Opinion by Peter Arndt
LAST Christmas Eve, I had the privilege of joining Catholic asylum seekers for Eucharist in the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation.
Among their number were two men who had lost parts of their legs during a recent civil war, another man who had lost his capacity to speak and one who had spent much of his time in a psychiatric hospital because of anxieties he had developed because of persecution in his homeland.
I have also met other asylum seekers such as a young man who had been repeatedly raped by soldiers for two years and a teenage boy whose father and other male relatives had been slaughtered because they were from a different ethnic group and practiced a different form of Islam from their persecutors.
Many who have risked the perilous journey to Australia to escape such horrors have spent time in places like Pakistan and Indonesia.
Life in these countries can be equally dangerous and miserable – so, it is not surprising that many are prepared to risk their lives to find safety and hope. All of us would do the same if we faced the same circumstances.
Despite the increased numbers of “boat people” coming here in the last year, we should not pretend that we are facing an unprecedented crisis on our own.
Australia still ranks low among the destinations for asylum seekers.
While we are rightly horrified by the thousand or so asylum seekers who have drowned on their way here in the last six years, the same number has drowned in the Mediterranean in just the last six months.
Even if we were able to keep asylum seekers out of Australia, the sobering reality is that millions of people would still face savage persecution in their own country or unrelenting misery in other countries.
Locking them up in Australia or in an isolated camp on Nauru or Manus Island or releasing them into the community to face deprivation, isolation and endless uncertainty is greatly adding to their suffering.
We are, supposedly, doing all this to put the people smugglers out of business, yet, neither they nor their business is suffering one bit.
All the while people who have already suffered greatly are being subjected to even greater humiliation and distress.
It is disgraceful and utterly reprehensible. We are talking about human beings who have experienced horrors and tragedies.
If we really are a humane society, we simply cannot turn such desperate people away and force them to live with misery and fear elsewhere, nor can we, in good conscience, subject them to harsh and cruel conditions as a means of deterring others from coming.
They are not migrants in the sense we normally understand that term. We cannot expect them to wait patiently and comply with a raft of bureaucratic procedures.
A small proportion of the world’s 43 million asylum seekers are seeking safety in Australia.
They deserve generosity, compassion and, above all, justice. In the 1970s, Australia cooperated with other countries to process and resettle over a million Vietnamese asylum seekers. Why can’t we respond to the many human tragedies around the world with the same sense of justice and compassion?
Peter Arndt is Executive Officer of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission of the Archdiocese of Brisbane, convenor of the Brisbane Refugee and Asylum Seeker Support Network, and a member of the Core Group of the Australian Churches Refugee Taskforce.
