Recently I had the disturbing experience of personally getting to know a little about the lives of around half a dozen individuals whom the community has come to call “boat people”. These people with names like Mohammed, Masoud, Mojtaba and Bahareh were in hospital being treated for a range of mental and emotional disturbances resulting from their imprisonment - yes imprisonment - in our detention centres. They were intelligent, caring, generous, gentle and likeable people who feared for their lives if they remained in their home countries of Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran. The most feared detention was on the island of Nauru, the so-called Pacific solution. They could barely speak of the treatment they received there; the fear in their eyes was obvious when they went silent, mumbling only a few words that it was bad, very bad. It seemed to me they did not want to appear to be complainers or troublemakers. Those from Iran referred to themselves as Persians which tells me much about how they regard their own political system. They would not say they were Iranians. That would identify them with a regime which they consider oppressive, not belonging to them in any way and dangerous in the extreme. That’s why they are here. By the way, that is just how Australia and our allies see Iran – oppressive and dangerous, yet we don’t empathise with those trying to escape. I am not one of those dewy-eyed idealists that want to open our borders to anyone who can make it to our shores. I really do believe in our sovereign right to decide on who comes here and that we need to be careful about who stays in our country. But when they do get here, surely we can do better than the treatment meted out in Nauru or other places that turn people into emotional, mental wrecks who have to be taken into our hospitals for patch-up repairs before being shuffled around the country and sent back to another detention centre, never knowing what is going to happen next. I learned that at least one of the people I met had attempted suicide. Am guessing it was more than one. They were all at times on the edge of emotional collapse. Meeting these people and learning a little about their lives over the space of a few weeks made me feel ashamed to be Australian. I am sure attitudes would change if more of us had the opportunity to meet personally some of the individuals who most seem to regard dismissively only as illegal boat-people. They were all real people who I would be proud to count as friends.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 06:03:51 +0000
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