Mission & Justice

Jewel Topsfield; 17/5/08

When former immigration minister Kevin Andrews sparked a race row over his claims that African refugees were engaged in crime and failing to integrate into Australia he was acting contrary to advice from his own department. In a confidential briefing to the minister, obtained by The Age, the Immigration Department stressed that studies suggested it was not ethnicity that determined criminal behaviour but a combination of socio-economic problems and other disadvantage. The briefing was prepared for Mr Andrews in response to an article in the Cranbourne Leader suggesting that transit police believed Sudanese men were responsible for 99% of assaults and armed robberies on two Victorian rail lines.

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17/5/08: http://www.smh.com.au/letters/index.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

The scrapping of temporary protection visas for refugees is long overdue and very welcome (”1000 refugees receive protection, not detention”, May 16). The Opposition’s claim that this sends a “clear message to people smugglers that Australia’s borders are open for business” should not go unchallenged. The Immigration Department’s statistics show that more people came by boat in the two months following the introduction of TPVs than had arrived in the previous10 months. Before TPVs, men travelled alone on the boats to Australia hoping to sponsor their families to join them later. But once TPVs came in, they could not access the family reunion program. With no legitimate way to be reunited with husbands and fathers, wives and children turned to people smugglers. Before TPVs, very few children were among asylum-seeker boat passengers. After TPVs the percentage of children on the boats increased. On SIEV X, the boat that sank en route to Australia killing 353people, more than 35 per cent of the passengers were children, most of whom drowned. - Sue Hoffman Bassendean (WA)

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Jewel Topsfield; 16/5/08

The terror of fleeing the Taliban and ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan, a hair-raising journey in a rickety boat and three years of detention on Nauru is more than anyone should have to endure. But even after asylum seekers such as Mohammad Dawlat-Hussain were found to be genuine refugees, the former government sought to punish them for another five years, Immigration Minister Chris Evans said yesterday. Mr Dawlat-Hussain, whose boat reached Ashmore Reef in 2001, is one of almost 1000 refugees who will be granted permanent residency within months of the Government’s abolition of the controversial temporary protection visa.

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Andra Jackson; 12/5/08

Coming to Australia after 18 months held in the Manus Island detention centre — 10 of them by himself — Aladdin Sisalem felt he had finally found a new beginning.Instead, the stateless Kuwaiti-born Palestinian found that he had merely exchanged one form of living in limbo for another. He was placed on a temporary protection visa that banned him from applying for permanent protection for five years.He has spent the past four years not knowing if he would have to uproot himself and try all over again to find another country to take him at the end of next year.

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Aung Hla Tun; 12/5/08

Desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta yesterday in search of food, water and medicine as aid workers warned that up to 1.5 million faced death if emergency supplies did not get through soon. Buddhist temples and schools in towns on the outskirts of the storm’s trail of destruction were now makeshift refugee centres for women, children and the elderly as millions of dollars in emergency aid was stalled on airport tarmacs pending permission to enter the country and hundreds of relief specialists were waiting for visas. The reclusive military government is accepting aid from the outside world, including from the UN, but has made clear it will not let in the foreign logistics teams needed to transport the aid into the inundated delta.

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Aung Hla Tun; 12/5/08

Desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta yesterday in search of food, water and medicine as aid workers warned that up to 1.5 million faced death if emergency supplies did not get through soon. Buddhist temples and schools in towns on the outskirts of the storm’s trail of destruction were now makeshift refugee centres for women, children and the elderly as millions of dollars in emergency aid was stalled on airport tarmacs pending permission to enter the country and hundreds of relief specialists were waiting for visas. The reclusive military government is accepting aid from the outside world, including from the UN, but has made clear it will not let in the foreign logistics teams needed to transport the aid into the inundated delta.

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Alistair Lyon; 8/5/08

While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinian refugees mourn the 1948 Nakbeh (catastrophe) when they lost their homeland. Often ignored in Middle East peace talks, they cling to a “right of return”. Alia Shabati was 12 when she fled Jewish attacks on her village of Kabri, occupied a few days after Israel’s creation. Now a matron of 72, wearing a flowery blue dress and white headscarf, her memories of Kabri in today’s northern Israel are vividly intact, unlike the village, which was wiped off the map. “We had houses and land,” Shabati said in the living room of her modest dwelling in the alleys of Beirut’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. “We had olives, grapes, prickly pears and dates. We had orchards and fields. Now what do we have? Nothing.”

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Connie Levett; 28/4/08

A Sierra Leonean refugee despairs at yet another obstacle to bringing the partner and daughter she thought were dead to Australia. It is a simple DNA test, but when you can barely afford a nappy, $1850 is a lot to pay to bring your family back together. For 17 months Abi Sesay has been fighting to bring her husband and daughter, whom she had assumed dead in the civil war in Sierra Leone, to Australia. She has post-traumatic stress disorder and post-natal depression. She has spent thousands of dollars on applications and medical and police clearances. Her migration file has gone astray. And now the Immigration Department has come up with the expensive DNA solution.

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17/4/08

Armed conflicts and violence displaced more than 26 million people within their own countries in 2007, the highest number in more than a decade, an international monitoring body says. And while there is growing international attention to the plight, there has been no breakthrough in reducing their numbers or improving their situation, said specialists from the Norwegian Refugee Council. The council’s internal displacement monitoring centre estimated that the number of such displaced people reached 24.5 million in 2006. But that figure continued to grow in 2007. Last year, the number of displaced people rose sharply in Iraq where there were almost 2.5 million victims by year-end, as well as Congo (1.4 million) and Somalia (1 million).

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17/4/08

Hundreds of Afghans returning home after the closure of a refugee camp in northwest Pakistan have been left stranded because of a roadblock, the United Nations refugee agency has said. About 70,000 Afghans are being forced to either return to Afghanistan or relocate elsewhere in Pakistan after the closure of the Jalozai refugee camp. Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera’s correspondent reporting from the Peshawar-Torkham highway, said: “For the last three days the main crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan has been closed because of a dispute between tribal elders and a group known as Lashkar-e-Islam.” Laskhar-e-Islam, which is sympathetic to the Taliban, stopped trucks along the highway, saying that drivers must stop trafficking alcohol and drugs across the border.

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