In amongst all the media and political frenzy regarding the Tamil asylum seekers  refusing to get off some boats in Indonesia, a much greater and more problematic stand-off has been occurring in Thailand.

160 Hmong people, originally from Laos, have been kept in a detention centre in Thailand for the past three years.  Despite the UNHCR saying the people have been recognised as refugees, and four countries – Australia, Canada, the USA and the Netherlands – offering to resettle them, the Thai government considers them to be “economic migrants” and proposes returning them to Laos.

This report from a year ago provides a bigger picture of the sort of long running abuses in Thailand. It details thousands of Hmong refugees who have been locked up for years, agreements being signed between the Thai and Laos governments to return the “economic migrants” and refusals by Thai authorities to allow the UNHCR to enter the detention centres to make refugee assessments and determinations.

It is necessary for the Australian government to continue to work with Indonesia and other countries in our region to find workable compassionate approaches to the large number of asylum seekers in the area.

But Australia must not be complicit in facilitating human rights violations or mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees (or unauthorised migrants for that matter). We should also get out of the habit of turning a blind eye to what other governments in our region are doing.

The more we know about what happens elsewhere in our region, the more obvious it becomes why refugees would risk their lives and rack up large debts to try to find safety in Australia.

Even more inexplicable is why the temporary protection visa (TPV) would be adopted when all the evidence unequivocally showed it was a complete failure on every level, as Bernard Keane notes. Boat arrivals increased dramatically after it was introduced in 1999.  This included a dramatic rise in woman and children on the boats.  The human harm done to many refugees on TPVs is well documented.  The barriers placed in the way of effective resettlement for people who were lawful residents in our community were also obvious and counter-productive.

Presumably the only measure in which TPVs could be seen to have been ’successful’ was politically, so presumably that is Malcolm Turnbull’s motivation. But it still a sad day when a blatantly ineffective measure is wilfully adopted purely for political appearances. (Laudably, Liberals Petro Georgiou and Judith Troeth have already spoken out against the move)

As both Greg Sheridan and Peter Mares recently pointed out, the only measure of the previous government’s which finally stopped the boats was pushing the boats back to Indonesia. This was also very dangerous – upping the ante for desperate people on boats – and a blatant breach of the Refugee Convention, as it clearly pushed refugees back into situations where they had no security against being returned to danger. I suppose we should be grateful the ‘Liberals’ are not proposing that policy again – at least not yet.

It would be nice to see the Liberals focus on the most obvious cause – the continuing brutality of the Sri Lankan government. Amanda Hodge has filed some quality pieces from the region of late, including this latest one noting that the Sri Lankan Navy has been blocking boats of Tamils trying to get to India. But this Navy, which was able to effectively contain Tamil Tiger weapons smugglers, obviously doesn’t mind if the Tamils are fleeing further afield.

Italy also recently adopted a law making it a crime to enter Italy without authorisation, punishable by a fine of up to 10 000 Euro.  They have also introduced other punitive measures for those refugees and migrants who do manage to be able to stay in the country.

These two articles from the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper provide reports on what life is like for some of the African refugees living in poverty in Italy.  The reporters spent some of their time in the coastal town of Agrigento in Sicily.  They note the irony that

in the central part of the city stands a Catholic church with the figure of a Black priest carved in stone perched high above in the church tower. It is a statue of Saint Calogero, an African priest who came to Sicily around the 14th century and is revered as the town’s patron saint.

A well-known Italian Bishop is said to have remarked that if the saint-priest were to arrive in Agrigento today, he would find himself in similar circumstances as the refugees who are detained and disdained.

All of this isn’t just a reason to beat up on the Italian government, but as a reminder of where policies can end up if an obsession with ‘tough’ treatment of asylum seekers gets out of control.  It mightn’t seem like we need a reminder of that in Australia, but Italy has now gone well past where Australia let itself go in 2001. They don’t even worry about using the pretext of pretending they are targeting people smugglers rather than refugees.

Mr Walgampaya, who speaks of course as a representative of the Sri Lankan government, has publicly stated that the asylum seekers “pose a threat to peace and security of Australia” and that “there must be Tamil terrorists” among them.

There is a mountain of evidence over many years of major human rights abuses by Sri Lankan authorities, including torture, killings and disappearances.  Of course, there were also plenty of grievous human rights abuses by Tamil Tiger leaders, but one hardly excuses the other.  Despite efforts to keep independent observers out, there is also evidence that this is continuing.  A report recently issued by the US State Department makes a strong case that war crimes were committed by Sri Lankan authorities and Tamil Tiger leaders in final months of the civil war earlier this year.

Returning people back to a country with this record when government representatives have already labelled them terrorists and threats to security is simply unthinkable.

It is undoubtedly the opposite of the High Commissioner’s intention, but the more he comments on this matter, the more certain he makes it that Tamil asylum seekers will be recognised as refugee and given permission to stay in Australia.

The future direction of a major aspect of Australia’s asylum seeker policy is in the balance right now, with potentially very significant future impacts for many refugees, as well as for regional relations and the treatment of people moving through the region.  The ‘tough & humane’ mantra of the federal government could end up tipping very heavily towards just one of those words – the key is which one it ends up being.

The Labor government made some significant changes on coming to office. Most important was the scrapping of the cruel and counter-productive temporary protection visa and the closure of the centre on Nauru.  Having done those things, a lot of what is now getting so much public attention about the so-called ‘Indonesia Solution’ is not really very new.

Australian has been cooperating with Indonesia on trying disrupt asylum seeker boats since the Howard era. Funding has also been provided for some time to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to process asylum claims lodged in Indonesia and to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to help with the basic survival for those still there and with possible returns to other countries.

What is new is that people are starting to pay attention and look at what all this entails, both in terms of treatment of asylum seekers and the overall cost. As reported in Crikey last week, independent and committed advocates such as Jessie Taylor and Kaye Bernard have travelled through the region gathering evidence of the conditions asylum seekers are being kept in for long periods.  Their findings are grim.  Some mainstream media journalists are doing the same, as shown in this report in The Australian over the weekend.

The simple fact is that the ‘accommodation’ many asylum seekers have been kept in ranges from adequate to appalling.  The Australian government, having gone on at length about the increasing cooperation with the Indonesian government, cannot now simply sidestep their responsibilities by saying the conditions are the responsibility of the UNHCR and IOM.

It seems we may be about to enter a major irony situation, whether the Coalition will be attacking the Labor government for funding the locking up of children behind razor wire and keeping refugees detained for long periods in terrible conditions with no certainty about their future.

It would be a welcome extra irony if  all of this attention and pressure on  the Australian government and their responsibility for what happens with the detention, processing and resettling of refugees in our region were to lead to a truly regional approach to effectively, efficiently and fairly manage this issue, with corresponding improvements in the way people in detention are treated in Indonesia (and ideally in Malaysia as well, where the treatment of refugee claimants is on the whole much worse again.

Such a result is a long shot, but as it is very unlikely the Australian government will reverse cooperation with other major transit countries in our region, we may as well try to apply maximum scrutiny and pressure about what is done there, and see if the standard can end up being lifted across the region.  Who knows, maybe regional cooperation and a recognition that taking in refugees does no great harm to a country might even lead to a more effective and safer process for assisting asylum seekers!  OK, I know that’s all very unlikely, but it will only be a chance of happening if the public scrutiny continues.

One of the big factors which assisted the Howard government in managing public perceptions under the Pacific Solution was a government in Nauru which was mostly happy to leave the whole thing to the Australian government – in return for various other forms of assistance – and even more importantly, performed the vital role of virtually closing the country off to any lawyers, journalists and other visitors from Australia.  When I first visited the detention centres in Nauru in 2003, the hundreds of refugees still there – including many children – had already been there two years with barely a single visitor from ‘outside’ the progression of Australian government officials.  That can’t and won’t happen in Indonesia.  The key question is whether people will keep paying enough attention long enough to ensure big improvements happen.

In Crikey’s daily email today, I wrote a piece examining some of the rhetoric regarding asylum seekers that various  governments around the world are using.

In short, I was surprised there weren’t ample examples of obnoxious rhetoric from government leaders and Ministers easy to find. No doubt I will now be sent hundreds of examples that I couldn’t find, but the fact one has to search harder for it suggests it is not as widespread as might be assumed.

Either that, or I have been so desensitised by the blatant, calculated demonisation of asylum seekers that came from Australia’s Prime Minister and some of his senior Ministers in the post-Tampa period in 2001 that every thing else seems mild in comparison.

However, examining this matter reminded me that what actually happens to human beings as a result of the policies of turning back refugee claimants is more significant than the rhetoric.  Disturbing details about this are very easy to find and provide much more sobering reading.

I’ve written a bit in the past about some of the practices in other countries. Italy is currently the most notorious, with their recent  deal with the Libya government to push asylum seekers back to that country undoubtedly leading directly to people deaths. Here’s one example of what Libya does:

Investigations by independent journalists and NGOs have shown that, on various occasions, the Libyan and Moroccan authorities have arrested and abandoned large numbers of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa in the desert, where many die of hunger and thirst.

Reasons why so many people try to flee right out of Africa are also obvious.

The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said Angolan soldiers have raped, beaten and tortured illegal Congolese migrant workers before deporting them across the border.

In 2006 Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos said that border security should be stepped up to prevent illegal migrants from destabilising the country.

“We must be mindful about protecting our borders to prevent the entry of foreigners, because the country has become the target of illegal and organised entries that could destabilise it,” said Dos Santos at the swearing-in ceremony of a new interior minister.

Controlling movement of people isn’t just between the western world and the outside either.

The Saudi government has built the Saudi-Yemen barrier,  which is a physical barrier along part of its border with Yemen. “ It consists of a network of sandbags and pipelines, three metres high, filled with concrete and fitted with electronic detection equipment.

Saudi Arabia claims the barrier is “a necessary tool in protecting the kingdom from terrorism” and is “necessary for protecting their borders against an influx of illegal immigrants and against the smuggling of drugs and weapons.”

Those “illegal immigrants” include many Somali and Ethiopian refugees.

It’s a complex problem with no easy or perfect solutions – short of Utopian aims such as achieving world peace – but a baseline has to be that any solutions that involve pushing people back to imprisonment, torture and death are not solutions that should be tolerated.

• In Greece – 200 unaccompanied children in detention:

More than 850 people – including 200 unaccompanied children – are being held in shocking conditions at a detention centre for illegal immigrants on the Greek island of Lesvos, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.  … UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic said commission staff had visited the centre, which has a capacity of 250 to 300, earlier this week. Most detainees were from Afghanistan, he said.

• In Austria – Thousands in immigration detention on hunger strikes

“The way the Austrian authorities implement the current detention system is a breach of human rights,” said Heinz Patzelt, head of Amnesty International in Austria. ….

Rights groups say that although there are clear international guidelines that preventive detention should only be used where completely unavoidable and should not include minors and people with special needs, Austrian authorities interpret the law broadly. They say many migrants are put in detention for lengthy periods, including children and those with special needs.

They also claim that conditions in preventive detention are worse than in normal prisons.  Prof. Manfred Nowak, head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna, said: “The facilities are only police jails, often dating back to the 19th century, and they were originally designed to serve a punitive purpose. They are not suitable as long-term detention centres. Open detention facilities where people have the chance to move around freely and do sports and so on are needed.

• In London / Baghdad (& London again):

Britain deported 50 Iraqi refugees to Iraq, but the Iraqi authorities who boarded the plane allowed only 9 of them to get off, and then sent the rest back to Britain, officials confirmed Saturday.

During the episode on Thursday, the nine refugees allowed to get off the plane were those who agreed to do so voluntarily and who could prove that they came from southern or central Iraq, according to the minister of displacement and migration, Abdul Samad Sultan, in an interview on Saturday. Practically speaking, that meant that Arabs could stay but Kurds could not.

• And in Malaysia

Another six Burmese migrants have died while in detention in Malaysia because of a suspected waterborne disease.

Detention of migrant and refugee children in Malaysia.

Figures provided to the Malaysian Parliament show 2397 children were put in immigration detention in Malaysia last year, including over 800 from Burma.

One of Howard’s core provisions was the excising of certain territories from Australia to prevent arrivals invoking Australian legal protections. While Rudd’s lot stopped sending the intercepted boat people to Nauru etc, they sent them to the excised territory of Christmas Island. The somewhat weak excuse was that there was a new expensive centre that needed to be used, despite the acknowledged heavy costs of running it and transporting people there.

This was obviously the ALP compromise version: we will be nicer to refugees, once their legitimacy is determined, but we will continue to look tough by sending them to an excised offshore island. However, this decision has now created an unnecessary problem because the facility has limited places and the numbers are becoming a political football of oversize proportions.

We have a major news story, moral panic and full blown political crisis because Christmas Island is about to overflow.

When 200 extra bunk beds make the media, there is a problem. Had the Government stopped sending the boat people to such a limited and visible facility, the extra numbers would have been a much smaller story. The fact that they continued this odd process reinforces the perception that there is a threat in the arrival of boat people that required both anxieties and high levels of spending.

We now have many years of settled boat arrivals, including those that arrived under Fraser and Hawke and NO evidence that they are in any way a threat to our social fabric. Yet Opposition politicians are still demonising the arrivals and creating a political panic and the Government has been caught in its own ambivalences. It should show some ethical courage by just bringing people to the mainland and processing them normally. Then people could just see them as just problematic arrivals who arrive inadequately documented.

I met some of the damaged people produced by the last Government’s policies and am appalled to see the start of another media feeding frenzy. Ruddock has learned nothing from the distress he caused, and the Opposition needs lessons in ethics v national and political self interest.

Please can we avoid the same mistakes again?

This latest boat, reportedly stopped by the Indonesian Navy at Australia’s behest, was carrying 260 asylum seekers, which is quite a large number compared to most of the boats that have arrived in Australia in the last year or so. Tellingly, all the asylum seekers are from Sri Lanka.  The human rights situation in that country is at a low point at the moment, with mass internment of Tamil citizens in atrocious conditions occurring for many months.  When a government kicks out the Red Cross, as the Sri Lankan government has done, you know things are not good.

The Australian government has been spending money trying to dissuade people in Sri Lank from trying to come to Australia.  It would have far more effect if the Sri Lankan government could be persuaded to start respecting basic human rights – although that is obviously much easier said than done.

Meanwhile, the inflexibility of Australia’s migration laws is on display again, with some more local level ‘let them stay’ campaigns happening.

Liberal Member for Hume, Alby Schultz, has voiced support for Mr Jing Bang Zou and his wife, Mrs Litang Fan, who are currently living in the New South Wales town of Young.  Mr Zou is reportedly a “world renowned apiarist”, but doesn’t have the required professionally recognised qualifications, thus making him ineligible for a permanent visa.  Earlier this decade, Young was one of a number of towns in rural Australia which had trouble finding enough labour for their local meatworks, and relied heavily on refugees from Afghanistan – all of whom would have come here by boat – to keep their meatworks profitable.

Meanwhile, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, a family of four originally from South Africa, who run a small business in Buderim, are facing removal because they have assessed as not meeting the minimum assets requirement of their business visa.  The local paper, the Sunshine Coast Daily, is going in to bat for them, with their coverage giving a strong emphasis to the unpleasantness of life in South Africa, with its  “barb wire-fenced homes with security cameras, guard dogs and streets deemed too unsafe for their children.”

An opinion piece in the Daily supports the family’s cause, while at the same time highlighting some readers’ comments attacking asylum seekers.  Somewhat ironically, but none the less appropriately, it ends with the following comment:

We all need to realise that Australia is built on the principle of the fair go – and that some of our best businesses have been created by immigrants, who are often more hard working than us laid back Aussies. In the end it means more jobs, not less, for all.

A good and simple principle, which I very much agree with.  Hopefully we can apply it to all who seek to settle here.

It is an unfortunate sign of how easily our priorities and perspective can be distorted. The arrival of a few hundred Sri Lankan asylum seekers is seen by some as a serious problem, even though those assessed as not being refugees are being returned.

Yet the Sri Lankan government continues to detain over a quarter of a million men, women and children in over-crowded, unsafe internment camps with barely a concern being voiced.  This piece by Jeff Sparrow notes that the silence about this situation extends to most other western countries too.  The piece also contains some descriptions from The Guardian and elsewhere about the awful conditions in the camps and other human rights breaches.

Human Rights Watch has done their usual thorough job of detailing the situation facing hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

Since March 2008, the Sri Lankan government has confined virtually everyone displaced by the war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to detention camps, depriving them of their liberty and freedom of movement in violation of international law. As of September 15, 2009, the government was holding 264,583 internally displaced persons in detention camps and hospitals, according to the UN, while fewer than 12,000 have been released or returned home.

Human Rights Watch also list specific problems such as:

• Arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance;
• Inability to trace missing relatives: The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which often traces family members, has been barred from the main camps since mid-July);
• Lack of protection mechanisms in the camps: The military camp administration is preventing humanitarian organizations, including the UN and the ICRC, from undertaking effective monitoring and protection in the camps;
• Conditions in the camps and expected deterioration during the monsoon;
• Lack of access to proper medical care;
• Lack of transparency and information.

But it seems the prospect of a few hundred Sri Lankans arriving in Australia by boat, some of whom are undoubtedly fleeing this situation, is a much bigger problem than the human rights abuses being inflicted on as thousand times as many people in the place they have left.

As Jeff Sparrow said in noting the minimal concern being expressed internationally:

That’s why the situation in Sri Lanka matters so much. It’s not simply because there’s something fundamentally wrong about mass collective punishment. It’s because if the world doesn’t speak out, you can expect see the model put into action elsewhere.

ADDENDUM: Given my comment on the importance of not remaining silent, it is appropriate for me to note a debate in the House of Representatives on this topic back on 1 June 2009.  The debate was to a motion moved by Labor Member for Fremantle, Melissa Parke. All of the 9 speakers from both Labor and Liberal provided balanced and non-partisan contributions, with the exception of Don Randall, the Liberal Member for Canning, who basically took the line that all atrocities were the fault of the LTTE, and there is no substance to any allegations of wrong doing by the Sri Lankan government.