(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

Lots of refugee news lately, of which more shortly, but first I wanted to quote you a para from the latest Refugee Council of Australia newsletter:

Statistics fail to justify media obsession with boat arrivals

It was ironic that, while representatives of UNHCR, governments and NGOs were at the UNHCR ExCom meeting discussing the forced displacement of millions of people, the Australian media were giving great prominence to the recent arrival in Australian waters of two boatloads carrying 31 asylum seekers. By any measure, the number of people of arriving in Australia by boat to seek asylum is tiny. UNHCR reports that, at the end of 2007, there were 739,986 asylum seekers around the world with claims still pending. Australia had just 1516 people in this category (0.2% of the global total). During 2007, 468,597 asylum seekers were granted refugee status. Of these people, 1702 (or 0.4%) were granted protection in Australia. Of the relatively small numbers of people who seek asylum in Australia, the great majority arrive by air, generally with a valid short-term visa of some description, and have their protection visa application assessed with no public fanfare. Asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat currently make up fewer than 0.01% of the world's asylum seekers.

Comments

[jebni.livejournal.com]

BTW, Chilout is a whole different thorny issue in itself -- did specifically campaigning for the release of children create a false division between "innocent kids" and adults (for whom "innocent before proven guilty" somehow didn't fully apply)?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

A world of issues there. I have no idea whether the Chilout folks were more concerned about the kids than the adults, and if so, whether that was because the kids were the most vulnerable victims, because they were the least deserving victims, or because they'd have the most appeal to a refugee-hating public - or all three.

[jebni.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it's a mixture of motivations and complicities. Kids often play such a bizarre, fetishistic role in political life -- e.g. as pawns in the whole Northern Territory intervention debacle. But regardless of such pitfalls, I do think the vulnerability of children should be an ethical beacon that can shock people into awareness and action; here's something I put together from the testimony of a little boy who escaped from Woomera and hid in our camp, back in 2002: http://eviltwin.com.au/woomera_boy.html -- it's possibly the most heartbreaking thing I've ever heard.