[Nettime-bold] Fwd: [v-i-s-a-s] We don't come here to sell our blood xxx

[ben moretti <bmoretti@chariot.net.au>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: visas-admin@lm.va.com.au
> Date: Thu Jun 27, 2002  12:56:43  PM Australia/South
> To: visas@lm.va.com.au
> Subject: [v-i-s-a-s] We don't come here to sell our blood xxx
> Reply-To: visas@lm.va.com.au
>
> Title: We don't come here to sell our blood
>
> Author: Caron Eliot
>
> Date: 27.06.02
>
> Email: caron_eliot@yahoo.com.au
>
> Summary: Last night approximately 200 people had the chance to meet 
> with and hear some of the Afghani refugees who have been released from 
> Woomera IRPC on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs). The occasion was the 
> second in a series of traditional Afgani dinners hosted by the Otherway 
> Centre, home of the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. Since September 2001 
> the Otherway Centre has grown to be a second home and strong community 
> support base for most of the 200 Afhgani Hazara refugees.
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------
>
>
> Adelaide. Small seething city of lies and whispers. South Australia, a 
> cut above those other states in its proud colonial history; no petty 
> convicts here, only state-sanctioned rapists, murderers and thieves, 
> thank you. The foundations of colony - Parliament House, Government 
> House, Pilgrim Church - built with the bones of the ancestors, the 
> great grey rocks blasted out from the right-angled bend in the river. 
> This is the place of the kangaroo dreaming. Small moments of grace with 
> the vote for women, gay rights, decriminalisation of marihuana. But she 
> was always England's dour daughter, once fair skin pocked with the 
> daughter radioisotopes of uranium, obsequious accepter of mother's 
> little atomic bomb tests, uranium mines, theft of artesian waters, 
> nuclear waste dumps. Come on down, you've fucked the rest, now the fuck 
> the best!
>
> Woomera, central-north South Australia. 1950's boys' own rocket town, 
> far far away from what is considered as centre. Deemed the perfect 
> place for the national repository project, a facility to dispose of low 
> level radioactive waste. Watch this space. And recently another 
> spectacular transformation. Notorious prison camp (sorry, Immigration 
> Reception and Processing Centre) to house the inconvenient sons and 
> daughters of globalisation. Some of the 20,000,000+ asylum seekers 
> adrift in the world right now. Fleeing political persecution. 
> Afghanistan. Iraq. Iran. Hey, wait a minute, they must be terrorists. 
> Punish them all! Lock 'em up and throw way the key. They're "rejectees" 
> according to Philip Ruddock, Australia's Immigration Minister, and 
> we're gonna teach them a lesson they will never ever forget.
>
> 1,618 people in detention as of 12 April 2002. Mainly people, families, 
> who arrived into Australia's territorial waters by boat. Claiming 
> refugee status as defined under the United Nations Refugee Convention.
>
> 60,000 people unlawfully in Australia as of 30 June 2001. People having 
> overstayed their tourist/work/student visas.
>
> Do the sums. What's really going on here? Why is the Australian 
> Government squandering millions of dollars of public money in a 
> systematic and sadistic program of the denial of human rights?
> Are we really compelled to endlessly repeat our brutal colonial 
> history, adding new forms of dispersals, extirpations and massacres to 
> our already bloody history?
>
> Every Indigenous South Australian - Mirning, Ngarindjeri, Kuarna, 
> Narungga, Adynyamathanha, Arabunna, Kokatha, Yankuntjara - I have heard 
> speak about the refugees has said more or less the same thing - "The 
> refugees are welcome here. We know what it is to be dispossessed and 
> locked up far from our families and we don't want anyone else to suffer 
> that. Not on our land. We know how to welcome strangers in the right 
> way. Let them free."
>
> Last night approximately 200 people had the chance to meet with and 
> hear some of the Afghani refugees who have been released from Woomera 
> IRPC on Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs). The occasion was the second 
> in a series of traditional Afgani dinners hosted by the Otherway 
> Centre, home of the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. Since September 2001 
> the Otherway Centre has grown to be a second home and strong community 
> support base for most of the 200 Afhgani Hazara refugees. Ex-detainee 
> Hussein Rezaiat is now the Centre's full-time Refugee Worker. In a 
> statement last November the Otherway Council made this statement:
>
> "We stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers who are asylum 
> seekers and refugees. We have no trouble putting ourselves in their 
> shoes. We reject the harsh and cruel treatment being offered to 
> desperate, persecuted and needy people who have come to Australia for 
> help. We ask the Australian government and opposition to begin to act 
> with humanity. We know what it is to be oppressed - we have experienced 
> much of the past 200 years as oppression. We know what it is to be 
> alienated and estranged in our own country. We know what it is to fear 
> for the future of our families, our young people and our children. We 
> know what detention centres are - our people were pushed onto reserves 
> and had to have exemptions to leave them. Australian prisons have 
> excessive numbers of our people. We know what it is to have no right of 
> appeal - there was no appeal for our people either against protection 
> and assimilation or against the taking of children. We know what it is 
> to be called "illegal" - it was illegal for us to consort with 
> non-Indigenous people, illegal to leave the reserve, illegal to drink 
> alcohol. We know what it is to be powerless. We know what it is to be 
> refugees in our own land. For more than 200 years we have watched boat 
> people come to our land. They came to escape poverty, persecution and 
> the effects of war. They came to make a better life for themselves and 
> their families. Now that the descendants of the "first illegal boat 
> people" are no longer poor and powerless, it seems ironic that they 
> would deny the same chance and hope to present day asylum seekers and 
> refugees."
>
> Shirley Peisley AM, Centre Executive Officer and Fr Tony Pearson, 
> Chaplain welcomed us to the dinner with an Afghani saying - 'guests are 
> a gift from God'. South Australia has a long colonial history with 
> people from Afghanistan, as many Afghani camel workers came here in the 
> 19th century to open up the transport and communication lines through 
> the central desert region. In the 1990s Afghanistan had the world's 
> highest number of refugees living outside of its borders. Today there 
> are an estimated 4-6 million Afghani refugees. Most of the asylum 
> seekers in South Australia are Hazara people from the central part of 
> Afghanistan (Hazarajat or Hazaristan). They speak the Hazaragi dialect 
> of Farsi and represent a mixture of Turkish, Mongol and other races. 
> The Hazara have been discriminated and against for more than 200 years 
> in Afghanistan under a various regimes, with more than 60% of their 
> people massacred in the 19th century.  The most recent massacres 
> occured in August 1998 at Mazar-i-Sharif (more than 8,000 men, women 
> and children slaughtered) and the Bamiyan Massacre, also in 1998.
>
> Qader Fedayee (real name used with his permission) is 18 years of age 
> and living in Adelaide on a Bridging Visa after some months spent at 
> Glenside Hospital recovering from severe depression and six suicide 
> attempts. He spent nearly two years incarcerated in Woomera as an 
> Unaccompanied Minor,
> and shared a little of his story with us. He is from Mazar-i-Sharif, 
> where his whole family were killed by the Taliban in the massacre of 
> 1998. He escaped to Charkein and lived for 8 months with not enough 
> food, water or shelter. Many died during this period due to the extreme 
> cold. He travelled to Orezgan where the Taliban killed his uncle and 
> his friend. His extended family gave him money to pay a smuggler and he 
> travelled to overland to Pakistan, and then by boat to Thailand, Hong 
> Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and finally Australia. The boat voyage was 
> frightening and an Australian plane helped to rescue people. He was 
> brought straight to Woomera from Ashmore Reef. "In Woomera I wished 
> that the boat had sunk and that I had died." He is now studying English 
> five days a week.
>
> Qader Fedayee still has to prove to the Australian Government that he 
> is a refugee!
>
> Hassan (sorry but i couldn't find him to ask his full name) was 
> released 3 months ago from Woomera. As a community leader, he began by 
> acknowledging the people at Woomera who are currently on a hunger 
> strike. Hassan's applications for refugee status have been rejected at 
> the primary stage and also before the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT). He 
> explained why "the process is not fair" to asylum seekers. A refugee's 
> first interview is with a Case Officer, the second with Immigration 
> officials. A third interview and then the language of the refugee is 
> analysed. The fourth interview is with a Migration Agent who acts as a 
> legal witness (rather than as a legal advocate for the refugees), and 
> then a fifth interview with the Case Manager and the Migration Agent. 
> This process takes about 25 days, with asylum seekers then waiting 
> around 9 months for a decision.
>
> They generally face rejection because of a language objection, and 
> subsequently spend another 12 to 30 months in detention during the 
> appeals process. According to Hassan most of the language objections 
> are baseless, with the people entrusted to analysing the language 
> having left Afghanistan 30 years ago. I think he was referring to the 
> fact that these 'experts' are out of touch with the living language, 
> and social conditions which effect language and necessity to learn a 
> second language of the dominant power group.
>
> Now Australia has signed an agreement worth $59,000,000 with the newly 
> installed Afghani Government to send the asylum seekers back.
>
> "We came to Australia as refugees. We don't come here to sell our 
> blood. It's a matter of life. We would like to work in  Australia. We 
> would like to pay tax. About 90% of Afghani refugees are working now 
> and paying tax. We would like the opportunity to live in the middle of 
> liberty, which we never had in Afghanistan. We are tired. We paid a lot 
> of cost. We paid genocide and massacre for over 100 years. We don't 
> like to be tageted anymore. We would like to ask the people of 
> Australia to help us, to live in the world of humanity. We are not 
> harmful to the country. We would like to have a real liberalism and 
> liberty. Please ask the people in Australia to contact the media and 
> talk on behalf of powerless people in Detention Centres. We need your 
> support."
>
> Hassan's powerful and eloquent words were followed by those of Hussein 
> Rezaiat. He began by saying that he wanted to speak about happy news.
>
> "But how can I when my friends are on a hunger strike in the Detention 
> Centre? How can we talk happy story when our people are suffering in 
> Afghanistan, in refugee camps in Pakistan, in camps here?"
>
> Hussein then told the story of Mustafa, an 8 year old boy who lost all 
> of his family in 1998, and ended up in Woomera. This is another big 
> story and rather than try to retell it here I will ask Hussein if he 
> would like to tell it himself to indymedia readers.
>
> Speaking of his fellow asylum seekers he asked, "Why are they sewing 
> their lips? Why are they hanging themselves, crushing their bodies? It 
> is because they are hopeless. They came to Australia and found another 
> jail. Unkind government, unkind guards, treated them like shit, and 
> they became hopeless.
>
> They tried to speak. They wanted the media and Human Rights groups to 
> come in to the Detention Centres. They didn't allow us. When we tried 
> to speak with them they didn't listen. They tried to speak with you 
> with a hunger strike. We will be hungry and thirsty until we die."
>
> Aunty Shirley Peisley ended this very moving and strangely joyous 
> evening (those beautiful babies and children bounding and abounding 
> helped) by saying to the refugees, "You are welcome in our 
> country...Your presence enriches us and we love you very much."
>
> The Otherway Centre is considering hosting similar evenings and I can 
> totally recommend the experience. They are also looking for volunteers 
> to help with English classes, computer training, and other forms of 
> social and skills-based projects. So....here is a really practical way 
> to help make a difference.
>
> Otherway Centre, 185 Pirie Street, Adelaide, 5000
> Phone:  (08)8232 1001
> Email:  AfghaniNights@acc.asn.au
>
>
> Hunger Strike Update, 12.15pm, Thursday 27 June 2002
>
> I have just spoken with Ali Hader (name used with his permission, sorry 
> about the spelling) at Woomera. He said that 190 people including women 
> and very small children are continuing the hunger strike. He said that 
> many of them have been in Woomera for 18 and 19 months. They are very 
> tired. They came here for freedom. Not to be put in detention centres.
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