Seeking Australian asylum: a well founded fear

Last month, according to media reports, gunmen abducted and then threw Afghan man Mohammed Hussain down a well before killing him with a hand grenade near his home in Kabul, Afghanistan.

A grenade just outside Kabul also hit Abdul Azim Rahim’s home in January 2006. His two young daughters, Rowna and Yalda, were killed.

Two and a half years earlier, in August 2003, Mohammad Mussa Nazari was gunned down near his home in Ghazni province.

Mohammed, Azim and Mussa had all fled their homeland to seek protection in Australia. Instead of receiving protection and safety, they were detained within Australia’s Pacific Solution before being returned to Afghanistan; a country racked by violence.

Their stories are told in the documentary A Well Founded Fear,  screened on SBS on November 19. The film follows Phil Glendenning, director of the Edmund Rice Centre, as he travels to Syria, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan - where Mohammed was abducted during filming - seeking to uncover the fate of some of those people that Australia returned after they sought  asylum here.

The documentary provides a harrowing insight into the consequences of Australia’s response to people seeking protection during the Howard years.

It hints at the destructive implications of Australia’s mandatory detention policy that forced asylum seekers to choose between the daily psychological destruction of indefinite incarceration or returning to situations where their lives and liberties were threatened. It is a story of corrupt, and arguably illegal, practices on the part of some Australian immigration officials.

But it is also a story of the violation of basic human rights, including the right to life. The Edmund Rice Centre has documented the deaths of “as many as nine men returned from Nauru” and “three children of people sent back from Nauru”. According to Phil Glendenning, as many as 20 returnees from the Pacific Solution could have been killed.

At the beginning of the film, Glendenning asks how it could be that we, as Australians, could allow this to happen “and at the same time not imagine how we would feel if it was done to us?” How is it that we could show such a lack of empathy? How is it that we could not see their suffering?

The answer lies, in large part, in the political manipulation of distance between “us” and “them” - the mainly Afghan, Iraqi, and Iranian asylum seekers who began arriving in Australia by boat in significant numbers from 1999.

The Howard government and its supporters in the media promoted a sense that the asylum seekers were somehow different from us. They were labelled as “illegals”, “queue jumpers” and in the terrible, bureaucratic jargon of the government, SUNCs;  suspected unauthorised non-citizens. They were said to be criminals, terrorists and threats to something called “the Australian way of life”. Worse, they were portrayed as being less human than we are, as though they were incapable of the same depth of experience and attachment to loved ones that we share.

The sense of distance that Australians were encouraged to feel towards people seeking our protection fed an indifference to their plight. The official response to stories of their ill-treatment and even death upon return exemplified this.

When confronted by reports of Mohammad Mussa Nazari’s murder, then immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, told the Senate that while “tragic” it did not reflect the inadequacy of Australia’s protection determination processes.

In late 2003, after a group of Afghans from the Pacific Solution had been returned by Australia amid reports of ongoing insecurity in Afghanistan, Vanstone denied that Australia would return people to danger, and then, mimicking her predecessor Philip Ruddock, drew parallels between the risks of returning to a life in war-ravaged Afghanistan and “walking across the street”.

Furthermore, in late 2006, after the Edmund Rice Centre had uncovered the deaths of more asylum seekers returned from Australian detention centres, Senator Vanstone scoffed at any sense of responsibility we might have to the relatively small number of people who could have been helped. Instead Senator Vanstone suggested that out of the millions of people who had returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, “It would not surprise me if …not all of them are alive”.

The stories told in A Well Founded Fear are not new. They have been documented in earlier reports of the Edmund Rice Centre and in my own work.

But they are stories that need to be told again and again.

In part this is because nothing has been done to rescue the hundreds of people who were denied protection by Australia and sent back to danger.

The Rudd Government must re-open the cases of Afghans and others returned by Australia during the Howard years and bring those in need of protection back to these shores.

However, in order that such people be saved, we as Australians need to accept responsibility for the acts that were perpetrated in our names. A thorough inquiry into Australia’s return policy and practice ought to be conducted; nor is this only for the benefit of those returned. As Glendenning says in the documentary, our treatment of these asylum seekers not only violated their rights but also compromised our own humanity. We are a lesser nation for the fate to which we have returned these people.

Furthermore, there is a need not to repeat the mistakes made by the Howard government. The Rudd Government has done a good deal to curb some of the worst excesses of the Howard government’s response to asylum seekers. But, there is always a danger that unless we take full account of the past we risk making the same mistakes again.

As A Well Founded Fear draws to a close, we see Azim at the graveside of Yalda and Rowna. He tells us of an Afghan saying: “The water runs where it has run in the past.” There are profound human reasons for us, as Australian’s, to do everything that we can to ensure that in this instance, this old Afghan saying is proved wrong when it comes to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.