Opinion

Sending THEM back

By Roger Pulvers

It was exactly 30 years ago this week that I first set foot on Australian soil. Less than four years later I became an Australian citizen.

Now, when you become a naturalized citizen of another country - something which most people do with a sense of joyous acceptance - you take on its long train of history: you are obliged to pull with you, into your future, its past burdens. I was only too aware of the racist elements in Australia's history, now my own by adoption. They were encapsulated in the then recently abandoned White Australia Policy, three words that speak volumes for a country's bigoted ethos.

But Australia in 1972 was on the verge of a brave, new experiment: the experiment

of multiculturalism. The proceeding decades of racial and ethnic liberalism left the earlier bigotry far behind. Or so I thought.

The past year has seen a reversal in that brave experiment. This reversal is evident in the present government's policy toward refugees.

Despite the fact that the government of John Howard committed Australian troops to the war in Afghanistan and has bent over backward to support Mr. Bush's threatened attacks on Iraq, it has refused entry to refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq on the grounds of illegal entry. These refugees have been either shunted off to neighboring countries or put in detention centers.

The most notorious detention center for refugees is located

in a small town called Woomera, some 500 km from Adelaide on the edge of one of the world's largest deserts. It is here that many of these refugees - some of whom have been kept for up to three years waiting to be "processed" - have been denied proper medical care and humane treatment. It is the children in particular who have suffered.

Amnesty International has deplored the treatment of children at Woomera, where guards have been known to "restrain" them by forcing them to take drugs. The center has been plagued by hunger strikes in which children have sewn their lips together in protest. Australia is the only democracy in the world to detain and torment children under such conditions.

And yet the Howard government has ignored all pleas on behalf of the detained refugees in this detention center, which, incidentally, is run not by the Australian government but by an offshoot of the American Wackenhut Corrections Corporation.

It is one year since refugees were saved from drowning by the Norwegian ship Tampa. New Zealand has taken in a large number of them, and they are assimilating well, with government support, into New Zealand society. In the meantime, the Australia that shows its face to the world in 2002 is an Australia run by mean-spirited, bigoted, cynically opportunistic politicians.

I would be ashamed of being an Australian if I did not think that the burden of carrying these politicians could not be lifted easily ... by detaching us from them and sending THEM back to the past in which they belong.

Shukan ST: Sept. 13, 2002

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