Hey.
I know that of late I have not been a happy little blogger and that this has probably been displeasing to some or all of my dear readers (it displeases me also, if that's any consolation), but forgive me yet another rant of unhappiness.
If you have, by chance, encountered my mother in the last week: face to face or facebook to facebook (or whatever) you may have noticed that her topic of conversation has pretty much circled around one topic.
This topic.
When something makes me angry I usually avoid talking about it or reading about it or listening to anything about it until I go mad, mad, mad in my strong emotional state... and write a blog about it. Which isn't terribly productive, I realise, in the end; considering that I have an audience of about three people who probably know or can guess what it is I have to say about said topic anyway. But it makes me feel better.
In this case, I would really love it if writing this blog made some sort of difference, though I realise the chances of that are very slim.
Ismail is a young twenty-six year old man who fled Afghanistan when he was about fourteen years old. We all should know that Afghanistan (for a very long time) hasn't been the most peaceful of countries for a boy to grow up in and live out his dreams; add to this the fact that Ismail is an ethnic Hazara - a group systematically persecuted in Afghanistan for hundreds of years, and you might be able to piece together his reason for leaving. He fled to Europe and eventually ended up in Ireland, where he was able to complete a High School Certificate equivalent - but not allowed to seek higher education or employment. So, unable to make a life in Ireland, he obtained a false passport, got on a plane to Australia and
handed himself over to the authorities in the belief that he would be treated with humanity in a country that prides itself on 'a fair go for all'.
He has been incarcerated in detention ever since. On Saturday he is going to be 'forcibly returned' to Afghanistan - the first person to be involuntarily deported after seeking asylum in Australia.
We, in Australia, are fed a lot of... bovine poo about refugees. The government parties use the 'boat people problem' as a scare tactic to try and win votes at election time - the media loves to tell us just how much the refugees cost our country in space and money and culture; everywhere our national predilection for racism and paranoia is fed like some sort of sacred flame.
Think of the films you like to watch. Any spy films, dystopian themed films, Holocaust themed films in that bunch? When you watch characters in these films steal away from dangerous enemy territory, clutching a false passport and sneaking their children through ditches, do you feel that they are selfish human beings? Do you feel that they are wrong for disobeying the law? Do you feel that they are cowardly or otherwise immoral?
Refugees aren't just people who didn't make good in their homeland and want to sponge off another country's government - refugee are, well, a good place to start would be
refugees are people. Refugees are fleeing from places where bombs fall on their houses. Refugees are fleeing from places where their daughters can't walk to school without being raped, fleeing from places where they cannot make fundamental life choices about what they believe, where (or if) they will live or how they will make a life. Refugees are fleeing from places where they have no hope for a future. They leave places where trouble has come upon them unsought.
Can you imagine what it must be like to BE a '
boat person'? Floating for days and days on the ocean, packed in with other miserable, frightened people with minimal resources of any description on a boat that will probably be two leaks away from sinking to the bottom of the ocean? Besides the almost always nonexistent hygeine facilities and the awful food and the lack of defense against the ravages of weather, there are also pirates. Not jolly, yo ho ho pirates with parrots and peg legs: real modern pirates who steal any kind of material possession you might have managed to bring with you. Pirates who rape and kidnap wives and sisters before the very eyes of their families. I'm not trying to shock or scandalise you for effect - these attacks are real, documented. This stuff happens.
And then, when you reach Australia, a civilised first world country, where poverty means hand-me-downs and Centrelink payments for Australian citizens, we imprison you in a detention centre, give you hope and snatch it away; make you wait YEARS and YEARS without any kind of certainty about your future and without anything vaguely resembling the freedom, liberty and justice that a country like Australia has to offer. People in detention centres suffer from the worst kinds of mental illness and are never offered any treatment.
Not only is Ismail being sent back to a part of Afghanistan where he has never even been before (and he has not been in the country since he was a child) and where he knows no one - the authorities have handed him a bill for the expense of his unwanted journey - over $30,000. This, for a man who has been locked up for two years like a criminal - who came to Australia because he wished to seek education and employment!
Bear in mind, this is a
person my mother and brother
know (from visits to Villawood detention centre over the last few months). He is not a random money-grabbing opportunist or a scary alien from another planet. I am told that he is a patient, gentle man who is genuinely scared of dying. He has seen three suicides and a riot happen at the detention centre. When he confessed feelings of depression and anxiety he was put in isolation in a video monitored blood stained room.
Ismail left Afghanistan because he feared death. Australians are sending him right back to Afghanistan - and his case will create a precedent for other Hazara people to be sent back into the arms of death. Pray for Australia. Pray for Afghanistan.
Pray for Ismail.
