The elaborate public façade carefully constructed by new president Maithripala Sirisena, with the hidden assistance of India and the US, is crumbling by the day, revealing the discomforting truth that Sri Lanka remains a brutal regime dominated by a military mindset.
The civil war may have ended seven years ago, with the chilling state-sanctioned slaughter of up to 70,000 innocent people on the blood-soaked beach of Mullivaikal, but there is no end in sight to the war on Tamils, who still suffer under the boot of Sinhalese military occupation in their homeland.
In fact, contrary to Sirisena’s deceptive words about justice and reconciliation, military might is clearly as important now to the government as it was when its army, air force and navy combined in early 2009 to massacre these innocent refugees from the war while they huddled in schools, hospitals, temples and out in the open, in hastily-dug foxholes by the beach.
Nothing could be more obvious after the recent elevation in the country’s public life of two men who, if the world was a place where justice served us all rather than a powerful elite, would be now be living off porridge in a cell at The Hague.
They are major-general Jagath Dias, who was recently promoted to chief-of-staff of the army and war-time army commander general Sarath Fonseka, who was promoted to field marshal, the highest rank in the military, and then, last month, appointed by the government to a seat in the parliament and a cabinet post.
The most shameful behaviour in all of this comes from major Western powers, including the US and UK, and middle powers such as Australia.
Dias and Fonseka are two of the Sri Lankan army’s most notorious accused war criminals, shown in any number of international investigations to be responsible for the calculated attacks on the 300,000 civilians cynically herded into so-called “no fire zones” and then set upon by the army’s powerful array of weaponry.
Dias is a particularly unsavoury character. This rotund, mustachioed veteran of the 57th division was fingered by the international community soon after the war, chased out of his post-war diplomatic job in Germany after being threatened with a war crimes’ prosecution. He was also refused visas by the US, UK and Australian governments because of his reputation.
What set him apart from your garden-variety war criminal, and elevated him to pre-eminence among Sinhalese extremists, was a stunning allegation about his role in the death of the Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Not long after the war, the Sri Lanka Guardian’s defence investigator laid before his readers a grisly story of wild-eyed, primeval revenge after Prabhakaran had surrendered to the army in the final days of the war.
This is what he wrote: “The LTTE leader was said to have suffered the sadistic attack of having a hot metal rod shoved up his anal tunnel, and he met his ultimate death by having the upper portion of his skull chopped with an axe while he was alive and struggling with the pain of anal penetration.
“Major general Jagath Dias personally undertook the gruesome task after verbally abusing him in filth and manhandling him in anger. Published photographs of Prabhakaran’s body showed a deep wound in his forehead. In images released by the Sri Lankan Army, the wound was covered by a blue check cloth.”
While Dias was a hero to the former president and fellow-Sinhalese chauvinists, Fonseka had a more chequered post-war path. He challenged former president Rajapaksa at the 2010 elections and for his trouble he was stripped of his rank, his medals and jailed for more than two years. He had three years added to the sentence for stating in an interview that the defence secretary and the president’s brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, had ordered the execution of Tamil prisoners of war. He later retracted the statement under pressure, and was let out of jail well before serving his full sentence.
Now Fonseka sits in a comfortable padded seat in parliament, gleaning all the material benefits of a cabinet post as minister for regional development and giving statesman-like interviews to overseas publications that mostly fail to mention that he’s got the blood of 70,000 murdered Tamils on his hands.
Of course, the same is true for the new president who, in an attempt to woo the Sinhalese vote, boasted during the election campaign last year that he was acting defence minister during the closing months of the war, and thus bears self-declared command responsibility for these war crimes, along with the Rajapaksas, Fonseka, Dias and other senior government officials and military officers.
Little wonder that Sirisena has been working so assiduously to stop international judges being admitted to any war crimes’ panel. Indeed only this week, he was reported to have hauled his foreign minister over the coals for suggesting to the US last week that Sri Lanka was open to the idea of allowing international involvement.
Everything you need to know about Sirisena is there for all to see as he brazenly reneges on his own government’s pledge in a UN resolution a few months ago to allow international input on the panel.
The façade is crumbling and Sirisena is now running for any rabbit hole he can find. However, he can’t hide the reality that nothing has changed in Sri Lanka, except the name of the president.
Yet the most shameful behaviour in all of this comes from major Western powers, including the US and UK, and middle powers such as Australia, who continue to lie to the world about change for the better in the island nation, in order to further their own geo-political aims.
For the likes of the US, it’s about reducing Chinese influence in the country and the region, and, for Australia, it’s primarily about stopping Tamils fleeing persecution in boats that end up in our waters.
These governments don’t care that they are actively protecting accused war criminals. Indeed, it’s just another glaring example of the international complicity that continues to aid and abet a genocide that’s been perpetrated against the Tamils for almost 70 years.

Trevor Grant

Sri Lanka rewards its war criminals

Journalist and advocate Trevor Grant details the ongoing genocide against the Tamil population within the Sri Lankan state, and the complicity of Western governments, in an article first published at <a href="http://tamilfightback.com/">tamilfightback.com</a>.
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When the eminent international jurist Raphael Lemkin introduced the word “genocide” to the world in the aftermath of World War Two, his definition was clear and unequivocal.
Lemkin was a Polish Jew who fought in the resistance movement against the Nazis in the 1930s and then, as a lawyer, was responsible for framing the first UN Treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Lemkin said that genocide – a hybrid word formed from the Greek “geno”, which means race or culture, and the Latin for killing , “cide” – was a premeditated plan, through mass killings and other means, to destroy a group’s identity and culture and then impose the identity and culture of the oppressor. (A group could be defined as national, ethnic, racial or religious.)
There is nothing fuzzy or imprecise about this definition. It makes it relatively easy to detect and call out acts of genocide, which are regarded as the worst crimes on the UN books. Yet decades later, while these words resound with clarity in the UN charter, sovereign states across the globe continue to commit genocide with impunity, knowing they have a free pass from those countries with the power to do something about it.
There’s no better example right now than Sri Lanka, where, with the full support of Western powers as well as China and Russia, the chauvinist leaders of the Sinhalese majority have been running a genocide against the Tamil population in the north and east since the British colonisers departed in 1947.
The determination to wipe out the Tamil identity in the regions where they are predominant, and have lived as a majority for thousands of years, has never stopped. It is an unrelenting, unforgiving project that today can be defined by any number of Sinhalese government actions, the most prominent of which is the continued military occupation of the north and east six years after the end of the war that saw the disintegration of a 30-year Tamil resistance movement.
This renders laughable the election promise of the new president Maithripala Sirisena to provide a more open and free society. Indeed, when you live with military checkpoints every 500 metres down the road and endure constant observation by armed soldiers, as well as regular home visits, it’s a bit difficult to believe you live in a free and open society. Even Tamil school-kids aren’t exempt from this suffocating authoritarianism, with military commanders regularly coming to their classrooms to deliver government propaganda. And, of course, they are required to bow these great men, under threat of punishment.
Sadly, there is no end in sight to this tyranny, given that Sirisena has vowed to maintain the military presence in the Tamil homelands, a predictable pledge from an acting defence minister in the Rajapaksa regime, who boasted during the election campaign about his time spent overseeing the forces that were in the process of slaughtering up to 70,000 innocent Tamil civilians in early 2009.
Military occupations spawn all kinds of hellish outcomes for innocent civilians. And this one, which deploys one soldier for every five residents, is no different. Young Tamil men disappear into prisons, where they face torture, permanent disfigurement, physically and mentally, and often death. Hundreds of political prisoners also remain locked away in secret jails across the country. Some have been disappeared into the prison system for decades.
The Sirisena regime says in one forum they are going to release all prisoners, then, in another, denies there are any political detainees. The end result is preservation of the status quo, except for a few token releases designed to silence continued demands from Amnesty International and other well-informed, respected human rights groups to free these people and investigate the 146,000 reported Tamil disappearances, along with the many mass graves that have been uncovered in recent times.
Rape has also been commonplace for years. Today women still do not walk the streets late in the day or evening. The immunity from consequences granted to all military personnel for any criminal act sharply increases this threat to the population.
The military commander of the entire Jaffna region, major-general Mahinda Hathurusinghe, had listed in his mobile phone the names of several Tamil women he used to sate his sexual appetite. Whenever he felt like fornicating with someone other than his wife, he would summon one of them by text message and rape her. They always submitted to this beast because they knew the consequences for their families if they didn’t. This became public in 2013, yet there was no inquiry, let alone a penalty.
Another sickening case, this time of gang-rape of an 11-year-old and 9-year-old girl by seven sailors in the north in 2014, was quickly hidden from public view after the government intervened and ordered a magistrate to delete the names of the sailors from the court record. They were immediately re-deployed in the south, and the families of the girls who had been protesting for justice were silenced by threats to their lives from the army and police.
All genocides are multi-pronged projects, seen today by the gradual obliteration of Tamil identity through the destruction of their religious icons and the imposition of a foreign religion.
Only this week, Tamils on an islet in the Jaffna peninsula, who are mostly Hindu, had to stand by, silently and sadly, as they witnessed the Sri Lankan Navy participate in a Buddhist ceremony, which included all-night chanting and then a senior commander laying a foundation stone for a massive statue of the Buddha. To make perfectly clear what they were all about, the government recently issued a gazette notification, changing the name of the island from the Tamil name, Nainathivu, to the Sinhala name, Nagadeepaya.
It is a weird thing to see all these Buddhist icons being built across the north and east, where no Buddhists live. The local media has estimated at least 250 Hindu temples have been knocked down and replaced by Buddhist stupas since the war ended.
Once again, it reveals the long term genocidal plan to populate the Tamil regions with Sinhalese settlers, including soldiers. In one week alone, about 700 Sinhalese families were deposited into homes in the north – on land owned by Tamils.
Soldiers stationed in the north have been encouraged take up permanent residence there through land grants. Also, a special bonus of 100,000 rupees (US$650) is on offer to Sinhalese military and police personnel to have a third child. Meanwhile, in Mannar region, it was revealed that about 30 Tamil mothers of small children were escorted to a major regional hospital, where they were forced to have contraceptive devices sewn into their arms. If ever you needed evidence of genocide, as defined by Lemkin, it is these two stories – Tamil mothers undergoing forced contraception and wives of Sinhalese soldiers receiving financial incentives to reproduce in bigger numbers.
The property theft continues, as the military refuses to leave Tamil-owned land, claiming it is needed for high security bases yet, at the same time, using much of it to build scores of lavish resorts that are owned and run by the military. This week an expansion to the Thalsevana resort was opened by the army in its high security zone on the north coast of Jaffna, on land stolen from Tamils and seemingly never to be returned.
While Sirisena attempts to persuade the international community of his good intentions towards Tamils by handing back to the rightful owners a few small portions of military-controlled land, his duplicity is often quickly exposed by Tamil media. A good example is this week’s story about the military’s attempt to confiscate permanently 3,524 acres of land that belongs to Tamil farmers in a village in Mannar province. The Jaffna District Secretariat found that 7,393 acres of Tamil-owned land in its region was under military occupation, keeping 10,495 people off their land and houses and living in appalling makeshift accommodation.
You can pick any date, any decade, since the Sinhalese, who represent 75 percent of the population, assumed power in 1947, and you will find evidence that equates with the definition of genocide. Every government, from the first, under D.S. Senanayake in 1947 to the current one under Sirisena, has bristled with the same ingrained superiority complex that views Tamils as unwanted tenants on an island that belongs only to the Sinhalese. (Of course, the undeniable fact that Tamils have been there since pre-historic times is conveniently written out of official Sinhalese history to allow the myth to prosper.)
The first obvious genocidal act came in 1948 when one million Tamils were immediately disenfranchised, and many deported, in order to silence any effective Tamil voice in parliament.
That done, they then wiped out the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Tamils who worked in the public service in 1956 by declaring Sinhala as the only language permitted in government jobs, supplanting English, which the Tamils had spoken for generations. It was impossible to learn quickly enough what was a foreign language to Tamils; they were thrown out of work en masse.
When Tamils began non-violent demonstrations outside parliament and other prominent places, they were viciously assaulted by the military and the police acting under government orders.
Government involvement in violence against Tamils continued, with the burning down of the Jaffna library in 1981, in which 95,000 books and invaluable ancient palm leaf manuscripts were lost. Then came the mother of all pogroms, in 1983, when thousands of Tamils were murdered, some being burned to death in the streets while their Sinhalese attackers danced around them. History now records that government officials were up to their necks in both outrages.
History also shows that foreign governments, such as the UK, the US and Australia, have been up to their necks in supporting the worst actions of successive oppressive regimes during the 27-year war against the Tamil Tigers, and well after it.
The UK supplied arms and advisers who were involved in civilian killings in the 1980s, which amount to war crimes. The US supplied arms that included illegal cluster bombs and white phosphorous for many years during the war. And since the war ended in May 2009, Australia has been supplying naval patrol boats and intelligence co-operation to help Sri Lanka stop Tamils – who have suffered torture, rape and beatings in filthy jails – fleeing the island to save their lives and seek asylum in places such as Australia.
Only two years ago, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Colombo, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott enlightened the world about Australia’s approach to the evil practices of the Sinhalese supremacists who run Sri Lanka. Asked about the well-documented torture of Tamils in Sri Lankan jails, Abbott said: “In difficult circumstances, difficult things happen”.
Abbott had broken new ground as the first Australian prime minister to condone torture. It was a startling comment that reflected the current decline in decent, human values amongst our rulers. Just as shocking is the continued support for the Sri Lankan regime by Australia and the major Western powers.
By doing so, these governments are not just denying genocide, but actively participating in its prosecution. As Raphael Lemkin outlined in 1948, in the very first UN charter, there is no greater state crime.
[First published at <a href="http://tamilfightback.com/">tamilfightback.com</a>.]

Genocide ravages the Tamils as the world turns a blind eye

As an Australian prison ship bobbed on the high seas for more than five weeks, its desperate, vulnerable human cargo of 157 people, almost all of them Tamils, locked up for 21 hours a day in the stinking, windowless hull, the government was fighting to stop these asylum seekers from accessing their right to re-settlement in Australia.
Even worse, it was secretly trying to return them to Sri Lanka. Using the same veil of secrecy the government had already returned a boat of 41 Sri Lankan asylum seekers to their persecutors. This galvanised human rights advocates into launching the High Court action which stopped the second boat from following the same path.
The government failed, but the asylum seekers are now to be caged in the remote Curtin detention centre in Western Australia for who knows how long. They still face the threat of deportation to India and Sri Lanka.
The callous criminality of the Australian government has been accompanied by Tony Abbott’s hollow claim that Sri Lanka is now a society at peace, a lie he and his ministers repeat over and over again.
Yet if Sri Lanka is a place of peace, why do Tamils flee in such numbers? The answer is that Sri Lanka has not been a place of peace for Tamils for more than 70 years.
Divide and rule
In 1505 the Portuguese began the sordid tale of colonial oppression in Sri Lanka, arriving to find an island ruled by distinct kingdoms with separate cultures, religions and language. The Tamils were predominant in the north and east of the country while the Sinhalese dominated in the south. By 1658, the Dutch had displaced the Portuguese, setting up separate administrative structures that reflected this difference between Sinhalese and Tamils, who represent 75 percent and 20 percent of the population respectively.
However, after the British ousted the Dutch in 1795 this co-existence between separate kingdoms was tipped on its head. In 1833 the British governor took the step that remains at the heart of the conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils. He decided to unify the country, stripping away the rights of Tamils to their homelands. It was done to enhance the colonial oppressor’s administrative control of the island, and thus increase the profits from pillaging the country’s resources.
By 1948, the British colonialists were on their bikes, but they left behind a constitution that gave carte blanche to the extremist Sinhalese nationalists to begin their genocidal campaign against the Tamils. The first step was to disenfranchise one million Tamils, effectively wiping out the Tamil voice in parliament.
Capitalising on this, the majority Sinhalese introduced a number of measures to force Tamils out of any positions. Sinhala replaced English as the official language, pushing thousands of Tamils out of government jobs. Then in 1972 they introduced a policy of standardisation in education, which meant Tamils had to achieve higher marks than Sinhalese to pass university entrance exams. Within a year, Tamil representation in tertiary education had fallen from 27 to 7 percent. Suddenly a whole generation had been alienated, and they were angry about it.
Genocide
By 1983, when yet another government-orchestrated pogrom saw more than 3,000 Tamils murdered in the streets, the ranks of the newly-formed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were bolstered by thousands of disenchanted young men and women. The Tamils had tried for over 60 years to use the political process to achieve some form of equality within a structure weighted heavily against them. Early on, they adopted Gandhi’s methods of non-violence in the face of vicious attacks from Sinhalese extremists and the army, which was entirely made up of Sinhalese soldiers.
The armed struggle which began in the late 1970s endured until 2009, when the new president Mahinda Rajapaksa – having acquired illegal weapons such as cluster bombs and white phosphorous from the US, China and Israel – launched one of the most heinous attacks upon innocent civilians in history. The UN, currently investigating Rajapaksa’s war crimes, estimates at least 70,000 were slaughtered. More than 146,000 people are listed as missing.
Today the genocide continues apace, with the complicity of many governments, including Australia, which provides aid and equipment to the Rajapaksa regime.
The Tamil homelands are under military occupation, with one soldier for every five people in the north and the east. In fact the Sri Lankan military has grown since the war finished, and now ranks as the biggest, per capita, in south Asia.
The Tamils endure torture, rape, disappearances and jailings on a daily basis. One man I interviewed for my new book, Sri Lanka’s secrets: how the Rajapaksa regime gets away with murder, told me of his experience in jail. “I was raped by whoever was on duty. They would butt cigarettes on my skin. They put hot iron bars on my back. A bottle was shoved in my anus. Bicycle spokes were pushed through my penis. A boy staying in my cell was taken away and shot. They said I was next.”
This is but one of thousands of cases of torture. No Tamil is safe, especially young men and women. Recently two girls, 11 and 9 years old, were raped by a sailor from a naval base near their village. A cover-up immediately went into operation, with the local military commander threatening the girls’ family from speaking out.
The military regularly seizes land from Tamils, and builds houses for Sinhalese settlers on it. More than 200 Hindu temples have been demolished and replaced by Buddhist stupas. Tamil Catholic women have undergone forced contraception and their menfolk are denied jobs. The rates of poverty and malnutrition among the Tamil population in the north and east are above 50 percent, while the island average is 27 percent.
What we are witnessing is genocide, yet the world averts its eyes. Worse, duplicitous leaders such as Tony Abbott ensure that Australia is actively complicit in it. One day it will become another shameful chapter in the dark history of this country.
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Trevor Grant is author of Sri Lanka’s secrets: how the Rajapaksa regime gets away with murder, Monash University Publishing.
Official book launch: Trevor Grant in conversation with Juila Burnside, 6:30pm Thurs, 14 August at Readings Bookshop, Cartlon.

Human cargo amid Tamil genocide

As Tony Abbott arrived in Colombo to attend CHOGM and to pay homage to a brutal dictatorship, his leaky boat diplomacy was fast taking on water. Abbott is a desperate man, his regional foreign policy driven by a domestic political slogan. “Stop the boats” is what he lives for. Any way will do: burn them, buy them, turn them back. Just, please, stop the boats.
In aid of this pathetically transparent policy, Abbott shamelessly appeases the Sri Lankan government, which is responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and ongoing genocide against millions of Tamil people.
He is isolated among the leaders of the most powerful Commonwealth nations. The Canadian prime minister refused to attend CHOGM in Sri Lanka, his foreign minister describing it as an accommodation of evil.
The Indian prime minister also pulled out, fearing a pre-election backlash from millions of people in the state of Tamil Nadu. And the prime minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, backed away from his original stance that everything is fine in Sri Lanka.
Cameron went, but the weight of public opinion had shifted so decisively that he was forced to face the reality and comment on it. Just before he left, he revealed that he had watched the frightening documentary No Fire Zone, which lays bare the war crimes of the Rajapaksa regime in murdering tens of thousands of innocent civilians at the end of the war in 2009.
Cameron described it as “chilling” and tweeted that he would have serious questions for Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Cameron was also forced into making the concession of a visit to the north to see how Tamils live under military occupation. This was a whirlwind, government-guided, handshake tour that failed to do anything to address the terror under which these people are forced to exist.
What all this meant, though, was that Tony Abbott was isolated. He was the lone ranger still saying that everything is hunky-dory in Sri Lanka.
When Canada pulled out, he had the cheek to admonish that government by saying that you don’t make new friends by rubbishing old ones or abandoning them.
As his major counterparts were either staying at home or making it clear they understood there was a dark and menacing side to Sri Lanka, Abbott was having none of it. He said he was “not inclined to go overseas and give other countries lectures”.
He would not even acknowledge the very obvious signs of Sri Lankan repression when Australian Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon was detained and questioned by intelligence operatives in Colombo while on a pre-CHOGM fact-finding trip that included meetings with some very brave, and now very frightened, pro-democracy activists.This was just a few days after two Australian journalists were arrested and deported while attending a conference on media freedom.
Rhiannon and her travelling companion, NZ Greens MP Jan Logie, who was also detained, issued a statement outlining information they received during discussions with Tamil politicians and pro-democracy activists.
It included details of the sexual abuse suffered by large numbers of women in the country. The statement named the commander of the Jaffna military base as one of the abusers: “Elected officials and members of civil society in Sri Lanka have provided us with examples of massive illegal land confiscation by the armed forces; people have been jailed and detained with regular disregard for legal rights; violence, often involving rape, of women and children with no police investigation of these crimes and on-going intimidation of media workers.
“Large numbers of women regularly suffer sexual abuse perpetrated by members of the Sri Lankan armed forces. One lawyer described to us the evidence collected about these crimes. In one case they have text messages from Major General Mahinda Hathurusingha to the ‘comfort women’ he frequently abuses.”
The Australian government’s position on Sri Lanka has once again been exposed as unprincipled. It ignores the torture and rape of innocent people, the abuse of “comfort women” by military officers, media repression and the persecution of thousands of people.
It ignores the deportations of Australian journalists for attending press freedom conferences and the harassment of an Australian senator who was collecting evidence about the rape of women and children by military officers.
It cosies up to and positively encourages the regime that does these things because it has decided that stopping asylum seeker boats from reaching our shores is the only thing that matters.
[Trevor Grant is a spokesperson for the Tamil Refugee Council and hosts the weekly Refugee Radio: <a href="http://www.3cr.org.au/refugeeradioshow">3cr.org.au/refugeeradioshow</a>.]

Abbott goes it alone at CHOGM

Labor MP Andrew Leigh’s latest book Battlers and billionaires: the story of inequality in Australia has reproduced some powerful facts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which condemn the system under which we live.
Since 1975, wages for the lowest paid workers have risen 15 percent, from $32,000 to $37,000. From 1993 to 2009, the average earnings of ASX 100 CEOs rose from $1 million, which was 17 times average earnings, to $3 million, 42 times average earnings.
Today the top 20 CEOs earn more than 100 times the average wage.
Leigh explores where this wealth goes, revealing that since the mid-1990s the number of helicopters in Australia has doubled, while the private jet fleet has tripled in the past decade.
These facts should send Leigh on a journey of exploration, to the heart of the problem and to questions about why such inequity is allowed to prosper.
However, Leigh’s examination hits a brick wall pretty quickly, and deviates into discussion about problems with parenting, with teachers and so on. It’s the usual self-imposed barrier that inhibits most writers from undertaking any genuine inquiry into capitalism.
After the facts, there are a lot of words. But there is no deeper political examination of the stark regression in the distribution of wealth in Australia, which, as he points out, is back to the levels of 100 years ago.
Any scholar would surely want to go further, but this would mean questioning the very basis of the system. In turn, that would mean asking difficult questions about the institutions that uphold the system, who supports them and who benefits from them.
Intellectual rigour dissipates so quickly because, in the face of such overwhelming evidence, no one can defend the obvious inequity of the capitalist system. In the end, even for the most inquiring minds, it becomes a matter of faith, not reason.
Leigh’s membership of the class that gave him an entree to the exclusive James Ruse High School in Sydney, to Harvard University and to Labor preselection dictates the parameters in which he must work. Anything outside them threatens the comfortable existence of those who flourish in his world on the backs of low paid workers.
In the end, he is another intellectual who writes and speaks about the injustices in this world while remaining wilfully blind to the real reasons behind the sufferings of those people trying to exist on $37,000 (or less) a year.
Leigh represents everything that is wrong about our education and parliamentary systems. People of his ilk have always been potentially more damaging to the working class than conservatives because they are promoted as caring advocates.
Not all workers are fooled by these snake-oil merchants. Many understand the deception behind so-called “Labor values”, and how ALP politicians use this slogan to garner votes only to carry on serving their masters in the banks and mining companies.
Realising they have been left without an alternative at the ballot box, and alienated by the election charade, working class people punish Labor in one of two ways. They vote for the likes of John Howard or Tony Abbott every now and then, or, as has been shown by the increasing drop-out rate on polling day, ignore the process altogether.
Leigh’s observations about inequality in books that those on $30,000 a year can’t afford to buy do little more than make him a nice supplement to his backbencher’s base salary, which, by the way, has risen 28 per cent in the past 18 months to $195,000 per annum.
[Battlers and billionaires is published by Black Inc.]

The new inequality

Australian cricket’s six-year search for the next Shane Warne has gone through a conga line of promising prospects who disappear as quickly as they emerge. Fawad Ahmed, 31, an asylum seeker from Pakistan, is the latest leg spinner to have this crushing burden thrust upon him. He’s no Warne, but he’s a talented bowler who was selected in the Australian squad for the one-day series in England in September.
At first glance, it’s a feel-good story about big-hearted Australia welcoming a desperate, frightened human being with open arms, and who is about to repay his adopted country by taking precious English wickets.
As usual, the reality is more complicated. Without being lucky enough to have the powerful lobby of Cricket Australia to plead his case, Ahmed would now be back in Pakistan, fearing that he would end up like a friend and fellow cricketer from his homeland – tortured, murdered and left in pieces in a bag.
Pakistan-born Ahmed fled his homeland in 2010 after receiving constant death threats from religious fanatics because he was coaching women cricketers and promoting women’s education and health. “They terrorised me, they made death threats to me”, he said in an interview with Melbourne media earlier this year. He spoke of the death of his friend, Nauman Habib. “We played together. He was a good friend of mine. They kidnapped him. After a few days somebody found him in a bag in pieces.”
Ahmed also told his story to the Immigration Department several times but, after being initially rejected and then failing through two stages of appeal, he was told to prepare for deportation last September.
As he made clear, the only reason he managed to avoid deportation was the actions of officials at his district cricket club, Melbourne University. They called on James Sutherland, a former bowler at the club and current CEO of Cricket Australia, who no doubt used his access to the halls of power in Canberra to lobby for Ahmed.
It was a successful campaign. The then minister for immigration, Chris Bowen, used his ministerial discretion to grant Ahmed a protection visa late last year. Bowen’s successor, Brendan O’Connor, fast-tracked Ahmed’s citizenship application in time for him to play for Australia in England.
Cricket aside, the Ahmed case has done much to highlight the ability of the government to do one thing and say another on refugee policy. As O’Connor was welcoming Ahmed as a new citizen at a ceremony at the MCG a couple of months ago, and personally validating his claim that he was a victim of persecution, his federal cabinet colleague Bob Carr was on a media blitz to signal a tougher policy on refugee applications. Carr claimed, among other things, that all recent asylum seekers to Australia were economic migrants.
The most recent Immigration Department figures show that 91 percent of asylum seekers arriving by boat are granted refugee status. The figure was 92 percent for Pakistanis. “When it comes to these threats on your life, you don’t have options”, Ahmed said, emphasising that economic reasons, including cricket, had nothing to do with his flight to Australia. “I just came here to live as a normal human being, as a safe human being.”
Carr has not backed off his campaign of demonisation against refugees, continuing to claim that people following the same path as Ahmed were getting an easy ride under a lenient assessment system, the same system that, but for the high-powered intervention of the elite cricket establishment, would have sent Ahmed back to the terror from which he fled. Had a tougher approach on refugee assessments been in place a year ago, our “next Shane Warne” could very easily have ended up in pieces in a bag, not in an Australian cap.
[Trevor hosts Refugee Radio at 3CR in Melbourne. Visit <a href="http://www.3cr.org.au/refugeeradioshow">3cr.org.au/refugeeradioshow</a> to listen to the podcasts]

From asylum to Ashes

For newly arrived Christmas Island asylum seekers, many of whom have endured life-threatening journeys, the fear and trepidation do not end when they reach land.
The fear of drowning on the high seas, dying of thirst or being eaten by sharks is nothing compared to the pre-dawn knock on the door of their room, with barked orders from a guard to “Get ready”.
According to Shalini (all the names of asylum seekers in this story have been changed), an English-speaking Tamil asylum seeker who phoned me from Christmas Island recently, it happened to three families in detention in the space of three days, all of whom claim to have fled Sri Lanka because of torture and intimidation from the Sri Lankan military or CID.
“The guards come at 5 a.m. and tell you to pack up. They stand at the door and watch you, not letting you speak to anyone or say goodbye to friends. They then take you away”, she said.
The Tamil Refugee Council has learned that one family – a husband, wife and two children – which had been sent back from Christmas Island to Colombo last month have been persecuted and abused since they returned. A spokesman for the TRC, Aran Mylvaganam, who has been in touch with relatives of the family, said the children have been allowed to live with relatives, but the parents were taken straight to jail and kept there. “They have been bashed with brooms and wooden sticks regularly during interrogation”, said Mylvaganam.
“It is always the same mode of operation. They are accused of having links with the Tamil Tigers and are bashed and tortured until they sign something and then pay a bribe to get out of jail.”
‘Screening out’
As asylum seekers continue to come to Australia in increasing numbers, the government’s reaction has been to send many more back – often, according to lawyers and refugee advocates, after very brief interviews and no proper access to legal assistance.
 These advocates describe this “screening out” process, and the failure to explain to asylum seekers their rights, especially about access to lawyers, as an illegal breach of the Refugee Convention. They say that many of these people are being deported to danger. According to Immigration Department statistics, more than 1200 asylum seekers from Sri Lanka have been sent back, at least 900 involuntarily, this year. Recent department figures also show that more than 90 per cent of arrivals by boat were assessed to be genuine in their claims for refugee status.
This puts the lie to government and opposition claims that most asylum-seekers are “economic migrants”. It also explains why the government’s much trumpeted policy of deterrence has failed to stop the boats. As advocates say, terrorised people will always opt for a leaky boat over a torture chamber or jail cell. 
Mylvaganam has spoken recently to several Tamil asylum seekers on Christmas Island, who rang him to express their fears about deportation. Pari, 25, comes from Jaffna and fled after his uncle, brother and brother-in-law went missing and then he was arrested on suspicion of being part of the Tamil Tigers. He said Australian immigration officials interviewed him for 10 minutes.
“I wasn’t given an opportunity to prove that I’m a genuine refugee”, he said “At the start of the interview, the officials advised me that if I failed it, I would need to cooperate with whatever decision they make. They made me sign a paper without reading out the contents to me.” Durga is a widowed grandmother in her late 40s from Trincomalee. Her three daughters and her nine-year-old grandson are with her. She said her husband was in the Tamil Tigers before they were married. He has been missing since being taken away in a white van in 1997. She has been harassed by CID officers.
“Last year, around October, the army took two of my daughters into custody for 24 hours and sexually assaulted them. When they came another time I told my daughters to hide. They took me instead. They slapped me and beat me but they didn’t do any sexual torture. They just talked sexually to me.
“I’m very scared about my daughters’ lives if they are sent back to Sri Lanka. I have seen many people being sent back whose lives are at risk. I don’t trust the Australian government. It seems to me they are randomly sending people back without checking their background.” 
The minister for immigration, Brendan O’Connor, has denied several times this year that asylum seekers with genuine claims for protection were being deported. 
He has easy access to the media. Deported asylum seekers don’t.

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