Australia’s folly returns Afghan Hazaras to torture and death
It has been a bad time lately for Afghan Hazaras with
Australian connections. In late September, the shocking news came
through that the Taliban had tortured and murdered an Australian of
Afghan background…
Hazaras have long been persecuted in Afghanistan, but those
returned from countries like Australia are in particular danger of being
tortured and murdered. Wikimedia Commons/ISAF Public Affairs Office, CC BY
It has been a bad time lately for Afghan Hazaras with
Australian connections. In late September, the shocking news came
through that the Taliban had tortured and murdered an Australian of
Afghan background, Sayed Habib Musawi. The Taliban had stopped the bus
on which he was travelling in rural Afghanistan and pulled him from it.
In an interview with the ABC, the deputy governor of Ghazni province where the killing took place, Mohammad Ali Ahmadi, flatly stated:
Of course the reason is that he was an Afghan-Australian … He came from a country that the Taliban thinks is an infidel country.
Hard on the heels of this tragic report came another story, in its
own way even more disturbing. At least in the case of Musawi, it was his
own decision, however fateful, that resulted in his being in
Afghanistan. This was not the case with Zainullah Naseri, whose horrific
experiences were recounted in The Saturday Paper by Sydney-based freelance journalist and photographer Abdul Karim Hekmat.
On August 26 2014, Naseri was deported to Afghanistan from Australia.
This was despite last-minute efforts in the Federal Circuit Court to
prevent the Department of Immigration and Border Protection from
removing him. In mid-September, seeking to travel to the district in
Ghazni where his family lived, he was seized by six Taliban, tortured
and — on the strength of his Australian driver’s licence and pictures in
his mobile phone of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge — accused
of being an infidel.
I have seen photos, not published in the press, of the injuries
Naseri sustained from the Taliban’s vicious beating. Only by a stroke of
good luck, namely the outbreak of fighting in the immediate vicinity
that distracted the Taliban’s attention, was he able to escape.
The experiences of Sayed Habib Musawi and Zainullah Naseri are not
surprising to anyone familiar with the long history of persecution of
Hazaras in Afghanistan. While some Afghans of non-Hazara background have
on occasion sought to play this down, the evidence is both clear and
chilling.
A long history of killings and persecution
Hazaras have a distinctive physical appearance and are known to be
overwhelmingly members of the Shiite Muslim minority. This has left them
doubly exposed.
Killings of Hazaras have continued since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001. For example, as reported by Reuters newsagency:
Afghanistan, June 25 - The bodies of 11 men, their heads
cut off and placed next to them, have been found in a violent southern
province of Afghanistan, a senior police official said on Friday. A
police patrol discovered the bodies on Thursday in the Khas Uruzgan
district of Uruzgan province, north of the Taliban stronghold of
Kandahar, said police official Mohammad Gulab Wardak. “This was the work
of the Taliban. They beheaded these men because they were ethnic
Hazaras and Shi’ite Muslims,” he said.
On December 6 2011, a suicide bomber attacked
Shiite Hazaras at a place of commemoration in central Kabul during the
Ashura festival, which marks the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala in
680 AD. Almost simultaneously, a bomb in Mazar-e Sharif also killed
Hazaras. The Kabul bomb killed at least 55 people and the Mazar bomb
four more.
The Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize
for his photograph of the aftermath of the Kabul atrocity. But many
other killings of course go unreported in Western news services and
escape the attention of Western embassies behind their sandbags and
blast-proof walls in Kabul.
Refugee rulings defy DFAT warnings
Zainullah Naseri’s experience highlights a very peculiar dimension of
official Australian analyses of Afghanistan. Different agencies seem to
live in different worlds.
The DFAT Smartraveller website warns in stark terms that all of Afghanistan is unsafe. DFAT
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warns in the starkest terms of the dangers of travel to Afghanistan. In its “Do not travel” advice dated September 16 2014,
DFAT writes of “the extremely dangerous security situation and the very
high threat of terrorist attack”. Attacks, DFAT notes, “can occur
anywhere, any time” and: “No province can be considered immune from
violence.” Furthermore, DFAT warns:
Overland travel is dangerous. Taliban and al-Qa'ida
members are active in many parts of the country, thereby creating a
significant security risk.
These are prescient comments indeed. However, warnings of this kind,
which DFAT has been voicing for a long time, seem to have had precious
little impact on the handling of Naseri’s application for refugee
protection.
His case was assessed
by a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal, Paul Millar, in December
2012. Millar expressed no doubts about Naseri’s credibility, but
inadvertently showed how those who lack a “feel” for the situation in a
disrupted state such as Afghanistan can get things horribly wrong. In
effect, he narrowed his focus to the possibility of there being a safe
route from Kabul to Naseri’s district:
The Tribunal is only considering the route for the
applicant to make a journey from Kabul back to his native area. In those
circumstances, the Tribunal accepts that the applicant is at risk as a
Hazara of suffering harm in making that journey but the Tribunal finds
that the level of risk does not reach the threshold of a real chance.
Millar added that “country information before the Tribunal is to the
effect that Afghans who return to their country after seeking asylum in
Western countries are not targeted for harm on that basis”.
No Hazara can safely return to Afghanistan
Authorities
are ignoring warnings by DFAT, the UNHCR and Hazaras in Australia about
the risks facing returned asylum seekers in Afghanistan. AAP/Steve Gray
Given what happened to Sayed Habib Musawi and Zainullah Naseri, there
is a terrifying irony in such comments. Naseri should never have been
forced back to Afghanistan, essentially because the fluidity of the
situation there militates fundamentally against the kind of
bold confidence that the Refugee Review Tribunal put on display. The
decision that led to Naseri’s removal was deeply flawed when it was
made, and badly out of date by the time he was removed.
On August 6 2013, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) affirmed this point in new Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection Needs of Asylum-seekers from Afghanistan.
These state that “while the conflict was previously located in the
south and east, it now affects most parts of the country”, and point to
the “volatility and fluidity of the armed conflict in Afghanistan in
terms of the difficulty of identifying potential areas of relocation
that are durably safe”. The guidelines identify “men and boys of
fighting age” as potentially being in need of international protection,
along with “members of minority religious groups”.
As long as this remains the case — and there is no sign that things
are likely to change any time soon — there should be an absolute
moratorium on the involuntary removal of Hazara asylum seekers to
Afghanistan.
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