AUSTRALIA: Hunger Strike by Asylum Seekers Worries Supporters

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Bob Burton

CANBERRA, Dec 15 2003 (IPS) - One-legged and blind in one eye, Jarnil Khan Hashimi from Paktia in Afghanistan is on hunger strike in the Australian government-funded detention centre, located on the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru.

According to information passed to A Just Australia, the national umbrella group of refugee advocacy groups, Hashimi hobbles around the camp – built on an abandoned phosphate mine – on crutches. He is unable to go to the toilet without assistance.

Along with 23 others, he is protesting the pressure from the Australian government to return home to Afghanistan, where he says he faces persecution.

Hashimi’s hometown, Paktia, has been identified by the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) as an area under threat or de facto control by the Taliban, whose government was ousted under U.S. attacks in November 2001. The UNHCR has also decided that the resurgence of Taliban activity has made it too dangerous for many to return refugees to Afghanistan, but the Australian government thinks otherwise.

The Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs wants Hashimi to opt to return home and if not, to persuade the beleaguered government of Afghanistan to accept asylum seekers who have involuntarily deported.

"We are currently in negotiations with the government of Afghanistan over the issue of involuntary returns," a spokesman for the department said.

In July, Hashimi was sent from Nauru to Melbourne to get a new artificial leg, but was returned prematurely to the camp in that Pacific island country of 11,000 people.

According to A Just Australia, "the prosthesis does not fit and has damaged his stump, which regularly bleeds, requiring attention". While follow-up attention has been promised, it has not yet happened as far as A Just Australia is aware – church leaders, lawyers and journalists have been banned from visiting the camp.

While Hashimi desperately wants his plight publicised, the Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs declined to discuss his situation, citing obligations to protect his "privacy".

However, the department has confirmed that 23 of the 24 people on hunger strike are from Afghanistan. Since the hunger strike started Wednesday last week, seven have been hospitalised. One released from hospital, the spokesman said, had rejoined the protest.

The detention centre on Nauru was established in 2001 when the Australian government was desperately seeking to find countries that were willing to take in asylum seekers it did not want on its shores – for as long as Canberra was processing their asylum claims.

The asylum seekers were intercepted by a naval blockade. A total of 284 asylum seekers remain on Nauru – 93 of whom are children.

The national director of A Just Australia, Howard Glenn, fears for the welfare of those on hunger strike. "These people are at the last stage of desperation after two and a half years à they have seen a thousand others pass through the camp and they have been left behind. I wouldn’t like to imagine their mental state. They say that they want to stick it out to death," he said.

Asked why the hunger strikers should return when the UNHCR deemed the country unsafe, the spokesman for the The Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs said: "I can’t comment on that.”

He also declined to comment on why the department accepted that, in reviewing the three-year protection visas for those Afghanis already in Australia, a return to Afghanistan was considered unsafe. "I don’t have any information on that," he said.

Figures in the latest annual report of the department reveal that 90 percent of those arriving by boat are granted asylum. However, on Nauru, deprived of appeal rights and access to lawyers, only 50 percent are accepted as legitimately fleeing persecution.

The department also refuses to accept that the hunger strike could be the desperate act of people genuinely fearing for their safety.

"All I can do is to reiterate the Department’s line they are failed asylum seekers à these actions will not influence the Australian government in providing them with entry into Australia,” the spokesman said. ”Blackmail will not work.”

Glenn finds the government indifferent to what is happening in Afghanistan. "Most of the Hazaras come from a village called Ghanzi, which was where those nine children were killed by the U.S. bomb in the fight against the resurgent Taliban and where a UNHCR worker was killed a month ago," he said.

Glenn is also dismayed at the lack of media organisations protesting the ban on journalists going to Nauru to look into the situation.

"There have been virtually no media coverage in there . This is more secure and media have been more substantially excluded than in Guantanamo Bay. It has been going longer but it is the people who fled terror rather than people who are alleged to have committed it," he said.

While the Australian government remains determined not to make concessions to those who remain on Nauru, last week the High Court of Australia said the department had erred in refusing to accept that two Bangladeshi homosexual men could face persecution if deported.

The men had arrived in Australia in 1999 and had sought asylum as refugees. The Immigration department initially rejected their application, as had all their appeals to tribunals and courts.

By a 4-3 majority, the High Court rejected the Refugee Review Tribunal’s decision that if they lived discreetly as a homosexual couple, they may avoid persecution and therefore their applications for asylum should be rejected.

"The Convention (on the Status of Refugees) would give no protection from persecution for reasons of religion or political opinion if it was a condition of protection that the person affected must take steps – reasonable or otherwise – to avoid offending the wishes of the persecutors," the majority of the High Court found.