Archive for the ‘asylum’ Category
Iran, football, refugees, war…
in the spotlight, but not as they hoped…
There’s an argument going round that we (in Australia) are now at war with Iran because we’re allied to the US. Not that the people pointing this out are happy about it – it’s more like ‘an inconvenient truth’. And AI (never lies) agrees, sort of:
As of March 2026, Australia is peripherally involved in the US-Iran conflict through intelligence sharing, AUKUS personnel, and regional base support, though it has not engaged in direct offensive action. Australian personnel were aboard a US submarine that sank an Iranian frigate, and a base in the UAE hosting Australians was targeted.
Over 80 Iranian crew members were killed in this submarine attack. The whole issue was discussed in an interview with three Australian journalists on the Guardian Australia website, together with the situation of the Iranian women’s soccer team, and I’ve been neglecting local issues for a while, so it’s time to catch up.
It’s an important issue for me not only as an Australian citizen, but as a feminist. Iran’s theocratically patriarchal government has been oppressing and indeed murdering women for some years, largely because many Iranian women, unlike the women in the UAE or Saudi Arabia or Oman, are well educated and outspoken – an obvious thorn in the regime’s side, to put it mildly. But the regime stands firm, in spite of the recent killing of its ‘supreme leader’ by the US. Needless to say, this attack and the USA’s, or Trump’s, declaration of war, has nothing to do with the oppression of women, and everything to do with oil and Trump’s hope of boosting his ratings. The people of Iran, male or female, don’t get to vote for him, so they’re surplus to requirements.
Australia’s alliance with the USA is of course long-standing, but is now problematic due to Trump’s increasingly fascist behaviour. It’s a problem we share with other western democracies of course, but lately our enthusiasm, if we can call it that, for helping to build submarines and other supposedly defensive materiel for the ‘alliance’ has placed us in a dilemma. I would hate to think about what ye olde Howard government would do in this situation, and I don’t envy Albanese’s current predicament.
So what about their soccer team? They were in Australia for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup (Australia to play Japan in the final tomorrow – I’ll be watching!), and were knocked out early in the tournament. According to DW news, seven members of the team requested humanitarian visas – they’d been described as traitors by members of the Iranian state media, because they hadn’t participated in singing the national anthem before their opening game.
Iran is rather a special case in a region of extreme suppression of female rights and freedoms, due to its history of equality and achievement before the disastrous takeover by the Ayatollahs in 1979, so it’s not surprising that many of these high-achieving women weren’t keen to sing of a regime that doubtless doesn’t respect such achievement. The players are forced to wear ridiculous head coverings as a sign of their ‘modesty’ – or their inferiority and lack of freedom as women.
The problem for the more rebellious seven players, however, is that they have families back home who would likely be targeted if the women didn’t return – and this has apparently already happened, causing a majority of them to change their minds (the humanitarian visas had been granted by the Australian government). Defiant sports personalities have been executed by the Iranian regime in recent times, and in early January the regime massacred thousands of anti-government protesters, so it’s hard to imagine the quandary of these Iranian players, who may be subject to reprisals even if they choose to return.
All of which may lead to many people wishing to force regime change in Iran on humanitarian grounds, but this is easier said than done, and obviously Trump’s declaration of war has nothing to do with humanitarianism. It’s a macho declaration of war against a macho regime – nothing new to see here.
One of the issues raised in the Guardian Australia video was that of asylum seekers generally and how the Australian government has treated them over the years. If you arrive by air as a member of an elite sports outfit, you’ll be treated very differently compared to those who arrive in a leaky boat after a perilous journey among the islands of Indonesia. The story of the Manus ‘regional processing centre’, first set up in 2001 by the Howard government on an island north of New Guinea, makes for depressing, and sometimes horrific, reading, but I will return to that issue in another post. Suffice to say for now that the more desperate and needy the refugees that have sought safety in Australia, the less willing our governments have been to welcome and support them. In a way that’s understandable – in our cities, we tend to steer clear of the most downtrodden-looking homeless – but to make life even more difficult for them, to treat them as criminals, seems a bit much.
The Iranian footballers, obviously under pressure and worried about their families back home, sang their national anthem in their remaining matches, while Iranian commentators claimed they were being manipulated by their Australian hosts. All a bit of a steaming mess, and no doubt a minor footnote to the more dangerous mess facing those Iranians opposing both their own government and their foreign adversaries.
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