Seeking Australian asylum: a well founded fear

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.