“Seeking asylum, the voices Australia should hear” – a review of ‘our stories’ published by the Asylum Seeker Resource Center in Melbourne.
This is a very good book, it shows the stories of refugees who have come to Australia and the difficulties faced by them as a result of government policy to refuse them entry. The stories that I read by Betelhem by Hamed, Jamal, Nadira, Joseph, Prudence, and Danijel are full of hope …. There’s some great stories in here. And it is really well put together. It’s an interesting way of presenting the refugee story because, up to now, we’ve heard plenty of refugee advocates talking about the position faced by refugees, but now we have their stories in their own words.
One of the leading people in putting the book together appears to be Liliana Maria Sanchez Cornejo. Liliana was born in Santiago in Chile in 1983. One of the most powerful contemporary refugee stories in Australian history is that of Chileans fleeing the military coup by Augusto Pinochet. The military was assisted by the CIA and an Australian company among others. Former Liberal PM Billy McMahon approved spy agency request to conduct covert operations in Chile. This was reversed by the Australian government led by Gough Whitlam and many refugees came to Australia under a program to assist them. That was after the coup on the 11th of September 1973. Liliana Maria Sanchez Cornejo is one of those people who were whose parents were involved in that diaspora from Chile caused by the military dictatorship that existed there for so long.
In the narrative, we hear a lot from people from very different political situations. Abdul, for example was a survivor from the war and conflict in Afghanistan, a country that was invaded by the Soviet Union by the United States, by the British, by Australia. He is an Hazara, a much persecuted people. And Abdul managed to come here to Australia, and to seek out an alternative existence. One of the big episodes that affected Hazaras were the 438 people aboard the Norwegian ship, the MV Tampa and the ensuing affair where the Howard government refused the Tampa entry to Christmas Island and sent SAS troops on board to deflect the captain Are Rennin from following the most basic law of the sea that won’t give succor to people in distress at sea and take them to the nearest land, you know, for assistance. And the Australian Government came up with the first Pacific solution where they had excised the whole Australian coastline from their migration act so that they could get around there being a signatory to the International Covenant to protect refugees, which Australia helped set up in the early 1950s. That’s one story by Abdul and the, you know, the John Howard incident won him government for 11 years, and he played upon community fear of people coming from overseas. Really, it is the story of Australia that that Australia is a country that from its beginning, has strived to lock out people. And so these recent events don’t come as any great surprise. We do not fulfill the basic Charter of the United Nations, and that is that everyone has a right to seek asylum, and it’s in the Declaration of Human Rights.
I would make a comment by, you know, obviously the well-meaning and quite dedicated lawyer, Julian Burnside, who has advocated for refugees seeking asylum and has been involved in a lot of the court cases, he seems to feel that there’s been a shift that was brought on in 1992 when Keating, Labour government introduced A process of mandatory detention. He felt that that’s, that was a shift and that the previous history of Australian engagement with people coming by boat is to be praised. Specifically he praises the Fraser Liberal government for its policy in taking refugees from Vietnam. He gives us some statistical basis for this, which I find a bit strange. The way he reads these statistics, according to Burnside, between 1948 and 1992, Australia successfully and peacefully resettled 452,000 refugees, and at this time the people seeking asylum were processed in the community. There was no policy of mandatory detention. Well, that’s a good thing; but, when you look at it, that’s only about 9,000 people per year in a world full of conflict and people fleeing war, and wars that Australia was involved in wars that they had no business to be involved in, specifically the American war in Indochina in Vietnam, where Australia and ironically, Malcolm Fraser as the army minister of the day was quite happy to send a 19 year old Australian to fight in Vietnam, which caused over a million deaths of Vietnamese people, and many young Australians also died in infamous battles like at Lon Tan.
Julian Burnside says that the Australian Government welcomed 56,000 people, refugees fleeing from Vietnam, including 2000 people who arrived by boat without documentation. They were granted entry under policies initiated by the Fraser government. Burnside said this all happened without fear, misinformation and political point scoring. That is the norm today. Well, that is not how I remember it. There was a lot of fear provoked, maybe more by Bjelke-Petersen government upon the arrival of boat people. Those boats littered the shores of North Queensland. So I don’t know that Burnside’s version is entirely correct, perhaps by people in Melbourne and Sydney it was.
Okay, that’s 56,000 people escaping Vietnam between 1975 and 1982. That’s only about 7,000 per year and think of the millions of people despite displaced as a result as a direct result of Fraser’s participation as the army minister in the American war in Vietnam that caused the disruption in the first place. Multiple Australian Governments were toadying to the US and their insistence that we participate in unjust wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many others. Well, I’ve got to say the Fraser’s policies were better than that of Scott Morrison. But then, in my experience, each new Australian Prime Minister is worse than the one prior. So we are steadily going downhill. I hope that Mr. Albanese will prove me to be wrong, that he will be better than Scott Morrison. But at the moment, I’m seeing that he is just as servile to the American foreign policy and their insistence upon wars, in both Europe in the Ukraine, and also in the war against China. So yeah, but that shouldn’t distract us from the story of very strong women and men who believed you can’t lock up someone’s brain and that you can make a life in in Australia, despite the racism and there are plenty of accounts in this book of young people and older people seeking refuge here and experiencing Australian racism at firsthand. Many of the people overcome it. T
hey acknowledge the communities that they left behind. For example, Joseph said, it took a community to get us here. They acknowledge that they were just some of precious few who were able to successfully flee was in other parts of the world and The story of Rafique, a Rohyngian man who helped set up a refugee soccer team that of Prudence who escaped from Chad, in Central Africa, after her father was shot and her experience of racism in regional Towoomba and her method of overcoming that by starting up, E- raced, which is an organization of young refugees and migrants, who visit schools and regional and rural Australia, and share their personal stories with teachers and their students. And that helps overcome the racism. Danijel who’s from a refugee camp in Serbia of Croatian heritage, managed to escape the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s. Danijel made his way to Australia and eventually ended up defending blue collar workers in Australia against wages theft by the companies that employed them. Danijel became a lawyer.
The book is from a publishing and printing point of view. It’s an interesting book, in that they’re beautiful photos. And it’s in the in the form of a coffee table style book, which maybe gives us a hint to the potential audience that of middle class Australia is whom they seem to be appealing to many of the people arrived in Brisbane. And of course, we had the terrible circumstance highlighted by refugee solidarity, where the government was using an inner city hotel as a detention center in kangaroo point, and they would imprison refugees who are not they’ve not done anything illegal, they would imprison them. Then for about eight years after being processed offshore in Nauru and Manus Island, many of the people were accused to be a being terrorists, which is totally wrong. They were people just looking for a new life and fleeing war in their in their own country. So all in all, an excellent book. I recommend it, I hope that we see a change in government policy under the new Albanese government. The annual Palm Sunday rally in March for Peace and refugees will be held on the second of April this year in Brisbane meanjin at 1pm and it’ll be in King George Square there’ll be a March following it. So everyone come along if you can. Okay, this is Ian curse signing off. We’ll go out with a song by Phil Monsour – stand with us.
Ian Curr
7 March 2023