WORDS Catherine Marshall

Refugees, particularly those arriving by boats, have been a hot-button topic in Australian politics for a number of years. Beyond the political rhetoric about stopping the boats, securing our borders and stopping people smugglers lie real human beings in terrible situations, making a desperate attempt to find a safe and secure place to live.

Various governments have offered a ‘solutions’ to the refugee issue. In this special feature, Catherine Marshall speaks to those working with refugees in Australia and asks if there is a ‘compassionate solution’ to be found.

Mercy Sister Joan Kelleher remembers a young Afghani man asking her one night, through tears of pain, why he was being detained at the Christmas Island detention centre.

‘Why is Australia locking me up when the only crime I have committed is to ask for protection?’ he asked. ‘I have never known peace, and my family are living in constant danger. I left Afghanistan to find a safe place for my family and here I am locked up in this prison.’

For Sister Kelleher, who was dispatched to Christmas Island by the Jesuit Refugee Service to accompany the asylum seekers who live there, it was a difficult question to answer. Statistics released by the Department of Immigration earlier this year show the average time asylum seekers will spend in detention in Australia has grown to more than six months. Some refugees will spend much longer than that in detention, with no knowing when their ordeal will end.

In Australia, where refugee policy is an increasingly contentious political issue, Catholic organisations are combining the practical responsibility of caring for refugees and asylum seekers with the mammoth task of influencing a refugee program that is in a constant state of flux and review.

Currently, people who apply for refugee status after arriving in Australia are processed under an on-shore protection program which is designed to meet Australia’s obligations as a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention. This convention recognises and provides protection to people fleeing persecution. Most of the people processed on-shore enter Australia as visitors or students.

Refugees residing outside of Australia – in refugee camps, for example – are processed under the off-shore resettlement program. Australia isn’t obliged to offer this resettlement option, but does so voluntarily in the hope of providing durable solutions for refugees who can neither remain where they are nor return home. The Refugee and Humanitarian Program allows for the acceptance of 13,750 refugees each year.

On Christmas Island, where some of these applicants are living, Sr Kelleher is moving in and out of the high security detention centre in North West Point. The experience has had a profound physical affect on her. Her entire body tenses up as she swipes in through six heavy, metal doors in order to get into the compounds where the asylum seekers are accommodated.

‘During my first week I found myself reacting strongly to the six-metre high double fence, which surrounds the centre. The outer fence is electric, though it had not been activated at that time. The harshness of the steel fences, together with the grey concrete buildings in every compound, are indeed a prison-like setting’, she says. ‘Every time I pass through those doors I get a flashback of that experience.’

The asylum seekers Sr Kelleher has come to visit are being processed ‘off-shore’ as part of the controversial Pacific Solution under which the territory has been excised from the Australian migration zone. These are people who have tried to reach Australia by boat – in many instances rickety, unsafe vessels into which these desperate people place all their hopes.

‘My wife and I came to Australia by boat. It was a harrowing experience that lasted 28 days’, says a Sri Lankan asylum seeker who was detained on Christmas Island. ‘Several times we didn’t think we would make it, especially when the weather turned wild. The only thing that we could do was to pray that God would protect us and care for us. Our prayers were answered.’

But so many refugees find their hopes dashed: the first hurdle is leaving their homes, a decision they make because they risk persecution or have suffered due to their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion or due to environmental disasters or displacement. Next, they must either head for a refugee camp – where they might languish for years – or find their own way, via plane or boat, to a country who is a signatory to the UN Convention. It is often a treacherous journey, but many refugees find compassion along the way.

Supporting refugees outside Australia

‘The heart of our work is always the human person, a person like you or me seeking the safety of a home, a job, a place to bring up their children’, says Fr David Holdcroft SJ, an Australian priest who serves as the Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Southern Africa. ‘As one refugee recently told me, “JRS is our family: they are there when we have none”.’

Fr Holdcroft, who is based in Johannesburg, oversees a program which encompasses five countries affected by displacement: Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. A handful of the people to whom JRS reaches out here will eventually be granted settlement in Australia. When Fr Holdcroft made his final vows in Sydney recently, he was thrilled to see in the congregation a refugee couple from the DRC whom he had first met in a refugee camp in Malawi. The couple now calls Brisbane home.

But the vast majority of refugees will have to bide their time in camps or in urban communities, living in limbo until they are ultimately repatriated or granted residence in a country that is only marginally less hospitable than their own. It’s these people for whom organisations like JRS are especially important.

‘Camps can be pretty horrible environments. They exist to provide safety for people who have had to flee for their lives’, says Fr Holdcroft. ‘The same applies for refugees who have fled to an urban centre in another country. They are there to find a community in which they can live and to which they can contribute. The challenge for groups like JRS is to help create what we now call this “protection space” in the middle of a busy city, where there are no food handouts, no special accommodation arrangements, and where refugees have to try, like everyone else, to compete for work and educational opportunities, in an environment that often exudes xenophobia and racism.’

Supporting refugees in Australia

For the relatively small numbers of refugees who eventually make it to the Australian mainland the battle is far from over. Until 2008, all asylum seekers were subject to mandatory detention, in centres located largely in remote, desolate parts of Australia. While then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd put an official stop to mandatory detention in 2008, the government continued to place asylum seekers who arrived on boats in mandatory – and what has proved in effect to be indefinite – detention.

Catholic agencies are an important source of comfort in the lives of these people: both staff members and volunteers visit refugees in detention and lobby for fairer treatment on their behalf. Asylum seekers who live in the community – and recognised refugees battling to restart their lives in Australia – also receive practical and emotional assistance: shelter, English classes, preparation for job interviews, and the friendship and accompaniment that faith inspires.

The work is paying dividends. JRS Australia and Marist Youth Care have been instrumental in trialling a new program in which many unaccompanied minors have been released from detention and placed in community detention. Working under the direction of the Red Cross, the two agencies are finding out what it is like to care for traumatised people in an environment that is far more humane than the one to which they had previously been exposed.

‘They may have come from a barbed wire detention facility – in a sense a prison – into what is almost a family unit. It is wonderful to see the change that they go through’, says Samuel Fuller, a case worker with JRS.

Knowing all too well that these minors face repatriation if their asylum claims are rejected, JRS and Marist Youth Care work actively to prepare them for whatever lies ahead. ‘A big part of our job is to give people life skills they can take with them anywhere in the world’, says Louise Stack, Project Coordinator at JRS. ‘If they end up having to return to their country, hopefully their life will be better because of the experience they’ve had here.’

The Catholic Church continues to walk the tightrope between its own responsibilities towards displaced people and Australia’s changing refugee policy. The Australian Catholic Bishops have denounced the government’s proposed ‘Malaysia Deal’, under which boat people would be sent to Malaysia, and a set number of recognised refugees currently living in Malaysia would be resettled in Australia. It has also called for a complete halt to off-shore processing.

‘Australia has a great community lead resettlement program’, says Fr Maurizio Pettenà CS, director of the Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office. ‘Community based detention reaffirms the human dignity of the person seeking asylum and is in the best interests of the common good of all humanity.’

Sr Kelleher’s experience back on Christmas Island reinforces this sentiment: she has been taking asylum seekers out into the community as part of her pastoral work, people who are so stressed by the experience of detention that psychologists have referred them for this simple yet effective form of ‘treatment’.

‘I have been taking people for a swim down near the jetty where the water is relatively calm. I have borrowed some snorkels and flippers and the exposure of viewing the underwater life is so therapeutic for asylum seekers’, she says.

‘After a few hours in the water we have a BBQ or cook lunch at the church kitchen which is nearby. Eventually when they return to detention they are more relaxed and usually want to know when the next outing is! During the last year I have taken over 250 out for the day. As one psychologist said, “this is more therapeutic than a month of counselling”.’

For more on Jesuit Refugee Service’s work with refugees in Australia and around the world, go to www.jrs.org.au .

Some key terms

Asylum seekers
Individuals who formally request permission to live in another State because they (and often their families) have a well founded fear of persecution in their country of origin. The rights of asylum seekers in Australia are more restricted than the rights of refugees in relation to movement (where they can travel to), employment, health care and social security. People move from asylum seeker status to refugee status once the country they have applied for asylum in accepts their claim.

Illegal immigrant
An illegal immigrant is someone who has moved from one state to another without any legal entitlement, such as a visa or a claim for asylum. Asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants. They are applying for asylum, which means they are complying with Australian law.

Immigration Detention Centres
The majority of people housed or detained in Immigration Detention Centres in Australia are those who have breached their visa conditions, often by overstaying their visa, and those who have been apprehended without the correct type of visa at an international airport in Australia.

Off-shore/On-shore
These terms refer to those people who have been pre-approved by a government and given assistance (offshore) before going to a new state, and those who are apply for refugee protection once in a new state (onshore).

What would a more compassionate solution to refugees involve?

1) Advocacy and development work in countries where refugees have fled from, to provide more people with the option of returning home safely.

2) Support for countries hosting large numbers of refugees to help rebuild their lives in peace.

3) Developed countries such as Australia taking more responsibility for hosting refugees, removing some of the burden from Third World countries.

4) Refugee detention being used only to determine identity, and processing of refugees in detention to be done in a more timely, transparent manner.

5) A change in public attitudes, seeing refugees as people with gifts to be embraced, rather than a burden on our resources.

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