Australia and Refugees

KHMER TIMES
ALAN PARKHOUSE

An injured Afghan refugee from the Manus Island detention center after he was allegedly attacked by a group of Papua New Guinean men while on day release. AFP

Cambodia may be one of the few winners from the debacle known as Australia’s policy on asylum seekers and refugees. The only other winners were Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru.

Cambodia was offered tens of millions of dollars – the real figure has never been disclosed publicly – to take asylum seekers and refugees from the Australian-sponsored detention camps on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and the Pacific island nation of Nauru.

No figures have been made public on the financial assistance given to PNG and Nauru, but it is thought to be a considerable amount of money.

A total of five refugees have so far been sent from those much criticized camps to Cambodia, four decided to go back to the countries they fled and the last one lives in despair in Phnom Penh, devoid of hope and a future.

PNG’s decision this week to close the center on Manus Island leaves close to 1,000 vulnerable people in that camp in limbo, and the decision-makers in Canberra have insisted there is no place in Australia for them.

No doubt Cambodia is being touted as an alternative place to send the 850 poor souls who have been stranded on that remote island off the coast of PNG. Cambodian officials said on Wednesday that it “didn’t matter which island the refugees came from,” when asked what they thought about the closure of the Manus Island detention center.

Cambodia had no problem agreeing to the deal when the Australian government first made approaches to take the refugees, after all, Cambodia and its people know a thing or two about refugees. A large number of the population here have been refugees in the past and at the time were grateful for the assistance given to them.

When the initial deal with Australia was signed, then-Foreign Minister Hor Namhong said: “We talked a bit on the issue just now. In the past, there have been Cambodians going out as refugees to different countries. Now perhaps it is time for Cambodia to receive refugees back to Cambodia.”

But Cambodia is a poor country struggling to recover from the ravages of genocide and war and lacks the facilities and social infrastructure to look after refugees and asylum seekers. Four of the five people sent from the Australian-sponsored camps left Cambodia and headed back to the chaos they fled.

Previous Australian governments suggested palming off their refugees to Malaysia, a country already struggling to accommodate thousands of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. That idea was dropped when Australia discovered Malaysia was not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Refugees.

Many in Australia are now calling for the people in the squalid camps on Manus Island and Nauru to be moved to mainland Australia, a place they should have been taken all along. The Guardian Australia’s publication of leaked documents from the detention centers paints a bleak picture of how those detained have been treated, particularly the children in those camps.

For successive Australian governments, it’s been a case of out of sight out of mind – send these troublesome people fleeing wars and persecution to two far-away islands where access is restricted and day-to-day events are covered up or not made public, and forget about them.

Politicians in Canberra argue that anyone wanting to seek refuge in Australia must go through official channels and apply for status as a refugee or asylum seeker, which sounds fair. But a close look at the requirements, paperwork and time involved will show that a very small number qualify, especially those who have fled war zones like Syria and don’t have the documents required.

Australian politicians should stop looking at alternative places like Cambodia to send these people and find some room on their own great continent to place them. Only yesterday the premier of the state of Western Australia, who is also a member of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s governing Liberal Party, offered to accept refugees from the two detention centers.

“We would certainly accommodate a number of them in Western Australia and we’d certainly support them as a state government,” Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Wednesday night.

Mr. Barnett has made similar statements in the past and his stand demonstrated a rare public split in the conservative Liberal Party over the controversial detention policy.

A spokeswoman for New Zealand Prime Minister John Key yesterday said an offer made to Australia in 2013 to accept 150 refugees, which Canberra rebuffed, still stood. Perhaps the politicians in Canberra, and some of the more right-wing members of the general public in Australia, have not had a close look at their own country’s history.

A little more than 200 years ago the first “boat people” started to arrive on that large continent and laid the foundations for what Australia is today.

Australia is a country built by immigrants, many of them fleeing the shattered remains of Europe after two world wars. At the time the current generation’s grandfathers and fathers arrived in Australia, they were welcomed, and they helped build a great country.
Compared with the number of refugees flooding into Europe over the past few years, the numbers trying to get to Australia are small. There are a total of 1,350 in the two island camps.

Perhaps it’s time the Australian government gave these people “a fair go,” as they say down under, close those squalid camps, forget about trying to palm them off on Cambodia and take them in.

Alan Parkhouse is a third-generation Australian whose grandfather served with the Anzac troops in Gallipoli and France in World War I and whose father fought for the allied forces in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia in World War II. He is the editor-in-chief of Khmer Times.