| July 7, 2003 | Monday | Jumadi-ul-Awwal 6,1424 |
The Taliban bogey
Unwanted honour
CANBERRA: The Australian government is being criticized by refugee support groups for sending 54 Vietnamese asylum seekers on a 1,600-kilometre long journey over four days to faraway Christmas Island — although they were discovered within a few kilometres of an immigration centre in Western Australia.
Activist argue that in making a political point — sending asylum seekers to a distant part of the country to show that they are not welcome on Australia’s shores — the government of Prime Minister John Howard is wasting public funds.
“There is no reason to be taking these people to Christmas Island,” said Howard Glenn, the National Director of ‘A Just Australia’.
“It will cost an enormous amount of money to transport them there, to re-open and staff the detention centre, to cover the costs of all the lawyers and government officials having to travel there to process their claims. It is the worst of all worlds,” he argued.
Despite the proximity of the asylum seekers to the Port Hedland detention centre, which houses 117 asylum seekers and has the capacity for over another 400 the Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock insists that the mothballed Christmas Island centre will be re-opened.
Asked why the government is bothering to send them over 1,600 kilometres from Port Hedland when it will make no difference to their legal rights, Ruddock stressed that it was all about symbolism. “We are sending them to Christmas Island to make it abundantly clear that people are not reaching the Australian mainland,” Ruddock said.
A leading critic of the government’s policy, Australian Greens Sen Bob Brown believes that Ruddocks’s decision is all about deterrence. “They are being sent to this mothballed camp at huge expense to let the world know that the Australian government is capable of inhumane treatment for boat people,” he said.
Between June 2002 and February this year, the Australian government paid 279 million US dollars to a private company, Australasian Correctional Management, to run the various detention centres.
In addition, the Australian government pays for the costs of detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. A total of 430 people remain on Nauru, where they were sent after their boats were intercepted by a naval blockade in 2001, and another three are on Manus Island.
The four-week journey of the nine children, 28 men and 17 women aboard a small boat from Vietnam ended when authorities at Port Hedland in Western Australia spotted them on Tuesday.
The group — the first boatload of asylum seekers to reach the Australian coastline in 18 months — left Vietnam on June 7.
At first, the government claimed their boat was detected well offshore and said they had been put aboard the Navy ship, HMAS Canberra, to be taken to Christmas Island, where their claims for refugee status would be assessed.
Last year, Ruddock pushed through legislative amendments with the support of the Opposition Labour Party — to exempt Christmas Island and Australian coastal waters from the application of Australian migration law.
As a result, asylum seekers there would be deprived of the right to appeal against adverse decisions before the Australian courts.
“This is (anti-immigration politician) Pauline Hanson’s policy. She first espoused the policy of excising Christmas Island from Australian law. It was adopted by John Howard and endorsed by the Labour Party,” said Brown.
However, the government’s claims that the Vietnamese asylum seekers were detained outside the migration zone was undermined when local witnesses told A Just Australia that their boat was actually within the harbour waters of Port Hedland.
“We got a tipoff that the boat was within the harbour waters of part Headland and was simply waiting for an iron ore carrier to go out through the channel,” Glenn said. Subsequently, the harbour master at Port Hedland confirmed to journalists that the boat was within the port.
On Friday, Ruddock confirmed that the Vietnamese would be entitled to have their claims processed as though they had landed on Australian shores since they had been detained within the migration zone.
The Labour Opposition, wary of alienating conservative anti- immigration supporters, has remained mute on the relocation of the 54 people to Christmas Island. Instead, it has claimed that if it were in government, it would have established a coast guard which would have detected the boat well before it reached Port Hedland.
Glenn believes the Labour Party’s timid response belies its reluctance to embrace a policy that protects the rights of asylum seekers and is less costly for the Australian community.
“We are disappointed with the Labour Party’s response on this issue. Neither they or the government support a more sensible policy of quickly processing applications for refugee status and minimizing the cost and trauma associated with people being held for long periods of time in detention centres,” he said.
By coincidence, members of a parliamentary committee inquiring into Australia’s detention centres are on Christmas Island inspecting the detention centre facilities and expressed an interest in meeting the Vietnamese group.—Dawn/The Inter-Press News Service.
ON THE eve of President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s departure on his 20-day foreign trip, religious zealots in Peshawar went on a rampage blackening women faces on advertising billboards. And on the eve of his return home, sectarian zealots went on a killing spree on Friday in Quetta, putting to death nearly 50 Shias in prayer at an imambargah on Friday.
It is hard to imagine that these two incidents could in any way be linked beyond the fact that they happened in close proximity to the president’s departure and his return home from his extended foreign tour.
But then it is the very timing of the two incidents which seems suggestive. The Taliban had vanished into thin air after 9/11. Even the dreaded Al Qaeda militants who were on the run were being apprehended and handed over to the US. Pakistan’s own religio-political parties, which may have had sympathies for the Taliban and Al Qaeda when the two were in command in the neighbouring Afghanistan, had contested elections in October 2002 and joined mainstream politics in the country, forming their government in one province (NWFP), entering into a coalition in another (Balochistan), and leading the opposition at the Centre.
If at all there was any contentious issue between these religious parties (the MMA) and Gen Musharraf, it was not Talibanism, but the president’s own inflexibility over the issue of the LFO. Even on this issue, the president had publicly shown his preference to negotiate with the MMA rather than working out an understanding with the PPP or the PML-N.
For its part, the MMA had recognized the need for the president to keep his uniform for one year which many thought they would be willing to accept, with a little bit of persuasion, and to extend the period for another year or even for five years.
So, one could discern a measure of political empathy between the two— Gen Musharraf and the MMA— as opposed to the extreme antagonism that exists between the president and the two mainstream political parties: both want him to transfer power and go back to the barracks immediately.
On the other hand, over the last one year or so, sectarian violence in the country had subsided to a large extent. So, then why out of the blue did the billboard incidents happen in Peshawar? Why was this followed up by the MMA getting a Shariat bill passed in the NWFP assembly? And why did the MMA decide to add Islamization clauses to their demands submitted to the committee set up by the government to settle the LFO controversy? And now why all of a sudden terrorist attack on an imambargah in Quetta?
If all this was meant to embarrass Musharraf during his foreign tour, then those behind these happenings have failed miserably because, while the first incident provided President Musharraf a God-sent opportunity to talk about Talibanization in foreign lands (music to the ears of his hosts), the second one seems to have supplied the needed evidence to back his Talibanization fears which he had expressed in some detail to his hosts.
Or, could it be that the religious elements in the country are deliberately creating a situation to make it possible for Gen Musharraf to convince his friends in the democratic world that it is not the LFO, but religious extremism of the Taliban type that needs to be tackled on a war footing and, therefore, his continuing in uniform at the helm of affairs in Pakistan is necessary for the present?
By remaining on the right side of democratic principles when it comes to Musharraf’s domestic challenges, the religious elements in the country seem to be helping him in keeping at bay the mainstream political forces led by the PPP and the PML-N.
By creating an impression that they are all but set to get rid of Musharraf by violent means if necessary and to usher in extremist Islamic rule in the country, these very religious elements seem to be helping the president to successfully defend his otherwise unacceptable LFO package and his uniform in the democratic world which wants him to restore democracy in Pakistan at the earliest.
Military rulers in Pakistan have never been ousted by popular uprisings. They have only been removed and replaced by their own uniformed colleagues when their time was up. So, it would be rather naive to think that the opposition, including even the MMA, poses any real threat to Gen Musharraf’s authority or his rule.
The possibility of President Musharraf losing patience with the opposition and dismissing the elected assemblies is also ruled out because Musharraf has a strong stake in the continuation of these houses. Indeed, only then can he prove his point about the so-called checks and balance contained in the LFO— he is making so consistently and tirelessly here and abroad since August 24, 2002.
The MMA too is not likely to push President Musharraf to a point where he would find himself left with no option, but to dissolve the assemblies. The MMA wants very badly to complete its tenure in the NWFP and Balochistan so that it could ensure its return in greater strength in the next elections. It feels that in case, the assemblies are dissolved at this point in time, it may not get the helping hand from the intelligence agencies in as big a way as it did in the last polls.
So, the MMA would like to keep the pot boiling, but not let it spill over, enabling Gen Musharraf to keep the PPP and the PML-N in the wilderness for the next five years, which perhaps the time the president believes it would take for these two parties to lose their support among the people. The political space vacated by the disappearance of the PPP and the PML-N, the MMA believes, would be for it to fill without much trouble. So, it helps the two, Musharraf and the MMA, to work in concert over the next five years, to achieve their respective political objectives.—ONLOOKER
A WEEK or so ago I quoted from The Statesman announcing a knighthood for Rabindranath Tagore. On June 3, 1919, the paper had the decency to publish the text of the letter Tagore had written to the Viceroy renouncing the title. It was apparently in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and its aftermath in the Punjab. It is not just an excerpt. It is history because Jallianwala marked the beginning of the end of the Raj in the subcontinent. The paper wrote under the heading, “Unwanted Honour”:
Sir Rabindranath Tagore informs us that he has sent the following letter to the Viceroy:
Your Excellency, the enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has with a rude shock revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India. The disproportionate severity of the punishment inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced are without parallel in the history of civilized governments, barring some conspicuous, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organizations for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification.
The accounts of insults and sufferings undergone by our brothers in the Punjab have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching through every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers — possibly congratulating themselves for imparting what they imagine as salutary lessons. This callousness has been praised by most of the Anglo-Indian papers, which have in some cases gone to the brutal length of making fun of our sufferings, without receiving the least check from the same authority, relentlessly careful in smothering every cry of pain and expression of judgment from the organs representing the sufferers.
Knowing that our appeals have been in vain and that the passion of vengeance is blinding the noble vision of statesmanship in our Government, which could so easily afford to be magnanimous as befitting its physical strength and moral tradition, the very least that I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving noise to the protest of the millions of my countrymen surprised into dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificances are liable to suffer a degradation not fit for human beings. And these are the reasons which have painfully compelled me to ask Your Excellency, with due deference and regret, to relieve me of my title of Knighthood, which I had the honour to accept from His Majesty the king at the hands of your predecessor, for whose nobleness of heart I still entertain great admiration.
HERE now is a story from Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation titled “What’s in the meat?” It begins:
On July 11, 1997, Lee Harding ordered soft chicken tacos at a Mexican restaurant in Pueblo, Colorado, Harding was twenty-two years old, a manager at Safeway. His wife Stacey was a manager at Wendy’s. They were out to dinner on Friday night. When the chicken tacos arrived, Harding thought there was something wrong with them. The meat seemed to have gone bad. The tacos tasted slimy and gross. An hour or so after leaving the restaurant, Harding began to experience severe abdominal cramps. It felt like something was eating away at his stomach. He was fit and healthy, stood six-foot-one, weighed two hundred pounds. He’d never felt pain this intense. The cramps got worse, and Harding lay in bed through the night, tightly curled into a ball. He developed bad diarrhoea, than blood diarrhoea. He felt he was dying, but was afraid to go to the hospital. If I’m going to die, he thought, I want to die at home.
The severe pain and diarrhoea lasted through the weekend. On Monday evening, Harding decided to seek medical attention; the cramps were getting better, but he was still passing a good deal of blood. He waited three hours in the emergency room at St. Mary Corwin Hospital in Pueblo, gave a stool sample, and then finally saw a doctor. It’s probably just a ‘summer flue’, the doctor said. Harding was sent home with a prescription for an antibiotic. Tuesday after noon, he heard a knock at his front door. When Harding opened it, no body was there. But he found a note on the door from the Pueblo city-country Health Department. It is said that his stool sample had tested... a virulent and potentially lethal food borne pathogen.
The next morning Harding called a nurse with the Pueblo Health Department. She asked him to try and remember what foods he’d eaten during the previous five days. Harding mentioned the dinner at the Mexican restaurant and the foul taste of the chicken tacos. He was sure that was where he had gotten food poisoning. She disagreed. The pathogen was rarely found in chicken. She asked if Harding had consumed any ground beef lately. Harding recalled having eaten hamburger a couple of days before visiting the Mexican restaurant. But he doubted that the hamburger could have made him ill. Both his wife and his wife’s sister had eaten the same burger, during a backyard barbeque, and neither had become sick. He and his wife had also eaten burgers from the same box the week before the barbeque without getting sick.
More of the story some other time.