Azaranica

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

'I don't care if I drown': asylum-seeker

PETER ALFORD, JAKARTA CORRESPONDENT From: The Australian September 07, 2011 12:00AM

Hazaras Rohallah Gharibyar, left, Aman Karimi and Zakir Faiyazi, in Jakarta yesterday, hope to find a boat to Australia. Picture: Peter Alford Source: The Australian
ROHALLAH Gharibyar is his family's only hope of escaping perpetual menace and frequent violence in Pakistan; better, he says, to drown trying to reach Australia than go back or wait indefinitely in Indonesia.

Now that the threat of Malaysian deportation is removed, Rohallah and his Hazara friends are looking for boats. One of their bunch flew on Saturday to Makassar, Sulawesi, to join one.

"We don't have any alternative, we are forced to go, our families are in danger," he said. "They want us to go and I am willing."

It cost Rohallah's family $US8000 ($7563) to get him this far from Quetta, via Thailand and Malaysia. Half of the money was inherited on his father's death, the rest borrowed from relatives.

Aman Karimi sold his brother's car, but his family borrowed most of the $US7000 to get him to Indonesia; Zakir Hussain Faiyazi's fare came from the sale of the family home in southern Afghanistan, where he lost a brother in a rocket attack about eight years ago.

Their families will have to raise another $3000 to $4500 to get them on to a boat to Australia and there is no question they will try.

"We have heard the Malaysian thing is no more and that's why I am looking for a boat," said Zakir, who came to Indonesia four months ago.

"My destination is Australia; I don't care about drowning."

Aman did not fear sailing to Australia, having experienced near-death on the small overloaded boat that almost sank in a storm during his transit from Malaysia to Sumatra.

"I have seen the worst thing in my life. The next boat will be bigger, so I don't care," he said.

The three young men or youths (they won't give their ages) claim they are driven to this dangerous passage by an overwhelming sense of family obligation. Life is more free of fear in Puncak, south of Jakarta, than in Pakistan or when they were passing through Malaysia, where canings and summary jailing is common.

But their families are waiting behind with only the hope that the adventurous sons and brothers will reach Christmas Island or Ashmore Reef, get an Australian visa and eventually get them out of the hellhole that is Quetta today for Hazaras.

That is why Rohallah hesitated after arriving in Puncak 10 weeks ago and learned from earlier arrivals about the Gillard government's Malaysia Solution.

His family could not afford for him to be stuck at the back of a Malaysian refugee queue for four or five years if he was deported back there and the relatives would want their loans back.

A decade ago, Quetta was a sort of haven for Farsi-speaking ethnic Hazaras, under constant attack in their Afghan homelands from Taliban militias. About 500,000 of them took refuge in the city and surrounding districts.

But these days, Shia Hazaras are preyed upon by Pakistani Sunni extremists. Eleven died in a suicide bombing of a crowded mosque last week during Eid-ul-Fitr prayers.

With the Pakistani security forces preoccupied by the spreading East Balochistan insurgency and the city now virtually sealed to outsiders, attacks on Hazaras are routine and unpunished.

"Now Quetta is worse than Afghanistan," said Rohallah, who claims he saw several friends die during a football game earlier this year when four men stepped out of a car and shot up the pitch.

"In Afghanistan, the Taliban kill everyone who disobeys their rules but in Quetta they just kill any Hazara they can find."

None of the three has the funds to get on another boat - and the smugglers are playing cagey, knowing they have a build-up of clients desperate to take advantage of the Australian government's confusion over offshore processing. It's getting so that asylum-seekers in Puncak have to pay even to get the smugglers' current mobile numbers.

When they do succeed, families back in Quetta will be asked to borrow again for the fare, depositing funds with hawala money brokers, who release them to the smugglers when Australian arrival is confirmed.

If people thought they could get Australian visas in Indonesia, said Rohallah, they would wait their turn: "We would like to go there by right. We don't want to cause trouble for the Australian government."

But the best anybody knows in Puncak is that Australia has not issued a visa through the Jakarta embassy in six months and even interviews for UN High Commissioner for Refugees registration involve a months-long wait. Lurking behind that is the fear widespread among asylum-seekers that Australia will completely close the refugee visa channel to them.

"It is a matter of time," said Aman.

Source,

The Australian

STRANDED IN KUPANG

Wednesday 7 September 2011, by Vikki Riley

If you are an Australian tourist en route to Bali for holidays or business, spare a thought next time you fly over Kupang, just an hour out of Darwin, for the Hazara asylum seekers locked up courtesy of the Indonesian police and dining on tainted white rice laced with dirt, ants and other insects. No happy hour there, just warm water that is murky and unboiled, sitting idle in plastic bottles in the heat.
No fans, no mattresses and guards that threaten to beat detainees for trivial matters like trying to ring home on a mobile phone. Rooms so cramped that the detainees cannot stretch out their legs and so take it in turns to sleep outside in the day in the dust and heat. Travel warnings on Australian government information sites list a raft of tropical diseases that if left untreated, can result in death or at least long term organ damage; Malaria, Typhoid, Rabies, Polio, Dengue fever and Hepatitus.

This is the situation for 85 Hazara refugees trapped in the Kupang detention centre .
After being intercepted by Indonesian police some nine months ago while out at sea trying to reach Ashmore Reef, Australia’s uninhabited farthest island they were escorted back to shore to the local detention centre where they are stranded in a no-mans land with few options left. Escape and try to board another boat to Australia or wait for UNHCR to take up their case. A trip to Jakarta to be assessed for refugee status is unfeasible. Unless they dig a tunnel like others have done before and disappear into the jungle. Many of the group are from Jaghori in Ghazni province.
Like others from that region their children cannot attend school, their vehicles are either stolen or blown up by the Taliban and the entire region is surrounded by Taliban military posts. With their families sent to Quetta in Pakistan the long journey to freedom is interrupted by incredible, intolerable abuses of human rights in a country they know little about.

East Nusa Tenggara, or West Timor, is the most easterly tip of the sprawling archipelago and the centre of the people smuggling trade. Darwin’s main detention centre houses the smugglers caught by Australian border security; poor, illiterate fishermen who get a small cut of the smuggler’s money to bring asylum seekers on their tiny boats. While their forebears, the Macassans, traded trepang and wives with aboriginal tribes around Darwin hundreds of years ago, these days the journey is truncated by arrest and detention.
Rumah Detensi Imigrasi Kupang as it is known, boasts its own Facebook page with snappily uniformed and medalled officers; last year several asylum seekers escaped and commandeered a boat themselves to Christmas Island. Like all Indonesian prisons, bribing the guards is an option but confiscation of property is commonplace. The Hazaras have little to barter with and are desperate to keep their mobile phones to keep in contact with their families. “Please help me get out before I die” was one message I received late one night here in Darwin. It is difficult to know how to help, if at all. Day by day the detainees are developing gastro problems and other conditions due to lack of food and poor sanitation.

Several detainees at Darwin’s immigration detention centres have been there too. Hazara Dunia Ali says he was there for eleven months. “Cruel and terrible” is how he describes it. “I saw lizards legs one day in the food” Many arrive in Darwin with malnutrition, tropical viruses and visible skin diseases.

Indonesia is a country where there simply is no asylum seeker policy at a federal level and like Malaysia, no signatory status to the UN Convention on refugees. It is ludicrous for the Australian government to suggest that a regional solution to processing refugees is possible. Previous PM Kevin Rudd claimed to be working “in tandem with Indonesia” but the deafening silence on a few matters of the past, namely the pending International Tribunal on War Crimes in East Timor, has made talks on refugees not on the table at all. Coincidently, there are a number of war criminals from the Suharto regime in West Timor where the police and miltary commander Colnel Dewa Siangan control border security for the region. Three of Siangan’s officers beat up a Catholic priest last year, Father Romo Bento Nino. Such is the division’s track record on human rights.

One of Darwin’s “sister cities”, Kupang in West Timor in Indonesia gets very little of the lucrative backpacker Euro these days. With all flights now direct to Bali there’s just no need to be curious about the once exotic Dutch East Indies outpost, unless you are a fan of the Mutiny on the Bounty legend. Captain Bligh navigated his ship with only a sextant and pocket watch, landing there in 1789.

These days, post East Timor independence, Kupang is pretty much run by the remnants of the dreaded Battalion 743, the TNI unit that was the base for counterinsurgency secret police against the East Timorese resistance until 1999. Radios blared anti-Fretilin propaganda across the then Timur-Timur.
Kupang Air Base was the launching pad for Black Hawk helicopters on raids into the East that saw hundreds of thousands die under the Indonesian occupation.
Then in 1999, some 200,000 East Timorese were forcibly removed to camps in Kupang and its surrounding rural areas, many raped, many starved or died from poor sanitation.
Since February 2009 the Indonesian government has denied access to the International Red Cross to monitor prisons and detention centres. In March 2011, ICRC signed a memorandum of understanding with the government whereby “It seeks to visit detainees in Indonesia”, in other words it has no arrangement.
The UNHCR itself has also whitewashed the facts, with feelgood stories of Afghan minors at their centre in Jakarta seemingly on a “Slumdog Millionaire”

Eternally smiling, 16-year-old Ghulam Reza exudes confidence as he dashes from his early-morning job at a bakery to deliver the fresh bread and then pay a friendly call on an elderly man he’s adopted as his surrogate grandfather.

So goes the hype on the feature story on the UNHCR Jakarta site.

UNHCR continues to be the primary provider of protection and assistance to refugees and asylum-seekers, undertaking responsibility for registration, RSD and the search for durable solutions. UNHCR will continue assisting the Government in preparing for its planned accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Efforts to build national capacity will be advanced by a programme of country-wide training sessions.

One of the largest “democracies” funded by the US government, it is hard to believe
such fiction passes as a mission statement. Yet Australia is still caught up in the politics of appeasement and Yellow Peril fantasies. When West Papuans tried to sail to Queensland a few months back, Australian Immigration officials burnt their canoes as a so called deterrent. Yet West Papuans, like the Hazaras in Afganistan, are both persecuted by Islamic regimes funded heavily in miltary resources by the United States. Both groups suffer from unofficial genocidal policies : murder, persecution, torture, removal from their land. That there is nowhere to run or hide is an indictment on Australia’s complicity in human rights abuses so close to home.

Vikki Riley is a freelance writer based in Darwin Australia

Source,

Kabul Press

Key defends aid work in Afghanistan

By Derek Cheng
5:30 PM Tuesday Sep 6, 2011

Prime Minister John Key is defending the New Zealand's aid work in Afghanistan, despite a highly critical Defence Force report that described the work as ineffective and not "sustainable in any way".

Mr Key was responding to claims in Nicky Hager's book, Other People's War, which details the New Zealand military's involvement in the "war on terror" in the past 10 years.

Hager quoted a 2010 Defence Force report into the work of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Bamiyan that cited a lack of a "clear and agreed upon strategy".

"The projects overseen by the [NZDF] through the PRT do no appear to be sustainable in any way and anecdotal evidence is that some have already failed," the report said.

Among the failures were a road through a marketplace that had to be fixed within six months, and a school that was "built in the middle of a dry river bed".

It concluded that the Defence Force was "not an effective aid provider".

"Contractors are not well supervised, projects are not monitored (and often not visited) and security issues outweigh development ...

[There are] no mechanisms in place to monitor the impact, effectiveness or sustainability of projeccts."

The review also questioned the PRT's ability to provide anything beyond "minimal" security outside of the PRT compound.

Mr Key did not deny the report existed.

"I have no recollection of reading it," he said.

But he strongly disagreed and described the aid work as "very effective".

"Our people have been actively been engaged in that reconstruction work - schools, hospitals and the like - provided support for the police force, [and] they've also proided some military capabilities to allow others - particularly NGOs - to get on and carry out their work.

"The feedback I had when I was in Bamiyan was that they were much loved for what they were doing and highly respected."

Mr Key said if the aid effort had been so woeful, Bamiyan would not have been "top of the priority list" for transition back to Afghan control.

He also took issue with the main claim in the book - that senior Defence Force and Minsitry of Foreign Affairs officials were cosying up to the Americans against Government instructions, and keeping ministers in the dark.

"In terms of whether Defence or Mfat follow their mandate, as best as I can possibly judge that - of course you rely on the very people you're talking about - I accept that they have followed their mandate," Mr Key said.

He was totally confident the departments were following Government policy.

"I have no reason to believe otherwise."

He said his officials had read the book and advised him, but he said he had not been advised on whether New Zealand intelligence agents had helped the US military target terror suspects in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"In due course we'll have a look at it, but it's not a high priority."

Source,

NZ Herlad

Monday, September 5, 2011

Bids for Hajigak mines to be opened today

Consortium led by SAIL, Corporate Ispat Alloys in fray; India seeks to use project to expand engagement in region
Ruchira Singh &
Six companies and consortia, including two bidders from India, are in the race to develop Afghanistan’s 1.8 billion tonnes Hajigak iron ore mines, bids for which will be opened on Tuesday.

Ravaged by a decade-long war, Afghanistan hopes to generate substantial revenue from the mines—located in Bamiyan province, 130km west of capital Kabul—to boost reconstruction efforts. But security concerns and the massive infrastructural expenditure needed to get the remote mines up and running will pose the biggest challenges for miners.

The bidders are an Indian mining consortium led by state-owned Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL); another Indian firm Corporate Ispat Alloys Ltd; Iran’s largest iron ore firm Gol-e-Gohar Iron Ore Co.; Iran’s Behin Sanate Diba Co.; Acatco, a US-Afghanistan firm; and Canada’s Kilo Goldmines Ltd. The bid evaluation will start on Tuesday, with the results expected to be declared in October.

“SAIL has made a consortium. The nationalities of some of the companies (bidders) are Iranian, Canadian, American,” Jalil Jumriany, director general for policy and promotion in Afghanistan’s ministry of mines, said on phone from Kabul.

“In the bids, everything has a weightage. How much financially, royalty will be given to the country, how much infrastructure will be created for the country, are they going to do vertical integration, we will also look at technical and financial capabilities of the players,” Jumriany said.

The SAIL-led consortium, formed at the Indian government’s behest, is comprised of NMDC Ltd, Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd (RINL), JSW Steel Ltd, JSW Ispat Steel Ltd, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) and Monnet Ispat and Energy Ltd. Tata Steel Ltd was initially a part of the consortium, but eventually opted out.

The deposits are attractive for Indian companies as their local expansion plans are hobbled by land acquisition and environmental concerns.

“If we become successful for this bid, it will set the stage for large cooperative efforts between the public and private sector steel companies in times to come in other sectors as well, such as coal,” said C.S. Verma, chairman, SAIL, which is also interested in setting up a steel plant in Afghanistan.

Gol-e-Gohar and Kilo Goldmines did not respond to emails seeking comment sent on Monday.

Global miners such as BHP Billiton Ltd, Rio Tinto Plc of Australia and Vale SA of Brazil were also expected to bid for the project but stayed away.

“These companies have big engagements in different parts of the world,” Jumriany said. “The economic mobilization would be much more (suitable) for countries like Iran and India for this place.”

Analysts said infrastructure costs and worries over security are the biggest impediments for the project.

The country has been facing an insurgency since US-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. Efforts to negotiate with the insurgents are yet to succeed, and US troops are expected to leave the country by 2014, deepening concerns about the security of commercial projects.

Rio Tinto did not bid because of security concerns, said Nik Senapati, managing director of the company’s India unit.

“For the company, safety comes first. No subsidiary of the company is bidding either. A mine in Afghanistan can at best work with the help of a government-to-government deal,” he said.

Vale and BHP Billiton did not respond to emails seeking comment sent last week.

The SAIL-led bid, if successful, will expand India’s engagement with war-torn Afghanistan, where it has already invested $1.3 billion (Rs.nearly 6,000 crore) in rebuilding. India views the country as key to its strategic interests, partly because it is situated between South Asia and energy-rich Central Asia.

India is also pushing the bid for geopolitical reasons. It fears Chinese companies may begin to dominate Afghanistan, having already secured the Aynak copper deposit in 2007.

Afghanistan invited international bids for the Hajigak deposit in January. The country has been promoting its minerals sector to foreign firms in the hope of boosting economic growth and employment. It aims to generate a revenue of $2 billion annually by 2017-18 from the mining sector, including oil and gas, from about $100 million now.

Afghanistan is keen to develop itself as a mining destination, with tenders for four more assets containing copper and gold deposits which will be opened in October. The Afghan government will conduct road shows in Singapore and Canada for the assets at the end of September.

Source,

Livemint.com