BY MAREE KENNY
In late 2001, hundreds of B-52 fighter planes roared through the skies above Afghanistan. While these US-led coalition forces bombed the Taliban and hunted Osama bin Laden, around 2000 Afghan asylum seekers in Australia waited for their refugee claims to be processed.
They had fled the fundamentalist Taliban regime, but once in Australia were treated more like the terrorists they hated than genuine refugees. Almost 1000 were held in mainland detention centres, and a similar number on the tiny islands of Manus and Nauru.
Eighteen months after the Taliban regime was removed from power, many of these asylum seekers are still living in uncertainty. The Australian government stopped processing asylum claims until the outcome of the Afghanistan war became evident. Once processing resumed, very few Afghans were given visas.
More than 600 are still in detention, where they are being pressured to accept voluntary return to Afghanistan. More than 1000 others have returned home, to a war-ravaged country to face unemployment and violence. The 3607 Afghans whose claims were processed between 1999 and the fall of the Taliban are waiting for their temporary protection visas (TPVs) to be reassessed. The Australian government now claims that it is safe for Afghans to return home.
"I'm witnessing the impact of a policy which makes people crash internally, and become emotionally and physically ill", says Hassan Ghulam, president of the Hazara ethnic society of Australia. The majority of Afghans in Australia are Hazaras a persecuted minority in Afghanistan.
Ghulam says that translators used by the immigration department have often resulted in Hazara people being incorrectly identified as Iranian or Pakistani. "The translators are mainly Tajiks and their understanding of the Hazara dialect is minimal", he said.
According to Ghulam, traditional hostility towards the Hazaras by other ethnic Afghan groups in Australia has sometimes led to interpreters deliberately misinforming the department of immigration.
Last September, one Afghan Hazara family living on TPVs in Launceston was re-detained in the Baxter detention centre after the department of immigration alleged that Mohib Sarwari, was born in Pakistan not Afghanistan.
Immigration lawyer Marion Le travelled to a tiny rural village in Afghanistan to obtain documents proving that Mohib was born there. On June 20, the Refugee Review Tribunal reinstated the Sarwaris' TPVs.
Ghulam is fearful for any Hazara person forced to return to Afghanistan. He says the Taliban is regrouping and growing in power. "The Taliban believes that the Hazaras invited the Americans", he says. "The Americans will be flying out, but the Hazaras left will be slaughtered."
The United Nations reported attacks against the international assistance community in two southern provinces in late June. This follows the June 7 killing of four members of the International Security Assistance Forces by a suicide bomber. On May 25, Britain's Observer newspaper stated that the ISAF are held in such low regard in Afghanistan that the population of Kabul has renamed them the "International Shop-a-Lot Forces".
Human Rights Watch says that Afghans will be at risk if forced to return, and has said the immigration department's "country information report" about Afghanistan gives "misleading information about human rights protections".
The immigration department is well aware that forced returns will result in criticism, not only from human rights groups, but also from the UN High Commission for Refugees, which argues that any returns should be voluntary.
In order to minimise the number of involuntary returns, Australia's immigration department is using psychological pressure to persuade TPV holders and asylum seekers to return home voluntarily.
In May 2002, the Australian government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Afghanistan interim government, which allowed it to promote voluntary returns to Afghanistan. On December 16, all Afghan TPV holders were offered $2000 (and $10,000 for families) to return to Afghanistan voluntarily.
The offer had to be accepted by June 30 this year. The implication is that those who refuse will be forced to leave eventually, but without the money. Very few Afghan TPV holders living in the Australian community chose to accept this package and return home.
R iz Wakil, an Afghan TPV holder, is in
contact with one of the few who did go
back. Under the conditions of the TPV, Wakil's friend was not able to bring his wife and children to Australia. "He felt responsibility for them", said Wakil. "He thought Afghan society had changed and there will be opportunity to build a new life."
Unfortunately, the returned refugee found no opportunity for a new life in Afghanistan. "He is now in Pakistan, trying to make his way to any other country where he can spend his life in peace", said Wakil.
In January, Wakil received a letter for the immigration department telling him his TPV was being reassessed. The letter asked him to explain why he was still in need of Australia's protection. "My family was well known as a non-believer of religion", says Wakil. "We were left activists."
He claims that, although the Australian government said there is a democratic government in Afghanistan, this is far from the truth. "In Afghanistan religion still rules", he said. "I don't see any space for myself in that society." Wakil does not know if his TPV will be renewed.
On June 25, around 500 Afghan TPV holders in Melbourne attended an immigration department meeting. One of the speakers was Enaytullah Nazari, the Afghan minister for rehabilitation and refugees. To the TPV holders' suprise, Nazari advised that because of security, health and employment difficulties, Afghanistan was not ready to accept returning refugees.
Pamela Curr, Greens spokesperson for refugees, attended the "confusing" event. "The Afghan government minister tells the people that they don't have to go home because Afghanistan is not ready... Meanwhile DIMIA staff send out the invites, pay for the venue and provide the 'how to return' brochures", she said.
It seems a rift is developing between the Afghan and Australian governments over the repatriation of Afghan refugees and asylum seekers. However, despite the advice of the Afghan minister, the United Nations, and various human rights groups who are all ringing alarm bells about increasing violence within Afghanistan immigration minister Phillip Ruddock maintains he is willing to forcibly deport Afghans.
As their status is reassessed, all Afghan asylum seekers whose TPVs have expired have been placed on open-ended Class XC bridging visas. These will either be converted back to a TPV if a refugee is deemed to be in continuing need of Australia's protection, or will be cancelled.
Once visas have been cancelled, former asylum seekers can be given as little as two weeks' notice to leave Australia. Ruddock told Radio National that, if they refuse to leave willingly, "they need to be detained to ensure that that happens".
Afghan asylum seekers in mainland detention centres report that they are subjected to increasing pressure to consent to voluntary return. On May 23, the department of immigration offered the repatriation package to asylum seekers in detention centres, if they accepted within 28 days.
Hundreds accepted, and have returned to Afghanistan, but Ghulam estimates there are almost 200 Afghan asylum seekers in detention in Australia too afraid to return home. Some report daily requests to sign voluntary repatriation forms.
In a December 2002 press release, Ruddock announced that a group of 199 Afghans had just left Nauru and returned to Afghanistan. "The package offered by the government will enable these people to return home in an environment of safety and dignity to help in the rebuilding of Afghanistan", Ruddock said.
Mohammad Mehdi was one of them. Mehdi sailed into Australian waters aboard the Tampa as an Afghan asylum seeker, but was denied a refugee visa and left Nauru in January 2003.
Kate Durham is a Melbourne-based refugee advocate who met Mehdi during a visit to Nauru in June 2001, and maintains sporadic contact with him. "The $2000 he was given was stolen by the police immediately on arrival", she explained. She says this is fortunate because others would have killed him for the money.
Mehdi comes from a rural area but he can't go near his hometown, says Durham, because powerful warlords rule it. During the last five months, Mehdi has been forced to move back and forth between Pakistan and Kabul, and is now living hand-to-mouth teaching English in Kabul. He tells Durham that even in the capital, the situation is precarious.
"He said residents stay awake and take guard duty over their own street", she says. "Different warlords are taking advantage, and it's more chaotic than when the Taliban was there." Durham is critical of the Australian government's delays in processing Afghan asylum seekers during the war.
"They said the Taliban has been shattered and that Afghans now had no enemies", she says. "Everyone I spoke to on Nauru had specific local problems and a local enemy. It was far more complicated than just the Taliban."
It would be easier for Afghans to face return to their county if they felt that the international community was honoring promises to rebuild Afghanistan. Unfortunately this isn't the case. The Western world has pledged US$5 billion to help reconstruct Afghanistan, but President Hamid Karzai, and many aid organisations, say this is not enough. "Afghanistan needs US$15 billion to $20 billion to reach the stage we were in 1979", Karzai recently told a British journalist.
Hassan Ghulam argues that Afghans in Australia are committed to rebuilding their country, even if the Western world isn't. "Every TPV holder who is working, they are supporting three families in Afghanistan."
He believes Afghans should be allowed to stay, not only because of the increasing instability in their homeland, but because they are assisting families in Afghanistan, and contributing to Australia by working in low-paid jobs on farms and in rural abattoirs. "Every single refugee is a human being", he says. "Not a piece of timber to be located from one place to another."
From Green Left Weekly, July 2, 2003.
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