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A narrative meditation on Australia's 2001 'Tampa Affair' about dangerous migrations and uncertain futures; politics and xenophobias; and welcoming strangers into our hearts.

Indian Ocean, August 2001: A 44,000-ton container ship, MV Tampa, is steaming north from Fremantle to Singapore on a regular round-the-world run. Its captain, Arne Rinnan, receives a request from the Australian Rescue Coordination Centre to intercept a stricken vessel off Australia’s north-western coast. [1] He changes course and by that evening more than 400 asylum seekers are huddling on the deck of his ship watching their little wooden ferry sinking to the sea floor.

Journey beginnings ... >>
The politics of fear >>
The Quetta Question: Madam, why do Australians think that Muslims are terrorists? >>
The 'Homelands' Project: nurturing dialogue between the peoples of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Australia >>

Beginnings ...

Most of the people rescued by the Tampa crew that day were ethnic Hazaras from Afghanistan. For them, this story ' begins' months, even years earlier in Hazarajat, the Hazara homeland in central Afghanistan, or in the refugee communities of Balochistan or Pakhtunistan (NWFP) in Pakistan; and in circumstances most of them would now want to forget.

The view across the Durrand Line into Afghanistan, where so many refugee stories 'begin'. As seen from the top of the Khyber Pass, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan. Photo by Merrill Findlay, October 2006.

For me this story ‘begins’ in Budapest as I watch events unfold on BBC World News, CNN and in the international print media. I simply can't believe what I'm seeing and hearing. Can Australian SAS commandos really be storming a foreign freighter to take control of it and forcibly transfer the passengers to an Australian naval vessel for transportation to an impoverished island state in the Pacific Ocean? And in the year 2001?[2]

Remember?

[Read more about Australia's so-called Pacific Solution in A price too high: the cost to Australia's approach to asylum seekers, A Just Australia and Oxfam, 2007. Large pdf file.]

Politics of fear

From Budapest this ‘Tampa Affair ’, as it became known, simply didn’t make sense to me—until CNN and BBC reporters reminded me that it was election time in Australia, a season when politicians traditionally stir up our deepest fears to make us vote for them.[3] The custom was introduced in the earliest days of British colonisation by Anglo-settlers whose first targets were indigenous Australians and Irish Catholics. Later, in the 1850s and '60s these opportunists and xenophobes shifted their attention to Chinese gold miners. Indeed, one of the founders of Melbourne, John Pascoe Fawkner, claimed that the colony of Victoria was in danger of ‘becoming the property of the emperor of China and of the Mongolian and Tartar hordes of Asia’ no less! [4] By the end of the nineteenth century such fear-inducing narratives had morphed into the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 or 'White Australia Policy', the first piece of legislation passed by the Parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia upon Federation.

Exactly one hundred years after the White Australia Policy was enacted, and just two days after the tragedy of 9/11, another Australian politician, Defence Minister Peter Reith, suggested that the little wooden boats that were still bringing Afghani and Iraqi asylum seekers towards our shores were a ‘pipeline for terrorists’.[5] Good on you, mate! John Pascoe Fawkner might have said!

Two young Afghan Hazara refugees who were wrongfully deported back to Afghanistan from Australia's immigration detention centre on Nauru under the watch of then-Minister for Immigration, Phillip Ruddock. Photo by Merrill Findlay, Quetta, November 2006.

From Budapest, where many people proudly claim descent from the ‘Mongolian and Tartar hordes of Asia’, what was happening in my homeland during the 2001 election campaign seemed bewildering, even frightening. The more so because so many of the people then setting out for Australia in little wooden boats were Afghan Hazaras who also claim descent from the 'Mongols' John Pascoe Fawkner and others had already taught Australians to fear.

So was history repeating itself in my homeland after all these years? Was this nation of migrants, refugees and their descendants closing its borders again to those who were fleeing war, violence, persecution, hunger and/or poverty? Were we Australians discriminating against newcomers out of fear, prejudice and ignorance once more?

Children at a drug rehabilitation centre for Afghan women in a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. Afghanistan now produces an estimated 90 percent of the world's opium. Photo by Merrill Findlay, October 2006.

My current book, tentatively called Into Australia’s 'Heartlands': a journey, is an extended meditation on such issues and on the many consequences of the anti-Muslim/anti-refugee narratives that were unleashed and legitimised in Australia and elsewhere in 2001.

This on-going project represents my search for fresh understandings about the many mass migrations we are all part of. It introduces some of the asylum seekers I met at Melbourne's Maribyrnong Detention Centre and their many supporters; it takes me back to Sydney, the site of Australia's first immigration detention centre for 'boat people' established in 1788 as Britain's 'Pacific Solution' to its overcrowded prisons; and allows me to revvive my memories of some of the countries I've visited from which refugees have been fleeing over the past decades, such as Sudan, Eritrea, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and, most recently, the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Pakistan 2006

A young Tajik carpet weaver in a workshop at a refugee camp near Peshawar, North West Frontier Province. Thousands of refugee families depend on the labours of their children to survive in Pakistan. Photo by Merrill Findlay, October 2006.

I visited Pakistan in October/November 2006 and was astonished, delighted, shocked and humbled by what I saw and experienced. I was overwhelmed by people’s hospitality, generosity and kindness to me personally but, as an Australian, I was also disturbed, discomforted and shamed on many occasions ...

In Quetta, for example, I was especially shamed when I was introduced to two young Hazara refugees who told me about being incarcerated on Nauru Island after seeking asylum in Australia. They had no access to lawyers nor even to Hazaragi translators on Nauru, and were informed by Australia's then-Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, that they had no option but to return to Afghanistan. When they finally reached their home villages they discovered that their parents had died or been murdered and that their family land had been stolen. And so they fled a second time across the border into Pakistan.

I also recall a mother I met in Quetta who wept as she showed me her daughter’s wedding photos. This young woman, a beautiful bride, drowned in the Indian Ocean somewhere between Indonesia and Australia. 'If I could just see her grave ...,' her mother said.

THE QUETTA QUESTION: Madam, why do Australians think that Muslims are terrorists?

But perhaps my most unsettling experience occurred at one of the remarkable Shamama schools for Afghan refugees in Quetta when an Hazara student very politely asked me the following question: 'Madam, why do Australians think that Muslims are terrorists?'

Students at a co-educational Shammama School for Afghan refugees in Quetta. Photo by Merrill Findlay, November 2006.

Without knowing it, this young man in his sparkling white school shirt and dark trousers had raised one of the many questions I was trying to answer myself. There was no simple response I could give him, no quick and easy way of unravelling the many threads of this troubling question in a few minutes to a class of very bright teenagers, however. I remember saying something about politicians using religion for their own purposes, and commenting on the diversity of Australian society, that there were some 360,000 Muslim Australians, for example, and that many of us non-Muslims were far too sophisticated and knowledgeable to believe the populist nonsense we were exposed to in the mass media.

I also suggested that Hazaras probably knew more about terrorists and terrorism than most of us because they'd been the victims of so many attacks by Islamist groups, even in Quetta.

My answer was inadequate of course, but I hope that it at least partly satisfied my young interrogator and challenged some of the stereotypes about Australians that he might have been exposed to.

How others see Australians

The student in Quetta was not the only person to express concern about Australian attitudes to Muslims while I was in Pakistan. A prominent Punjabi lawyer stopped me in the Mall in central Lahore one day and asked me about racism in Australia; and a pharmaceutical company representative asked me a similar question in the provincial town of Jhellum.

At Royal Television, a satellite news and infotainment studio in New Garden Town, Lahore, the Director of News, Rai Husnaian Thair, commented that he too had heard that Australia was a very racist country. ‘But I don’t pick that up in your demeanor,’ he added. I smiled and said something about not all of us being racist, although yes, some of us undoubtedly were.

As I was leaving the newsroom the Director of News plucked a red rose from the arrangement on his desk and graciously presented it to me as thanks for visiting his homeland. Not to be outdone, his colleague, the Assignment and Reporting Editor, pinched a yellow rose from the same vase and gave it to me. Like all the liberal Pakistanis I met, these young two journalists were anxious that I portray their homeland as a sophisticated, modern and liberal country, which it is certainly appears to be from their state-of-the-art television station with its global reach into 140 countries.

A young victim of polio with his father at the UNHCR Afghan Refugee Information Centre in Quetta. This young man supports his extended family as a tailor but he now wants to do a computer course to increase his income. Photo by Merrill Findlay, Nov. 2006.

What to do?

The 'Quetta Question' - Madam, why do Australians think that Muslims are terrorists? - continued to haunt me, and I had plenty of time to think about it on the long journey from Quetta back to Lahore on the Jaffer Express. Somewhere in the Bolan Pass, the gorge between Balochistan's high plateau and the Indus Valley, I decided that, as a writer, as a citizen, as a moral agent, I had to do something practical about promoting dialogue and understanding between the peoples of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Australia to help undo some of the damage that was done in 2001. I jotted down a few rough notes on the train about inviting people from different backgrounds to talk and write about what mattered to them, what made them happy and sad, what they loved and loathed about the places they called home, what kinds of futures they wanted to live in and how they might make these better futures real. My preliminary notes from the Jaffer Express read something like this ...

The 'Homelands' Project
to nurture and support dialogue between people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Australia

A joint initiative by Imagine The Future Inc with partner institutions and community organizations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Australia, in the spirit of UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and the UN Alliance of Civilisations.

Draft Objectives

1. To offer people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Australia opportunities to share their stories about their pasts, presents and possible futures with one another and a global audience.
2. To promote dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims.
3. To honour people’s bonds with their homelands, the places they live in now and/or have lived in in the past.
4. To affirm the universal values of peace, love and social harmony, along with the goals of social and ecological sustainability which are implicit in all the world’s major religions.
5. To challenge the stereotypes and propaganda in the mainstream 'Western' media which associates Muslims with ‘terrorism'.
6. To support young adults in developing their writing skills in Standard English and give them opportunities to have their work published on-line.
7. To lay the groundwork for further expansion of this initiative to promote understanding and dialogue between all peoples.

I discussed these ideas with a number of academics, teachers, journalists, writers, students and other people when I reached Lahore and have continued some of these conversations by email. I've been thrilled by the enthusiasm and in-principle support the general concept has received so far.

In Pakistan people suggested that we host a series of face-to-face gatherings in each country, small conferences and workshops about human rights, social justice and theological themes, for example, with particular emphasis on women's rights. That we invite high profile guest presenters to these events and publish their presentations online; that we invite high school and university students to undertake their own research projects for online publication; and that we facilitate writing workshops for participants who are less experienced with Standard English so their work can be published too.

One friend, a poet, even offered the use of a flat in Gulberg, a suburb of Lahore, as project headquarters. We all agreed that enabling project participants to interact face-to-face was as important as sharing their work and interacting online, if not more so, and that the proposed project should give priority to face-to-face interaction.

So, let's now see where this idea takes us ...

Merrill Findlay
merrill[at]merrillfindlay.com
NSW
2 March 2007

Merrill Findlay's book project, Into Australia's 'Heartlands': a journey, has been supported by Hotham Mission Asylum Seeker Project, North Melbourne, and by the 2% Committee for Global Discipleship and Justice, Uniting Church in Australia (Victorian Synod). The author gratefully acknowledges this support and the help contributed by many other individuals and groups, including Kerang Rural Australians for Refugees and the Holy Eucharist Centre, St Albans, Victoria.

Please note that views expressed on this page or elsewhere on this site are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of project supporters.

REFERENCES
[1] Richardson, M. (2001) Australian Case Shows Rescues Can Be Costly: In Migrants' Plight, a Sea Of Trouble for Skippers, International Herald Tribune, Thursday, September 6, 2001.
[2] Marr, D. and M. Wilkinson (2003) Dark Victory, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, page 19.
[3] Kelly, P., Ed. (2002). The race issue in Australia's 2001 election: a creation of politicians or the press? Joan Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Working Paper Series, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, page 9.
[4] McLaren, I. (1985). The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, Melbourne, Red Rooster Press, Ascot Vale, page 21.
[5] Quoted in Mares (2002), Borderline, UNSW Press, page 134.

Page first created 2 March 2007 and last updated 18 June, 2008.

Salam Alaikum. Peace be upon you, the traditional Muslim greeting

NEW: GRASSROOTS PHILANTHROPY
Visit The Hunza Wear Project, an indigenous community development initiative in Pakistan's Northern Areas I'm associated with. I commend this project to you. Read more >>

Yeh Hum Naheen: We are not that >>
Pakistanis singing No To Terrorism.
Watch the video >>

Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan's YouTube channel 'to foster values of tolerance and acceptance, and increase cross-cultural dialogue' >>

Sites that are helping me learn more about liberal Islam ...

Who speaks for Islam? What a billion Muslims really think: Partners in Humanity:Common Ground News Service >>

'Cool Islam': a radical rethink in France >>

The Liberal Islam Network based in Jakarta, Indonesia >>

Dailogue with the Islamic World: Qantara.de based in Germany >>

Blogging the Qur'an, my friend Zia Sardar's blog for The Guardian in which he interprets a different Surah each week and invites comment More >>

Global Voices Online: a non-profit global citizens’ media project based at Harvard University More >>

For more on faith communities in Australia see Religion, Diversity and Safeguarding Australia [pdf 1,350kb] >>

I think that I am here, on this earth/ To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know./ As if I were sent so that whatever takes place / Has meaning because it changes into memory.

Czeslaw Milosz, The Unattainable Earth