Open letter to Kevin Andrews MP, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship
Posted by Campbell on | April 16, 2007
Dear Mr Andrews,
Please do not allow the 21 unprotected Afghan asylum seekers on Lombok to be forced back to a war zone.
It would be inhumane to force the return of Hazara Afghan asylum seekers at a time when the United States of America and Australia are planning to send more troops to Afghanistan to curb the violence of the increasing Taliban insurgence. The Taliban is notorious for persecuting the Hazara minority.
The 2006 Edmund Rice Report established that a number of asylum seekers who had been coerced into returning to Afghanistan had been killed or had to flee the country again after being tortured and otherwise mistreated. One Hazara Afghan deported after 16 months in Australian detention, despite his pleas that he and his family would be killed, lost his two children, aged six and nine. A grenade was dropped on their house four months after they returned to Afghanistan.
The families and single people presently threatened put their lives in the hands of people smugglers to escape the torture and killings of the Taliban. They arrived in Ashmore Reef in 2001 but were forced back to Indonesia by the Australian navy then taken to Lombok.
They have lived there for over five years without the basic human rights of work, travel, family reunion or study. For unstated reasons, these 21 people were not granted refugee status and are now illegal immigrants in Indonesia; a country which has not signed the Refugee Convention. They are now vulnerable to arrest and have been threatened with quarantine, where families, including babies, have reported being locked up in a single room without a mattress, on starvation rations, for an indefinite period of time.
I ask that the 21 women, men and children, who have suffered uncertainty and deprivation on Lombok for over five years, be allowed to share their culture and work skills with the Australian society as they are fairly assessed for refugee status and become valuable, contributing members of our community.
Yours sincerely,
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