Where the refugees are
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The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has just released its annual survey of refugees and displaced persons. Its listing of where they actually are shows that when it comes to asylum seekers Australia is well down the list.
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Not many here in spite of the whining by us. The amount of money we waste jailing the few that are here is so monstrous when we consider we spent $1 billion on SERCO last year and $30 million was given to the UNHCR.
Has any other government internationally caused the deaths of as many asylum seekers as Labor?
Or doesn’t the United Nations High Commission for Refugees address that?
The Liberals has Australia be one of only three countries that illegally invaded Iraq, and the death toll of this folly is rather significant. And it also led to millions having to leave their homes, and to millions of refugees.
Provide evidence beta.
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq:
“According to The New York Times, “he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule”. Others have estimated 800,000 deaths caused by Saddam not counting the Iran-Iraq war. Estimates as to the number of Iraqis executed by Saddam’s regime vary from 300-500,000 to over 600,000, estimates as to the number of Kurds he massacred vary from 70,000 to 300,000, and estimates as to the number killed in the put-down of the 1991 rebellion vary from 60,000 to 200,000. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.
Other atrocities
During the 1991 rebellion, several “dungeons” were liberated, revealing “disoriented and confused” inmates that believed Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was still the president. Of nearly 2 million refugees created by the 1991 crackdown on dissent, it is estimated that 1,000 died every day for a period of months due to unsanitary and inhumane conditions. The destruction of Shi’ite religious shrines by Hussein’s regime has been called “comparable to the levelling of cities in the Second World War, and the damage to the shrines [of Hussein and Abbas] was more serious than that which had been done to many European cathedrals.” Methods of torture used by Hussein’s regime included assault with brass knuckles and wooden bludgeons; electric shocks to the genitalia; scorched metal rods being forced into body orifices; the crushing of toes and removal of toenails; burning off limbs; lowering prisoners into vats of acid; poisoning with thallium; raping women in front of their family members; burning with cigarette butts; the crushing of bones; the amputation of ears, limbs, and tongues; and the gouging of eyes. After the 1983-88 genocide, some 1 million Kurds were allowed to resettle in “model villages”. According to a U.S. Senate staff report, these villages “were poorly constructed, had minimal sanitation and water, and provided few employment opportunities for the residents. Some, if not most, were surrounded by barbed wire, and Kurds could enter or leave only with difficulty.”
Just for the record, we all know that Saddam was a brutal dictator, but this was not used as either a public or private justification for the invasion before the war.
@JamesK… I struggle to find any logic in your comment here. Sadam killed as many as a million of his own citizens – so that would be a human toll roughly equivalent to that of emperor Bush II & his satraps?
That NYT quote mentions destruction of Shia religous shrines. How does that compare to the wholesale, nation-wide ruination of civil infrastructure we delivered to Iraq?
There was never any license under international law for our invasion of Iraq. Have a glance over the Geneva conventions (for starters), they’re fairly unequivocal.
Just for the record, Michael has decided to prove that not only hasn’t he got any real point but that he is himself essentially pointless.
Certainly answering any question that might provide a rationale for his regularly insane assertions is never the point.
JamesK has posted several times in each of the last two topics in this blog, but does not seem to post anywhere else on Crikey (note that James K is a different person).
This suggests to me that JamesK has ‘kindly’ volunteered to do his bit for his cause, and has been assigned this blog.
If this is true it explains why someone like JamesK is reading Crikey (answer, apart from this blog he doesn’t read Crikey).
The amount of work involved in posting some of the climate change denial comments has led me to feel fairly certain that some of these posts are paid for by the vested interests. But, especially given the quality of his posts, I’m pretty sure that JamesK is an unpaid volunteer.
So well done Jamesk! And now that you have been sprung, is there any chance of you leaving us alone?
Rivers of gold Michael.
Rivers of gold.
Has it ever occurred to you that you don’t ever defend your inevitably silly positions?
If you can’t defend them then they can’t be rationally arrived at.
Ergo you are the personification of the reality rejecting nasty emotional leftist effete.
On the plus side, you are nigh impossible to parody as your facile positions are so completely ridiculous.
Sorry you were moderated out Rupert.
Equivocal or fairly unequivocal?
I think that it is instructive and helps put things into perspective if we compare the above numbers on a per capita basis. Here are the numbers for Australia and a for few countries we often compare ourselves with.
Number of refugees:
* Australia – 1.02 per 1,000 population.
* United States – a bit less at 0.84 per thousand
* Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Canada – much more – between 3 and 7 per thousand.
Number of pending cases:
* Australia 0.23 per thousand, i.e. about one per 4,000 population
* Britain – about the same
* United States – at 0.04, much less
* Germany, France, the Netherlands and Canada – much more – between 0.6 and 1.2 per thousand.
We are hardly being ‘swamped’. Millions cross our borders annually and a few thousand arrive without papers asking for our protection. This is NOT ‘losing control of our borders’. It is also clear that compared to many (most) other developed nations, our ‘problem’ is not that big.
Our ‘problem’ is that we are an attractive destination. When we consider everything else wrong in the world, not a bad problem to have. Of course the real problem is that parts of the world are so bad that people are willing to risk everything to escape. Also, as per my previous post, there seem to be issues in Indonesia which are allowing the trade to continue and expand. We need to work with our neighbours, especially Indonesia, and the wider international community, to identify a solution. It won’t be as easy as punishing the victims as we did under the Howard government.
Maybe the souls of the 800 dead as a result of Rudd throwing the mouth-foaming Left an unnecessary bone whilst claiming moral superiority would think differently Steve?
It’s you who is the morally repugnant fool here, not Howard.
Selective memory JamesK? No government kills asylum seekers. But far more died during the Howard years. Heard of SIEVX?
And how many are dying in refugee camps?
The statistics are useful in general terms However they are influenced by legal definitions in individual countries. For example in Indonesia, only people who are receiving assistance from the UNHCR are listed as refugees. That’s 1006 people. In reality there are many more.
Australia takes a tiny number for an affluent country with skill shortages at all levels in of employment.
JamesK, while we all welcome robust debate, insulting other posters is not going to change anyone’s mind and you are wasting your time if that is what you are trying to accomplish. I will correct you one point. I did not call John Howard a ‘morally repugnant fool’ as you seem to suggest. He was no fool nor do I consider him morally repugnant. However, the willingness of Messrs Howard, Ruddock, Abbott, Craig Morrison and others to garner votes by exploiting the dark side of Australia’s character over the asylum seeker issue does not, in my opinion, reflect well on them.
Is this all the Lib/Nats have to offer as a wedge? Again?
I guess there isn’t anymore traction with Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper now that this in the full swings of “Blowback.”
The AWB made payments to Saddam Hussein totalling $300 million. The AWB chose to give them cash instead of a few thousand tonnes of wheat instead. No retrospective legislations was even tried to be introduced by Ruddock to seek justice after that was revealed.
John Howard was no fool. Morally repugnant…maybe so.
Probably not many Cliffy but 20,000 remain or were sent elsewhere ‘cos 20,000 could afford $10,000- $20,000 to reach Christmas island illegally with ‘only’ the death of ~800 souls at sea.
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