Dear asylum seekers…
Read the letter given to asylum seekers aboard the Oceanic Viking, guaranteeing them resettlement if they get off the boat and are found to be genuine refugees.
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What was Rudd saying about not doing any deals with the asylum seekers? I think Rudd needs to buy some new hats, he has spoken a hole through is last set.
I’m going to hold my breath until Kevin Rudd gives me a million dollars.
Hopefully they translated it before giving it to them..
Don’t be such pathetic snivellers. Let’s look instead at why they don’t actually trust the words of Australian embassy officials.
1. It was under Ruddock that the rounding up of refugee claimants was started with the promise that if they go to the UNHCR and register they could come to Australia. The Afghans and Iraqis we sent back in 2001 have only just been accepted after 8 years of illegal incarceration in a jail supported and funded by Australia by paying off a mercenary organisation who provide nothing but steal our funds.
2. It would appear this group fell for the yarn years ago and have lost all their money, their legal rights, their right to work, the rights of their kids to go to school ever, more and more years of waiting – remember Australia is paying to keep them illegally in Indonesia and yet last year we only accepted 35 from our illegal jails.
3. As 37 of them are already refugees we have no right in the world to detain them, tell them where to go, who they can live with or anything else and we certainly have no right to lock them up in a prison where Afghan babies are behind razor wire and bars and are beaten to a pulp by guards paid for by us.
4. What went wrong here is actually not Rudd’s fault in the first instance – the rescue was fine. It was the assumption that the people had sailed direct from Sri Lanka and had not been assessed that was wrong and should have been corrected by the crew on the Viking. Someone lied, that’s what went wrong. I applaud the government for rescuing refugees instead of letting them drown.
5. Rudd should have simply had the ambassador on the docks with papers for the already accepted refugees to apply to come here, or with bridging visas to enter.
6. With our manipulations we have made the refugees stateless, unable to apply to any other country and in limbo in a nation that does not accept or recognise refugees.
7. In short it was always Australia in the wrong here, not the refugees.
Shepherdmarilyn, almost all the Afghan asylum seekers ended up in Australia or New Zealand. You have an incredible capacity to distort the situation.
We should ideally not be accepting any asylum seekers who come via boat. Those granted asylum on Christmas Island should be resettled in other countries in exchange for those accepted as refugees in other countries. If they choose to circumvent the normal refugee channels then they should have NO say in where they are resettled.
The “37 …already accepted as refugees” have no right to remain on the Oceanic Viking. Their behaviour is disgraceful. The have forfeited the right to settlement in Australia.
If Indonesia will not allow them to be forcibly removed, we should negotiate with Sri Lanka to allow their safe repatriation to that country and guarantees of safe treatment there. They should then be offered the choice: get off in Indonesia or be returned to Sri Lanka.
Australia carries far less culpability on this issue than Sri Lanka, which made them refugees; Indonesia, which refused to honour its rescue at sea obligations, so endangering future rescues; and the refugees themselves, who have sought to blackmail our government and also compromised future sea rescues.
Few ship captains will bother diverting for sea rescues in the Indonesian rescue zone.