POLITICS: Australia turns its back on the desperate

The beachside Sydney suburb of Manly is home to many an Aussie boat-owner. Indeed locals (including the abundance of Kiwi settlers) will tell you that the most enjoyable way to get to Manly from the city is by boat. Manly is also the heartland of Tony Abbott, the conservative Opposition Leader who is also desperate to become Prime Minister.

In the 2010 elections Mr Abbott almost made it to the top job with the slogan of "Stop The Boats". Until some days ago, this mantra should have been Mr Abbott's ticket to the PM's house. Mr Abbott has effectively capitalised, indeed monopolised, on the love-hate relationship many Aussie voters have with boats.

In Mr Abbott's electorate, just about every punter owns a boat. Elsewhere, owning one is just about every bogan's dream. But boats are also a nightmare because they're often the vessels that bring dark-skinned unwashed illegal immigrants to our shores. The 5600 boat people that flooded the country in 2010 represented a huge threat to our migration system and our security compared to, say, the 53,900 harmless overstayers largely from Europe and North America.

So who is to blame for this influx of boat people? Is it the bullets and nooses and torture chambers of the God-awful governments, militias, mullahs, juntas and civil wars these people are fleeing? Is it crazy theocrats like the Taliban our brave troops are fighting in Afghanistan and our American allies are cosying up with in peace talks in Qatar?

Since 2001, Australian politicians have had a simple answer. The blame for the influx of asylum seekers lay with the asylum seekers and the people who smuggle them here. Boat people are "queue jumpers". People smugglers, often former asylum seekers themselves, are a bunch of crooks.

Mr Abbott's solution - send in the navy to turn any boats around so they can go back to where they came from. Almost always that means Indonesia. Too bad for Mr Abbott that many Indonesian leaders find this approach inhumane and impractical. And Indonesia knows our Opposition will take their opposition seriously.

Now Mr Abbott faces a new Prime Minister who is just as ruthless. A few days ago, Kevin Rudd signed a deal with Peter O'Neill, leader of Australia's impoverished northern neighbour and former colony Papua New Guinea. Mr O'Neill has agreed to house unlimited numbers of boat people on the remote northern island of Manus or in other facilities.

Mr Rudd has instructed the Immigration Department to place advertisements in local newspapers declaring "If you come here by boat without a visa YOU WON'T BE SETTLED IN AUSTRALIA". A version of this message in video form is also in Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Pashto, Sinhalese, Tamil and Vietnamese.

Mr Rudd has effectively closed the door to asylum seekers arriving by boat and has thrown away the key in the direction of Port Moresby. A recent issue of the Economist rates Port Moresby as the 139th most liveable city in the world, below Karachi and Harare. Manus Island would unlikely make any list of liveability. It's true that PNG has at least acceded to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, but they have sought exemptions on providing basic services to refugees such as employment, education and housing.

But that's not all. Catherine Wilson writes in Crikey:

Female asylum seekers will find themselves in a society grappling with very high levels of gender and sexual violence, with inadequate law enforcement. Last year the World Bank reported that violence victimisation rates in PNG were among the highest in the world and violent crimes were on the increase. 

Bleeding heart do-gooders like myself are frothing at the mouth and penning editorials on how Mr Rudd's new policy is tougher and less humane than anything Mr Abbott ever came up with. And that's exactly the message Mr Rudd wants to get out there. On asylum seeker and border protection, Kevin Rudd sounds more like Tony Abbott than Tony Abbott. At least that's how it will look until Mr Rudd wins the election and then reviews the policy in 12 months time.

Retired Brigadier Gary Hogan, a former Australian Defence Attache to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, recently wrote for the Lowy Institute:

A cargo cult mentality is alive and well in PNG and this afforded the necessary levers for the Australian Prime Minister to pull so deftly in his game-changing policy statement, which will almost certainly stem boat arrivals in the near term, until people smugglers and Australian activists are able to find paths around the absolutist decree that even legitimate asylum-seekers will now not find sanctuary in Australia. 

Australia, a huge and sparsely populated island continent whose European incarnation was established by criminals arriving in boats, has turned its back on desperate boat people who have in the past made terrific citizens. Still, our loss could be Kevin Rudd's gain. Which I guess is really all that matters.

 Irfan Yusuf is an Australian lawyer and author. First published in the NZ Herald on Thursday 25 July 2013.

UPDATE: An excellent comment from Dr Susan Harris Rimmer of ANU can be found here.

MEDIA: WikiLeaks hysteria ...

This post will be a running tally of updates on WikiLeaks developments. I can't guarantee it will be updated regularly. If only I had the resources of Fairfax or News Limited!

UPDATE 1: Jeffrey T Kuhner, a writer for the Washington Times, a far-Right newspaper published by a Korean preacher, has called for WikiLeaks dude Julian Assange to be assassinated. He writes:

... we should treat Mr. Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.

Yep, send him off to be tortured at Guantanamo. Clearly he is worse than the worst of the worst.

(Thanks to NB)

UPDATE 2: A bunch of (largely left-of-centre) academics, lawyers, journos and entertainers have signed an open letter to Julia Gillard regarding Julian Assange. Read it here.

UPDATE 3: Here's a discussion on the unusual offence Assange has been charged with under Swedish law. They call it "sex by surprise".

UPDATE 4: Here's another op-ed, this time from a newspaper that at times tries to emulate the other Washington newspaper owned by a Korean preacher I mentioned earlier. The headline reflects just how much George W Bush's imbecilic logic still pervades certain sectors of the American Right. Read this and try not to laugh:

Assange has threatened America with the cyber equivalent of thermonuclear war.

UPDATE 5: I am accustomed to hacking into Alexander Downer's record as foreign minister. Hence I always imagined he would be more stupidly pro-American than the ALP when it came to China. But The Age reports that Downer and Howard showed far more good sense on this issue.

... 2004 remarks by the then Howard government foreign affairs minister, Alexander Downer, that a conflict between America and China over Taiwan would not necessarily trigger Australia's obligations under the ANZUS treaty with the US. The ANZUS treaty, which came into force in 1952, commits Australia and the US to respond if the armed forces of the other party in the Pacific come under attack.

Mr Downer's comments - which he insisted were taken out of context - caused concern in Washington and prompted the then US ambassador Tom Schieffer to declare that America expected Australia's support in the event of conflict over Taiwan.

The then prime minister John Howard refused to comment publicly on what Australia would do if hostility broke out between the US and China, saying it was a hypothetical situation.

But what of Kim Beazley?

AUSTRALIA'S ambassador to the US and former opposition leader, Kim Beazley, assured American officials that Australia would always side with the US in the event of a war with China, a confidential diplomatic cable reveals.

Mr Beazley's remarks, made in a 2006 meeting with the then US ambassador Robert McCallum just months before Kevin Rudd replaced him as Labor leader, are significant because no Australian federal political leader has publicly disclosed what position they believe the nation should take if the US and China came to blows over Taiwan - an event that would present Australia's greatest foreign policy dilemma.

The cable, classified as confidential and not to be disclosed outside the US government, gave the following summary of Mr Beazley's comments: "In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen."

If the contents of this cable are correct, they show a troubling degree of political and foreign policy naivety. It also shows that our political establishment places the interests of a foreign power above those of our own nation.

UPDATE 6: While millions in his country were suffering after a massive cyclone and storm surge, the head of Burma's military junta wanted to spend $1 billion buying English football team Manchester United. We know about this because of WikiLeaks.

UPDATE 7: A report from AlJazeera English on WikiLeaks on Latin American leaders.



UPDATE 8: Julian Assange cites Rupert Murdoch in Rupert's own Australian flagship newspaper.

UPDATE 9: A Labor Right powerbroker revealed as one of numerous US Embassy contacts within the Labor Party.

UPDATE 10: Hopefully my credit card won't be affected by this revenge hacking.

UPDATE 11: Hilarious video.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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OPINION: Refugee Hysteria Suggests Aussies Have Forgotten Their Own Ancestors

YOU can always tell when Australia has entered election mode. Suddenly the really big issues come to the fore - issues that affect the economy, national security, indeed Australia's very survival. Issues like the occasional arrival of a handful of desperate boat people from Afghanistan, Iraq or Sri Lanka via Indonesia.

On Sunday, March 28, Rupert Murdoch's tabloids across Australia ran the front-page story of a mass invasion of asylum seekers. In Brisbane, the headline was THEY'RE HERE.

And who were they? The paper reported that 2000 asylum seekers had made it to Christmas Island, while 425 people were being housed on the mainland. But the real nightmare was seven adults and three children going shopping in Brisbane. They spent an hour and a quarter in a shopping centre, the paper howled.

The group returned with two shopping trolleys loaded with grocery bags. Their purchases included Home Brand Hawaiian pizza, Smith's potato chips and cartons of Coca-Cola.

How selfish of seven adults to share pizza, chips and soft drink. And to think these people claim to be desperate refugees!

Anyway, back to the world of sanity. Readers with even a basic knowledge of Australian history will find the current immigration hysteria ironic. For some reason, non-European illegal immigrants seem to bring out the worst indignation in white Australia. It's as if Aussies have forgotten their own ancestors came here from mother England on boats. And many were here as a result of being sentenced for the kinds of offences for which our migration laws today would bar them from leaving Sydney airport.

Australians are all too quick to forget the key historical role people from Afghanistan played during the mid-19th century. For 60 years, these men and their camels were the only transportation available through the centre of Australia, servicing distant mines and sheep stations as well as being involved in Australia's first overland telegraph line.

With troops fighting in Afghanistan, Australia has an obligation under international law to restore order. Australia and its coalition and Nato partners have singularly failed to do this. Hence, when it comes to accepting Afghan refugees, Australia has a major responsibility. Sadly it is the conservatives, self-declared protectors of Australia's Christian heritage, who show the least Christian attitude towards refugees.

The prejudice in Australia's popular media toward anyone deemed a Middle Eastern migrant is so endemic that one can only hope God in his good sense doesn't send the Son of Man to Australia for the Second Coming.

IN AUGUST last year, on an ABC television chat show, Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop reminded viewers of the perils posed to Australia by an increase in the number of people arriving by boat.

She shared the panel with conservative American humorist P J O'Rourke. He found all this hysteria about boat people in Australia and some parts of the EU rather amusing.

You know, we in the States have much, much more experience with being all wrong about immigration than you do. I mean, 36,000 you said in Italy? We laugh. That's a day in the United States. And we are so wrong about it. I mean, build a fence on the border with Mexico, give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry, you know ...

Ms Bishop tried to rescue her conservative credentials after being showed up by O'Rourke. She recited the usual Liberal Party mantra about people smugglers.

O'Rourke's response?

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You know, if you open your borders, you don't have people smugglers ...

These people are assets. One or two of them might not be, but you can sort them out later. Oh, I think conservatives are getting this wrong all over the world, I really do.

The Rudd Labor Government is not much better. Australia's immigration minister recently announced that the processing of new asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan would be suspended. The government says circumstances have changed in both countries such that it is now safe enough for asylum applicants to return.

That being the case, one can expect Australian troops in Afghanistan to prepare for their imminent return. Yet the reality is that the US is getting ready to send 17,000 more troops into the country and has requested its allies (including Australia) to increase their troop presence. Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay has told Nato and other allies that the military alliance cannot take its foot off the gas in Afghanistan, simply because the US is about to send 17,000 more troops.

And so we have all this fuss over 4500 boat people. Meanwhile, there is little fuss over 50,000 illegal immigrants from Britain and the US.

In the Australian psyche, illegal immigrants must necessarily be non-European and non-white. Either that or some illegal immigrants are more illegal than others.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer. This article was first published in the Dominion-Post in Wellington, New Zealand.

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POLITICS: Gay marriage in America ...

In Australia, our own PM Kevin Rudd has signalled his opposition to recognition of same sex marriage. In the United States, the matter is the subject of hot debate. A number of states have already legislated to recognise such marriages. And in the state of Maryland, supporters of the cause have found an interesting ally.

I'm proud that I'll have stood on the right side of history: In support of full marital rights for same-sex couples.

My stance on this issue isn't politically expedient. I am the first Muslim in the legislature. Homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Islam. As such I have evinced much grief from my most conservative supporters.

But I recognize that I represent people of all faiths and no faith at all. If I tried to enforce religion by law — as in a theocracy — I would be doing a disservice to both constituents and to my religion.

See, this is what happens when these Mozzlems take over. They slowly, ever-so-quietly, try to impose sharia law on us all while we're not watching. You just can't trust them.

OK, now that we got that out of our system, here's a few facts about Saqib Ali:

* He went to high school in Saudi Arabia where homosexuality is punishable by law.

* He is the first Muslim delegate to be elected to the Legislature in the State of Maryland.

* His stance has surprised conservatives among his supporters.

Click here for more on this story. Compare Mr Ali's stance to that of a New Zealand Labour MP on civil unions.

OPINION: Values blur in good and evil ...

Uncle Sam stands at the top of a flight of stairs, looking more than slightly perplexed. Below him is a windowless chamber its sparse furnishings consist of a lamp, a wooden bench and a closet shaped roughly to the contours of a human body, spikes emerging from its rear wall. A man hangs from the roof, his ankles bound. Below him stand a Caucasian man dressed in a Nazi uniform, a hooded Spanish inquisitor brandishing a sword and a third man in military fatigues and an Arab head-dress.

All three are watching Uncle Sam, inviting him to join them, the third man stating:

C'mon down. Once you take the first step, it's easy.

What I've just described in words is a cartoon by Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth. It's only now, with debate over the use of torture in the "war on terror", that we're discovering just how deep the Leader of the Free World had descended.

The frequent mantra recited by Western political masters was that we were in a war against terrorists who hated us because of who we are, because of our values. Terrorists despised us for being civilised. They wanted to replace notions such as democracy and the rule of law, which we stood for, with terror and lawlessness. This was a war for civilisation, a fight to defend freedom.

Yet within a mere six months of the 9/11 attacks, top officials of the CIA were happy to flout the rule of law and to breach the very values they claimed to protect. To use the words of North Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, the Bush administration saw the law as a nicety we could not afford.


This new lawlessness incorporated the use of harsh interrogation techniques (read torture) such as waterboarding. In this torture, a prisoner is bound to an inclined board, his feet raised and his head slightly below the feet; then cloth is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the prisoners gag reflex is activated and he feels convinced he is drowning.

One CIA prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi, is said to have been subjected to waterboarding that proved so effective that he provided false evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein which led to the 2003 invasion. Al-Libbi made these fabricated claims as he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

Even if we accepted claims by United States lawmakers that torture was used to protect Americans, al-Libbi's torture was clearly used for political purposes to justify a war the Bush administration was determined to fight even before the first jets hit the World Trade Center. Once evil means are adopted even for seemingly noble ends, the lines between good and evil soon become blurred.

Al-Libbi's treatment is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of people have been detained in various US detention facilities, both known and secret, including in Indonesia, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay. Among them were two Australian citizens David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib.

Yet while US media seem almost fixated with the role that Republican and Democrat lawmakers and US government officials played in ordering and executing torture of detainees, few Australian journalists have considered what role (if any) the Australian government may have played or at least what knowledge it may have had of the torture of Australian citizens at Guantanamo Bay.

And yet now the US is reluctant to settle Guantanamo detainees on its own territory. Meanwhile US President Barack Obama is reluctant to release further documents and photos of torture conducted by the CIA for fear it will further inflame tensions. It is this very secrecy which provides a perfect cover for even more abuse.

Regardless of how painful the process may be, the US must take responsibility for the consequences of its inquisition. Yet all we seem to be hearing from Obama is empty rhetoric about how the US does not torture the same rhetoric used by his predecessor. Obama chose Cairo as the location to give his speech to the nominally Muslim world.

Cairo was also the place where Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was sent by the US to have terrorism confessions extracted from him using the most brutal forms of torture. In his memoir My Story: the tale of a terrorist who wasn't, Habib outlined not just his own torture but also the suffering of other inmates also beaten and drugged.

During his Cairo address to an audience of political leaders and diplomats from Muslim-majority states, Obama admitted the US had acted contrary to its ideals by instituting torture. Yet among governments represented were those which will continue to implement the US policy of extraordinary rendition or the secret abduction and transfer of prisoners to countries that will carry out torture on behalf of the US.

The Washington Post reported on February 1, 2009, that Obama issued executive orders allowing the CIA to carry on with renditions. He further allowed the CIA to detain suspects in facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis. America will effectively now outsource Guantanamo-type operations to the generals, sheikhs, colonels, dictators and presidents-for-life who will no doubt torture not just those deemed terror suspects by the US but also domestic political opponents.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recently urged all those involved in the torture process including doctors, nurses, psychologists and lawyers to be pursued and not let off the hook. Australia and New Zealand can play a role in this process, given that both are the only two nations in the Pacific region to have ratified the Convention Against Torture. Yet given the lacklustre performance on the part of John Howard and Kevin Rudd on the treatment of former Australian citizen detainees at Guantanamo, one cannot expect too much from Australia.

Terrorists may hate us for our values, but clearly we don't seem to like our values too much either.

Irfan Yusuf's first book Once Were Radicals about young Muslims flirting with radical Islam was published by Allen & Unwin in May 2009. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Tuesday 7 July 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: Rudd and the return of multiculturalism ...

John Howard never liked the "m" word. But Kevin Rudd has brought it back, reinstating the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council that Howard abolished. At one time, many of us associated multiculturalism with a government-funded industry filled with "ethnic" leaders busily stacking their organisations so that they could employ their otherwise-unemployable nephews and/or stack ALP (or in my case, Liberal) branches for pre-selection purposes.

And after reading the story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, you might be tempted to believe that the usual suspects will form part of this council.

Suspects like the kind of largely irrelevant self-appointed leaders of Muslim religious organisations, most of whom were middle aged first generation migrant men who push women away from mosques and who even validate domestic violence. Howard had little hesitation in placing these men on his Muslim Community Reference Group because they had little ability to engage with media and politicians.

Some of them enjoyed making embarrassing public statements, and their removal from the public stage has provided plenty of relief to a beleaguered faith sector to often held collectively responsible for events overseas they have little control over. Imagine if all Queenslanders were held responsible for Attorney-General Kevin Shine’s insensitive remarks on rape victims.

Rudd’s choice of nominees for his Multicultural Advisory Council reflects a good mix of academia, sport, professional experience and grassroots activism. The only Muslim religious community representative, Joumanah El Matrah, belongs to an organisation that works tirelessly at a grassroots level with women from emerging communities such as Afghans, Iraqis and Africans. Generally media-shy, El Matrah is one of Australian Islam’s unsung heroines.

The interests of indigenous communities are too often ignored in discussions about multiculturalism.

Rudd’s committee includes Rhonda Jacobsen, an accomplished indigenous lawyer who has written extensively on the legal aspects of reconciliation. Without exception, these appointees represent the best and brightest of Australian pluralism.

Hopefully they will advise the Rudd government in such a manner that minorities won’t be marginalised or turned into political wedges in a manner so common during the 11 years of Howard’s monocultural madness.

First published in Crikey on 18 December 2008.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Suharto no angel, but still mourned ...

During the late 1990s, I worked for a lawyer who spent his spare time making documentaries. A decade earlier, he produced a documentary about East Timor. He interviewed an Indonesian general who, as a young man, had taken part in the purge of presumed communists during the mid-1960s. When asked how he recognised complete strangers as communists, the general responded: "I can tell by the share of white in their eyes".

Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians, many having no communist links, were murdered during these purges. Many Western leaders knew but kept silent in much the same manner as they are silent today about atrocities and human rights abuses committed by dictatorships across the nominally Islamic world against anyone deemed extremist.

The man who orchestrated these massacres was another Indonesian general who is (to be fair, quite rightly) praised for leading his nation through a period of industrialisation and economic development.

The front page story of The Jakarta Post yesterday speaks of Suharto

"[v]enerated for much of his 32-year tenure as the liberator he appeared to be after more than two decades of authoritarian rule under his predecessor Sukarno, and vilified near its end for his authoritarian rule and for the corruption he appeared to condone in his later years in office."

It went on to describe Suharto's period of leadership as one which saw political and economic stability at the expense of freedom and human rights. Such words could never have been written in a major Indonesian newspaper before Suharto's 1998 resignation. At least this is what I was told by an Indonesian postgraduate student when I visited the country in 2006.

Within three months of my arrival in January, a popular Indonesian tabloid, Rakyat Merdeka, (perhaps the closest thing to an Islamist Daily Telegraph) published an article critical of Australia's involvement in West Papua. This wasn't unusual but what was new was a cartoon (which would have offended the paper's devout Muslim readers) showing one dingo with the head of former prime minister John Howard from behind another dingo with the head of former foreign minister Alexander Downer.

The cartoon was deemed too risque even for a certain former shadow foreign minister named Kevin Rudd, who described it as

... not passing any standard of taste anywhere in the world ...

and even hinting at the Indonesian Government using any

... powers it had over Indonesian newspapers in terms of decency standards.

Suharto will be given a state funeral in his home town of Surakarta. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has declared a week of mourning. Suharto's coffin was draped in the Indonesian flag when turned over by his family to the military. Tens of thousands lined the streets from the Suharto family's Jakarta residence to an air force base as the coffin was driven to be transported for the funeral.

The man whose New Order regime dominated Indonesian public life for over three decades ironically had humble beginnings. He was born in June 1921. At age 19, he entered a military school in Gambong. During the Japanese occupation, he spent some time in the Japanese-sponsored police force in Yogyakarta.

Following independence in 1945 and until his accession to the presidency in 1968, Suharto went through the ranks of the Indonesian armed forces. That period saw an ongoing struggle against the Indonesian Communist Party.

Suharto's presidency was characterised by strong economic development and he was proclaimed the Father of Development. At the same time, he brutally suppressed dissent. In January 1978, he ordered the closure of a number of influential newspapers and sent Indonesian troops on to university campuses.

Yet it was the 1975 invasion and subsequent occupation of East Timor, believed to be a hotbed of communist activism under Fretilin, for which many Australians will remember him. Today, independent East Timor is a tiny nation at war with itself. No doubt in his last days, Suharto and many Indonesians who supported his intervention would have been whispering under their breaths, "We told you so".

Islamic theology teaches that if God intended to make men perfect, he would have created them as angels. The man who ruled over the world's largest Islamic nation for over 30 years certainly was not perfect. But today Indonesians enjoy freedoms which their co-religionists in other parts of the nominally Islamic world yearn for. Had Suharto not led his nation to relative prosperity, one wonders if its present democracy could thrive as it does.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and associate editor of AltMuslim.com. A version of this article was first published in the Canberra Times on 29 January 2008.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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