Hamid fled Iran only to become a casualty of a savage and gratuitous war – Australia’s war on asylum. The decisions that led directly to his death – the appalling conditions on Manus, a reported delay in treatment, the very fact that any refugee is sent offshore at all – are the most recent of the raids in this war: raids on common decency, reason, hope, and the bodies and souls of refugees themselves. In brutalizing refugees, governments have established the principle that no matter how weak and in need of help someone is, the state owes them precisely nothing. Can people do anything about this? In a war, we have to fight. It’s not enough to just express outrage. There’s only one real option for people who care about what their government is doing to refugees: help build a social movement that can force refugee rights to the centre of the national agenda, and not back down until those rights are honoured. What that means is not just acting oneself; it means continually encouraging new people to act as well, so that the voices calling for justice for refugees grow so loud and insistent that they’re impossible to ignore. If that doesn’t happen, one thing IS clear: slowly but surely, complacency will poison this society, just as Hamid’s blood was poisoned. Without a real movement for refugees, we will allow our society to become more violent, unfair and unliveable, just as it already is for the refugee women on Nauru who asked to terminate their pregnancies because they’d rather lose an unborn child than condemn it to the life of affliction and loss that they themselves are living.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 05:03:18 +0000
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