Activism and refugees: what we can do
BY STEPHEN LANGFORD
Omid was the Iranian refugee who set himself on fire in Nauru on 27 April this year. He died in a Brisbane hospital two days later. After Omid’s funeral in Iran his family issued a statement. It reads, “Our hope is gone! Omid is gone forever. He was only 24.
‘Omid’ means ‘hope’ in Persian. We lost our Omid, our hope. Who has made this life so bitter for us?”
Whenever I read this, I am shocked at the reality of what we are doing to the 1600 asylum seekers locked up on the prison islands of Manus Island and Nauru, and other detention centres across Australia. Their lives are in limbo.
How did it ever come to this; that refugees are subjected to this kind of sadism by Australia? This is the same Australia that takes in 200,000 business migrants per year. It seems you’re okay if you have money, but if you come here looking for human help you’ll find yourself locked up and subject to what the United Nations rightly calls torture.
This is no mistake, it is part of the deterrence policy of this Government and supported by the so-called Labor opposition. Even the Greens would like to lock up people coming by boat if only for a month. This way of thinking is ingrained in our political system. After all, we have been locking up innocent asylum seekers who have come by boat since 1989.
I still have a letter my father wrote in 1943 for the New Zealand paper the Dominion. In it he equates the persecution of refugees to fascism. He was an Austrian refugee himself. As a Jew he faced what all Austrian Jews faced after Hitler’s army marched into Vienna in 1938. My father served in the New Zealand Air Force and could not believe the hostility refugees faced in coming to New Zealand.
The very people who had been fighting fascism, were advocating for brutal measures against refugees.
This makes me wonder: who is going to stop the brutal policies of this government, loyally supported by the opposition? It has to be us.
I would like to praise the hard work of refugee solidarity groups, particularly the Refugee Action Coalition. They organise rallies and vigils. Their work is necessary but it almost feels insufficient.
I have first hand experience in campaigning and activism from the East Timor solidarity struggle that we won in 1999. We won not only because of what we did. A lot of hard work and discipline came from the East Timorese; they are the real heroes resisting the horrific and illegal occupation by the Indonesian army. I do not want to say the struggle was enjoyable, but it was full of interesting work.
We hassled the media, especially the ABC. That time of struggle taught us some interesting things about the ABC’s coverage. Firstly, if the ABC thinks it can get away with not reporting on ‘controversial’ human rights issues, they will avoid it. We have to be the countervailing force. We have to hassle the ABC into doing the reporting they should be doing.
We have to use every means available to pressure the ABC. This is why I am the Spokesperson for Real Friends of the ABC and we demonstrate outside the ABC in Ultimo every final Thursday of the month from 4:30pm, demanding proper human rights and environmental reporting. Sometimes people from the ABC come out and congratulate us for what we are doing.
It is the ABC and the other networks that are keeping people ignorant. They need to be hassled. How can we keep 1600 people indefinitely imprisoned without it being heavily reported? When the US Embassy hostages were held hostage in Tehran, it was news for every one of the 444 days they were held captive.
When Omid died so tragically, I felt that we were not doing nearly enough to stop these human rights abuses. Sadly not much has changed. We need to act – in ways that make real change.
