Identifying with the Refugees

By Minh Nguyen*
March 2004

The problem of refugees arriving uninvited on our shores is a problem we must accommodate, Minh Nguyen argues

Extract of a talk given to high school students at St Scholastica College, Glebe, Sydney, 8 March 2004

I’m speaking to you as a Vietnamese refugee who is very grateful for the opportunities afforded to me by Australia. All of my refugee contemporaries would probably express the same appreciation. I know many Vietnamese around my age tries so hard to be “Australian”. Many have integrated so successfully that I sometimes wonder whether they’ve forgotten their own past. Allegiance and the need to belong can sometime clog our critical faculties.

It is well known people like myself – Vietnamese, Chinese and Eastern European migrants and refugees – are among some of the sternest supporters of the current Government’s approach to people seeking asylum on our shores.

This paradox occurred to me during a pub discussion with one of my friends at the height of the recent boat arrivals. My friend’s position was that Australia was right to send boatpeople back to Indonesia because they were illegal economic migrants and even possible terrorists. I was astonished at his position because here we have a boatperson stating an apparently anti-refugee position. You can’t be more mainstream Australian than this, I thought.

How did he come to distinguish his circumstances from the circumstances of the current wave of refugees? He, like many of my contemporaries, arrived with papers, having gone through the UN camps in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Yet thousands of his fellow Vietnamese arrived by boat during the late 1970s and early 1980s without papers. Did he oppose those people too?

Being a refugee and one from a marginalised ethnic background has its advantages. I’m able to tell you, “I know what it’s like.” But experience can sometimes be wasted unless it is married with critical thinking and moral reflection. One moral exercise at our disposal based on a principle that is fundamental to virtually every dominant religion is, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” This principle forces us to think about “the Other”. It is invitation for us to put ourselves in the position of the Other – to try and see things the way they see it.

My friend who distinguished his experience from the experiences of the current boatpeople thinks that the Iraqi and Afghani asylum seekers are exceptions to the rule. What if I were to tell him that the term “queue jumping” was invented during the period of Vietnamese refugee arrivals? What if I were to say that Australians used to accuse us of being economic migrants whose boats sunk at sea because of the gold bullions we were carrying? What if I were to say that the majority of Australians opposed Vietnamese refugee intakes at the time? Would his opinion be the same had people accused him of being a potential Viet Cong upon his arrival to Australia? These slurs are analogous to the sort of things being levelled against the latest wave of refugees.

I came from a middle class Catholic family in Vietnam. My parents were former officers of the South Vietnamese army and my father was active in the anti-communist movement. My parents were made refugees twice: the first time fleeing from North Vietnam to South Vietnam when communists took government in 1954; the second was when we left Vietnam bound for Australia following the fall of South Vietnam to the Viet Cong. While many people probably benefited from the new regime, my parents were not one of them. They witnessed the arbitrary arrests, torture, executions and persecution for certain classes of people considered bourgeoisie or traitors by the communists. They witnessed the devastation of terrorism and civil war.

We know the facts. It’s poor countries, not rich countries like Australia or even the European Union, that are providing the vast majority of asylum to the global refugee population. However, there comes a stage when refugees must look elsewhere. We all desire security. Sometimes we have to travel far and wide to find genuine, permanent protection. You can be absolutely sure of this rule: when a crisis occurs somewhere in the world, refugees will ripple to the far corners of the earth. Do not be surprise if one day another major wave of refugees arrives on our shores.

To flee one’s country is not an easy choice to make. You’re leaving behind your homes, your relatives and friends, your culture, your possessions, your memories, your childhood. Fleeing a country on a boat is also a dangerous affair. People speak of the savagery of being looted, raped and killed by pirates at sea. People talk about the unspeakable horrors of resorting to cannibalism of the dead to regain enough strength to fix the boat’s engine. Many of us had knowledge of this so why did we take the risk?

We seek freedom because the government we were escaping did not respect our freedom. You will find this is a common story among refugees. Refugees by definition leave their country because of persecution. But clearly some refugees are also attracted by the ideals and prosperity of Western societies. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with this. There is nothing wrong with a refugee having escaped his or her country because of persecution, and then to seek real and lasting protection against socio-political insecurities in a country that can afford to offer it.

We were the relatively lucky boatpeople who did not encounter pirates, whose boat was not blown off course by storms, and who were rescued just in time. However, the journey was no less perilous. One infant, who would be my age today, died during the journey. On the third day our water supply was contaminated. We were all thirsty and frightened to the point where we could have given up all together. But we took the gamble because we believed the risk at sea was still better than staying in communist Vietnam.

When I reflect on this, I fail to see how some of my refugee contemporaries could distinguish between our experiences and the experience of those recent boatpeople arriving on our shores. The experience of refugees since the times of the Jewish exodus from Nazi Germany is a common story of humanity – people seeking a secure and safe future for themselves and their children. Asylum seeking probably dates back to the dawn of civilisation. Wherever there are wars and persecution, you can be sure there will be people seeking asylum in a foreign land.

The phenomenon of people seeking a secure future in a foreign land because of persecution at home is a problem we must accommodate. It doesn’t help by saying that Australia is an exception to the rest of the world; or that the latest wave of refugees is an exception to the waves that came before it; or that the time is unique in history.

I concede to some extent that we are living in different times. There is an undeniable threat of terrorism against Western interests. But it’s one thing to say that Australia has a right and responsibility to protect its borders against potential harm to its citizens, it’s another to try and link terrorism with boatpeople. The only suspected terrorist to be found in Australia, Willie Brigette, landed in Australia by air. We would be verging on the absurd to believe terrorists would want to risk their mission by arriving on our shores on leaky, dangerous boats. No one dared to accuse Vietnamese boats of potentially carrying Viet Congs and yet we are resorting to this dubious argument against the latest boat arrivals.

I will also concede that the Government is right to wage war against the flourishing illicit trade in human beings in the form of human trafficking and people smuggling. The smugglers exploit the vulnerability and desperation of migrants and asylum seekers. We often hear of gruesome discoveries of asylum seeker corpses in airtight truck containers. These were people who had paid people smugglers their life savings to seek a new start in a foreign land. The claim that the latest 15 boatpeople arriving on Ashmore Reef could have been duped and dumped by people smugglers further illustrates the need to crush this trade and find lasting solutions to the global migration situation.

How are we to respond to this? Are we prepared to control the perpetrators of terrorism and people smuggling by punishing the very victims of their crimes?

Unlike the Vietnamese experience in which the Government felt an obligation – having bombed the country into smithereens – to accept Vietnamese refugees, the current policy towards the latest wave of refugees defies logic. How could we decry with a straight face tyranny and terrorism and join Coalitions of the Willing to carpet bomb countries accused of harbouring terrorism, while we detain without trial the victims of these regimes, suggest that they might be terrorists, and tell them that they shouldn’t have come here in the first place? Have we lost it as a nation?

After World War II it seemed we entered a new era marked by an ever-increasing awareness of the interconnectedness of humanity. The experience of war and despotic regimes has taught us the worth and dignity of every human person. It taught us that even in politics no one should be used as a means to an end, no matter how noble the cause and how much collective benefit that might stem from doing so. Much of the struggle for human rights and international law seemed to have been inspired by this acknowledgement. As a nation, we need to bring ourselves back in line with this tradition.

We all have a responsibility. We need to continually ask, what is the rationale of excising Australian islands from the mainland and denying boatpeople an opportunity to claim asylum under Australian migration law? What is the rationale of continuing long-term detention of people, including women and children, in desert camps when the Government’s own figures show that 90% of them are likely to be genuine refugees? What is the rationale of denying people proven to be refugees permanent and full protection? Why do we think these people are different from the refugees that came before them?

We all need to do our part. Signing petitions and sending letters to our politicians is noble, but I think it’s futile in this case. While popular opinion continues to favour current policies, the Government and Opposition will continue to milk the refugees for what they’re worth. So we need to go to the root of the problem. What we need is creative and lasting ways of purging Australia’s deeprooted fear of the Other. The Australian consciousness needs to be moralised with the truth and with critical thinking. For this we must start with our own education and the education of others at the level of our homes, schools and neighbourhood.

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