An Episode of Sparrows

I've just been listening to an extremely eye-opening, confronting talk about the pitfalls of the proposed "Malaysian Solution" on Radio National, with Graham Thom from Amnesty International and Eileen Pittaway of UNSW's Centre for Refugee Research, that is well worth a listen.

The conditions for refugees, who cannot move beyond the status of illegal immigrants in Malaysia (ie no emplyoment, housing or health rights) sounds horrifying. There are so many things in this talk that shocked me, but perhaps the most confronting aspect is the way in which Pittaway illuminates some of the horrors of 'endemic' sexual violence against refugee women and children, that sadly constitutes a pattern around the world. The horrors that she speaks of, such as "survival sex", and girls younger than twelve dying in childbirth as a result of rape, their bodies too young to survive labour, would be almost unimaginable if they were not painfully true for far too many people.

(somewhat unrelated image created by me, to break up the text)

The whole thing left me rattled and confused. I wasn't so much left questioning the validity of the Malaysian Solution as a viable option for Australia (it simply isn't) as questioning why we aren't doing more to resettle refugees from Malaysia and other non-signatory countries to here, without a 'swap', now that we know how terrible the conditions are. It's probably just a far-off, near-impossible ideal at this stage, but wouldn't it be amazing if our government was focused on alleviating the suffering of so many people, at the very least in the Asia-Pacific region, rather than trying to find ways to sidestep our obligation as a signatory country of the Human Rights Convention?

In the final part of the talk, Thom calls for a change in attitude among the Australian public and government, to acknowledge that, ultimately,"people aren't moving because they want to, people are moving because they have to." If we could all remember this, from the driver with the "fuck off, we're full" bumper sticker to the prime minister, I think that alone would make a huge difference.


NB: Actually, if we could all simply remember that we are talking about people, that would also probably make a big difference. One of the things that really shook me about the talk was when they mentioned that a lot of the refugees in Malaysia have come from Burma. All I could think of was the Burmese girls that I tutor, who were born in camps on the Thai-Burma border, and could have easily ended up in Malaysia or somewhere else, or perhaps equally as bad, still be detained somewhere like Christmas Island, if they had had the misfortune of arriving by boat. It's a cliche, sure, but when there is a human face that connects you with an issue, it simply can't not matter, yet amidst all the talk of intake numbers and visa grants it's easy to forget altogether that we are talking about people.