Boys renew Australian asylum row
Posted on Saturday, July 20 @ 13:30:23 GMT by netmastan |
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Alamdar and Muntazer Baktiyari flew back to Woomera from Melbourne by chartered flight yesterday morning, leaving behind an accelerating international row over Australia's policy of keeping child asylum seekers in mandatory detention.
The boys, aged 14 and 12, missed their father Ali Baktiyari, who flew to Melbourne from Sydney where he is living under a restricted temporary visa to meet the children, who made worldwide headlines with their dramatic bid for asylum at Britain's Victorian Consulate-General.
Baktiyari, facing the possible revocation of his visa and expulsion from Australia, attempted his own bid for refuge with an unsuccessful plea for asylum at the German Consulate after vowing to fight extradition "with my last drop of blood".
Alamdar and Muntazer were delivered to the 17th-floor British Consulate-General in Melbourne's Collins St by a nun from the Catholic Brigidine Sisters, although the order said it had not sheltered the boys since their escape from the Woomera detention centre in outback South Australia.
The boys have been in detention with their mother and three sisters for 18 months since arriving in Australia after a perilous trip from Indonesia in one of the decrepit fishing boats used by people smugglers to ferry asylum seekers across the Indian Ocean.
How they travelled safely and in secret more than 1000km out of the harsh Australian interior to Melbourne's central business district remains unknown, although it is widely believed they were hidden and moved by refugee activists.
The family claims to be from the central Afghan village of Charkh, and to have fled from the Taleban to Pakistan, where Ali Baktiyari found passage to Port Hedland, in northern Western Australia, with people smugglers. He was initially accepted as an Afghani by immigration officials and granted the temporary visa, but the Government now maintains it has evidence that Baktiyari is, in fact, Pakistani and not a refugee.
Baktiyari's wife Roqiah, with her two sons and three daughters, were detained when their boat was intercepted early last year.
Immigration officials have rejected their application for refugee status on the grounds they are Pakistani - still vehemently denied by the family - and Roqiah and her children have lived behind razor wire working through the appeals process.
The boys' account of life in Woomera, taped and sent to the ABC by refugee activists, and the reported suicide attempts by 14-year-old Alamdar have added to the disturbing and graphic evidence unfolding at a Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission inquiry into the mandatory detention of children.
"Two times I kill myself by razor, two times I suicide me ... ," one of the boys says on the tape. "When there was fighting they would push the children on the razor wire.
"The guards they beat, they have a stick and ... when we throw stones they hit us with the stones.
"They give no toys to us. The majority of them they sell to us, and we have to buy it by money. We have to work - one dollar one hour."
The Government has stood by both its policy and its standard of care in the centres, but Labor - while supporting the boys' return to Woomera under the law - has attacked the detention of children.
"I don't believe kids should be kept behind ... razor wire, high security," Opposition Leader Simon Crean said.
Yesterday, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser joined the Democrats in attacking Government policy, and Lyn Breuer, the South Australian MP whose electorate covers Woomera, said the boys' bid for asylum in Britain was a national embarrassment. Brisbane's Lord Mayor, Jim Soorley, said he was ashamed to be an Australian.
Criticism also mounted overseas, with the London newspaper the Independent accusing both the Australian and British Governments of brutality and lack of compassion.
One Australian legal expert suggested that responsibility could be sheeted home to Britain. Sydney University senior law lecturer Mary Crock said Britain may face action under European law, having rejected their claim for asylum.
Dr Crock told ABC TV: "Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and is subject to the European Court of Human Rights.
"Potentially a claim could be made there against the British Government for the way they have treated these children."
But callers to talkback radio in Australia overwhelmingly supported the decision to refuse the boys asylum. And Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said the children had been manipulated by a well-honed refugee advocacy industry.
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