I’m reading Jaivet Elom’s book Escape from Manus with great interest as well as a kind of horror and shame, as a ‘naturalised’ Australian who knew about the treatment of asylum seekers or ‘boat people’ as they were often called, and their treatment at the hands of various Australian governments, beginning with that of Johnny Howard, and his more or less triumphant, ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. I compare this to a wounded or crippled individual who lies collapsed on my front lawn, and me going out and shushing her away, with ‘I will decide who enters my property and the state of health in which they do so.’
Nobody wants to be a refugee, obviously, but Palestinians, Kurds, Congolese, Hazaras, Uyghurs and Rohingyas, to name a few, often find themselves without other options. Jaivet Elom is a Rohingya, a Moslem ethnic group that has now moved, or been moved, more or less holus-bolus from north-western Burma to Bangladesh after decades of being treated like absolute shit by the predominantly Buddhist Burmese people and government, for reasons unknown to me. I first learned about their plight some years ago on reading Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma (the author rejected the name ‘Myanmar’, because of its association with the brutal military takeover of that multi-ethnic state), and Elom’s account only reinforces my sense of shock and outrage at their treatment.
So now I’ve read the whole of Elom’s unputdownable book, my book of the year so far, and I can hardly imagine any work that will inspire me more. It tells me that with enough intelligence, perseverance, support and luck, an occasional individual can survive and escape even the worst conditions a hostile state can impose on them. If only I could keep Johnny Howard, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, Scott ‘Skummo’ Morrison, Peter Dutton and other gate-keepers and their minions under lock and key until they have read, aloud, every word of this book.
So has Australia improved or softened its policies towards refugees in any way over the past few years? Have its decision-makers felt any embarrassment or shame about Elom’s revelations? Of course there are those who argue that the harsh policies of successive Australian governments have been effective in stopping the boats. Yes, this is true, treating people like lumps of shit that need to be flushed down the toilet will tend to make other people who hear about it want to avoid you. It’s hardly a great insight. But at least Elom’s book shows that he and many of his fellow Manus and Christmas Island prisoners have been decent people who deserved far better than the contemptuous treatment they received from my fellow Australians.
Anyway, the Australian government continues its pretentiously-titled ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ program, though the boat arrivals, or attempted arrivals, seem to have dropped to around the level of zero, but was such a draconian and essentially inhumane approach necessary? Yes, it seems to have been popular with Australians – I looked at a program discussing Ealom’s book from four years ago, and one brief comment pointed out that the policy of successive governments had been effective in stopping the boats. It garnered many more likes than posts about the cruelty and callousness of it all. But it surely doesn’t take much thought to realise that if every country treated escapees from genocide or ethnic cleansing this way, then…. what? How could they justify their humanity?
So with the continuation of this program (there have, according to AI, been successful ‘interventions’ this year, with ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ being sent to ‘regional processing centres’ in Nauru and elsewhere, and the Indonesian government has often voiced its displeasure. New Zealand has accepted hundreds of these refugees, and hundreds more are in Australia as ‘transitory persons’ on temporary arrangements – a kind of grudging acceptance, it seems).
It would be great if we could have some binding international laws to protect people escaping from nightmare scenarios from being subjected to further nightmare scenarios in another country, but, looking at the current international scene, we’re about as far from that kind of maturity as we’ve ever been.
References
Jaivet Ealom, Escape from Manus: the untold true story, 2021
Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019