BY SARAH STEPHEN
In comparison to the number of refugees arriving in the United States or Europe, the number of refugees arriving on Australia's shores is a mere trickle, yet the Howard government continues to whip up a frenzied state of fear within the Australian population that each new boatload is the precursor of an imminent "flood".
What the government doesn't explain is that the vast bulk of asylum seekers who have arrived by boat on Australia's shores in the past two years are fleeing just one country — Afghanistan.
Prime Minister John Howard and immigration minister Philip Ruddock provide no information about the political and economic conditions in Afghanistan or in the refugee camps in neighbouring Pakistan. Such information would work against their racist campaign to create the impression that Australia is facing an "invasion" from faceless Middle Eastern Muslims with money to "jump the queue".
The global Afghan refugee population has skyrocketed over the past few years. At around 3-4 million, it is now the second largest refugee population in the world, second only to Palestinians.
Twenty years of civil war have taken a severe toll on the population of Afghanistan. For more than a decade, from 1979 to 1992, the country was ravaged by a war between the Soviet-backed secular, leftist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government and the CIA-funded and armed landlord-led mujahideen guerillas. This was followed by two more years of war — between rival factions of the victorious mujahideen. Since 1994, the remnants of the mujahideen — organised in the Northern Alliance — have been fighting to resist the complete takeover of the country by the Pakistani-backed Islamic fundamentalist Taliban militia.
Taliban regime
The Taliban has imposed a regime of religious terror on the population. Its interpretation of Islam is one that denies freedom of public expression for any alternative political views and cultural practices. It specifically denies the need for representative government and popular elections and assert the despotic authority of just one individual, Mullah Mohammad Omar.
The Taliban asserts that women must be "protected" by being denied any role in public life, and has made it a crime for women living in urban areas to seek any source of independent income other than begging in the streets. It is also a crime for provide schooling to any female Afghan who is older than 12 years.
The Taliban has demanded that non-Muslims wear an identifying patch on their clothing. It persecutes and massacres members of minority ethnic groupings. The main ethnic minority targeted by the Taliban is the Hazara, concentrated in the mountainous central Hazarajat region.
Afghanistan is currently suffering from its worst drought in 30 years, resulting in massive crop failure, water and pasture shortages. Since mid-2000, 470,000 people have left their homes because of drought. Forty-eight per cent of children are affected by chronic malnutrition. One million Afghans are in danger of starving.
Due to a combination of massive drought and the Taliban's near total destruction of schools and hospitals, average life expectancy is currently only 43 years, the literacy rate is 25% and the infant mortality rate is the highest in the world. Only a minority of people have access to safe drinking water, sanitation, health care and education. Gross domestic product per capita is just US$700.
Afghanistan is also one of the most mine-infested countries in the world, injuring an estimated six million people and killing 70,000 in the last 10 years.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), since September 2000, 15,000 Afghans have fled to Pakistan, 350,000 are internally displaced and 10,000 stranded at the border with Tajikistan, having been refused entry to the former Soviet Central Asian republic. Pakistan now hosts an estimated 3.2 million Afghan refugees (1.2 million in camps, 2 million in cities and towns). Iran hosts around 2 million Afghan refugees, living in cities and towns.
Many Australians believe that Afghan refugees should wait in Pakistan or Iran where their lives are not directly under threat from the Taliban, and only come here through official immigration channels. For a number of reasons, this is a cruel illusion.
First, it ignores the fact that at the end of 2000, Pakistan closed its borders to Afghan refugees. Pakistani border guards often beat refugees to prevent them from entering Pakistan.
Secondly, Afghan children and elderly people die every day from diseases in the refugee camps. During the month of May, 43 people, mostly children, died in Jalozai camp in north-western Pakistan, which houses 57,000 Afghan refugees in searing desert heat. The UNHCR identified extreme summer heat, congestion and unhygienic conditions as the cause of the deaths, and has met refusal from the Pakistani authorities when approached about moving refugees to a new camp in a more hospitable climate.
In recent months, thousands of male Afghan refugees in Pakistan have become the subject of arbitrary arrest, intimidation, beatings and deportations by the Pakistani police. According to news reports, police stop Afghans in the streets demanding bribes. Those who can pay are released, while others are taken to police stations and either released when their families pay a bribe or are beaten or deported.
On December 5 last year, Iran expelled 26,000 Afgan refugees when they entered the country "illegally". The UNHCR reported in April this year that Iran had begun to refuse entry to new refugees. Then at the beginning of July, thousands of Afghans were forced out of work due to a new US$25 fine imposed on Iranians who have employed them.
Given the appalling — and worsening — situation within Afghanistan and for Afghans in neighbouring countries, it is not surprising that many Afghans are beginning to travel further afield.
UNHCR
William Maley, in his 2001 Australian Defence Studies Centre Working Paper titled Security, People-smuggling and Australia's New Afghan Refugees, observed that in September 1999, "the UNHCR in Pakistan, according to Reuters News Agency, urged the refugees from war-torn Afghanistan not to approach its offices for resettlement". The UNHCR, he notes, "is simply not equipped to deal with the number of refugees in camps awaiting assessment".
According to Maley: "Hazara Afghans, despite the great dangers they face on ethnic grounds, have very little hope of being properly interviewed, and Afghans are by now deeply (and understandably) cynical about the interest of the UNHCR in their individual circumstances.
"While no one would envy the task of having to select a few hundred applicants for resettlement from thousands of deserving individuals, egregious lapses of judgement on the part of Australian officials do not lift the credibility of the program, such as that which in 1993 saw a distinguished former professor of Kabul University, 'Professor H', who had been adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, rejected for resettlement when he applied to be reunited with his daughter in Sydney. This blunder was later corrected (although only after a delay of several years), but the suspicion remains that it may have been the tip of the iceberg."
Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Christopher Kremmer reported on June 16 that of the 1.2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistani camps, only 450 had been referred by the UNHCR to Australia last year, and the number this year is likely to be 600.
How can those "most in need" number only in the hundreds? They don't. What these paltry figures indicate is the miniscule resources the UNHCR has to resettle refugees, a mere US$1 billion a year for all its operations around the world. They also indicate why those most in need give up waiting and find their own way to safety.
Maley explains that "an applicant under the Special Humanitarian Program [Australia's UNHCR-assisted resettlement program] faces incredible processing delays of well over a year". He writes: "Yet those at the greatest risk cannot afford to wait that long. In Iran, for example, Afghan refugees still run the risk of being picked up in the street and forcibly deported to Afghanistan, despite the move by the UNHCR to put in place an orderly system for the registration of refugees.
"In Pakistan, the situation is nearly as dire: hundreds of Afghans have recently been deported to Afghanistan. Yet Australia allocates in a year hardly more places than this for resettlement to Australia of Afghans who apply at the Australian High Commission in Pakistan. Many who apply fall outside the strict convention definition of a refugee, and are only eligible under the Special Humanitarian category, which requires that the applicants must have some prior connection with Australia... Apart from the recent arrivals, there are very few Hazaras in Australia, and as a result the procedures of the Special Humanitarian Program covertly discriminate against the very group in greatest need. Indeed, since an applicant need not meet the stringent convention definition of 'refugee' in order to qualify for a Special Humanitarian category place, one can argue that the people smugglers are actually doing a better job than the Australian government of assisting those Afghans in greater danger, since the vast majority of recent boat arrivals from Afghanistan and Iraq have been found to be convention refugees."
Ruddock and Howard continue to insist that Australia has an exceptionally generous humanitarian program and takes more than its "fair share" of the world's refugees. This is simply not true. Last year Australia accepted 295 Afghan refugees who applied on Australian soil (58% of all applications) in addition to the 450 resettled via the UNHCR. In comparison, Austria accepted 1329 onshore applications from Afghans (93.4%), Denmark 1061 (89%) and the Netherlands 3405 (93%).
While Pakistan and Iran host large numbers of Afghan refugees with increasing unwillingness, many other poor, Third World countries have opened their doors to significantly larger numbers of Afghan refugees than any of the rich, developed countries. Last year Kenya resettled 9400 Afghan refugees, Yugoslavia 3300, Egypt 3100 and Turkey 2300.