Little Brindha rejected by Immigration Department

Paige Taylor, from the Australian, 3 January 2011

BRINDHA, the little girl who made an impassioned plea to be accepted as a refugee, has been rejected by the Immigration Department. BRINDHA made her televised plea to be accepted as a refugee from the impounded asylum-seeker boat at Merak in Indonesia in 2009. The rejection comes after a 14-month ordeal that has included nine months in detention in Australia with her parents. 

Brindha and her parents were among the original 254 asylum-seekers onboard the Jaya Lestari cargo boat that set out from Malaysia 14 months ago and was then seized and taken to Merak by the Indonesian navy as a favour to then prime minister Kevin Rudd.

  Pics courtesy of http://www.crikey.com.au/

 

But Brindha, her parents and about 87 others escaped and made it on to a bright blue boat, arriving at Christmas Island last March just ahead of the Rudd government’s lockout on processing claims by Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum-seekers.

The Australian has been told that no Merak escapee to reach Christmas Island on that boat has been granted a visa. Many are still waiting for decisions from the Immigration Department. Three Merak escapee families have now received news from the department that they are not considered refugees and therefore will not be getting visas.

Brindha’s family received their bad news shortly before Christmas. Like all asylum-seekers who get rejected by the Immigration Department, they are entitled to an independent review of the decision. Brindha turned 10 in detention last year. She spent much of the year living in the Asti Motel in Darwin with other asylum-seeker families. There, she shared a room with her father, an engineer, and her mother, a teacher. They are Tamils, originally from Jaffna in the north of Sri Lanka, but they had been living in Colombo before seeking asylum in Australia.

Sara Nathan of the Australian Tamil Congress said it was stressful for families to be forced to wait for long periods for a decision about their future. Ms Nathan said she had observed how, in immigration detention facilities, the family structure broke down as children watched their parents taking orders from guards. “The father cannot work and provide for the family, and the mother cannot do the things she normally does for her children like cook and take them places,” she said.

Ms Nathan said she believed the government was making an example of the Merak people. “I believe that the Australian government is trying to teach people a lesson and say to people, ‘Don’t come to Australia because it’s not going to be easy’,” she said.

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Meet Alex and Brindha: a media savvy bunch of boat people

Sophie Black,  Courtesy of www.crickey.com.au, 18 October 2010

Andrew Bolt calls this latest boat docked off Merak in Indonesia ”Rudd’s Tampa” — http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/its-rudds-new-tampa/story-e6frfhqf-1225787339717

Part of the reason why it’s not is because we’ve seldom seen images like this of boat people. We’re never up this close. And we haven’t heard soundbites from children before, or very articulate teachers like Alex. Back in the Howard years, asylum seekers were kept well away from the camera. And children were definitely not seen or heard.

As David Manne, principal solicitor for the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre, told Crikey: “What we’ve seen and heard provides extremely compelling evidence of what these people are going through.

In the past, in the last decade, the Howard government went to extraordinary lengths to keep asylum seekers out of sight, out of mind, and out of rights. There were very concerted strategies to do, with government instructions or directions to Australian authorities, including the military, to ensure that asylum seekers’ identities and voices were obscured. This was one of the key, potent propaganda tools to perpetrate this policy, which at its heart sought to deface and and then dehumanise these vulnerable people so that their faces coudn’t be seen and their stories couldn’t be heard.”

The images of today’s asylum seekers are not as tightly controlled, but being that they’re far away on Christmas Island, the Australian public never really get the chance to get up close and personal.

“At the heart of remote detention policy in this country is keeping asylum seekers out of sight and out of mind,” says Manne. “Because what’s also clear is, and our history tells us this, once the public is able to hear the stories and see the faces of these people, it touches people’s hearts and minds.”

Manne cites the example of rural communities and their role in advocating for refugee rights: “One of the really important dynamics during the last decade of degeneration in the response to refugees was that one of the most important voices that opposed this was in rural and regional Australia. Many of those people who arrived by boat from 1999 to 2001 from Afghanistan and Iraq ended up living in rural and regional communities and became neighbours, became co-workers, co-parents with kids at school, and friends … These people became part of the Australian community and some of those communities became some of the most important voices in calling for a more humane and compassionate approach to refugees.”

A media scrum has descended on the boat in the dock at Merak, and the asylum seekers are speaking in soundbites. Not only that, these people have names. And cute children. They have clipped accents, they sound educated, they sound smart, they sound desperate, they sound like us.

It’s a little harder to work the “humane but hard-line approach to border security” angle, to try to outdo the Opposition leader in the hard-arse stakes in fact, when there are images of a small crying child pleading for help immediately preceding your soundbite.

  This is Brindha: “We are your children. Please think of us. Please. Please take us to your country. It’s OK if it’s not to Australia. It is better if any other country takes us.”

Somehow the tight-lipped demeanour doesn’t go down so well when Alex, the English teacher, has just politely congratulated you on your compassion in the past, and politely asks you to continue to extend that compassion.

Alex has left behind his pregnant wife in Jaffna. He said this to the media scrum: “If you had no place, if you had no country of your own, what would you do? And how long would you stay in a boat before you were able to enter a country that will give you asylum?” “We are not animals. We are not dogs. We are not stray dogs. We are people without a country to live in.”

At this stage we don’t know the details of these people’s asylum claims, but nonetheless, if this continues, and these people are still docked when our Prime Minister makes it to Indonesia on Monday, how is Rudd going to play this?

“On current figures, current estimates, a refugee in Indonesia will on average take nine years to be resettled to a safe country,” says Manne. “Picture this: on average a nine-year wait, living at best in substandard conditions in a camp, periodically subject to imprisonment, and constantly at risk of being deported back to the scene of persecution. Living in a country that has not signed the refugee convention, can’t and won’t provide sanctuary to refugees and has a poor human rights record.”

Says Manne: “This is a policy which has shifted from the Pacific Solution to the South-East Asian solution where Australia plays a central role in encouraging other countries like Indonesia to stop people coming here to seek safety … it seeks to get those countries to intercept people and then warehouse them in those countries and then Australia bankrolls the warehousing operations and exerts significant control over those warehousing operations.”

Alex was asked whether his group’s refusal to take their place in the refugee camps of Indonesia was unfair to the other asylum seekers who’d been waiting years. He said: “I know it’s unfair. It’s very unfair. But the whole situation is so unfair, having no country of your own.”

Hard to argue with that. But now that Alex and Brindha are in our sights, will the public learn to care?

At this stage we don’t know the details of these people’s asylum claims, but nonetheless, if this continues, and these people are still docked when our Prime Minister makes it to Indonesia on Monday, how is Rudd going to play this?

“On current figures, current estimates, a refugee in Indonesia will on average take nine years to be resettled to a safe country,” says Manne. “Picture this: on average a nine-year wait, living at best in substandard conditions in a camp, periodically subject to imprisonment, and constantly at risk of being deported back to the scene of persecution. Living in a country that has not signed the refugee convention, can’t and won’t provide sanctuary to refugees and has a poor human rights record.”

Says Manne: “This is a policy which has shifted from the Pacific Solution to the South-East Asian solution where Australia plays a central role in encouraging other countries like Indonesia to stop people coming here to seek safety … it seeks to get those countries to intercept people and then warehouse them in those countries and then Australia bankrolls the warehousing operations and exerts significant control over those warehousing operations.”

Alex was asked whether his group’s refusal to take their place in the refugee camps of Indonesia was unfair to the other asylum seekers who’d been waiting years. He said: “I know it’s unfair. It’s very unfair. But the whole situation is so unfair, having no country of your own.”

Hard to argue with that. But now that Alex and Brindha are in our sights, will the public learn to care?