks to information provided to me this week in Bangkok by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), I discovered that a Sri Lankan family that has been waiting for resettlement for THIRTEEN YEARS and finally got accepted by Australia, had their visas revoked because relatives who reached Australia by sea were sponsoring them.
I was speaking with one of the legal team at JRS, Kathryn Smyth, because of some Pakistanis I am helping with their application for refugee status. In response to a request from a Jesuit friend in Pakistan, I am effectively “in loco parentis” for five (soon to be six with a birth expected in April) refugees whose only crime in Pakistan is that they are Catholics.
They were forced to flee following events where they were beaten up, shot at and given the popularly administered death sentence that comes with accusations of blasphemy.
With Kathryn, I was checking some of the documents I’ve prepared for these people and she told me again in graphic detail something I know too well: that even if they got the first of three interviews with the UNHCR today, they would most likely not get the second interview till January 2016.
And then there’s a further year of waiting for the UNHCR’s adjudication followed by an unknown wait till a country accepts them for resettlement.
I said “Yes, yes, I and they know about it” only to be told of the casual vindictiveness of the Abbott Government in its merciless treatment of people adjudged by the UN to have “a well founded fear for their lives on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion”.
There are literally thousands of refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand. The UNHCR can’t cope with the scale of demand that the troubles in Pakistan and Afghanistan are presenting them with. When a refugee lands in Bangkok, they register with the UN for consideration of their case.
Many of the refugees and asylum seekers in Bangkok are like my friends – Christians fleeing the terror of the blasphemy laws introduce President Zia Ul Haq who was assassinated in 1988. Those laws allowed Muslims to allege that anyone had been blasphemous by insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Summary execution of the accused is then allowed with no action taken by police or Courts to bring the murderers to justice.
For refugees arriving in Bangkok, it takes between three and six months to get to first base – and initial consideration that allows the applicant to be scheduled for an interview about their case that takes at least two years to happen.
And in the Thai capital, there are currently 3,100 in that category of applicants trying to get to first base. There are many thousands more in the line waiting for the interview two years hence. They live on a pittance, patiently doing all they can do – wait!
For the Sri Lankan family I mentioned earlier, where do they go after 13 years waiting, finally getting acceptance only to have the prize ripped from your grasp? Perhaps the Australian Government has done them a favor. Who’d want to live in a place that treats human beings this way?
White trash, as mentioned, live beyond the common standards of decency and respect for human dignity, and through their assessments and actions degrade the common humanity we share.
As an Australian, I regret to say the country’s performance in Asia deserves the description that Prime Minister lee gave us long ago.
As with so many other things on the sex abuse issue, the Holy See’s response to the findings of the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child is conspicuous for its failure to acknowledge the central issue raised by that Committee: pontifical secrecy imposed on the Church’s investigations of child sexual abuse by clergy.
The Vatican spokesman, Fr Lombardi complained that the Holy See provided ample written responses under the Convention, but the Committee did not take “adequate account of the responses, both written and oral”. Lombardi makes the gratuitous comment that the report suggests “that it was practically already written, or at least in large part blocked out before the hearing,” as if the Holy See’s responses were knock out blows to the matters raised by the Committee. He then claimed that the Committee did not understand “the Holy See’s responsibilities”. He said, “Are we dealing with an inability to understand, or an unwillingness to understand? In either case, one is entitled to amazement.”
The really amazing thing is that Lombardi does not seem to have understood that the Holy See itself had shifted its position from what he had stated on 5 December 2014, that the Holy See was only responsible for the protection of children within the 44 hectares of the Vatican City – the children of the Swiss Guards.
The Committee’s Report was blunt about that claim: “By ratifying the Convention, it (the Holy See) has committed itself to implementing the Convention not only on the territory of the Vatican City State but also as the supreme power of the Catholic Church through individuals and institutions placed under its authority.” That power comes through canon law, a subject that Lombardi avoids mentioning.
On 16 January 2014, the Holy See’s delegates in Geneva, Archbishop Tomasi and Bishop Scicluna were prepared to answer questions about the Holy See’s worldwide responsibility. They were even prepared, reluctantly, to produce some figures on how many priests had been dismissed since 2005 for child sexual abuse out of the 4,400 the Holy See had been investigating since 2001. These priests were not abusing the children of the Swiss Guards.
Lombardi then goes on to suggest that the United Nations paid more attention to “certain NGOs, the prejudices of which against the Catholic Church and the Holy See are well known.” He then criticizes the UN for “going beyond its powers” by attempting to interfere in the moral and doctrinal positions of the Catholic Church regarding contraception, abortion, and its vision of “human sexuality”.
It is a pity that the Committee gave the Church this opportunity to avoid the central issue of the Catholic Church’s governance through canon law by referring to such Church teachings, because it allowed Fr. Lombardi to deflect attention away from the most important issue of pontifical secrecy.
The Committee recommended that the Holy See review its canon law to make sure it complied with the Convention. It expressed concern that child sexual abuse was dealt with through confidential disciplinary proceedings that “have allowed the vast majority of abusers and almost all those who concealed child sexual abuse to escape judicial proceedings in States where abuses were committed.” It said that as a result of the code of silence imposed by canon law, there were very few cases of sex abuse by clergy reported to law enforcement authorities, and it pointed out that reporting to national law enforcement authorities has never been made compulsory. It recommended the abolition of pontifical secrecy, and to establish clear rules for the reporting of all suspected cases of child sexual abuse.
At the Committee hearing on 16 January 2014, Bishop Scicluna said that canon law required bishops to follow domestic law on mandatory disclosure, but when he was pressed as to why all complaints of sexual abuse were not reported, irrespective of whether or not there was a law requiring it, Scicluna replied in effect that it was really up to the victim to report. The victims, since Pope Benedict’s extension of pontifical secrecy in 2010 now include those who “habitually lack the use of reason”.
Under canon law as it stands at the moment, pontifical secrecy still applies wherever there are no local laws requiring reporting. In Australia, only New South Wales has such a law to cover all cases of sexual abuse. The only inference that can be drawn from the Holy See’s refusal to change canon law to allow reporting of all complaints of child sexual abuse is that it is determined to hide clerical sexual abuse wherever it can get away with it. It is only prepared to allow enough reporting to keep bishops out of jail.
We know the result of that policy from the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry: of the 607 cases of child abuse, none of them were reported directly by the Church to the police. The reason: Victoria had abolished misprision of felony in 1981, and clergy were not included in the mandatory welfare reporting laws passed in the 1990s. There was no obligation to report and canon law stipulated that there should be no reporting of any information that the Church had gathered from its internal inquiries.
At the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry, Cardinal George Pell said that on the issue of sexual abuse by clergy, the Congregation of the Clergy “did not get it”. It seems that the Holy See still does not. Nor does the Church in Australia. There is no suggestion in its submission to the Royal Commission that canon law is even a problem, let alone that it should be changed.
The Vatican’s former Chief Prosecutor, Bishop Charles Scicluna, found himself before the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child in Geneva on 16 January 2014. He joked that in the past his predecessors may have been on the other side of the table as the “Grand Inquisitor”.
The Church signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, but had failed to provide reports under the Convention until 2012, arguing that its only responsibility for child abuse was within the 44 hectares of the Vatican City. It was a Jesuitical response that it continued to press as recently as 5 December 2013: see https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=1089 However, it seems that over Christmas, the Vatican had a change of heart, and was prepared to front the UN Committee to answer questions about its role in child abuse matters as a result of the Church’s canon law.
Scicluna stated that when allegations of sexual abuse of children are made, bishops have to carry out an investigation and refer it on to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – he was referring to Canon 1717 and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (2001). He said that this procedure does not override the “legitimate rights of the sovereign State”. He referred to guidelines issued in 2010 and again in 2011 which required the local church to “follow domestic law on mandatory disclosure”. What he did not tell them was that until 2010, pontifical secrecy imposed by canon law did require bishops to break domestic laws on disclosure, and that canon law was the most significant factor in the world wide cover up of child sex abuse by the Church since Pope Pius XI issued his decree, Crimen Sollicitationis in 1922.
What he also did not tell them was that most complaints about sexual abuse are made after the victim has reached adulthood – children take a long time to come to terms with it. If the figures given at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry for “historic abuse” are any indication generally, that represents more than 99% of all cases. What Scicluna also did not tell the Committee was that very few countries have mandatory disclosure laws for historic abuse – only New South Wales amongst the Australian States has it. And in many jurisdictions (for example, Victoria) the mandatory welfare reporting laws about children “at risk” do not apply to clergy. What he also did not tell them was that pontifical secrecy still applies to internal Church investigations where there are no domestic disclosure laws.
Two of the UN Committee members were a wake up to this, and repeatedly asked Scicluna why the guidelines did not provide that in “all cases these crimes should be reported.” His response was that “Education is the key to empowerment. Every local church has a moral duty to instruct people about their rights.” In other words, it is up to the victim to report the abuse, not the Church. This was a parroted response of what the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Castrillon, had written to the Irish bishops in January 1997 and November 1998. Cardinal Castrillon was not the only senior Church official to insist on this: see https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=1089
In Australia, Francis Sullivan, the CEO of the Truth Justice and Healing Council that represents the Church at the Royal Commission said much the same. On 3 April 2013, on the Australian ABC’s “7.30 Report” he was asked what steps the Church should take if one of its teachers reported to Church authorities that he suspected that a priest was sexually abusing children at their school. He said it was up to the teacher to report it, and not the Church authorities. This is also the answer that is enshrined in the Melbourne Response: it is not up to the Church to report; it is up to the victim – and the most likely reason that the Melbourne Response had Vatican support and Towards Healing did not.
The absurdity of the Vatican policy is illustrated by the case of Fr. Lawrence Murphy who abused as many as 200 deaf mute boys in the care of a church school for the deaf. Does the Church really expect deaf mute boys to be running off to the police station with sign language to report such abuse?
It is even more absurd when you consider that one of the “reforms” of Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 was to extend pontifical secrecy to cases of priests having sex with “those who habitually lack the use of reason”. Are they going to be educated by Bishop Scicluna and his fellow bishops about their rights so that they can be “empowered” to go off to the police?
The State of Victoria is a very good example of the practical outcome of the Church’s canon law as stated by Bishop Scicluna. Between 1996 and 2012, there were 611 complaints of sexual abuse involving clergy and religious. The Victorian Parliamentary Committee’s report, “Betrayal of Trust” found: “No representatives of the Catholic Church directly reported the criminal conduct of its members to the police. The Committee found that there is simply no justification for this position.” There was no justification, but there was a reason – Victoria had no such reporting laws: misprision of felony had been abolished in 1981; the mandatory welfare reporting laws did not apply to clergy, and canon law prohibited disclosure of such allegations to the police.
The same thing will continue to happen all over the world where there are no such domestic laws: England, Germany and Austria, most parts of Canada and the United States, New Zealand, and many other countries – and every State of Australia other than NSW.
Pope Francis had an opportunity to announce at the UN the end of pontifical secrecy for clergy sex crimes. It did not happen. The cover up of clergy sex abuse of children will continue wherever the Church can get away with it.
As Thomas C. Fox, the publisher of the National Catholic Reporter wrote on 21 January 2014, “Despite Pope Francis’ heartfelt expressions of lament over priest sex abuse last week, the Geneva hearing suggests to date he does not understand the full magnitude of the related sex abuse issues, or, if he does, is yet unwilling or incapable of responding to it.”
The Church is still insisting on pontifical secrecy where there are no legal obligations to report, and pontifical secrecy is the cornerstone of the cover up.
Kieran Tapsell is a retired solicitor and barrister with degrees in theology and law.
If you watch the tabloid television and the Murdoch press, you would certainly believe that violence is increasing. It seems counter-intuitive to suggest that we are moving away from violence.
Over the holidays I have been reading ‘The Better Angels of our Nature – the Decline of Violence in History and its Causes’. It focuses particularly on the West. The book was written by Steven Pinker (Penguin 2011). Pinker is an experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist. He is a Harvard College professor
It is a long read, but I found it encouraging.
He examines violence in its worst manifestations in war, murder, rape and domestic violence, racism and hate speech. He argues that we are more aware of violence because of modern communications. That is why we aren’t so aware of the global decline in violence.
In his preface, Pinker states his thesis
This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakeable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.
The book’s essential message is that over thousands of years, despite the setbacks of eg WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, tribalism has given way to expanded and inclusive relationships and that we have developed more appropriate and effective institutions to contain violence, despite their shortcomings.
Pinker gives us a glimpse into the viciousness of the cultures and customs from 8000 BCE to the 1970s.
In human pre-history we find graves and prehistoric remains that reveal people ‘strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed or tortured’. In this period he says that a person had a high chance of coming to bodily harm.
In Homeric Greece, war was waged against the entire population. For the heroes of the Illiad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war. Achilles ‘spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women’.
Pinker describes the Hebrew Bible as ‘one long elaboration of violence’. Cain slew Abel. Noah’s ark saved only a select few. The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt and the Egyptian army was drowned in the Red Sea. Samson became a hero in slaughtering 1,000 Philistines and killed over 1,000 with the jawbone of an ass. Captured, his eyes were burnt out and in revenge he crushes a building and kills 3,000 men and women. The warrior Saul’s Court sings that ‘Saul has killed by the thousands, but David by the tens of thousands’. Fortunately a lot of this never happened, but it offers a window into the lives and values of the civilisation in the first millennium BCE.
An architectural symbol of the Roman Empire was the Colosseum. Gladiators fought others to death for public amusement. Animals tore flesh from humans. The most frequent means of Roman execution was crucifixion. It was an orgy of sadism. Saints were put to death by barbaric means.
Infidels were put to death in the Spanish inquisition by burning at the stake and drawing and quartering.
The medieval Christian knights may have treated the ladies well, but their intervention in the Crusades resulted in probably 1.5 million deaths, particularly of the Saracens. Jerusalem was allegedly left “knee deep in blood.”
In early modern Europe Henry VIII had two wives beheaded. Bloody Mary had 300 religious dissenters burnt at the stake. Elizabeth I had 123 priests drawn and quartered.
Despite the awful events in recent centuries, Pinker commented that the declines in violence unfolded over vastly different scales of time.
‘The taming of chronic raiding and feuding, the reduction of vicious interpersonal violence, such as cutting off noses, the elimination of cruel practices like human sacrifice, torture-executions and flogging, the abolition of institutions such as slavery and debt-bondage, the falling out of fashion of blood sports and duelling, the eroding of political murder and despotism, the recent decline of wars, pogroms and genocides, the reduction of violence against women… the protection of children …’ all point to a reduction in endemic violence.
Pinker describes the factors that have not helped the decline in violence. These include technology and weaponry, the quest for power and resources, affluence and religion.
In a chapter entitled ‘On Angels’ Wings’, Pinker describes the pacifying process. He says ‘Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural and material conditions’. He describes certain broad forces that have pushed violence down. These include the civilising process with the consolidation of law enforcement; the humanitarian revolution with improved literacy, urbanisation and access to mass media; the ‘rights revolution’ away from tribalism to national authority and freedom of speech; the benefits of international commerce and feminisation.
Pinker concludes:
Yet while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, the [human] species has also found ways to bring the numbers and incidence of violence] down and allow a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savour and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilisation and enlightenment that made it possible’.
I found the book encouraging- to think that our struggle against violence, war and denial of human dignity is worth the effort, despite the doomsayers and what our 24/7 media keep telling us.
Like many Australians, I look on the way the Abbott government is handling the matter of asylum seekers with ever increasing dismay. Tony Abbott’s mantra “stop the boats”, is unprincipled, contrary to signed UN agreements and impractical. It is hard to erase the pre-election memory of the Western Sydney interviewee..”I’m going to vote for Abbott, because he’ll stop the boats “.
What dismays me most is that Tony and I shared an educational experience at the hands of the Jesuits and then a friendship that reaches back almost 40 years.
Like Tony, I’m very grateful for my time at a Jesuit school. In our day a substantial number of our teachers were Jesuits and we had the benefit of their highly trained minds, sharp moral sensitivities and educational method that always emphasized evidence over rhetoric. Even though the Jesuits were strong on presentation skills in argument, the argument had to have substance.
Their clarity of thought and pursuit of learning for its own sake sets them apart from all other educators especially those I encountered at Sydney University. Their ability to look at all sides of an argument prior to coming to a conclusion was both stunningly simple, and at the same time extremely thought provoking.
Surprisingly, our religious education in latter years included a look at many religions…Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Protestantism and others. We were shown the merits of these religions and taught an all encompassing view of life and peoples.
We were taught quite simply that the major requisites of Catholicism were: love, inclusion, and protecting or looking after those more needy…of any denomination. Fr Gerald Drumm went further, stating that as we were boys starting life from a privileged position in a Jesuit School, we owed it to our God, the Jesuits and ourselves to put our teachings in to practical effect if we were ever in a position to do so. It was as black and white as that!
Tony and I were, from our earliest days taught people had an inherent dignity and to use them as a means to an end is the antithesis of anything the Jesuits taught us.
Tony and I were both members of the SRC and had many battles with “the lefties”, both verbal and physical. We both enjoyed playing Rugby for Sydney Uni, if not for Australia. It was a time of great frivolity and for forging life-long friendships. But those playful undergraduate days are long gone. And now in government, the play is for real.
Instrumentalizing desperate human beings for political advantage is absolutely unacceptable. As I said to Tony a couple of years ago over dinner…”Mate, you and I would be the first in a boat with our families were we to encounter the atrocities they have had to face“.
The solution is again very simple. We must embrace these poor desperate souls, get them in to our communities and enrich our lives, and theirs. Give them the dignity to live without fear, give them the dignity to work and pay tax. Let us take the lead in a regional resettlement program to accommodate these people. No more detention centres, political bottom feeding, refugee camps or queues. Let’s get the Australian psyche back to where it should be.
As Tony should know, playing to the xenophobes in Australia just flies in the face of well known facts about people movement and its cause in our region.
Asylum seekers ARE NOT ‘ILLEGALS” they are our brothers and sisters.
Tony’s and my Jesuit teachers are turning in the graves for the lack of logic, human sympathy and compassion let alone any reflection of what Jesus had to say about welcoming the stranger and going the extra mile. Bad luck for the Good Samaritan. He was a mug and would never get endorsement as a Coalition candidate.
John O’Mara is Managing Director of Big Image Sydney Pty Ltd
It would be dangerous to open up the pandora’s box of the Refugee Convention. It has served us well. Who would seriously suggest that persons facing persecution should not be protected. Given the world wide agitation against refugees and ‘outsiders’, a review of the Convention would be a great opportunity for extremists to run their campaigns against foreigners. It would be a field day for the Scott Morrisons of this world.
This is a repost from 19 July, 2013.
When will the nonsense stop on boats and refugees? A few days ago Foreign Minister Carr suggested that too many economic migrants were being accepted as refugees. He produced no evidence. What public information I have seen suggests that he is wrong. I would discount the advice he gets from his own department.
Now the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is saying that the Refugee Convention needs revising, presumably to make it harder for asylum seekers and refugees.
Where is this mistaken advice coming from? Unless Minister Burke is careful, he will become the fourth Labor minister in a row who has failed in the Immigration portfolio.
There are sound reasons, both humanitarian and practical, why we should leave the convention alone.
The Refugee Convention is not broken. We should leave it alone and work with it. Let’s stop being side-tracked by nonsense about economic migrants and changing the Refugee Convention.
The one area where Kevin Rudd should employ his considerable diplomatic skills and experience is to help negotiate a robust regional arrangement. Everything else is fifth-rate. A lot is also nonsense.
( Arja Keski Nummi and I have written extensively on this subject)
For over 60 years Australia has played a vital role in the development and strengthening of a system of international protection for refugees. It was one of the earliest signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention. It has been an active member of the Executive Committee of the UNHCR and has held the Chair on several occasions. Australia was one of the key countries in the development and implementation of the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo Chinese Refugees (CPA). Two Australians have been awarded the UNHCR Nansen Award for Refugees: Sir Tasman Heyes in1962 and Major General Paul Cullen in 1981.
Australia has one of the largest humanitarian resettlement programs globally and contributes substantially to international efforts in support of displaced people and refugees. Despite this, in the past decade, Australia, like other developed countries, has grappled with the increasingly contentious nexus between asylum, irregular migration and secondary movements. The public debate is now so polarised that it has become difficult to have a rational and constructive dialogue on the best ways to respond to such movements.
This essay reviews recent developments and focuses on some practical strategies that could be taken by Australia in strengthening the regional and international protection system.
Globalisation is testing the tolerance levels of developed countries regarding population flows, immigration and asylum. We know we need immigration, but in the asylum context we just don’t like the apparent self-selection that occurs. It offends both our sense of a fair go and an orderly process. Alongside this concern is the emergence of organised people smuggling activities (a low risk /high profit venture) that facilitate the movement of people when migration systems fail them or do not accommodate their needs. Finally we are often suspicious of the motivation for such population movements, particularly secondary onward movements. Is it opportunistic? Is it out of fear for safety or merely economic? Is it because legal channels have been cut off? The answer probably lies in a complex mixture of all of these.
These various strands of concern have coalesced into a sense of crisis regarding the perceived uncontrolled onward movements, especially by boat, and the capacity of the international protection system to respond effectively in a way that addresses both States’ legitimate concerns and individual protection needs. In our domestic policy context we see this being played out with ever-changing and often more restrictive policies on asylum, immigration, border control, interception and attempts at disruption, arrest and prosecution of people smugglers
While such policy responses may temporarily have some impact, they fail in essence to tackle what is at the heart of the issue – the need by people forced to flee their countries to find a place of safety.
This has been compounded further by the shrinking protection space for displaced people globally. For the past 60 years the complementary elements of an international protection system have been:
However after thirty years of mass outflows of people because of wars and civil unrest, from the Vietnam War to Syria today, the international system has struggled to find an effective way to balance these dual responsibilities.
We do know it can be done. The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo Chinese Refugees in this region, and in Europe the airlift from Kosovo, shows what is possible when national and international interests come together. Despite being controversial and contentious at the time, both achieved their objectives of keeping borders open and providing at least some protection in the region until durable solutions were available.
However the examples of failure to act quickly are horrific: the hesitation to intervene in Rwanda that saw over one million people killed; and the current indecisiveness on Syria where over two million have fled across the borders and where, the UNHCR estimate, there are some 4.25million people internally displaced.
For over a decade there has been intense discussion on enhancing international cooperation and yet no consensus on a framework has been achieved, largely because governments have not seen what is in it for them (1) The reality is that any framework that is developed must take account of States’ national interests or it will not succeed. This is not Australia’s “problem” to fix but, as in the past, we have an important role to play in finding regional solutions because until we do we cannot hope to reach a reasonable response to the complexities of such population movements.
To achieve this, three complementary approaches that build on current arrangements are examined here.
1. Building a strategic policy dialogue
The foundations already exist, but they often appear ad hoc and uncoordinated with little appreciation by others of what is being done. This includes the Bali Process and its various working groups as well as the Regional Support Office; the Regional Cooperation Framework endorsed at the last two Bali Process Ministers conferences, and in civil society, the work of the Asia Pacific Regional Refugee Network (APRRN) (2).
The missing link in these arrangements is a mechanism that engages government and civil society in a strategic policy dialogue. There is an urgent need to start the work of establishing such a process and creating a framework that brings Governments and civil society in the region into a structured and constructive policy dialogue.
One approach could be modelled on the “Track 2 Diplomacy” dialogue that has been effectively used in the Asia-Pacific region on security related issues. The objective of this unofficial dialogue would be to develop a shared understanding and a shared acknowledgement of the problem and the role of diverse players. This would include people working in immigration, security, intelligence and border protection areas of government as well as refugee and asylum experts in civil society.
Done well, this approach has the potential to be transformational in breaking down the unproductive suspicions of the different parties, the current dynamics of which are self-perpetuating and so reinforcing of the stalemate that exists.
While building a track 2 dialogue takes enormous effort and commitment the dividends can be many:
If successful such a dialogue could conceivably be expanded into a regional approach sitting alongside or under the Bali Process.
2. Alternative Migration options
A central focus of the international discussion on population movements and asylum has been the concept of mixed migratory movements. The literature and research on such movements highlights the complexities inherent in making simple assumptions. A migration path that on the face of it might have started principally for “economic” reasons might, when more fully probed, have compelling refugee dimensions as well. In a 2004 study on mixed migration the absence of alternative migration pathways was cited as one possible reason for the growing “asylum” populations because no other alternatives existed (3). We should understand these dynamics better and examine ways to use extant visa programs as one way of easing the pressure on asylum systems as the only migration option available.
We have faced such dilemmas before and responded with arrangements such as the Orderly Departure Program from Vietnam or the Special Assistance Category visas created for specific circumstances to release migration pressures that could otherwise have moved into an irregular migration pathway.
The government, therefore, has in its toolkit a number of visa options that could be considered, and there is a persuasive case for the creation of a negotiated Orderly Departure and/or Special Assistance Category program from targeted countries such as Afghanistan or Sri Lanka. In the case of Afghanistan it could be incorporated into the discussions on the changing nature of Australia’s engagement with Afghanistan in the wake of the draw-down of our military presence. Other vulnerable populations that could be considered are, for example, the Tamils in Sri Lanka or Rohingya in Burma.
While there will always be difficult bilateral issues with such arrangements these can be addressed through robust diplomatic engagement and discussion, as they have been in the past.
3. Building a Regional Protection Space.
Most people displaced by war and conflict will largely remain within their region of displacement (4). People continue to move when the protections in the country of first asylum become precarious or where processing is taking so long that they start to lose faith in return.
It is important to provide a humane and responsible way to for people to search for alternative protection arrangements elsewhere. We need to work with host countries along the displacement corridors to support populations so as to minimise the need to move on or use smugglers for their onward movements. Such support includes timely registration and processing of claims, access to shelter, education and health services, as well as some capacity for self-sufficiency pending a durable solution.
In this context the need to pursue regional processing arrangements through which resettlement or return can occur is urgent. Such an arrangement needs to be regarded in the broader context of supporting the continued development of a regional framework. If done well, it could assist in developing a common asylum processing system and infrastructure in the region.
Balanced with a commitment to resettlement and appropriate alternative migration pathways, as well as safe and transparent return for people who are not refugees or who do not qualify for other visa programs, this would go a long way to restoring the spirit of international cooperation envisaged in the refugee convention.
References
1. See for example James Milner, Refugee Studies Centre Working paper No4 Sharing the Security Burden: Towards the Convergence of Refugee protection and State Security, May 2000.
2. A key NGO umbrella organisation that brings together civil society and regional NGOs to identify and work out practical ways to support the development of a protection framework in the region for displaced people.
3. Crisp, Jeff and Christina Boswell Poverty, International Migration and Asylum; Policy Brief No.8, UNU- WIDER 2004.
4. See for example UNHCR Global Report 2012.
Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2007-2010. This article was published as a contribution to ‘Australia21’. It was part of a series of articles on refugees and asylum seekers. See www.australia21.org.au.
On 16 December last year, Eureka Street carried an article by Neil Ormerod about Pope Francis and his economic, social and political message. That article can be found on the link below. John Menadue
http://www.eurekastreet.com.
Although it sits on a vast undersea gas reserve, Timor-Leste remains deeply impoverished.
Deep under the Timor Sea, there is a huge reserve of gas. Geologists now believe it is worth upwards of US$100 billion; a figure more than twice the amount estimated by Australia as recently as 2006. It is perhaps ironic that the nation with the strongest claim to ownership of that gas, by dint of proximity to it, is Timor-Leste, which is also among the world’s poorest nations.
But will it ever get the benefit of it?
There have been numerous treaties over the last 42 years between Australia, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, regarding the fate of the gas. All of them have heavily favored Australia. None of them have been in accordance with international maritime boundaries and laws. Australia has sought to protect these favorable borders using means that have been illegal and unethical at times – not to mention mighty un-neighborly.
The last treaty signed with Timor-Leste in 2006, known as CMATS, is now under dispute at the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration, the PCA.
CMATS was based on two earlier treaties. These were inked with Indonesia’s Suharto dictatorship in 1972 and 1989, and since dismissed by many lawyers as illegal. The treaties carved up the seabed between the two countries at a time when Indonesia was illegally occupying Timor-Leste, an occupation that only Australia among its international peers recognized.
There is much at stake. Impoverished Timor-Leste, which is 95 percent Catholic, would obviously welcome a massive boost in assets and income, as would any country, including Australia.
But Australia has even more to worry about. Its greatest fear is that if its 2006 treaty with Timor-Leste comes unstitched, then Indonesia, its vast northern neighbor, now far wealthier and more powerful than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, may want to renegotiate its own maritime borders with Australia – and that has far reaching strategic and economic implications.
“Well, they didn’t have to sign the treaty, no one forced them to,” Alexander Downer, Australia’s Foreign Minister from 1996-2007, now says of Timor-Leste.
It was Downer who made the key decision, only two months before Timor-Leste’s independence in 2002, to “withdraw” Australia from the maritime jurisdiction of the PCA.
Now that some gas revenues are coming in, and under pressure from UN negotiators, Australia has agreed to hand over a larger share of them to Timor-Leste. But it has refused to budge on a 50-year clause that prevents Timor-Leste from challenging the boundaries established with Indonesia; boundaries that one former Indonesian foreign minister described as “taking Indonesia to the cleaners”.
Timor-Leste has long been unhappy with CMATS. But then last year, the dispute stepped up several gears when it went public with allegations of spying by Australia during the treaty negotiations.
Timor-Leste claims that Downer authorized the installation of wiretapping equipment in the walls of the new cabinet room in the capital, Dili. The building was being constructed, ostensibly as part of an “aid project,” in 2004 as the treaty negotiations were commencing. The allegations originated from an intelligence officer who worked for Australia’s overseas spy agency, now known in the PCA case as Witness K, to his government-approved lawyer Bernard Collaery in 2008.
Timor-Leste took the case to the PCA last April. Then on December 3, more than a dozen officials from Australia’s domestic spy agency raided Collaery’s office and removed many high-level, evidential documents relating to the case. They also raided Witness K’s home, canceling his passport.
The government claims this was done for national security reasons. The following day, Australia’s attorney-general George Brandis, under parliamentary privilege, stated the raid had nothing to do with CMATS. But Collaery, an approved lawyer for both domestic and overseas intelligence officers, told ucanews.com this claim is rubbish; there were no national security grounds for the search. He added that Witness K “was simply fulfilling his obligation as a Commonwealth officer to report illegal acts”.
At the time, Australian and Timor-Leste officials were debating how Witness K would be handled, including a possible witness protection program, so the December raid does look extremely pre-emptive.
It was hardly surprising that later in December, Timor-Leste’s Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao sent both an official letter and his foreign minister, Jose Guterres, to Canberra, demanding a re-negotiation of CMATS and an explanation for the alleged spying.
In a piece of especially inept statesmanship the incumbent prime minister, Julia Gillard, sent diplomat Margaret Twomey as her envoy for a three-hour meeting in Dili. Twomey pleaded for the East Timorese to cease their legal actions but it fell on deaf ears. The fact that Twomey was the Australian ambassador in Dili when the alleged spying took place, and the Timor-Leste government nursed its own suspicions about her role, would hardly have helped.
Looming over all this is the cozy relationship between Canberra and Woodside, Australia’s biggest home-grown oil and gas company. Woodside controls Great Sunrise, the largest gas field opened so far in the disputed territory. Woodside has been “saved” once before, by government fiat, from a takeover by rival Royal Dutch Shell in 2001. More recently it has also enjoyed consultancy services from Downer’s company, Bespoke Approach.
There can be little doubt that the well-connected, armor-protected Woodside will have strongly lobbied the Australian government for the best deal in the Timor Sea; even less doubt that its requests would have been favorably heard.
This furore is just the latest sign of the Australian government’s current struggle to understand or deal effectively with its Asian neighbors. In recent months it has fallen out with Indonesia on the question of illegal immigrants. More damagingly, it has emerged that Australia spied on Indonesian President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono, his wife and others.
Australia’s new conservative government, led by Tony Abbott, has also decided to slash its aid budget by a cumulative A$4.5 billion in coming years, the vast majority of which goes to its nearby Asian neighbors.
Referring to the spying allegations, Pires said: “It was all done under the cover of an Australian aid project. Now we are even suspicious of Australian aid. Many people, particularly young people, have become very disillusioned with Australia over this.”
The bottom line is that once again the people of Timor-Leste, who have been through so much for so long, are just collateral damage.
Michael Sainsbury is an Australian journalist based in Bangkok.
This article was published by CathNews on 8 January 2014. See link below.
On 17 December, Sir William Deane, former Governor-General launched Australia21 – essays on refugees and asylum seekers. Sir William Deane’s remarks follow.
Paul Barratt’s acknowledgement of the traditional custodians in which I respectfully join, serves to remind us that apart from indigenous Australians we are all migrants or descended from migrants and that many of us were asylum seekers or are descended from asylum seekers. My own great-grandfather came to Australia with his wife and young family, including my grandfather who was aged 7 from Tipperary in 1851 on a wooden sailing ship called the Harry Lorrequer. They sought asylum on this side of the world from the devastation of the great famine. After disembarking in Melbourne and time on the goldfields near Ballarat, my great-grandfather took his family to Wahring near Nagambie in rural Victoria where he became the legal owner of land taken without compensation from the Taungurung people. That land, which we now know was unlawfully acquired, provided the basis of his and his family’s subsequent well-being.
The first point which I wish to make through that brief reference to a rather typical Australian family history is that we Australians should have understanding and compassion for the actions of those who subject themselves and their families to serious risk of disaster at sea, to escape from violence or terror or unbearable hardship and seek asylum in a new country which they dream of making their homeland. We will never know precisely how many of the wooden sailing ships, bearing asylum seekers from Europe to Australia in the 19th century didn’t make it. Or how many men, women and children died through the awful sicknesses and conditions on the way. The Harry Lorrequer did make it. But parts of the journey were so stormy that 45 passengers and seven sailors were washed overboard and the youngest of my great-grandfather’s children, Martin, died as a result of the sicknesses which threatened all on board.
Perhaps some would criticise all those early Australians and present would-be Australians for subjecting themselves and their families to such awful risks. Most of us would however see them as bravely seeking a better life for themselves and their families in circumstances where they saw or see no really worthwhile alternative. The other point is that from the earliest days of European arrivals and constantly thereafter, our country and its people, both indigenous and nonindigenous have faced extraordinary and at times seemingly overwhelming challenges and problems.
The challenge which we as a nation face in relation to refugees and other asylum seekers who arrive, or seek to arrive by boat is a very difficult one. But it is not the most difficult which has confronted our nation. And while it seems to me that there are no obvious complete answers or solutions, I believe that we are as a nation capable of dealing with it, with both justice and decency. In that regard it is well to remember that other countries are facing much greater challenges as regards refugees then we are. For example as the violent crisis in Syria enters its third winter, Lebanon with a considerably smaller population than ours is currently engulfed by more than 800,000 refugees.
The book which we are gathered to launch “Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Finding a Better Way” demands the attention and careful consideration of any Australian who is concerned with that challenge. Its contents are of immeasurable national value and importance as a basis of understanding, of discussion, of planning and of hope. The authors of the essays are outstanding Australians with extraordinary expertise and profound practical and theoretical experience in the field. They identify what they see as current problems, difficulties and shortcomings and suggest what they see as possible lines of investigation, discussion and solution. As the editors explain in their thoughtful preface, the objective of Australia21 in initiating and publishing the book has been to provide the foundation for the convening of a roundtable of stakeholders and decision makers next year to examine the feasibility of a fresh, new bipartisan approach.
It is only a couple of weeks since the world’s most respected authority on refugees, the United Nations High Commission delivered its assessments of our detention camps, officially called “regional processing centres” on Nauru and Manus Island. There is close correspondence between the published findings in relation to each place. As regards the Nauru centre which has been established or re-established for more than a year, the United Nations Refugee Agency found, that “The current policies conditions and operational approaches do not comply with international standards, constitute arbitrary and mandatory detention under international law; do not provide a fair and expeditious system for assessing refugee claims and do not provide safe and humane conditions of treatment in detention”. As regards the children who are in our nation’s care and detained on Nauru, the agency found “The harsh and unsuitable environment is particularly inappropriate for the care and support of child asylum seekers” and that “children do not have access to adequate educational and recreational facilities”. Finally, and relevant to the description of the Nauru detention centre as a regional processing centre, the agency found that “Only one claim for refugee status had at the time of inspection been finally determined and handed down in the 14th month period since the transfer of asylum seekers to Nauru commenced in September 2012.
Hopefully, our government and the relevant authorities will in due course, properly respond to the United Nations Refugee Agency’s criticisms. But pending such a response one cannot but fear that at least some of the findings, particularly those relating to children held in detention and unsatisfactory processing are justified. If they are correct, the United Nations reports diminish our country’s hard won and long justified international reputation as an upholder of human rights and dignity. More important, they give rise to questions relating to our decency and sense of fairness and justice as a community and as individuals, which we cannot properly ignore.
In that context, the publication of this book and Australia21’s call for open discussion and dialogue and a search for national consensus about a new and better way, come at a particularly apposite time. I sincerely hope that all concerned, particularly the legislators and decision-makers in government and the administrators in the field, will welcome that call and fully participate in any ensuing discussions and exchanges, and that at everyr every stage of such discussions there will be a conscious awareness of the fact that the lives, the well-being and the futures of extraordinarily vulnerable human beings including children are involved.
Let me conclude by congratulating and thanking all who have contributed to the initiation, writing and publication of this book, authors, editors, publishers and the members of Australia21. I join them all in wishing it every success.
“Refugees and asylum seekers: finding a better way” is now officially launched.
Earlier posts on ‘Refugees and asylum seekers’ can be found in the categories to the right of this page.
Yesterday Sir William Deane launched a book ‘Refugees and asylum seekers – a better way’. A link to the book can be found at
http://gallery.mailchimp.com/d2331cf87fedd353f6dada8de/files/Refugee_and_asylum_seeker_policy_Finding_a_better_way.pdfThe book includes a chapter I wrote ‘Election aftermath – where to now on asylum seekers and refugees’. This chapter follows
Election aftermath- where to now on asylum seekers and refugees?
Since Tampa in 2001 asylum-seekers and refugees have become a divisive public issue. In that debate, boat arrivals have been the most contentious issue of all.
Just before the September election the Rudd Government announced that no asylum seeker coming to Australia by boat would ever receive refugee status and permanent residence in Australia, but would be transferred to PNG or Nauru. This hard-line policy with some additional punitive measures in Operation Sovereign Borders has been adopted by the Abbott Government.
The number of asylum seekers coming by boat fell dramatically in the last weeks of the Rudd Government. That trend has continued. The net result is that the gate has been very nearly closed for boat arrivals for the foreseeable future. But it will never be shut completely.
Asylum seekers will continue to come by air. Presently about 7,000 to 8,000 asylum seekers come to Australia by air each year. Invariably they state their intention to come as a student, visitor or working holiday maker. They then get issued with a visa, enter Australia and apply for refugee status. Desperate people do desperate things. The chief source country for air arrivals is China and with about 40% of all air arrivals gaining refugee status. This situation is likely to continue. The toxic political debate is only about the mode of arrival. Arriving by aeroplane is OK but not by boat! What a lot of nonsense this is. We are obsessed only by boats.
But as the gate for asylum seekers coming by boat closes more will seek to come by air.
Against this unfortunate background where should we now try to focus the debate? Can we find some ground where effective and humanitarian policies can still be pursued? How can we blunt the edges of cruel policies?
Despite the setbacks of recent years, I still think that there is quite a lot that we can try and do, as difficult as it will be in the present political climate.
We must change the political narrative with a positive message about persons facing persecution and their contribution to Australia rather than the demonization and fear that has been engendered since John Howard’s days. It comes down to leadership across our community and not just politicians. Polls suggest that boat arrivals do not rate highly against such issues as health and education but it is a hot button issue on its own that produces a very strong and hostile response. It is so easy for unscrupulous politicians and some media people to engender fear of the outsider, the foreigner and the person who is different. History is littered with such unscrupulous people. We must keep trying to change the debate and appeal to Australians more generous instincts that we all know are there.
The dialogue between the Government, including the Department of Immigration and refugee advocates has been broken for a long time. We need a “second-track dialogue” – involving government officials, civil society, NGOs and refugee advocates in the dialogue process. A more constructive role by refugee advocates is essential and with a government prepared to listen.
Progressively we should increase the refugee and humanitarian intake. If we took the same number of refugees today that we took during the Indo Chinese program of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s adjusted for our population increase since then we would now have an intake of about 35,000. The Gillard Government increased the intake to 20,000 pa but the Abbott Government plans to reduce it to 13,750. Having been frightened over border security Australians may now feel more secure with the new government in charge! As a result they may now be more supportive of refugees that have been processed in a more orderly way offshore, particularly by the UNHCR.
Reluctantly, I have come to the view that the blanket opposition to offshore processing of asylum seekers has politically failed and with dire consequences for asylum seekers. A couple of years ago I welcomed with some reservations the agreement with Malaysia on transfers and processing. Unlike the Rudd Government’s agreement with PNG, the agreement with Malaysia was supported by UNHCR. On the contentious issue of offshore processing, the UNHCR in May this year issued a ‘Guidance Note’ on bilateral and/or multilateral arrangements on the transfer of asylum seekers. It emphasised that in any arrangement there must be effective protection. This encompasses (a) people given a legal status while they are in a transit country, (b) the principle of non-refoulement (c) people have access to refugee determination processes either within the legal jurisdiction of the state or by UNHCR and (d) treated with dignity. What is important is not where the processing occurs, but whether it is fair, humane and efficient and consistent with the Refugee Convention.
The Malaysian Agreement was opposed by the Coalition, the Greens and almost all refugee advocate groups. It was an odd alliance! The failure of this agreement saw a threefold increase in boat arrivals within a few months. These arrivals rose to 14,000 in the six months to June 2013. The result of that large increase and with an election looming was the draconian agreement with PNG.
In opposing the Malaysian Agreement many refugee advocates sided with Tony Abbott on “canings” in Malaysia. It was quite novel to see Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison defending the human rights of asylum seekers. Tony Abbott gave the impression that he was not interested in stopping the boats but stopping the Government stopping the boats. This was consistent with what a “key Liberal strategist” told the US Embassy in November 2009 that the boats issue was “fantastic” for the Coalition and “ the more boats that come the better”( SMH 10 December 2010).
The agreement with Malaysia was also criticised because of the treatment of children. But children could never have been excluded from the arrangement or the boats would have filled up with children. They are called “anchors” to haul in the rest of the family. Children do need protection through a guardian arrangement but the Minister cannot be both gaoler and guardian.
We should also pursue alternative migration pathways to discourage asylum seekers taking dangerous boat or other “irregular” Journeys.
The first alternate pathway is through orderly departure arrangements with “source countries” such as we had with Vietnam from 1983. Over 100,000 Vietnamese came to Australia under this arrangement. We must pursue ODA’s with Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In both Iraq and Afghanistan we will have to bear particular responsibilities for our involvement in the wars in those countries just as we did after the Vietnam War. An orderly departure arrangement with Pakistan would probably have to be managed by UNHCR. Importantly DIAC must anticipate future refugee flows.eg Syria and Egypt. I just cannot understand why the previous government did not actively pursue ODA’s.
Secondly we should consider permanent or temporary migration in particular situations. e.g. Iranians on 457 visas. Recent Iranian boat arrivals are mainly single males, well-educated and resourceful. With a population explosion in Iran and the sanctions biting hard many want to leave. In the last 12 months the proportion of boat arrivals from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33%.Iranians are by far the largest national group in immigration detention in Australia. We need alternative pathways to address the special needs of nationals like the Iranians.
Many asylum seekers in the community on bridging visas are not allowed to work. This is absurd. Work rights for all such visa holders are essential for reasons of human dignity and taxpayer cost. We should also review the ad hoc and confusing support arrangements for all asylum seekers living in the community.
We should progressively abolish mandatory detention. At the end of August this year there were over 11,000 people in immigration detention. 96% were asylum seekers. At that time there were 1700 children in immigration detention of some form. It is all cruel and expensive. There is no evidence that it deters but politicians believe that it makes them look tough. If we should have learned anything from successive governments it is that punitive policies in immigration detention centres will result in riots, burnings, suicides and other self-harm. We will bear the human, social and financial costs of mandatory detention for decades
Despite the heavy handed crackdown on boat arrivals there are still some important areas that we could address to help asylum seekers and refugees in their desperate plight. We have a duty to do what we can despite the toxic political environment.
But we cannot manage these problems on our own. Regional cooperation is essential, not to shift the burden but to share it. That is why we need to work particularly with both Indonesia and Malaysia in cooperation with UNHCR in the processing and then the resettlement of refugees. Those arrangements will problem not be” legally binding”. They will depend on trust.
But whatever we do there is no “solution”. Refugee flows will always be messy. Desperate people will try and cut corners. They will not play according to our rules. But we can do a lot better as we have shown in the past by successfully settling 750,000 refugees in Australia since 1945.
John Menadue is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He was Secretary Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1980-3. He was also Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan and CEO of Qantas.
Postscript:
Only a few days ago, Tony Abbott released a pamphlet on the government’s achievements since the election. The first subject mentioned was ‘Stop the boats’. At this very time, the UNHCR was been drawing attention to the growing refugee crisis around the world and particularly the outflow of 4 million people from Syria. Yet Tony Abbott took pride in the fact that 33,000 refugees already living in Australia will ‘all be denied permanent residence’.
Submissions and speeches by the Australian Catholic Church about child sex abuse, remind me of Fawlty Towers, where Basil asks his non German guests not to mention the war. In the Church’s case, the unmentionable is canon law, the law of the Catholic Church. In his speech at Ballarat on 20 November 2013, Francis Sullivan, the CEO of the Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council acknowledged that there had been cover ups, but, once again, failed to mention that canon law was behind it.
The Church submission, “Facing the Truth” to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry, has a chronology of 150 pieces of legislation, both civil and canonical, and references to inquiries, reports and Commissions from 1961 to the present. But the central document that created the legal framework for the cover up of clergy sexual abuse all over the world, the reissue of Crimen Sollicitationis in 1962, is never mentioned, nor is pontifical secrecy imposed by later decrees. Archbishop Hart admitted in evidence that he knew about Crimen Sollicitationis, so this omission could only have been deliberate. The Truth, Justice and Healing submission of 30 September 2013 to the Royal Commission makes no mention of them either.
In 1994, a former seminary professor of mine, who became a bishop, had refused to hand over to the police a report from a canon lawyer about the sex abuse of children by a group of priests in his diocese. The end result was that a search warrant was issued, and his presbytery searched. This bishop was an admirable and honourable man. Why did he do that?
Fr Frank Brennan SJ recently expressed the same surprise about Archbishop Little of Melbourne who did not keep any notes of complaints of sex abuse by priests, and routinely shifted them around where more children were abused. Brennan said this was “…devastating news for those of us who thought Frank Little to be a kind, compassionate, considerate, prayerful leader of his flock. And he was…” Why did this admirable man do that?
At the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry, Bishops Bird and Connors poured the bucket over their predecessor, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns, the Bishop of Ballarat from 1971 to 1997. They said he had “effectively facilitated” child sexual abuse, that he was “very naïve” and had made “terrible mistakes” in dealing with two serial paedophile priests, Gerald Ridsdale and David Ryan. Yes, he had done all those things, but it was no coincidence that Mulkearns had a Doctorate in Canon Law, was a founding member of the Canon Law Society of Australia and New Zealand, and the initial chairman of the Special Issues Committee set up by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to find ways around canon law. Everything Mulkearns did as Bishop of Ballarat, misguided as it was, followed the provisions of canon law. He had taken an oath at ordination to obey canon law. Canon law “effectively facilitated” child sexual abuse as much as he did.
Cardinal George Pell at the same Victorian Inquiry criticised his predecessor as Archbishop of Melbourne, Frank Little, accusing him of “mishandling the issue”, but defended him by saying that there were “no protocols” in place and “no procedures” at that time.
There were protocols and procedures. For some 1600 years, from the 4th century to the present time, canon law has had protocols and procedures for dealing with the problem of the sexual abuse of children by clergy. Until a radical change to canon law in 1922, such priests were to be dismissed from the priesthood, and then to be handed over to the civil authorities for punishment according to the civil law. This was the effect of decrees of Popes Alexander III in 1179, Innocent III, (1198-1216), Pius V in 1566 and again in 1568, the Third and Fifth Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1514, and the Council of Trent in 1551.
But all that changed in 1922 when Pope Pius XI issued his decree Crimen Sollicitationis that imposed “the secret of the Holy Office”, on all allegations and information obtained by Church authorities about the sexual abuse of children, with no exceptions for reporting those crimes to the civil authorities. Then, after his election in 1978, Pope John Paul II systematically reduced to a complete shambles the canonical disciplinary system for getting rid of paedophile priests, the end result of which was that a priest could only be dismissed with his consent.
The protocols that canon law imposed after the promulgation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law were: no reporting to the police; a 5 year limitation period; the requirement to try and cure the priest prior to putting him on trial; an impossibly complicated system for dismissing a priest; the requirement to apply canon law’s Catch 22 defence – a priest cannot be dismissed for paedophilia because he is a paedophile; the destruction of documentary evidence of the priest’s crimes; and the right of the victim to bring a “contentious action” for damages.
Like the Murphy Commission in Ireland, the Victorian Parliamentary Committee got it right. While accepting that these bishops made errors of judgment, the Committee said it was “unfair to allow the full blame to rest with these individuals, given that they were acting in accordance with a Catholic Church policy.”
In an earlier speech in Canberra on 22 April 2013, Francis Sullivan said, “The Australian community has been kept in the dark for too long.” He is absolutely right. The attempt by the Church to keep the community in the dark about canon law and the six Popes responsible for it continues.
Our foreign policy is more than boats or asylum seekers but that is what the Abbott government has reduced it to.
We should all be concerned because what is at stake is much greater than stopping boats – it jeopardizes our ability to influence and be taken seriously on issues of greater importance to our long term future and well-being such as cooperation in security related issues, trade and in the longer term building genuine regional cooperation on asylum seekers and displaced people.
Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop have much to learn if we are to have a credible stand in the region. The sycophancy of Tony Abbott’s comments in Indonesia and Sri Lanka fooled no one and least of all his hosts but it belittled us.
In Bali on 7 October he said this of West Papua “… The situation in West Papua is getting better, not worse, and I want to acknowledge the work that President Yudhoyono has done to provide greater autonomy, to provide a better level of government services and ultimately a better life for the people of West Papua. ….[and then]…. and while I acknowledge the right of people to free expression, I acknowledge the right of people to fair treatment under the law, I should also make the point that the people of West Papua are much better off as part of a strong, dynamic and increasingly prosperous Indonesia.” And last week in in Sri Lanka – where he virtually justified the use of torture by saying that. “We accept that sometimes, in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen,”
Unbelievable and contradictory comments that fly in the face of the evidence. Tony Abbott and his government must be living in a parallel universe!
Australia is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture. Our long held position has been that we do not condone torture in any form anywhere. Has our policy on this changed? Are we now to “turn a blind eye” to inconvenient truths if it means we can stop the boats? The import of the Prime Minister’s speeches in Indonesia and Sri Lanka would suggest that he will ditch any ethical positions or long held conventions to “stop the boats”. He will debase our foreign policy to get a domestic issue, largely whipped up by him in Opposition, off his back.
Equally disturbing is the fact that no conditions have been placed on how the patrol boats gifted to Sri Lanka will be used. One can speculate how they will be used. The cynic in me can see them being a convenient vehicle to facilitate the movement of people out of Sri Lanka via corrupt navy personnel. The other extreme where they become the vehicle for greater human rights abuses by preventing people being able to seek asylum and so potentially we will be putting ourselves in breach of our Refugee Convention obligations. A breach we should take seriously but I suspect under this government will not register as a transgression worth worrying about.
How we work and cooperate with countries in the region across many issues is important. However, it does not mean that we should or need to go overboard and explicitly endorse what should be for us as Australians fundamental universal freedoms and rights.
The latest soap opera being played out on the spying allegations against the President of Indonesia, his wife and senior colleagues betray just how fragile the relationship is with Indonesia. Despite his speech currying favour with Indonesia just a few short weeks ago it was not enough. This, together with the government’s seeming disregard of Indonesia’s sovereignty with its own Operation Sovereign Borders policy and Abbott’s his appalling lack of judgment in not even being able to pick up a phone and talk to the President, has meant that his Jakarta not Geneva policy is in tatters for the time being. It will turn a corner at some point but I suspect the Indonesian government is in no hurry to forgive him; first for how he spoke of the region while in Opposition and now how he has handled the spying fiasco. They know they hold in their hands the success of his domestic policy on boats and will play it for as much as it is worth.
The tragedy of such games is that it plays with the lives of desperate people – boats will come, tragedies will occur and it need not be so.
What we need is an approach on asylum seekers that is rooted in reality and underpinned by ethical considerations:
What this episode shows is that we cannot manage these issues on our own. The only way we can do this is working in the region with our partners in governments and civil society and that requires trust and being there for the long haul, not merely until the “problem” is fixed. At the moment we are displaying very little of that in the ham-fisted way this government is pursuing its policy on “stopping the boats”
Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
Tony Abbott has continued his ‘stop the boats campaign” in Sri Lanka regardless of growing concerns about human rights abuses in that country.
He offered two patrol boats as part of a ‘foreign aid package’. His justification for this is that it would help save the lives of people drowning at sea. Please spare us this hypocracy. The real reason is that with the cooperation of the Sri Lankan Navy he hopes he stop asylum seekers leaving Sri Lanka and possibly landing in Australia. The previous government used the same phoney excuse that it wanted to stop the boats to stop the drownings.
But the drownings were really only a secondary part of the story. The main story was attempts to stop the boats carrying asylum seekers who were seeking refuge in Australia. It was politically embarrassing for them to come by boat.
As asylum seekers in direct flight from persecution, Sri Lankans were unlike many other boat people who were in transit through Malaysia and Indonesia to Australia. Those in transit were not in direct flight from persecution. Because Sri Lankans landing in Australia are in direct flight, they have a particularly strong claim to our protection as the first country of asylum.
Tony Abbott last week said that he would not comment on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. But when it suited him he had no hesitation in criticising human rights policies in Malaysia. He criticised ‘judicial canings’ and many other alleged abuses in order to discredit the Gillard Government’s attempt to stem the boats by negotiating an agreement with Malaysia in cooperation with UNHCR.
Last week the UK Prime Minister went out of his way to visit the Tamil areas in northern Sri Lanka. He expressed concern about human rights abuses. Canada refused to attend CHOGM at all because of concerns over human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. The Indian Prime Minister did not attend.
So as with the naval boats, Tony Abbott is quite misleading when he refuses to comment on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.
Successive Australian governments have badly treated Sri Lankans seeking asylum in Australia. Some have been ‘voluntarily’ repatriated to Sri Lanka. Very few people know how much pressure was applied by government officials to persuade them to leave Australia.
Some Sri Lankans coming to Australia have been found to be genuine refugees but have been refused permanent residence status because of dubious and secret ASIO assessments. These assessments would in part have relied on information supplied by Sri Lankan intelligence agencies who are not known to be friendly to Tamils. The fact also that a person has been a member of the Tamil Tigers should not automatically rule that person out from our protection. Given the ruthlessness of the Sri Lankan military it is not surprising that young Tamils would join the Tamil Tigers. For the same reason, Irish nationalists would have joined the IRA decades ago. Some are now members of parliament and ministers.
To break the impasse over the persecution of Tamils and persons fleeing Sri Lanka, the Australian Government should negotiate an Orderly Departure Agreement with the Sri Lankan Government which would enable persons facing discrimination in Sri Lanka to leave that country in a safe and orderly way – perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 p.a. It would provide an alternate migration pathway. It would not be a refugee pathway as those covered under such an ODA would still be resident within Sri Lanka. It is possible that the Sri Lankan Government would cooperate, at least quietly, as it would probably be pleased to rid itself of Tamil dissidents.
When I was Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in the early 1980s, Australia negotiated such ODAs with the Communist government in Vietnam and the military regimes in Chile and El Salvador. Over 100,000 came from Vietnam under such an arrangement. Thousands came from Chile and hundreds from El Salvador.
We should seriously consider an alternative migration pathway for Tamils and others facing human rights abuses and discrimination in Sri Lanka.
This blog by Marcus Einfeld is in response to the blog by John Tulloh of 16 October on the above subject.
John Tulloh’s 40 year career in international news gathering should have taught him that jumping into Israeli-Palestinian issues with instant judgements and simplistic solutions is unwise and simply assists to continue the conflict. The concept, promoted in Tulloh’s piece posted on this blog on October 16, that the only or principal cause of the ongoing problems in this long dispute is Israeli settlements is at best naïve. More importantly it demonstrates a seriously imperfect knowledge of the facts and of the problems that have defied solution at the hands of the world’s best diplomats for almost 70 years, during most of which there were no settlements at all.
Tulloh’s strange one-sidedness comfortably ignores the overwhelming majority desire in Israel for a peace treaty with the Palestinians based on the two state solution and the resultant evacuation of practically all the occupied territories including the settlements. It also conveniently fails to acknowledge the impossibility of negotiating with enemies holding the unashamed goal of Israeli destruction in preference to compromise and negotiation as equals. They seek, not the removal of the settlements, but the very removal of Israel itself.
It was also rather blind of an experienced journalist to overlook that even a potential peace partner like Fatah is more worried about what will happen to its leadership at the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad if it reaches an accommodation with Israel than anything Israel might or might not do or where some of its people might live. The hateful militancy of these terrorist organizations manifests itself not merely in their regular random killing of innocent civilians but in their frequent and regular pledges to their people and the world never to negotiate or allow peace with Israel. Mind you, they are just as vicious with their own fellow countrymen and women who aspire to peace as well.
To say the least, Prime Minister Netanyahu is and has always been much more a lucky opportunist than an inspiring leader and an enthusiastic peace maker, even more so than Prime Minister Sharon before him. Lucky because as in Australia a few weeks ago, recent election results in Israel owe more to the shenanigans of opposition parties than to Netanyahu’s personal popularity or acceptability to his constituents. Lucky because the terrorist organisations have given him no real choice but to take the populist if practical line of shoring up Israel’s defences waiting for the Arab parties to get their act together, which they never seem to show any signs of doing, and for the Muslim world to disavow terrorism and murder as mechanisms of progress. Lucky because the Israeli people have for some unknown reason apparently forgiven Netanyahu for his shameless role in the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
I agree with Tulloh that the peace process has not been worth its name in desert sand, basically ever since the Rabin assassination but I am surprised that he does not seem to realise that if a genuine peace were to be in prospect, still more if it were to break out with all borders secure and people safe, most of the settlements would be no more than a passing phase of history, whatever some might shortsightedly try to argue.
In the course of leading an Australian, World Bank and multinationally funded program, in the wake of the Oslo Agreements, to assist the Palestinians to build a legal system based on democratic justice and the rule of law in the 1980s and 90s, I met and spoke at length to virtually all the Palestinian Authority leaders and many others of their people. I have continued some of these contacts since. These leaders know full well that the settlements are in truth irrelevant because in substance they will largely go away in a peace treaty. They know that the so-called “right of return” of Palestinians to Israeli coastal areas is a hoax and a cruel play on words used to save Holocaust survivors, with no chance of fulfilment. They very well know that Israel could be, and in peace would be, a massive source of aid and support to a Palestinian State in almost every area of human and developmental activity, from music to irrigation and beyond.
But their extremists have for decades vetoed all efforts to make peace, ensuring the election of the Netanyahus, Sharons and the religious extremists, and taking the pressure off them to protect their people by pursuing peace with vigour, instead preferring a form of protection by building and expanding wherever they want. Many of these activities have certainly not helped the so-called “peace process” but they merely demonstrate the supreme irony that as Palestinian attitudes have sent the Israelis lurching to the right, more in fear and exasperation than aggression, Israeli activities have sent the moderate but disunited Palestinian leaders into shutdown mode.
Australians can do little to assist these parties to reach a compromise settlement of the issues which divide them. Rather than criticise one party alone, it would, in my view, be more helpful if those who wish to contribute to the public debate were to lend their talents to actions designed to show Palestinians what democratic statehood really means by contributing to the viability and peacefulness of a future Palestinian state and to challenge the Israelis to search for common ground based on mutual respect, understanding and constructive co-operation.
In my country Iran, many dads take two jobs. They work hard so that their kids can check more items off their wish list. Moms like other moms in the world sacrifice their comforts for the sake of their children. Despite this, according to UNHCR data (immigrationinformation.org) the number of Iranian youth seeking asylum around the world has more than doubled since 2007. In 2012 nearly 20,000 Iranian sought asylum. Iran has thus, laid claim to producing one of the highest rates of brain drain in the world. Simultaneously Iran is one of the world’s largest refugee havens, mainly for Afghans and Iraqis.
Why do young Iranians leave Iran?
Sixty percent of Iran’s population is under 30, and are facing major difficulties in getting jobs. In Iranian families, the value of education is an important cultural element. Almost everyone believes that university education is essential for success. Thus, despite the highly competitive University entrance exams, the percentage of high school graduates who are admitted to universities is high. However, unemployment is one of the thorniest problems. This is because educational planners have focused most of their energy on expanding the universities’ admission rate. This has resulted in graduates having high expectations for their careers but with poor job prospects.
Over the period 1970 to 2000, Iran experienced a revolution in many ways. The Iraq-Iran war lasted from 1980 to 1989. There was a regime change from conservatives to liberals after the election in 1996. The revolution impeded economic growth and the Iraq-Iran war exhausted resources in the economy and hindered economic growth. Conservatives took over power again in 2005 by electing Ahmadinejad and re-electing him in a fraudulent 2009 presidential election, resulting in a series of protests. According to Anna Johnson and Brian Murphy in June 2009, the Iranian government disputed these allegations, and confirmed the deaths of only 36 people during the protests. Unconfirmed reports allege that there were 72 deaths in the three months following the disputed election. However, the death toll was possibly higher because relatives of the deceased were forced to sign documents claiming their family members had died of heart attack or meningitis. During this period Iranian authorities closed universities in Tehran, blocked web sites, blocked cell phone transmissions and text messaging, and banned rallies.
To make it worse the U.S. government tightened sanctions on Iran. These sanctions were directed at ordinary people who bore the brunt in medicine and food shortages. There were also money problems.
As I mentioned earlier, Iranians put education as their priority, so they try hard despite all the financial and political pressures. However they like to speak out peacefully for their rights and they want to freely write their opinions without fear of interrogation and prison. They look for their legitimate rights in Iran. When they can’t find it in Iran they seek it elsewhere.
Their choice is immigrant friendly countries such as Australia that value freedom. The International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), states, “That every human being has a right to life, and to personal security, inviolability and freedom.” Countries that have ratified this agreement have taken concrete steps to promote and protect the economic, social and cultural rights of their people. Rights such as the right to work, the right to social security and the right to an adequate standard of living.
Why opt for immigration?
For these reasons many Iranians under economic or political pressure decide to leave their home and migrate to a friendly country. However obtaining a visa is not easy. The immigration process now takes more than 3-4 years with no guarantee. So many just give up and look for an alternative way.
To make matters worse, immigrant friendly countries like Australia have toughened their immigration policies towards Iranians. This is particularly when there are political tensions in migrant friendly countries. However, it should be understood that Iran’s people face political persecution at the hands of the Iranian government. These people have difficulty obtaining legal visas while ironically, members of the regime can easily relocate to other countries on special visas. As a result innocent Iranians are being caught in the crossfire instead of getting support from refugee host countries like Australia.
Between 1994 and 2000 Australia admitted a large number of Iranian postgraduate students and their dependents. Virtually none returned home. Contrary to common preconceptions, Iran’s education system has been world class – notably in maths and sciences. Australians of Iranian heritage now work as leaders in law, politics, science and the arts in Australia and they have been acknowledged for the contribution they have made to Australian society. (Crock and Ghezelbash –ABC.net.au 25 July 2013)
There is a need for us to care for each other to make the world a better place to live in. The Persian poet, Saadi, says;
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.
*******
In my blog of July 28, I referred to the special problems of Iranians, ‘Refugees or Migrants’. I suggested the need for other migration pathways, perhaps a 4-5-7 visa or sponsored migration.
In the last 12 months, the proportion of boat arrivals in Australia from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33% of all boat arrivals. At 31 August there were 2,786 Iranians (32%) in immigration detention. Iranians were the largest group by far. A particular difficulty for Iranians who are refused refugee status is that the Iranian Government will not accept any returnees to Iran who have sought refugee status elsewhere. So unless Iranian asylum seekers can find residence in another country they face long detention in Australia.
John Menadue
In every way, Yu Woo-seong was a model defector. In his early 30s, he was smart, friendly, ambitious and well-liked. Despite the fact that he had been in South Korea for less than six years, Yu managed to work through his university studies while adapting remarkably well to his new environment, finishing his bachelor’s degree in 2011.
While taking on organizing roles in a number of Seoul-based clubs and organizations created by North Korean defectors to help new arrivals, Yu gained entry into a master’s degree program, majoring in education in social welfare. Less than one year into his graduate studies he was hired by Seoul City Hall as a special attaché for North Korean defector projects. In every way, he was a model assimilation case – until early this year, when he was arrested as a North Korean spy.
The evidence against him was based on testimony from his sister, who attempted to defect in October 2012. During an intense and highly secretive interrogation by the National Information Service (NIS) that all defectors are subject to upon entering the country, Yu’s sister, Yu Ga-ryeo, “confessed” her brother was a spy. The plot took a further twist when, on March 5, after 179 days in detention, his sister retracted her accusations against her brother, claiming that she had been subject to physical and psychological abuse at the hands of NIS agents and deceived into making the confession. A number of facts continue to be shrouded in secrecy; one detail, however, emerged as incontrovertible fact – Yu and his family are Chinese nationals who were born in North Korea.
Further to the ambiguity regarding the significance of Yu’s ethnic background and the difficulties of potentially unravelling the twine of blood and nationhood that marks the socio-political fabric of both Koreas, are basic questions of human rights.
In the modern, robust democracy that is South Korea, is it right – both morally and in the eyes of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – that a person arriving and claiming asylum can be detained for up to 180 days? During this time an individual is subject to round-the-clock interrogation without legal representation. Questions including but not limited to place of origin, their motivation and method of escape, their political sympathies, their family networks, their day-to-day life in North Korea, their movements and activities since they were born, their medical history and much more are asked at all times of day and night.
The question is not one of whether or not the government should be permitted to take the means necessary to defend its borders and citizens. Rather, it is of accountability. The period of time during which agents of the state interrogate asylum seekers continues to be cloistered from the gaze of the public in every way possible – a mysterious process through which it is ascertained – to some vague degree – that an individual is, or is not, an enemy agent and a genuine asylum-seeking North Korean.
The general public seems at best oblivious to this process that is carried out in its name, and to some degree the absence of public discussion on this subject approaches the tacit condoning of these practices. It must be asked, given the potential physical and psychological harm a process like this can cause, whether it is any surprise that thousands of North Koreans are re-migrating to third countries as soon as they can muster enough funds.
This is all possible because, on many levels, aspects of the Cold War linger on in Northeast Asia and cries of “spy” and “communist” still bring to attention (and to heel) the general public in passions which are only matched by their complete apathy towards matters pertaining to North Korean new arrivals, the much romanticised idea of reunification, and human rights.
Yu’s case has underlined the apathy that is endemic in South Korean society, towards human rights and towards issues pertaining to that whose name cannot be spoken – North Korea. This disheartening fact is only compounded when we are faced with a North Korean defector community incapable or ill-prepared to fight for the human rights of defectors in South Korea (that is saying nothing about the human rights of North Koreans in North Korea), a divided leftist activist community, and questions about what constitutes a defector.
On August 22, after eight months in solitary confinement, during which the highlight of each day was a one-hour exercise period – time also passed alone – Yu Woo-seong walked out of the In-deok detention center in south Seoul a free man. In his verdict reading earlier that day, the judge ruled Yu innocent of all charges.
As the dust settles and the media loses interest in the latest spy scandal to capture its interest it is worth considering that perhaps Yu’s greatest crime was simply that he was more successful than other North Koreans at being a model defector. This case further highlights the need for media reporting that questions, rather than parrots the government announcements and that still values the old legal maxim “innocent until proven guilty.”
Markus Bell is a PhD candidate at the ANU. Sarah Chee is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In his toxic language over asylum seekers in the last three years, Tony Abbott has been not only derogatory about vulnerable people fleeing persecution, he has also gone out of his way to insult our neighbours in their handling of asylum seekers. He has shown no favouritism. He has insulted them all.
Within the last two weeks he has offered ‘contrition’ to three regional leaders for his insulting language about their policies and performance. He has described his insults as really only part of a ‘rather intense party-political discussion in Australia’. That is sheer evasion. It has been Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison who have directly and personally led the attack on asylum seekers and our neighbours.
What must regional leaders think of the intemperate behaviour of our new Prime Minister? In their minds it would not suggest strong and stable leadership on which they can rely. They would reasonably conclude that he will slip into a domestic political mood if that is necessary and ignore relations in the region.
In Jakarta on his first visit, he had to apologise for his challenge to Indonesian sovereignty. He had earlier said that unilaterally his government would tow boats back to Indonesian waters and would intervene in Indonesia to purchase Indonesian vessels. This was clearly blatant intervention in Indonesian affairs. The Indonesian President was polite, but the real annoyance is best judged by statements by the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Members of Parliament, officials and the Indonesian media.
Then in Bali this week at the APEC meeting he apologised to a succession of regional leaders.
He insulted Malaysia in June 2011 when he said ‘Imagine taking boat people from Australia to Malaysia where they will be exposed almost inevitably to the prospect of caning … they will be detained, they will be tagged, they will be let out into the community and in the Malaysian community, people of uncertain immigration status are treated very, very harshly indeed. … What is supposed to protect people in Malaysia from caning and other very harsh treatment? …. What [the Australian] government is proposing is to take people from Christmas Island, detain them, tag them and then expect that they are not going to be caned.’ Scott Morrison chimed in at the time that ‘Malaysia could not guarantee the human rights of people sent to that country’. For Scott Morrison to espouse the human rights of asylum seekers was surely breath-taking. One would not be surprised that in Bali the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak, was left wondering about the behaviour of our new Prime Minister with his belated apology.
After the meeting with the Malaysian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott then had to apologise to PNG Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill. During the election campaign Tony Abbott said that to buy the cooperation of PNG the Rudd Government had surrendered control of half a billion dollars annually in overseas aid to PNG. The accident-prone Julie Bishop at the same time attempted to put words into the mouth of Peter O’Neill to the same effect. Peter O’Neill responded at the time that the Opposition claims were ‘completely untrue … we are not going to put up with this nonsense’. At the same time, the PNG High Commissioner in Canberra ‘warned Australian politicians to observe international protocols and courtesies when discussing relations with other friendly sovereign nations and not impugn the dignity of our leaders who are attempting to assist Australia in this very complex regional and international issue of asylum-seekers’.
What enormous damage Tony Abbott has done, not just to asylum seekers who seek our protection, but in relations with our key regional neighbours. The ‘rancorous’ debate we have had in Australia didn’t come out of the air. It was provoked and led by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. It has been at great cost. Loose lips do cause damage. They can even sink ships.
More importantly Tony Abbott should apologies to the Australian public for misleading us about his boat “policy” and suggesting that he could pull regional countries into line to do his will.
Like Australia, Israel has a major problem of what to do with asylum-seekers. And, like Australia with our proposed Malaysia solution in 2011, Israeli legislation aimed at curbing the influx has been thrown out by the country’s highest court.
Those seeking refuge in Israel did not come by boat. They came across the Sinai from Egypt, many having to pay up to $2000 to Bedouin people smugglers. The majority were Sudanese and Eritreans fleeing abusive regimes. They used to fly to Cairo for refuge until police broke up a peaceful demonstration by Sudanese in 2005 and killed 20 of them.
Last year, with more than 55,000 having reached Israel, there was growing disquiet. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the new arrivals ‘illegal infiltrators’ who threatened the security and identity of the Jewish state.
Jerusalem decided to act with what was known as the Anti-Infiltration Law. It allowed Israel to detain the asylum-seekers for up to three years without trial. Two detention camps were hastily built – and, like Woomera, the main one is in a desert location. They house more than 1700 people – mainly men, but also women and children – in what social activists call harsh conditions.
Two weeks ago, the nine members of Israel’s High Court of Justice unanimously ruled the new law illegal because it violated Israel’s law on human dignity and disproportionately impinged on a person’s right to freedom.
One of the judges, Edna Arbel, noted: ‘We cannot deprive people of basic rights, using a heavy hand to impact their freedom and dignity, as part of a solution to a problem that demands a suitable, systemic and national solution’.
As welcome as this news was to the incarcerated, they remain locked up at time of writing. The Interior Ministry has 90 days – until mid-December – to review the inmates’ status. The Israeli government is said to be examining other ways of keeping them under detention.
The governing coalition’s Whip, Yariv Levin, denounced the court decision as ‘insane, breaking all records for anarchy and will turn Israel from a Jewish state into a state belonging to its migrants’. This is hardly likely when Israel has now managed to stem the flow of ‘the illegal infiltrators’.
Earlier this year, construction of a 230-kilometre fence from Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba to southern Gaza was completed. This has reduced the unwelcome visitors to a trickle.
Virtually all the now estimated 60,000 asylum-seekers in Israel remain in a legal limbo. Most have temporary protection visas which have to be renewed every three months.
Although they entered Israel from Egypt, Israel cannot send them back there because Cairo refuses to rule out returning them to their country of origin, where human rights are questionable. News reports in August suggested that Israel was planning to repatriate them to ‘safe’ African countries in return for military and other specialist aid. Jerusalem has denied this.
Uganda was mentioned as one such country. Ironically, it was a place which Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, once considered as a site for his Jewish homeland.
The majority of the asylum-seekers have made their home for now in Tel Aviv’s poorer southern suburbs. They have been subject to the predictable demonizing, including being blamed for criminal activity whereas statistics show that the rate of crime by others is much higher.
The government provides a range of social services, such as free education for children and free medical care for infants. An emergency medical clinic has been established along with psychiatric services for children.
But, said Sammy, a 32-year-old Eritrean quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘There is one big problem here – we have no ID, no papers, and no life’.
Mindful of the persecution of the Jews over the centuries and their need to escape, Israel has long championed the rights of refugees. It helped draft the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol protecting the rights of people fleeing persecution.
Indeed the Jewish Bible – the Old Testament to Christians – exhorts the faithful to ‘love the stranger as thyself, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt’.
John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.
The Australian government in cooperation with the Sri Lankan government and its security services has been returning asylum seekers to Sri Lanka. They are called ‘voluntary returnees’. Increasingly however, doubts are being expressed by many commentators about the continuing plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka. In the following article, published in Catholic News on September 12, Father Regno, Director of the Catholic church’s social work in the Jaffna community, and other commentators describe the plight of many Tamils. John Menadue.
Like many ethnic Tamils in northern Sri Lanka, for the last four years Reverend Father Regno Bernard has been waiting patiently for a sign.
Not from his God—from his government.
“After the war people expected a lot from the government, that there would be reconciliation, peace. But the people have been deceived,” says Father Regno, director of HUDEC Jaffna, the social arm of the Catholic Church of Jaffna.
“There has been no sign of reconciliation.”
For decades the Sri Lankan government was embroiled in a brutal civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an insurgent group that fought to carve out a separate Tamil homeland in the country’s North and East until it was defeated militarily by government forces in May of 2009.
Both sides stand accused of a range of human rights violations committed during the war, which claimed the lives of 40,000 civilians in its final days alone, according to the United Nations.
Sri Lanka, which is poised to host the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in November and serve as CHOGM’s chair for the next two years, is keen to whitewash its rights record and simply relegate past offences to the past.
But international rights monitors and Western governments have repeatedly called on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government to take steps toward allowing a credible, independent investigation into war crimes alleged to have been committed by the country’s security forces during the final stages of the conflict.
Its failure to do so has left a huge rift between Tamils and the ethnic Sinhalese-dominated security forces. This has been exacerbated by the fact that the government continues to push stubbornly forward with a policy aimed at achieving reconciliation in former conflict areas through economic development alone.
Critics contend that Colombo has interpreted the phrase “road to reconciliation” rather too literally in this case, focusing solely on improving infrastructure such as highways while neglecting Tamils’ calls for a degree of autonomy and accountability for war crimes.
Driving through the Vanni, the sparsely populated swath of land that formerly served as the stronghold of the LTTE, recent cosmetic upgrades are readily apparent. A proliferation of newly opened banks, military-run shops, and billboards advertising everything from telecoms to fizzy drinks to construction materials now line an ever expanding network of freshly sealed roads.
“The development is a façade,” says Father Regno. The government is busy “carpeting the road” when what is needed is a “lasting political solution.”
Such feelings of disillusion run deep in the North.
Northern Tamils resent that the government has not scaled back its military presence, that Sinhalese are imported from the South for the vast majority of skilled jobs in infrastructure development, that Tamils cannot file complaints at the police station in their own language, that lands seized during the war for security purposes have not been returned, that more has not been done to encourage investment and the creation of jobs, and that harassment and rights violations committed by the security forces continue unchecked.
“It’s not only about [having enough] rice and curry,” says Eran Wickramartne, a Sinhalese Member of Parliament with the opposition United National Party.
It’s also about “a feeling of ‘I belong’, that ‘I am respected’, that ‘I have dignity’, that ‘my ideas and proposals count’. ‘Respect for my language, respect for my culture’. Reconciliation is about that. There has to be a holistic approach. I think that is where the government has fallen short,” says Wickramartne.
The problem with the government’s approach is that “development is not inclusive” and Tamils are not being consulted in decision making processes, says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo-based research group.
“The population still feels it is being treated with suspicion,” he says.
Civilians have to inform the military if they want to hold a school program or sporting event – any kind of gathering that could “arouse suspicion” – and then invite the local commander as guest of honor, says Saravanamuttu. In practice, this means any unsanctioned gathering of more than five people is banned.
It is “such an outrageous and unacceptable rule,” says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council.
The omnipresent feeling of being watched by Big Brother pervades almost every aspect of life for Tamils in the North. But the most glaring manifestation of this is that individuals even suspected of having prior links to the LTTE are closely monitored, subjected to frequent questioning, forced to act as informants and—in some cases—subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of the security forces.
Amitha (a pseudonym) joined the LTTE in 1995, but returned to civilian life in 2005 when she married. After the war she was ordered to check in with the military twice a week at a civil affairs office in Jaffna.
“On these visits I was sexually abused,” she says. “One guy would put me up against a wall and touch me from behind. He tried to kiss me, but I would not allow it. So he would put his hands on my skirt and pull it up and touch me inappropriately.”
When she started missing appointments, they came looking for her.
“One day when I was alone at my parent’s house a soldier came. He tried to grab me. He said, ‘You have to go inside your room and take off all your clothes. I have permission to examine your scars.”
Amitha refused and pointed out that the civil affairs office would have sent a female officer to conduct this kind of examination if it were legitimate.
“Finally, he said, ‘If you are not going to do this, I am going to use your thighs’,” she says.
Amitha ran away, and has been in hiding ever since.
Her story, while not uncommon, is one of the more blatant examples of how the government is failing to win Tamil hearts and minds.
Indeed, the government’s policy has been to categorically deny there is a prevailing culture of silence and impunity for sexual violence in the North.
Such reports of torture and gender-based violence are “based on hearsay,” says military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya.
Many independent observers agree that a lasting political solution can only be achieved once a measure of autonomy is granted to the Tamil-dominated areas in the North and East. To this end, the Sri Lankan government has faced significant international pressure to hold Northern Council elections, which have been slated for September 21.
“The fact that the government has decided to go along with the Northern Council election is a positive step forward,” says Wickramartne. “It is long overdue.”
But questions have arisen about just how much power Colombo is actually willing to share. Most discussions on this topic tend to gravitate toward the 13th amendment, which in theory grants police and land powers to the provincial councils. But the government has threatened to dilute these powers, while some observers claim that in practice the 13th amendment already lacks teeth.
The notion that the amendment would guarantee the Northern Council some level of autonomy is flawed because “everything has to be approved by the central government,” says Thevanayagam Premanand, executive editor of the Jaffna-based Tamil language newspaper Udthayan. “Without the approval of the governor, [the council] cannot pass any law.”
“The 13th amendment, as it is today, is not being implemented as it should be,” says Wickramartne. The central government needs to come to terms with the idea of “sharing power with the periphery,” he says.
The issue of which body controls state land is the key to the discussion, says Kumaravadivel Guruparan, a lecturer in the Department of Law at the University of Jaffna.
Sri Lanka’s military appears to have been given carte blanche in terms of seizing land, and in the aftermath of the civil war has used lands originally acquired for security purposes to set up hotels, plantations, tour operations and more. This, of course, has aroused the ire of local Tamils.
“How do these amount to public security?” says Guruparan.
In the most high profile land-grabbing case, over 1,000 complaints have been filed by property owners demanding compensation or the return of their lands in an approximately 2,430-hectare area, which the government has announced it will retain possession of on the Jaffna peninsula. This area includes the large Palay military cantonment as well as the military-operated Thalsevana Holiday Resort.
“Those lands cannot be released due to development plans for [an] airport and harbor,” says Wanigasooriya, adding that military bases such as Palay are “essential” for national security.
The central government, which is primarily concerned with maintaining stability in the former conflict areas as well as pandering to its Sinhalese voting base, is unlikely to budge on the issue of control over state land.
“There is a belief that if you give the north land and police powers they will run away with it,” says Saravanamuttu. The primary fear, he says, is that Tamils will once again try to set up an independent state, using land powers acquired through the 13th amendment as a legal means to unify provinces in the North and East.
These fears are largely exaggerated, says Saravanamuttu, but the current government is willing to do “whatever necessary to hold the support of the Sinhala-Buddhist constituency.”
When asked about these fears, the government is quick to point the finger at the Tamil diaspora.
“There are many groups based in other countries propagating the ideology of separatism,” says Wanigasooriya. “We cannot afford to let our guard down, not yet.”
The decision to host CHOGM in Sri Lanka is a huge feather in the cap for the Rajapaksa government, despite the fact that the upcoming summit has served as a talking point for critics to refocus attention on Sri Lanka’s reluctance to be held accountable for rights abuses.
“Certainly Sri Lanka has to make good on its human rights record,” says Wickramartne. “By our own standards we have fallen short.”
“We are hopeful [that] it is possible for all communities to live together,” says Wanigasooriya.
But for people like Amitha, who is desperately trying to secure asylum in a European country, the notion of reconciliation is a hard sell.
“I can never go back home because I know what happens to female ex-cadres,” she says. “I would rather commit suicide.”
Father Regno, too, is not optimistic. Over a cup of milky sweet tea he offers one last musing.
“Without a political solution, we have no future.”
Launch of the 2013-14 Catholic Social Justice Statement by John Menadue 11 September 2013
This statement follows the proud tradition of the Catholic Church in Australia since 1940 of calling Catholics and all Australians to act for social justice. The 65 statements issued over the years cover a great range of social justice issues – poverty, violence, peace, environment, indigenous people, ageing and inequality. Many years ago GK Chesterton referred with admiration to the practice of Australian Catholics in their Justice Sundays and annual statements.
This year is no exception with the call to fight global poverty. The famous parable of Lazarus and the rich man calls all Christians to a commitment to work for the poor and the marginalised. As the statement says, whilst progress against world poverty has been made, major problems still remain.
As the statement so eloquently puts it, with 20% of the world’s poor living in our region ‘Australia is the rich man and Lazarus is at our gate”. Unfortunately our politicians keep slashing our ODA budget.
It is an honour for me to launch this statement. Let me congratulate the authors and designers who have drafted this excellent and timely statement. We are in your debt.
The Catholic Church remains for me the greatest influence for good in the world.
That influence is part of what Cardinal John Henry Newman described as the great beauty of the Catholic Church and not just in the lives of its saints or in its art.
No single institution in the world is doing more than the Catholic Church about poverty, social and economic self-enhancement of deprived people, especially through education and particularly for women, in societies where they have little place. It is also shown in the care of refugees, people with AIDS, lepers and outcasts of many kinds, and carrying out what is a fully developed understanding of total human development.
But unfortunately that wonderful story is often lost and as we are ashamed of the revelations out of the Melbourne parliamentary enquiry and the Newcastle royal commission about grievously failed leadership of our church on sexual abuse. The way the Church sees itself is not the same as that perceived by many in the public square.
But despite that, I think we are getting a spring back in our steps and the reason is Pope Francis as he speaks of the poor, refugees, prisoners, the oppression of women, the marginalised and people of different faiths.
There is a lot we can do to build on the church’s remarkable record in works of justice, mercy and charity. I suggest that we can do two things now – clear up our amnesia about our past treatment of indigenous people and lead the way on refugees.
The Frontier War
We have still not properly acknowledged the great damage we have done to our indigenous people. Along with the Australian War Memorial, we still blot out the Frontier War that settlers and the settler parliaments conducted right across our country from 1790 to early last century to dispossess indigenous people. There are no monuments to this long war but even the AWM concedes that 2500 settlers and police died in the war alongside 20,000 aborigines who were “believed to have been killed chiefly by mounted police.” Informed and engaged scholars like Henry Reynolds in The Forgotten War now believe that the number of indigenous men, women and children killed was probably over 30,000. This was an epic war. Its purpose was the occupation and sovereignty over one of the great land masses of the world. It was to wrest control from a people who had lived here for 40,000 years. This was a war which was much more central to our future than any other war in which we fought. In proportion to our population in the 19th Century which was about 2 to 2.5 million people, this Frontier War was the most destructive of human life in our history. The A W M applauds indigenous people when they fought for the empire, but refuses to suitably acknowledge the 30,000 indigenous people that were killed resisting the empire that was taking their land. The AWM remembers the Sudan War of 1885 in which no Australians were killed in combat but ignores the Frontier War. We easily call to mind “Lest we forget” but it is really “best we forget” the 30,000 Australians who were killed in our Frontier War.
The “whispering in our hearts” will continue until we are honest about our history, both its glory and its shame. Political slogans about a “black armband view of our history” are designed to avoid the truth and encourage us to forget.
Refugees
A major world problem we all face is what Pope Francis called the ‘globalisation of indifference’ to refugees. There are 45 million refugees and displaced people in the world. And the number is increasing daily. Just think of Syria. So often refugees and boat people are seen as an Australian problem when it is a major global problem.
The Torah which is a key part of our Jewish/Christian tradition, places great store on welcoming the stranger. The Torah repeats its exhortation more than 36 times ‘remember the stranger for you were strangers in Egypt’. This caring for the stranger is repeated more than any of the other biblical laws, including observance of the Sabbath and dietary requirements. As Leviticus 19 puts it ‘When an alien resides with you in your land, do not molest him. You should treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the native-born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself, for you too were aliens in the land of Egypt.’ The gospel of Luke asks ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and tells us the story of the Good Samaritan. Matthew’s Gospel tells us what may be an apocryphal story about the holy family’s flight from the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ to safety in Egypt. Perhaps flight by donkey is OK but not by boat!
Australia has a proud record of accepting 750,000 refugees since WWII. They have been marvellous settlers. But today in our political debate we have plumbed to a depth most of us would have thought impossible. This poisoning of our generous and humanitarian instincts has not happened overnight. It started with Tampa in 2001 and “children overboard”. We have been on a slippery slide ever since. There has been a failure of moral leadership, and not just by politicians.
We must change the present conversation. We cannot indulge our parochial stupor when we face a world where people are being killed and persecuted. This critical issue of how public opinion can become more generous and thoughtful will take time and a lot of effort. But it must be done. The Catholic Church and others must play a vital role. Our political leaders keep appealing to our darker angels. But we all have better angels that Abraham Lincoln referred to which will respond to strong and generous leadership.
Pablo Casals puts that appeal in different words.
‘Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness.
If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most.
It is not complicated, but it takes courage.
It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
In the present toxic environment, governments are determined to curb boat arrivals. But I suggest there are still many things that we could do with strong leadership, courage and with good management.
Our supposed land of the fair go and the second chance is punishing some of the most vulnerable people on this earth. With good leadership across the community, including the churches, we must change the conversation. Pope Francis is showing us that leadership.
Lebanon with a population of just over 4 million people is providing protection for one million Syrians. Pakistan, one of the poorest countries in the world has 2 million refugees within its borders. Their generosity shames us.
Importantly we need to do and show that the Church is not preoccupied with sex and gender and concerned to protect its own name at the expense of those that we have harmed.
Also we need to remind ourselves that despite our concern about current social and political trends, we do have a record of improvement in many areas. In my youth sectarianism and racism was rife. We have broken the back of those two vices although not completely free of them.
This social justice statement can be part of a process to change the narrative and our own behaviour, and highlight again what John Henry Newman called the beauty of the Catholic Church in the fields as justice, mercy and charity.
The Catholic Church, although wounded, remains for me the greatest influence for good in the world. I see and learn of it every day. We must never take that record for granted. It is always work in progress.
It is my honour to launch this statement
Our four Australian/Korean children were educated in Japanese primary schools.
Every summer holiday we struggled through the prescribed homework text- Natsu no Tomo (Summer’s friend). In the early August segment, there were assignments regarding WWII. They stated, “talk to your parents about WWII and write a composition about the importance of peace”. So, we talked to our children about their Korean grandfather, how he was conscripted from Korea into the Japanese army, how he fought in the savage battles on the Truk Island, was injured and was badly treated because he was not Japanese. In retrospect, writing about a Korean grandfather was probably off-limits as all Japanese children were expected to write the customary composition regarding how the Japanese had suffered as a result of the nuclear bomb and the importance of peace. Every following year in the Natsu no Tomo the topic never progressed past the nuclear bomb and a peace discussion. There was no mention of Japan’s hostile war of aggression. Because the nuclear bomb transformed Japan into a victim, education played the key role in creating what many Japan critics call collective amnesia.
Our homework chronicle was 25 years ago. Not a great deal has changed, Japanese textbooks still barely mention Japan’s war of aggression and the ultra-right nationalists have been successful in making war crimes such as the Comfort Women and the Rape of Nanking a taboo topic.
I have just returned from Germany. In comparison to, Japan, where the insensitive gaffes of Japanese politicians are relentless denial and whitewashing of history, Germany is coming to terms with its horrific past. All over Germany I found monuments displaying remorse for the carnage and the terror Germany caused. As I looked out over the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, (that covers the area equivalent of a housing estate) I couldn’t help thinking about the Japanese diplomatic outrage triggered by the monuments erected for Comfort Women outside of Japan in places such as Seoul, New Jersey and Los Angles. The stepping stones, in Berlin with real names, memorializing the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, made me think about the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and the massacre of thousands of Koreans that followed. However, collective amnesia again conveniently helps the Japanese public pretend the massacre never happened.
Public monuments help to reinforce historical facts. But most importantly, monuments can demonstrate contrition. In the 37 years I have lived in Japan, on occasion I have stumbled across privately erected monuments for Japan’s WWII victims- particularly the Koreans and the Chinese. But sadly they have invariably been desecrated by Japanese ultra-nationalists.
If Germany can come to terms with its horrific past, so can Japan, Collective amnesia denigrates victims and is extremely unfair to Japan’s next generation.
Nothing you can do can change the past, but everything we can do changes the future (Ashleigh Brilliant).