My Say - South Edition
Australia's Dilemma
Australia's effort to discourage, divert, delay and dilute the sea-borne flow its way of illegal immigrants from Asia by dumping some in the Pacific Islands, is not an edifying spectacle.
By early November, it had succeeded in unloading about 800 at Nauru, and about 300 at Manus. Unlike Nauru, Manus is a large, verdant, luxuriant, but also an isolated island north of the Papua New Guinea mainland.
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Kiribati was offering to take 500 at the very isolated and stark atoll of Kanton.
The Fiji cabinet was in a quandary over whether to accept a thousand, or even more, with the former leper hospital island of Makogai being mentioned as a possible location.
Nauru and Papua New Guinea were already having trouble with their guests, people Australia swear that within a year will either have been admitted by it as acceptable immigrants or sent back home - mainly to Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.
But as human rights protection vigilantes were stressing, United Nations law on refugees, which what the boat people claim to be, and which Australia disputes, declares that refugees must not be returned to places at the risk of persecution by the regimes they claim to be escaping from. If they are refugees, what will happen to those rejected as being unfit for a legal lifestyle in Australia?
Australia's motives in deflecting the real difficulties it has about people it doesn't want to have called refugees are understandable, but also partly suspect.
The current prime minister, John Howard, previously exhibiting little interest in the micro-nations floating east of Sydney, was felt by Australian commentators to be cynically using the refugee issue to get him re-elected in November. Keeping Afghans and others out was of great political appeal to the majority of the electorate being courted by him.
The rival Australian Labour Party was attacking Howard's stand and professing sympathy for the would-be arrivals. What would the Australian Labour Party policy have been had it been in power and, like Howard, unsure of surviving the election?
If Howard remains prime minister, will his policy towards the refugees become more liberal? Wait and see.
Whatever happens, it is quite likely that those Pacific Islands accepting what they have been promised as "temporary" presence, will eventually regret their decision.
Nauru plainly opened its door for the money. Papua New Guinea did so probably out of a sense of obligation to Australia, a vital source of aid for it. Kiribati's motive is probably a mix of hopes for economic and political gain, including a catalyst for the development of the lightly inhabited, but very remote Kanton Atoll.
In Fiji, commentators give little credence to the government's denial that any decision to assist would be spurred by Australia's lifting in October of aid and other sanctions imposed after the May 2000 coup, and by other economic considerations like garment quotas.
New Zealand and the European Union are refusing to lift sanctions before a court decision next February about an opposition constitutional challenge to the legality of the new government's cabinet.
The Howard government's move in using the Pacific Islands as an escape hatch has been roundly condemned jointly by the Pacific Conference of Churches and numerous other concerned organisations.
The Australians, proclaim the churches are flouting moral and legal principles and possibly endowing the islands with long-term difficulties they are ill-equipped to deal with.
Yet, Pacific Islands critics of the arrival of refugees in Nauru and Manus and soon who knows where else, themselves exhibit more than a trace of hypocrisy in slating Australia.
The Australians insist that the unwelcome stream of people heading their way are economic refugees, not political ones. They are people intent on escaping the destitution of their homelands and are really ruthless queue-jumpers.
What then are the tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders settled in Australia, New Zealand and the United States?
Another economic refugee is quietly becoming established in the Pacific Islands. Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Nauru have in recent years acquired substantial numbers of settlers from mainland China. Does anybody in Fiji really know how many are illegally in the country? Some police officers say there are thousands more than officially admitted. Tonga has a problem with them. Also Papua New Guinea and perhaps now Vanuatu. As for Australia's dilemma, given the present way of the world it is one that will not soon fade away.
