Asia-Pacific, Civil Society, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Migration & Refugees, Population

AUSTRALIA: Mock Refugee Camp Brings Home Grim Realities

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Mar 23 2008 (IPS) - Moving aggressively before the locked wire gate, the border guards used large sticks to keep the refugees in check. Eventually, with the aid of bribes, the participants were allowed to cross the border in order to seek refuge in the camp on the other side.

An unlikely occurrence in Australia’s second-largest city, the interactive simulations were designed to bring home to visitors the grim realities faced by some 34 million people worldwide.

“The aim is to educate Australians about refugee rights and refugee experiences,” says Stephanie Cousins, project coordinator for Oxfam Australia. Refugee Realities, as the project is called, recently finished its three week run at Melbourne’s Gasworks Arts Park

“What we’ve tried to do is create a compelling experience for people so that they can identify with the experiences of refugees who have fled here,” she says.

Some 7,000 to 8,000 people visited Refugee Realities, which was modelled on refugee camps in Sudan, Kenya, Burma and Pakistan. While visitors to the camp took part in exercises such as registering for humanitarian assistance, collecting food and water, dealing with sanitation issues and organising shelter, they were also exposed to the experience of travelling to the camp and the difficulties that people face when and if they are finally able to leave.

“One thing that we found from our research was that people felt it was really important to have a journey as part of the experience,” Cousins told IPS.

In addition to receiving advice on the project from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Australian Red Cross, the experiences of Oxfam aid workers and former refugees living in Australia were also drawn upon in order to make the simulation as authentic as possible.

Saif Mohamed, who spent thirteen years as a refugee in Egypt after fleeing the Darfur region of Sudan in 1989, was involved in conducting research for Refugee Realities and organised focus groups of Sudanese, Afghans and Iraqis for the project.

Mohamed says that it is difficult for Australians to appreciate refugee experiences such as war, the forced fleeing of homelands, and the separation from and loss of family members. “When we came to Australia, the people are being very friendly,” says Mohamed. “But they don’t feel what we feel in our hearts.”

Mohamed told IPS that while refugees may physically appear to be like others in the broader Australian society, differences lie in what cannot be seen. “Emotionally they can’t feel what we have inside our hearts,” he says.

Active in the Australian Sudanese community and an Oxfam volunteer, Mohamed says that Refugee Realities can allow Australians to “understand what refugees are and what kind of circumstances they came through.”

According to Mohamed, this understanding can lead to a change in how some Australians regard and interact with refugees, thereby encouraging “refugees to integrate into the wider Australian community.”

There have been concerns in Australia recently regarding refugees’ ability to integrate into the community. These came to a head last year after several incidents involving African refugees – and Sudanese in particular – provoked controversy and a heated public debate.

Cousins agrees that there is a lack of understanding in Australia regarding refugees’ pasts. This leads to deficiencies in the “awareness of why difficulties might crop up and what responsibilities we have as a community to welcome people and to make them feel at home,” she says.

“The ultimate goal of Refugee Realities is to improve relationships between newly arrived refugees in Australia and the broader community,” Cousins told IPS.

The journey upon which visitors embark begins in a house setting, with groups divided into “families”. “It’s a narrative where you basically step into the shoes of someone who is about to be displaced,” says Cousins.

She says it is common for refugees to be “moving for six months before they get to some kind of safety.”

Visitors must flee their “home” upon hearing the sounds of battle, after which the simulation takes them through several stages, including a jungle setting, a minefield, as well as a night journey, for which participants are blindfolded.

They then arrive at the border crossing where the guards determine their fate. The process of having to negotiate with the guards and resort to bribery, in addition to the separation of families – some “parents” are detained at the border by the guards – “is really about showing people how powerless they can be,” says Cousins.

After experiencing camp life, visitors are debriefed. The final stage looks at four different families who are not able to go home or settle locally. Eventually, one family is permitted to resettle in Australia.

“That’s a good way of tying together the camp with actual Australian issues and resettlement issues,” says Cousins.

The project coordinator says responses have varied, especially among school students, who made up around 50 percent of visitors. She says there was an “overwhelming” response from older students.

“A lot of the school groups that have come through here have former refugee students in their classroom and I think it’s really empowered those students, but also educated the rest of the class, about some of the things that they have gone through,” she told IPS.

But Cousins says that adult visitors provided some of the best reactions. “They see the global reality of what we’re trying to educate about here so they can…think about what it would be like for their children to go through something like that,” she says.

While Refugee Realities was a pilot project and the first of its kind in Australia, Cousins is confident that its impact was sufficient for the simulation to be taken elsewhere. “It’s really quite intensive to get something like this off the ground, so it has to have a big impact to make it worthwhile,” she says.

But “the impact has been really strong, so I would be pretty surprised if it wasn’t run again,” Cousins told IPS.