It must have come as a shock to his conservative Australian fans. Appearing on ABCTV’s Q&A panel in April, conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke turned his acidic wit on fellow conservatives who wanted to limit the number of asylum seekers entering the country.
While his fellow panellist, deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop frothed at the mouth about how ‘since last August there has been an increase in the number of people arriving by boat’ and how ‘the people smugglers are back in business’, P. J. had this to say:
You know, we in the States have much, much more experience with being all wrong about immigration than you do. I mean 36,000 you said in Italy? ... We laugh. That’s a day in the United States. And we are so wrong about it. I mean, build a fence on the border with Mexico, give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry, you know ... the thing is when somebody gets on an exploding boat to come over here — they’re willing to do that to get to Australia — you’re missing out on some really good Australians if you don’t let that person in.
His very wide and very humorous tirade went even further:
Let them in. Let them in. These people are assets. One or two of them might not be, but you can sort them out later ... I think conservatives are getting this wrong all over the world, I really do.
So today’s asylum seekers are tomorrow’s ‘really good Australians’ and ‘assets’. O’Rourke gave hard-headed conservatives more than just ‘bleeding heart’ reasons to show compassion to refugees. He reminded us that compassion also paid economic and nation-building dividends.
That was also the message delivered to the National Press Club on 11 August by exiled World Uighur Congress leader Rabiye Kadeer. A number of innocent Turkish-speaking Uighur men have been kept at the Guantanamo gulag waiting to be resettled. It took our American allies some seven years to realise the men posed no threat to anyone.
‘All of the Uighurs in Albania, Bermuda and Palau are living very normal and productive lives — so we’d be happy if Australia took the four’, Kadeer was quoted in The Australian.
The plight of the Guantanamo Uighurs in Albania, Europe’s poorest nation, came to the attention of the international media in 2007 when Al Jazeera English broadcast a 24-minute documentary called A Strange Kind Of Freedom. The program detailed the experiences of four Uighur men who had been dumped in Albania with no apology from their American captors and no explanation for their 54 month detention at Guantanamo.
But how did these men end up all the way from Western China to Afghanistan and then Pakistan? The men fled China due to their support for the East Turkestani/Uighur independence movement. They ended up in Pakistan via Afghanistan in 2000, and were sold for a mere $5000 each to the Americans before being transferred to Guantanamo. But despite living in limbo and separated from their families, these men are not sitting on their hands feeling sorry for themselves. Two of the men are training to become pizza makers, and they are all attending Albanian language classes. They receive some government assistance.
At one stage, Albania was the only country willing to take the Guantanamo Uighurs. Now some Uighur men have also settled in small Pacific Island nations which have no Uighur or other Turkish-speaking communities. Which raises a simple question — if an impoverished nation like Albania and North Pacific island nation of Palau can accept Uighurs, why can’t a wealthy nation like Australia?
Australia doesn’t exactly have a good record in welcoming even its own citizens who were former detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The fact that credible reports showed our men, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, were also abused and tortured did not move our political leaders (apart from Bob Brown and a few other lonely voices) to place pressure on the United States.
Indeed, a profile of former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer published in The Australian on 9 September 2008 showed him having a good laugh when mention was made of the torture of Australian detainees and the practice of water-boarding.
And if a recent Red Cross survey on attitudes to torture is any indication, it seems many Australians have a fairly lax attitude toward torture. Some 47 per cent of those surveyed said they believed it was acceptable to torture prisoners of war in some situations.
That’s POW’s, not former ‘enemy combatants’ and ‘suspected terrorists’ such as the innocent Uighur men our country is being asked to adopt. Australia has established Uighur and Turkish communities and could easily accommodate the few remaining ex-Gitmo Uighurs. If we refuse them, we won’t just lose the opportunity to have good citizens. We’ll also lose another piece of our collective soul.
(First published in Eureka Street on 14 August 2009)
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