Don’t turn your back on refugees
Herald Sun
18 July 2013
“AUSTRALIANS are essentially a warm-hearted, kind people who want to have the continuation of an orderly migration system.”
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s recent attempt to focus these two lenses of the Australian binoculars on boat people was missing the third lens: a global perspective.
When asked if we could be “more compassionate to the refugees” at a community cabinet meeting in Rockhampton, Rudd should have known that compassion requires a lens from the outside looking in, not the reverse.
On the other side of the world where I was born, my 4 million Lebanese compatriots have accommodated more than 1 million Syrian refugees, and counting.
Ironically, even the 500,000 Palestinians in South Lebanon refugee camps have opened their tents to the Syrian families. To reject fellow humans at their doorstep was deemed unthinkable and heartless.
This lack of perspective was confirmed by World Vision Australia’s Tim Costello, who recently returned from refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, where he met many host families, who explained: “I tell my children we are still lucky we must accept them.”
When comparing the Middle Eastern perspective with Australia, he concluded that “we are thinking in stats and categories, not looking into faces”.
According to Lebanese UN ambassador Nawaf Salam, “Lebanon will not close its borders. It will not turn back any refugees”, even though one in five residents in this war-scarred country is a Syrian refugee.
In contrast, only about one in 200 residents in our land of plenty is a refugee.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website provides further factual perspective, with 15.4 million refugees seeking a home in 2012, of which only 16,000 were in Australia.
Lebanon and our island nation are geographically and historically incomparable. Many may also argue that Syria and Lebanon share a border, a language and a culture.
This is akin to arguing that New Zealand shares the same affinity with Australia because of our shared language, Tasman Sea and British colonial history. Would Australia have taken a million Kiwis if they were rendered refugees due to war, earthquakes or global warming?
Would rejecting them be unthinkable and heartless? Are our refugee binoculars fitted with a cultural lens?
Our true colours are exposed if we see our trans-Tasman neighbours as “different to other refugees because they are the same as us”. They do not count as stats because we see their faces. Yet, ironically, neither of our “mongrel nations” are monocultural or monolingual.
Hence, it is peculiar that Rudd would be “looking at this right now globally in terms of the effectiveness of the Refugees Convention”, as Article 3 stipulates that the provisions shall apply “without discrimination as to race, religion, or country of origin”.
The 1951 Convention, which was initially a response to World War II on the European continent before the 1967 Universal Protocol, makes no reference to refugee applicants by sea or air.
So long as the applicant is “outside the country of his nationality” and has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”, the refugee definition applies.
If Rudd intends to capitalise on Australia’s seat at the United Nations Security Council, perhaps he should take a more global rather than Australia-centric perspective.
He may propose to redefine Australian territory to exclude the sea, or redefine refugees to exclude seaborne asylum seekers, secondary points of origin (Article 31) and voyages arranged by people smugglers.
But such proposals may amount to a breach of Article 33, the principle of non-refoulement: “No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened.”
If Australia were to move to modernise the 1951 Convention, it ought to broaden rather than narrow the definition of refugee beyond “fear of persecution”.
Given the growing effects of global warming, there are refugees as a result of sinking islands in the Pacific.
There are internally displaced refugees in the face of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes. And of course there are refugees from war-torn countries such as Syria, regardless of their race, religion, regardless of whether they are a majority or minority, and regardless of their economic status.
Only then could the revision of the refugee convention be given a global perspective.