Fears Groundless?

Two days ago this report appeared in the SMH.  This might be a reference to an entirely different boat, but I am haunted by information I received last night that there are currently efforts underway to locate a boat believed to be in trouble.

If it is the same boat, how terrible for the people.  They will have been at sea for a great deal longer than anticipated as they were expected to arrive three weeks before the Christmas Island tragedy, according to the above article.

I hope it is not the same boat.  Please let it not be the same boat.  There is nothing in the mainstream media this morning that I have noticed, so perhaps nothing has been found. Or nothing has been

This article published some days ago in The Age is a very good article on why people risk their lives in this way.   I came across another article the other day that was also pertinent. 

There are SO MANY displaced people and refugees in the world.  What are we, as a species, doing to ourselves?

While I know that mathematically as our global population grows, so will the numbers of refugees and displaced persons, I find the figures upsetting.  The UN figures state there were 26 million Internally Displaced Persons around the world in 2008.   15.2 million refugees in 2009.  Asylum seekers are refugees who have not had their refugee status recognised.  I quote the UN web site:

At the beginning of 2009, there were some 826,000 asylum-seekers of concern to the UN refugee agency. They are found around the globe. UNHCR advocates for governments to adopt fair and efficient procedures to determine if an individual asylum-seeker is a refugee, recognizing how difficult it is in many cases to document persecution.

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Richard Flanagan sums it up

Excerpt Reposted from the UK Guardian I have no personal comment for this one – Richard’s article stands alone.  Please click on the link to read the full article.

• Richard Flanagan
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 16 December 2010 21.30 GMT
• Article history

Boat tragedy: How Australians became complicit in the horror of Christmas Island

The myth that we must be protected from hordes of refugees is a weeping sore at the heart of my country’s public life

As the Australian territory closest to Indonesia, Christmas Island has in recent years become a favoured destination for refugee boats. And so it fell to the islanders to be awoken on Wednesday by the screams of the drowning as a small wooden boat carrying about 70 refugees was smashed by a wild sea into a limestone cliff.

“I saw a person dying in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to save them,” resident Kamar Ismail is reported to have said. “Babies, children, maybe three or four years old, they were hanging on to bits of timber, they were screaming ‘help, help, help’.” Lifejackets thrown down were tossed back by storm winds, the last illusion of a hope that had once borne the name Australia.