Good, the bad and the ugly

Boat people, asylum seekers, refugees

| by Shanie

"Refugees should receive at least the same rights and basic help as any other foreigner who is a legal resident, including freedom of thought, of movement and freedom from torture and degrading treatment." - UNHCR Basic Facts

"Physical Security, No Refoulement (forcible return of refugees to their own country), Basic Rights and Durable Solutions." - Basic Principles of Refugee Protection

(September 08, 2012,Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In recent weeks, the ‘boat people’ from Sri Lanka have been making the newspaper headlines. Hundreds of them have been undertaking the perilous journey over 3,000 miles of treacherous seas in usually rickety unseaworthy old boats. Their ultimate destination is believed to be Australia but sometimes the middlemen who organise these journeys do not always take the people directly to their ultimate destination but via a transit point. The people who wish to go in these boats, sometimes whole families with young children, have had to pay enormous sums of money to the middleman. Sometimes, a relative abroad puts up the money needed, but in most cases, families have had to sell all their assets and utilise all their savings to pay for this dangerous journey. If something goes wrong and they find themselves back home, they are left with nothing to re-build their lives.

Why do these people take such enormous risks, risk of several weeks or months at sea in open boats with little food, the risk of detection and deportation and the risk of losing their lives during the hazardous journey, to get away from their home country and to an unknown future in an unknown country? Some years ago, Channa Wickremasekera, a Sri Lankan writer based in Australia, wrote a powerful novella involving the boat people. It is a slim volume describing one journey in a small boat that carried 50 men, women, a child and her cat. The boat is ‘captained’ by a man who is referred to as ‘Red Cap’ – he was always wearing one. But the story has no political or ethnic overtones. Wickremasekera does not even attempt to answer the question why the people are prepared to take such huge risks to undertake such a perilous journey. But the feeling that he evokes in the reader is one of sympathy for the boat people. The novella is powerful because he is able to convey ordinary human emotions in a people who have found themselves in a desperate situation. They have been victimised and left with little alternative other than to flee. But the victim of injustice can also become the perpetrator of injustice when self-preservation and self-interest demands it. In the face of injustice, the majority choose to remain silent. The one dissenter who speaks up for the marginalised is ridiculed and cast out along with the marginalised. The personalities in the novella will haunt any sensitive reader long after he has finished reading it

The Vietnamese Boat People

The ‘boat people’ came into prominence in the nineteen seventies at the close of the war in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of people from Vietnam (and some from neighbouring Cambodia and Laos) left in boats. After the US Army left Saigon in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese forces overran the South and unified the country. The new government sent tens of thousands Vietnamese whom they alleged had collaborated with the old South Vietnamese government to ‘re-education camps’. Sadly, there was a lot of abuse in these camps and thousands perished inside and outside the camps. It is to escape from all this that people began to leave in their thousands in boats, big and small. There was overcrowding and insufficient food and water; the boats were not oceanworthy and the boat people were often raided by pirates mainly from Thailand. It was a huge humanitarian crisis and the United Nation High Commission for Refugees stepped in, negotiated with the Vietnamese government and several western countries to arrange an orderly migration from Vietnam. The USA, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, UK and several other countries agreed for over a million Vietnamese refugees to be granted permanent residence in their countries. The UNHCR received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

The Sri Lankan boat people

The boat people are basically seeking asylum in a third country. Sri Lankans have been seeking asylum in several western countries for many years. They have been reaching these countries by many means. Long journeys in overcrowded boats seem to have begun only recently. The arrival of 490 boat people in the Canadian port city of Vancouver two years ago attracted a lot of publicity and since then, there has been a steady stream of boat people. In recent months, of course, hundreds have been undertaking these dangerous journeys almost on a weekly or even at more frequent intervals. As one Australian TV channel reported, boats after boats have been leaving the shores of Sri Lanka bound for Australia or the nearest landing point, be it Christmas Islands or some Indonesian coast.

The boat people want to land in some country where they could seek asylum as refugees. The United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees, to which all member nations subscribe, defines a refugee as ‘ a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it’. Once boat people, there is a process of screening and it is up to the asylum seeker to claim that he meets the criteria set by the UN Convention on Refugees and for the host country to accept those claims.

Do the boat people qualify as refugees?

The unfortunate fact is that many people, even in Sri Lanka, who are critical of the boat people, are unable or more correctly unwilling to examine the reasons for this exodus. Most of the boat people are Tamils from the North and East. The claims that nearly all those displaced owing to the war have been satisfactorily re-settled is simply propaganda and untrue. Most of the families who lived along the coast in the North and East have not been allowed to return to their original place of residence. Either they have been designated as High Security Zones (e. G. Myliddy in the North and Sampoor in the East) or it is claimed that the land is ear-marked for ‘development’. Thus many of the displaced have lost their original means of livelihood. It is reported that many residents in these areas who were not displaced even during the war have now been served with notices to move out of their place of residence because it was needed for the development plans of the government. A woman who now lives elsewhere in Sri Lanka is the joint owner with her siblings of family property with houses in Tellipallai. Apparently, when she went recently to her property, she found that the land had been cleared and a bulldozer had been used to flatten and level the land. Neighbours had told her that the security forces were used for this exercise. Irrespective of the truth or otherwise of what the neighbours said (which seems credible), it fits in with the general belief (articulated by parliamentarian Sumanthiran) that there is widespread land grabbing going on in the North and East and the government is to be held responsible.

In the light of the plight of the displaced persons in the North and East who are being deprived of their land and livelihoods, who are we to condemn these boat people for risking their lives to go elsewhere where they can live in security, earn an honest livelihood and ensure a future for their families. The frequent comment that is heard is that the boat people are economic migrants. One TV producer in Australia had the temerity and the lack of good sense to present a little child and get her to say (no doubt, quite truthfully) that she wanted to stay in Australia for a better education and for a better life.

Why is that most Sri Lankan react with glee when the Sri Lanka Navy intercepts the boat people and turns them back? Has it not got to do with the fact that most or nearly all the boat people are Tamils and come from the economically marginalised in society. We reacted with horror and anger when the LTTE drove people out of their homes and refused to allow them to return and made them refugees in their own country. Is that not what is happening to the many who are being deprived of re-settling in their original places of residence. Is it not a reflection of the polarisation in our country that we apply a different yardstick to a social problem faced by a community other than our own? In this sense, the boat people fit into the UNHCR definition of a refugee.

Some years ago, Rose George wrote a book about the civil war in Sierra Leonne and the involvement of neighbouring Liberia in it. (Charles Taylor, then President of Liberia, has just been convicted of war crimes by a Tribunal in The Hague and sentenced to 50 years in prison.) George’s book is titled ‘A Life Removed – Hunting for Refuge in the modern world’. Refugees, she says, are survivors - of rebels and soldiers and war, of international inaction, of anything the tabloid can hurl at them – and victims.