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Why would Lebanese board the boat?

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15529
http://bit.ly/18lyHUy
On Line Opinion, 1 October 2013

Why would Lebanese board the boat?

The tragic drowning of the Lebanese citizens in Indonesia should be a wakeup call for officials … Lebanese people cannot build their future in their own country.

Former Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora galvanised the tragedy to highlight the desperation of poverty-stricken parts of Lebanon.

But this sentiment may be music to the ears of Prime Minister Tony Abbott who has been singing the same tune that our primary responsibility in these tragedies is to stop the boats.

While Abbott may galvanise the tragedy to highlight the fatal ‘means’, the source countries are navel-gazing about the human ’cause’.

But in a new military model that is driven by Operation Sovereign Borders and immigration policies coupled with Border Protection, questions of why asylum seekers leave their home countries are off the political radar.

To seriously and simply ‘stop the boats’, we cannot afford to be simplistic. We need to stop the causes of the people inside the boats. This does not mean solving all the inhumane push factors that drive this desperation, but it does mean looking beyond the ‘people smuggling’ pull factors and looking more at the people than the boats.

Who were the people inside the latest boat tragedy?

We know that they were an estimated 120 people from Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen, of whom there have been only 28 survivors so far.

We know that they were at sea for five days before food and water supplies depleted before the two Indonesian crew became disoriented then decided to return to the Javanese coast in six meter waves.

We know that the Lebanese boarders were mainly from Akkar, the northernmost region of Lebanon bordering Syria.

We know that more than a million Syrians have fled the war to Lebanon which has placed enormous economic strain on this struggling neighbour of only four million residents. Stories of Akkar families struggling without affordable schools, electricity and food to feed themselves abound. Stories of Syrians resorting to cheap labour, crime and even prostitution abound. Stories of car bombs exploding near Lebanese mosques in August, echoing the seismic sectarian strife within Syria and threatening to widen the fault lines within Lebanese civil society abound. Stories of frustrated Lebanese crying out for some of the foreign aid that is sent to their new Syrian ‘neighbours’ abound.

Stories of people predators with promises of visitor visas to Indonesia then a ship to Christmas Island abound. Akkar families with ‘nothing to lose and everything to gain’ became the perfect prey, in the hope of a future life in Australia.
Their voices of desperation drowned out the voices of reason by their Australian relatives over the phone, discouraging them, warning them that there is no such ship – it is a suicidal fishing boat.

The rest is history repeating itself, as recovered bodies are identified then flown back to their village for burial, if indeed they are recovered.

The latest tragedy has sent shock waves throughout Lebanon, prompting introspection about poverty and safety for those who see no future for their children. Local MP Nidal Tohme blamed “the neglect of [Lebanon] to Akkar residents” claiming that “their deprivation and leaving them alone to face poverty and unemployment is what led the sad citizens to venture to the unknown.”

Legitimate questions have been asked about how the boat boarders could use communications technology as an SOS, but could not use communications technology to predict the rough seas or discern that the smugglers were lying about the safe ships. They paint a picture of the asylum seekers as illegitimate and unsophisticated. Compatriots from Lebanon are likely to be deterred by the news of this tragedy, and may attract more attention from their government, both of which may be constructive outcomes.

But our discourse in Australia and Prime Minister Abbott’s discourse with his Indonesian counterpart this week needs to extend beyond the boats per se.

The Abbott government’s decision to curb foreign aid by $4.5 billion to pay for infra-structure is an example of compounding the causes of the people inside the boats. By steering and supporting a political solution rather than a military solution for Syria in the UNSC, Australia could again be redressing the causes of the people inside the boats.
As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stated, “the burden of helping the world’s forcibly displaced people is starkly uneven … anti-refugee sentiment is heard loudest in industrialised countries”.

Speaker of Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri called on authorities in Australia and Indonesia to launch an investigation to determine who was responsible for the incident.

But while Lebanon looks in the mirror, perhaps our prime minister can also look into his moral mirror and realise that his honourable mandate for humanity must always prevail over his political mandate for sovereignty.

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Politicisation of Asylum Seeker funerals reeks of xenophobia

Coalition comments are not a case of poor timing – they lack all humanity.

Published in The Age, 16 February 2011
http://bit.ly/epZ2iX

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MY WIFE is buried not far from the three victims of the Christmas Island tragedy in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery. During my regular visit this week, I was saddened by the bleaker plight of my fellow mourners, but ashamed by the opportunistic politicisation of this tragedy.

The fact that my wife was buried in Sydney was a decisive factor that led my family to stay put rather than move back to Melbourne, where we spent most of our life. It was essential that we could regularly visit the site which is now sacred to our family.

If the victims of the shipwreck tragedy of December 15 were buried on Christmas Island, the grave sites would remain abandoned and inaccessible to the relatives. Joe Hockey respectfully declared that “to be there for the ceremony to say goodbye” was totally understandable. It should go without saying, unless what you are saying is that the victims should be blamed for their tragedy. Indeed, this was what his colleague, opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison, implied when he questioned the cost to the taxpayer of these funerals. Morrison has fanned the flames with his concession that “the timing of my comments was insensitive”.

Does this mean that a debate about funeral costs for shipwrecked asylum seekers should be adjourned, and this will be the extent of our interest in this global humanitarian epidemic?

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was quick to contextualise the division within his party and regurgitate his boat-stopping, vote-buying mantra – “the most humane thing you can do is put in place [border protection] policies that stop the boats”.

Apart from this being a narrow and xenophobic perspective, the concepts do not flow.

Rather than being fixated on border protection and channelling taxpayers’ money at the symptoms, it makes more sense to understand the inhumane conditions from which these asylum seekers are fleeing.

For example, Australia was a proud partner in the US-led coalition that forced regime change in Iraq in 2003. This strategy unleashed a civil war that has rendered the country so unsafe that thousands of citizens have fled. How could we be complicit with the bombardment of Iraq, then blame the victims when they land on our shores seeking refuge?
Australia is also a proud partner of many of the undemocratic countries in the Middle East that have driven this desperation for a new homeland. Our political leaders are happy to shake hands and raise glasses for the cameras with Israeli, Saudi Arabian and Egyptian leaders. But when families flee from the oppression of these same regimes, we halt them with the same hands and call it ”border protection”.

How extreme do conditions need to be for families to endure border after border, detention after detention, queue after queue, then risk what is left by paying smugglers who dispatch them onto the wild seas?

We hear rumours that boat people are future terrorists, queue jumpers or risk takers and must never set foot on our soil.

Many of us were even sucked in by the ”children overboard” rumour in 2002. Yet most refugees I have met are the exact opposite; they love law and order and have kissed Australian soil. Where are the statistics to verify how many asylum seekers were ultimately deemed to be telling the truth all along and granted refugee status?

Like us, these people also hear rumours about a safe passage to Australia’s friendly shores, where they will live happily ever after. Like us, they too get sucked in. They find that the boat is overcrowded, with no life jackets, and the ocean voyage is treacherous. Many perish at sea with no funerals, no faces and no names. After all, they had no citizenship, no home, no passport, and no record of their departure. If they survive to reach Australian waters and are intercepted, they are then at the mercy of interpreters and officials who need to make a prima facie assessment before the detention and deprivation ensues.

Tony Abbott’s proposed tougher border protection looks superficially at the symptoms of a far more serious humanitarian crisis – a crisis that Australia cannot pretend to have clean hands over, as we have been complicit and supportive in sustaining the very regimes that have become intolerable for these people. Only when we face the international sources of these asylum seekers, rather than the symptoms, will we seriously find a solution to ”stopping the boats”.

If the Catholic Abbott asks what Jesus would do, he would find a familiar story about a family fleeing persecution. Herod ordered a mass murder and the parents feared for the life of their baby. They were prepared to cross as many borders as necessary to save his life.

The problem with the politics is not the timing. It is the tapping into the simplistic victim-blaming that absolves us from any responsibility for the plight of fellow humans. Cemeteries remind us of our common humanity that temporary politicians prefer us to forget.

Joseph Wakim is founder of the Australian Arabic Council and a former Victorian multicultural affairs commissioner.