SYDNEY: The Australian government on Wednesday released nine Afghan teenagers from a dusty detention centre in the outback, where more than 200 of their fellow asylum seekers are on a hunger strike. The boys had made a pact: They would commit suicide if they were not released.

The government moved the boys from the Woomera Detention Centre in South Australia into foster care. It was a small gesture meant to defuse an increasingly volatile situation. And with that they brought to a close yet another conscience-churning episode in an uneasy summer for many Australians as they consider just how to handle what has become the dominant issue on the country’s intellectual landscape.

Like many developed countries, Australia has seen a marked increase in asylum seekers in recent years. And the country has engaged in a heated debate over how it should handle their arrival. But in no country have so few boat people - 8,000 in the past five years - drawn so much attention as they have here. “This has taken over everything,” says Neville Roach, a respected businessman who resigned in protest last week, after serving for six years as a senior adviser on migration issues to Prime Minister John Howard.

For a decade, Australia has been the only developed country in the world to put asylum seekers arriving illegally in mandatory detention while it processes their claims. More than 2,500 asylum seekers are now held in six detention centres around Australia.

While it has been widely criticized overseas, the anti-refugee policy is now hugely popular in Australia, and many analysts say Howard, who arrived in the US on Monday for a week-long visit, owes his reelection last November to both the boat-people crisis and the events of Sept 11.

Even in the face of a two-week-old hunger strike at the Woomera centre, Howard has refused to review what many critics charge is an inhumane policy for dealing with people fleeing wars and political persecution.

But Howard’s critics say he has supervised a disturbing turnaround from Australia’s policies of a quarter-century ago, when the country took more Vietnamese boat people per capita than any other country. (Between 1976 and 1981 almost 50,000 Vietnamese landed in Australia.)

That, the critics say, has caused Australia to lose some of the moral high-ground it once enjoyed. And, they add, it has left Australia facing an uneasy relationship with a new batch of migrants who have landed on its shores.

Anthony Burke, a political scientist at Adelaide University in South Australia, argues the debate now taking place is driven by a lingering fear of the outside world - and looming invasion - that grew out of a long history of being the only European cultural outpost in a region viewed as hostile.

But Burke, the author of a recent book entitled “In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety,” argues that it is also an illogical fear born out of a simple lack of knowledge about the region around Australia.

That kind of irrational paranoia, he argues, has raised the temperature of the debate over asylum seekers and turned it into a higher-profile discussion than it should be. —Dawn/LATS Service (c) Christian Science Monitor.