How did we come to THIS?

21 Aug 2013

By The Record

A Libyan boy looks on during celebrations of World Refugee Day in 2012 at a UN refugee camp in Benghazi, Libya.Photo: CNS/Esam Al-Fetori, Reuters

By Fr Anthony Paganoni CS

One might take the view that, considering the accumulation of fears in Australia added to the complexities surrounding the refugee situation, we have moved to a situation that is definitely not “a many-splendoured thing” – indeed, quite the opposite.

Yet the undeniable truth is that we live in this lucky and affluent island nation, Australia, which has been peopled by successive waves of migrants and refugees, not forgetting that the first inhabitants are believed to have originated in Africa.

Through a simple search in the national and state archives, one can trace one’s origins, the forebears who arrived two centuries ago at the most.

Our own or our ancestors’ relatively recent arrivals make us all a nation of immigrants, where identities and cultures have come together to shape and form the vast and rich collection of individual stories we call Australia.

As is so clearly shown in the Encyclopedia of the Nation (subtitled The Australian People and edited by James Jupp), we are all brushing elbows with people of different origins.

Australia is an island nation and because of its geographical setting, with its only residents being historically migrants or refugees, the ever-changing dissimilarities of its population resemble those of the ancient Roman legions which were successfully merged with local populations without causing major upheavals.

Even up until very recent times, repeated struggles have served to convince new and old Australians that the island nation is indeed a ‘land of opportunity’, where a ‘fair go’ has been the maxim, shaping prevalent social and thinking patterns.

I dare say, however, that moods are changing – and not only moods.

Issues surrounding refugees have rapidly escalated and become exacerbated over the last decade or so.

We speak about people who have not yet landed on Australian shores and yet have somehow become an almost incendiary substance  (or made to appear as such?), in spite of the fact that those who have previously been processed and resettled in Australia have not been reported as being disrespectful to the Australian way of life.

The call to “stop the boats” (a simple slogan hiding deep complexities) coexists with various interpretations of the push factors in their countries of origin, and of the Geneva Convention, which is subjected to various legal and para-legal interpretations – as if we didn’t know how to put it into practice anymore or are very reluctant to do so.

All of these arguments and the existing asylum models seem to annoy everyone involved: first and foremost the refugee families trying to save their relatives hopelessly living in camps, then the Australian workers forced to act as jailers for people they are supposed to be helping and the Australians invited, almost day in and day out, to embrace a ‘get tough’ stance.

Why is it that a few thousand totally unknown people have, in recent times, become responsible for infringing our sovereignty by violating our national borders?

The irony of it all is that we know that many more people in Australia are already staying illegally, such as those who have overstayed their visa or gained illegal access through airports.

Have we unknowingly resurrected an attitude of rejection similar to that acclaimed in Terra Nullius which was culpable for inflicting marginalisation and suffering on the traditional owners of this land – an attitude which in today’s version is culpable for fencing out thousands of defenceless men, women and children in order to prop up a perilously false sense of national safety and security?

Not only are we denying asylum seekers arriving by boat any hope of settling in Australia, but we are publishing pictures of their anguish at being told so.

Has the suffering of others become an opportunity to exploit? What is this spectacle implying for the island nation peopled by successive waves of migrants and refugees?

Our steady and sad decline into the abject victimisation of a vulnerable group of people goes on unabated. We are now at the point where it seems that the truth of the people’s lives counts for almost nothing.

Yet the truth of the matter is that these people – boat people – have been fenced off, barred from any access to any rule of law, outlawed, significantly deprived of contact with other human beings and duped – as we suspect they have been – by the so-called people smugglers.

The accusing finger is severely and disdainfully pointed at these shadowy entrepreneurs: “merchants of the flesh”, as Blessed John Baptist Scalabrini used to call them.

But even people smugglers fall into two categories, argues former ALP President Barry Jones:  Some are evil, some are not. Jews were smuggled out of Germany in 1938 as human cargo – and many died because they were turned back from Britain, the United States and Palestine.

Were people smugglers involved? You bet. Were they to be condemned? You bet. And the people who smuggled Jews from Denmark to Sweden or from France to Switzerland?

Waves of refugees don’t depend on the sales pitch of people smugglers – they depend on the degree of desperation in the countries of origin.

Our daily conversation about refugees has been drained of any degree of rationality and replenished with catch phrases and just plain, brazen lying spread by ideological and political winds of the moment to the far corners of our country.

Politicians can say and do almost anything, trump up lies and easy labels without being held to account simply because there is no way facts can be checked – or the truth revealed about lives lost at sea or in refugee camps.

Among so many winds blowing in all directions, the wind of fear is pervasive.

I must add, at this point, that the winds of fear are not confined to Australia.

The ‘Fortress Europe syndrome’ has dictated the political agenda of a number of parties in Europe, particularly in Spain, Italy and Greece where human cargoes, notwithstanding thousands of known deaths in the Mediterranean, are definitely not figments of the imagination.

The wall across the US/Mexican border, built to stop Latinos from crossing into the rich Norte, the Eldorado, is equally responsible for the death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of young people who, after having been abandoned by traffickers, have tried unknown routes, only to die of dehydration and exhaustion in the Texan desert.

South Africa’s electrified borders are likewise the setting for numerous painful and tragic dramas. And these are by no means the only stories.

I alluded earlier to the push factors. Fear has become the greatest motivation and the most obvious negative factor influencing large segments of popular opinion in developed nations, aided by a mix of compassion-fatigue and xenophobic feelings towards strangers, even when these are known to represent welcome additions to depleted segments in the labour market of the G8 nations.

Comparing our own national record with that of other similarly placed national communities leads one to conclude that Australia’s attitude smacks of arrogance.

Developed nations, including Australia, have forgotten the simple fact that, according to UNHCR reports, most of the world’s refugees, the victims of enormous economic imbalances and often fratricidal civil wars, are being hosted in third world countries.

Up until recently, the Geneva Convention, as amended by the 1967 protocol, has been hailed as the norm – one which safeguards humanitarian principles and considerations against the dangers of suppression in the interests of short-term political advantage. Particularly over the last decade, populist politics in Australia have promoted an ill-informed debate about refugees.

The rhetoric, fanned by both sides of politics, advocates tough action to stem the flow of refugees and smash the operation of people smugglers, so as to save the sovereign right to safeguard national frontiers.

But it has turned the nameless, faceless, stateless and homeless refugees into a public enemy – to be feared, above all.

It seems to me that, somehow, the ethical and moral assumptions which were at the basis of the Geneva Convention, in its different phases of drafting and final resolution, have been relegated to the dustbins of history.

This is a loss, sad and unforgivable, in our secularised world where the phrase “human dignity” has become like an indispensable household appliance, yet maintaining its practical relevance has become an uphill battle.

If we fear the boats because we have drowned a sense of fairness and compassion, what alternative is viable and worth pursuing?

In the insistence that “we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” (as former Prime Minister John Howard famously asserted), I sense a one-sided approach to sovereignty – as if our way of life is ours by right, and so within our right to share or withhold as we see fit.

A gift, after all, cannot be demanded. It is and must be given freely.

Above all, it must be ours to give for we can only give what we have. But have we really earned that entitlement, as philosopher Patrick Stokes of Deakin University asks? It is nice to be lucky, but it is not a merit. Who decides that our nice dessert is only ours to enjoy?

Accepting such a radical contingency can appear disquieting, but it can turn out to be liberating. And inclusive.

According to St Thomas, misericordia (mercy) implies a real grief as if the others’ suffering were our own, a ready responsiveness to the distress of others, the kind that we would normally offer to those in our family and community.

But misericordia cannot be activated unless the climate of fear, the strong currents of obtuse selfishness, is sidestepped.

Fear must be replaced by trust and faith with encounters that convey sanity and humanity. Refugees, both in their transit facilities and places of resettlement, have often testified to the value of the informal friendship offered to them through church-related groups.

The offer of simple and direct advice, the organisation of activities and outings, the sharing of celebration, the teaching of a new language, money for the bus ticket, clothes and toys for children and the opportunities for volunteering that churches present can help to counter the isolation, fear, disempowerment and enforced passivity experienced by people on the move.

In fact, personal relationships providing emotional, informational and tangible support are vital and essential. But even more crucial is the type of relationship: there is a way of helping people that fills their hands but breaks their hearts: what is kindness to the helper can be cruelty to the helped.

Mutuality needs to be at the heart of all encounters between refugees and supporters. Christians must go beyond an approach that is only about duty, towards one which is definitely a source of reciprocal enrichment, guarding against imposing assumptions about what best assists re-settlement.

Refugees, like migrants, need to be allowed to be themselves, to be real. Webs of uncertainty, fear, joy and hope need to be honoured and friends should avoid suffocating or absorbing the ‘otherness’ of strangers.

All this and more will go a long way towards transforming lives of fear and uncertainty into something entirely different.

What is the role of churches and non-government organisations in the political football of constantly changing rules and moods? I believe there is an inescapable political role.

Political engagement may take a variety of forms from publishing responses to government decisions, to awareness-raising and lobbying.

The human identity of strangers needs to be represented in circles where their own voices are rarely, if ever, heard. Given that forced migration and the climate of fear it breeds are transnational, paths out of fear are also likely to be transnational.

And churches, particularly the Catholic Church, are well placed in the international arena to lift refugees and migrants from their predicament onto another level compared to that sponsored by various bodies struggling for dominance and access.

The Church must simply offer a radically different imaginative landscape, in which people can discover possibilities of change.

The real miracle of the kingdom of God is to become like children again – beginners again, perennial students, true scholars, that is.

Above all, never to take exclusive possession of anything, not even the insights about our own answers.