Life in limbo

The Canberra Times ran a story last week on the situation of an Iranian mother and her two daughters, who are amongst a small group of asylum seekers that have not been granted refugee status but have been invited to apply for permanent visas because they are unable to return to their homeland.

This group and those that have already been released from Nauru and Baxter on TPVs, continue to live a twilight existence of uncertainty and fear that they will be returned forcefully to their home countries. Responding to pressure brought by backbenchers, the Government has opened a small window of hope for those that have failed in their bid to be designated refugees, but can not return home because of the risk of persecution, which would appear to indicate they are in fact genuine refugees.

Refugee advocates have rightly highlighted the bloody mindedness of this latest Catch 22 scenario hatched by Vanstone and chums. I have never seen a government so practised in the art of pettiness.

I have been fortunate to become friends with an Afghani man in this predicament. I will refer to him has Hamid (not his real name). After Australia kept Hamid on Nauru for almost three years, he was released on a TPV to live in Canberra, where he has been assisted by the ACT Government and refugee advocates. Hamid is an agricultural scientist, a musician and a progressive thinker, an obvious target for the Taliban.

Hamid fled Afghanistan, leaving his family in his home province, and only survived to tell his tale by chance. His journey is truly amazing, transiting many countries, running the gauntlet of pirates, ending up in the sea twice after boats sank, falling prey to criminal boat smugglers and detained on Nauru for three years with little chance of reprieve. Lobbying by refugee advocates and a revised UNHCR situation report on Afghanistan led to Afghani detainees being released on TPVs, but the fear of rejection and further persecution is a constant for these people.

When some of their stories come to be written in detail, Australians will be shocked at the brutal treatment meted out by a government with a manic determination to manage the boat people phenomenon as a political wedge issue.

What happened to that freedom loving social democracy built on universal human rights; a nation at ease with itself and welcoming to those who face persecution on political, religious or ethnicity grounds? Do Australians remember how we welcomed Vietnamese boat people in their many thousands?

Now we are looking more and more like a xenophobic client state of the US, an uncompassionate society ready to disbelieve the legitimate claims of asylum seekers who didn’t stand in a non-existent queue of orderly people waiting for whichever repressive regime they are escaping to allow them to migrate. The silliness of this position overwhelms me at times.

The history of propaganda reveals that you can package lies very successfully if they play to irrational fears – it is especially difficult to counter when cloaked in the garb of national security. Are Australians prepared to allow their government to continue to ignore human rights and refugee conventions – to sit by while basic rights are suspended, or as Noam Chomsky put it, ‘democracy is deterred”?