Yesterday we saw the minister for managing Australian racism, Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen sign a memorandum of understanding with the Afghan Refugee Minister, Jamaher Anwary, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Sydney. It enables the forced return of Afghans whose bids for asylum fail. Bowen made the dubious claim.
”Never, all through the Howard years, never before today,
has there been an involuntary return from Australia to Afghanistan,”
An involuntary return means, as documented by Four Corners in 2003, that after being notified your on a ‘removal pathway’, that at any time within the next 48 hours, most likely in the middle of the night, being snatched from your bed, drugged, handcuffed, thrown on a plane under guard, dumped into the hands of officials from the very regime you fled!
This shocking scenario played out so many times during the Howard years that eventually commercial plane pilots and crew began refusing to operate flights on which deportations were taking place.
The claims of ‘never before’ should be taken with total skepticism, Australia has a history of deporting Afghans through lies and coercion. In the 2008 SBS documentary “A Well Founded Fear” it was shown that Afghans were told not only that it was, wait for it, ‘safe to return’, told that if they didn’t ‘return voluntarily’ that they ‘will face detention forever’, in at least one documented case told ‘they face permanent solitary confinement’ their ‘acceptance’ to return is then statistically logged as a voluntary return.
It was also shown of the about 400 Afghans who were detained on Nauru who were returned to Afghanistan at least 20 had been conclusively proven to be murdered, many had been tortured, and others have simply disappeared. It is worth noting of the 400 who decided not to leave, later were granted refugee status and resettled in Australia and other countries like New Zealand.
The UN Convention on refugees states clearly that no government can deport someone who has a “well-founded fear of persecution.”
So the other lie pedaled today is that ‘Afghanistan is now safe’, are we really expected to swallow this garbage? In the ‘age of wikileaks’ We have a plethora of diplomatic cables telling us otherwise, we have the Afghan war logs, we know there is a war raging in Afghanistan, 21 Australian soldiers have lost their lives, others charged with killing children, American soldiers taking fingers as trophies, rape, pillaging. At last count there were 150,000 troops from 47 different nations, of which 100,000 are US troops occupying the war ravaged nation of Afghanistan.
With the UNHCR seemingly complicit with this latest attack on refugee rights and the department of immigration repeatedly showing they have no regard for human rights or human life, we are left with only one choice. We must get angry, track down your local Refugee Action Collective in your city or on your campus, form your own Refugee action group in your city or campus. Let us pick a fight with the biggest purveyors of racism in Australia today, the Australian Government, Gillard and her lackey Bowen.
We must reach out organise and build a campaign capable of holding these bigots to account. As under Howard if we don’t do it the horrors will continue. Refugees will die, they will continue to die en-route, die smashing into cliffs, die ignored by Australian Navy as they sink, die as they take their own lives in despair, die thrown down wells in Afghanistan, decapitated. Die beaten to a pulp on Australian streets by confident bigots believing and defending the Government line. We must draw a line somewhere, and it is time it is drawn. Past time.
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