One Too Many – World Refugee Day

This morning I went to the World Refugee Day breakfast hosted by the UNHCR. The theme of World Refugee Day is:

“One family torn apart by war is one family too many”.

It’s a clean sentence. Simplistic, consisting of 11 words and it rolls off the tongue easily.

But think about its implication. What if that hypothetical ‘one family’ were my family or yours? It certainly would be one family too many. If my brother was killed by a suicide bomber, or my mum went missing, a suspected kidnapping because of her political affiliation, the reality of the theme would be anything but a compilation of marketing words.

There is an important question we should be asking the decision makers of Australia so vehemently dehumanise asylum seekers for political advantage:

“If you had to flee your country, how would you like the rest of the world to treat you?”

Instead of harping on about the threat to our borders, or the deaths at sea, it’s time, as a nation, we step back and adopt a new perspective. Asylum seekers are human beings just like us. The only difference is, they were unlucky enough to be born into a precarious situation. Forces outside of their control – famine, war and global climate change – push people out of their homes and into a world where empathy is quickly overwhelmed by power.

Today, Australia sent troops back to Iraq. They also plan to send rejected asylum seekers back there.

There are three things wrong with this.

One – if we want to stop the global movement of desperate people seeking asylum, we need to stop war. Before sending armed troops, we must consider peaceful diplomacy, a concept conspicuously missing from the current international Iraqi media coverage.

Two – if we are going to so rapidly deploy troops to Iraq to mitigate the threat of a terrorist war, then where are the troops in DRC, Central Africa, South Sudan and Syria? Aren’t all of these places facing the same fearful reality? What does Iraq have that these countries do not? (Yes that is dripping in hypothetical sarcasm).

And finally – if Iraq is dangerous enough to permit the deployment of military, risking the lives of men and women, whilst expat workers are rapidly being evacuated, how is it safe enough to return ‘failed’ asylum seekers? Non-refoulement (a principle of international law) forbids the return of a person to a place where they are at risk of persecution.

I was brought up believing in justice and that the means should never justify the end. As Australians isn’t it time we wake up to ourselves and decide that our moral compass must be realigned?

No one is asking for a better life for themselves. They are asking for a better life for their children. Wouldn’t you do the same?

Dedicated to Leo Seemanpillai, the young Sri Lankan asylum seeker who died after setting himself on fire, and to his family, who were denied visas to attend their sons funeral.

The Seeker of Asylum – Published Work

An exert from an article  for Enhance Magazine published in 2012. 

It was a small, half broken boat that bought Ajmal* to the shores of Australia. The leaky boat flirted with death, as the ferocious ocean carried the tiny vessel and 80 or so desperate souls further from their nightmares and closer to their dreams.

“We spent, maybe, 5 or 6 days in the sea. You lose count. But every minute we were expecting a drama because of the sea,” says Ajmal, “it was about 50 per cent chance that I didn’t expect to get here”.

Sitting in a small, dimly lit room, asylum seeker Ajmal describes his journey from Afghanistan to Australia. Leaving his wife and young family in Afghanistan, he risked his life in order to find safety and security. He planned to eventually bring them over, where they could be raised in freedom and opportunity away from the terrors of Afghanistan. The journey took six months, including the life-threatening week at sea. That was three years ago. Since his arrival, Ajmal has remained locked up in a detention centre, while the Australian government processes his application for refugee status.

Ajmal’s story represents the plight of so many other desperate men, women and children fleeing their home land, seeking asylum and placing their hope for a better life in the Lucky Country. Only 2 per cent of the world’s asylum seekers arrive in Australia each year. We have 0.21 per cent of the global share of refugees, ranking us 79th in comparison to our wealth (GDP) per capita.

If you are surprised by those statistics and expected them to be a lot higher, you’re most likely among friends.

Many of us barely understand the difference between an asylum seeker and refugee and the media is quite rash in telling us our borders are being flooded by ‘boat people’, illegal immigrants and queue jumpers.

Perhaps you oscillate between a compassionate heart, moved to love these strangers, yet your fears hold you back; What if they’re from a terrorist group? Aren’t they all going to come if we allow a few in? If Australia can’t deal with its own issues such as homelessness or indigenous issues, how can we help these foreigners?

Here’s the thing; these people aren’t illegal. Nor are they queue jumpers. Seeking asylum from persecution is recognized internationally under the UN Refugee Convention, to which Australia is a signatory. Even arriving without documentation (sometimes it’s too dangerous in their country of origin to access their documents) is completely within their rights if their fears are well-founded. And as for queue jumping, there is no queue to join when you are fleeing persecution with your life in danger. In Malaysia, waiting for resettlement is like winning the Lotto. Statistically, it will take 150 years. I’d probably get on a boat too.

A very small margin of people seeking asylum come via boat. Australia’s borders are among the most secure in the world. The majority of these people are arriving by plane, not boat. And plane arrivals typically have a 40 per cent success rate, 85-90 per cent of those arriving by boat are granted asylum.

The concept of a refugee is quite a foreign concept to many Australians. It is not a choice. It is about life or death. They have to flee for their life. That is the foreign thing about it.