کابل پرس

زندگی ویکی رایلی با رنج، غم و اندوه پناهجویان گره خورده بود!

2012-09-11T09:00:00Z

ویکی رایلی دوست بومیان استرالیا، مدافع سرسخت پناهجویان و همکار کابل پرس^? روز گذشته در حالی که سوار بر دوچرخه اش به محل کارش می رفت، دچار حادثه ی ترافیکی شد و در سن 50 سالگی از این جهان رخت بربست. او به کارش عشق می ورزید و درد و رنج پناهجو را درک و لمس می کرد.

یکی از فعالیت های مهم ویکی رایلی در دو سال اخیر گردآوری استعدادهای پناهجویان بود و با همه ی توان آنان را تشویق می کرد تا فعالیت کنند و صنایع دستی، نقاشی و سایر کارهای هنری تولید کنند. ویکی رایلی سعی می کرد از هر استعدادی استفاده کند و با برگزاری چند نمایشگاه از جمله نمایشگاه در سالن دادگاه عالی استرالیا، مقامات قضایی این کشور را متوجه پناهجو کند تا آنان مقابل تصمیم های خودخواهانه و غیر انسانی مقامات حکومتی بیاستند.
یاد و خاطره ی این مبارز خستگی ناپذیر حقوق بشر گرامی باشد.

صفحه فیس بوک ویکی رایلی

Hazara teenagers wasting their youth in detention in Indonesia

Vikki Riley | Darwin, Australia — 2012-04-16T05:41:36Z

Young Murtaza Ali, just sweet sixteen, is like any other teenage boy. A mad Manchester United soccer fan, computer savvy and keen to go to university, he has a bright future ahead of him. Yet his mother frets day and night in Quetta, Pakistan because her son is trapped midway

Murtaza Ali

to a new life in Australia, locked up with one hundred and fifty other Hazaras in Tanjung Pinang Detention Centre in Indonesia, just 40 kilometres south of Singapore. Many, like him are what are referred to as unaccompanied minors. He's been there six months after being arrested at Indonesia's Batam airport on a flight arranged in Quetta that he was told who lead him to a boat that would take him to Christmas Island where he could apply for a Protection Visa to live safely in Australia.

Born in Uruzgan province, where Australian troops are currently engaged in fighting and containing insurgent Taliban groups, he fled the province as a four year old with his parents when Pashtun warlords stepped up their attacks on local Hazaras there and had been living in Quetta until his mother urged him to try his luck in arriving in Australia. Historically, Murtaza is following in his ancestors' footsteps. The pogroms carried out by Amir Abdul Rahman khan a century ago whereby up to 44,000 Hazaras were displaced from their homelands in favour of Pashtun settlers saw a mass migration to the then Persian city of Mashed and the then British India's Quetta.
Those Hazara survivors who couldn't escape were captured for the auction block while their wives and daughters were often relegated to the harems of the Amir's Pashtun generals and supporters.

In these times however, suicide bombers in Quetta mean a further mass migration to Indonesia by plane then a people smuggler paid to get them to Australia, hopefully still alive. In between there is the detention centre industry run by the Indonesian military and police, with some centres allegedly funded by Australian international aid in a game of dirty politics aimed at keeping the numbers of asylum seekers arriving illegally at bay.

Officially there are six Rumah Detensi centres and given that Indonesia still practices torture as a sanctioned form of political control, some of these centres such as Pontianak in Kalimantan have seen Hazara minors not only tortured but killed in a brutal fashion with electric shocks, cigarette burns and beatings. Last December dozens drowned on a boat which capsized near Java. In June 2010 Australian media reported that staff at Tanjung Pinang detention Centre were using Tasers, or electric stunguns on the Hazara inmates for asking questions about their rights or requesting to see UNHCR officials. The leader of the Greens, Senator Bob Brown, described the allegations made by asylum seekers at Tanjung Pinang as "very disturbing"and called on the Australian Federal Government to provide a full account of how Australian tax payer dollars are spent and ensure conditions inside the centres overseas are humane and protect basic human rights. So far no report has emerged and the numbers of asylum seekers detained in the centres continues to grow while the attacks on Hazaras in Quetta and Afghanistan are sustained.

Murtaza's story echoes other Hazara teenage boys who travel without a parent thousands of kilometres in order to claim some kind of future for themselves. His mother widowed and his three siblings living with her scraping together an existence from house cleaning others' homes, he cannot enrol in a public school or university because he is not Pakistani and his only option is a private educational institution which costs money the family simply doesn't have. As a Shia and a Hazara he also can't attend religious schools so a life of unemployment and illiteracy awaits those who remain.

Yet he is eager and passionate about learning English “I want to study now in the detention centre” he tells me, although there are no resources, books or teachers. Using social media such as Facebook to maintain daily contact to the outside world is about all the Hazara teenagers can do. Despite after finally getting a visit from UNHCR officials who issued him with a card social media won't get him out of detention nor will it help him evade detention once he makes it to Australia. He seems incredulous when I tell him that detention awaits him and his friends if he succeeds on boarding a boat to Christmas Island or that his age will not prevent him being locked up while his claims for refugee status are assessed.

The food is tolerable but the bare minimum. Chicken and rice one day, beef and rice the next. The constant worry about the situation at home gnaws away at Murtaza's nerves as his Facebook alerts bring up one bloody image after another in the past week's killings of Hazaras on the street by suicide bombers who just like him, are young, desperate and uneducated. It is ironic that the bombers are also often teenagers, albeit Pashtun, who are brainwashed by religious teachers into thinking they will ascend to heaven after killing members of the Hazara minority. Unmarried like Murtaza but with a head full of false promises of endless virgins and celestial prosperity. Murtaza for now has escaped that world and poised somewhere between in limbo while the Australian government uses him and others as statistics to win votes and the Indonesians use him as a chip in the lucrative industry of incarceration and punishment.

Inmates pass the time with board games .

UNHCR map of the Rumah Detensi network network of immigration detention centres in Indonesia where hundreds of Hazaras remain incarcerated. Advocates believe the Australian government helps fund many of these centres via so called “foreign aid” programs.

Dormitories

Shower facilities used by 35 people

The words of court scribe Faiz Mohammad Katib come alive in contemporary Afghan history

Ali Zadah , Vikki Riley | Darwin, Australia — 2012-03-24T08:40:17Z

The first few pages of Katib's opus Siraj al Tawarikh, or Lamp of History, published around 1902/3

With the beginning of Amir Abdul Raman Khan's rule in Afghanistan in 1880 the social and political persecution of Hazaras began. Brutal attacks began on Hazarajat , immediately transforming a calm and peaceful region into a massacre site and grab for land. The Hazaras were eliminated especially in south and eastern part of the country and the royal decrees allowing mass murder, looting and the suppression of Hazara political and economic rights continued until his death. By the end of his rule in 1901 one hundred and twenty thousand families had been wiped off the map.

His successor, Habib Ullah Khan, was more magnanimous in that his crimes were allowed to be documented. He employed a court writer who became the first witness to recording the ethnic upheavals that left the original inhabitants of Afghanistan as landless peasants forever on the run.

“
“Some children and decedents of of Daru ancestors came to Kabul and request the Emirate to gave them the fields, farms and plantation in the village of Chora which belongs to Hazara people and the great Amir accepted the request and assigned Dost Mohammad Khan Ayshak Aqasi of Prince Sardar Habiballuh Khan who is from the same tribe as the head of these people to implement the decree. In illuminated script here is the decree: The plantations and farms of Hazara people who were living in the Chora district should be measured and for every male three acres and for every female half of it has to be given... they should have a comfortable life and also the government has to provide seeds, cows and machinery which are needed in agriculture for one year. For every male and female and for every child and elder every month 303 quarters of wheat and different kinds of grains, of a weight used in Kabul, distributed from the government warehouse. Dost Mohammad Khan and the Daru descendents should occupy the area and make Hazaras work under them , make the Hazaras leave their residence, confiscate their lands and force them to leave despite the fact that they have paid taxes on those plantations and farm fields and give their lands to Pashtuns.... And from that day Dost Mohammad Khan used all his force to evict the Hazaras and bring in different tribes of Pashtuns. Up until 1902 almost 400,000 Hazaras were forced out of their homeland and their houses, from Qurb of Kandahar to Mulistan, Hazaras of Behsod and Saypaaye Daizange, Nelie, Daikundi .The length and width 150,000 of the Daikhutahi Daichopan, Daymere and Dayfolad has been given to Pashtuns. 100-120 Hazara families have fled and made it safely from Afghanistan to foreign countries like Khurasan of Iran , Turkistan of Russia and Bokhara, Punjab in India and Baluchistan.””

Faiz Mohammad Katib, 1862-1931, an ethnic Hazara born in Qarabagh, Ghazni, who went on to be Afghanistan's greatest social historian and chronicler of Amir Habib Ullah Khan's brutal rule. He was a member of what became known as Junbish-i Mashrutiyat or The Constitutionalist Movement

And so it goes on to describe the great injustices committed during Amir Habib Ullah Khan's reign of Afghanistan in Faiz Mohammad Katib's three volume history of Afghanistan, Siraj al Tawarikh.

Hazara lands, he writes, were taken from them and given to the nomadic Kuchi Pashtun tribes and others and the people were prevented from leaving the country and emigrating.

In Faiz Mohammad Katib's text he notes; “A few families, of whom their affluence was given to Pashtuns, were going to British India for assistance, but en route were Royal guards Qhandow Khan and Marza Sahab Khan, who had the order that if any Hazara passed through the border the guards of that border would be hanged and the Hazara familieswere put in Kandahar jail until they died.”

Imprisoning Hazaras inside Afghanistan and preventing contact with the outside world was a strategy used to disempower the Hazara people then, as it is now. The tyranny of the Karzai government and the Pashtun warlords who continue to suppress them is consistent with events of a century and more ago.

In the second volume of his work Faiz Mohammad Kateb writes about two individual Hazaras, “Hassan and Khudadad who were living in Kandahar became sick and went to seek the British government's medical care and became well. When the ruler of Kandahar found out on the 21st day of Ramadan he ordered that they should be taken to Herat and be given to the ruler of Herat to imprison them until their death.''

The attitude that Hazaras are second class citizens in their own country survives today and
the present government is also following the same policies of the past against Hazaras but in a different shape and form and in a somwhat more complex way. In 2012 the residents of areas close to Oruzgan, Ghazni and Maidan Wardak provinces are not safe for Hazaras.
People of Daikondi province, after nearly 200 years of systematic and continual murder of their people, are forced to leave their houses. After Daikondi became a new province, was briefly calm until separation from the Gizab district in 2006. The geographic structure was damaged. Mirroring the situation in 1890, as Katib writes, “Uruzgan and the suppressed people of Gizab facing Abdul Rahmani threats.”

The geographical location of Gizab and the residents of Shahrastan , Gajran and other districts makes Daikondi province suffer perpetual insecurity due to the proximity of Oruzgan province. The residents of Daikondi are seeing terrorists, land occupiers, the narcotics mafia and weapons moving through the Gizab district into Daikondi province .The Afghan security forces are new, mostly uneducated and hungry.The security forces can't defend violence against the people of Daikondi; they couldn't before nor are able to now, despite Western involvement.

In May 2011 two teachers, Sakina Wafai and Ahmad Wafai of Ghaswan High school in Alqah district of Daikondi province were killed. Although their stories were told many times, no action has officially been taken to prosecute those who committed this act of violence and no one has been charged. According to one resident, one member of the Afghan police was also involved. Taliban make regular public announcements that threaten that boys and girls aren't allowed to go to school and they have told about the consequences of it : murder.
Through the radio of Daikondi, the Taliban media unit announced they had beheaded seven people and threw their bodies in river. Also two years ago thirty nine students had been poisoned in a school in Daikondi. In Kjran district eight police and many residents were killed in horrific circumstances by the Taliban and the people that defended them have been forced to flee.

A Hazara child in Daikondi

Written or oral threats to families by the Taliban forces hundreds to abandon their homes. Taliban and their supporters in Tamzan, 20km from Nelie in the centre of Daikondi province had the control of large swathes of the region. There is always news on Daikondi radio that many passengers on the way from Kabul to Kandahar and Herat have been killed indiscriminately. The news from Ariana TV recently reported that twenty travellers on their way to Herat have been killed by Taliban; they beheaded them and their bodies were thrown on the side of the road. The main factor to note in this story is the Karzai government's decision to give away Gizab province to Taliban leaders to control. Life is very difficult in Daikondi province.Apart from threat to kill scenarios, lack of communication facilities, roads, lack of electricity, lack of access to medical services, poverty, bad weather and heavy snowing in the winter as well as the existence of corruption in the local administration and the judicial system means it is a lawless zone. Lack of schools mean illiteracy reigns supreme.

Hazara children in Daikondi

Despite the fact that the government is not addressing high level of poverty in areas where Hazaras live, it is expanding and strengthening Taliban's jurisdiction in those neighbourhoods such is Tamzan and Gizab, Daikondy, Kabul-Ghazni, Maidan-Behsod, Bamian-Parwan and others. The ever present Kuchi tribes are there also as the handmaidens of misery, the pawns in Karzai's fabric of centralised control.

There is no mystery as to why Hazaras continue to flee Afghanistan to Australia, Iran, Norway, Italy, England. Neither is it a secret as to why Hamid Karzai has signed deportation agreements with these countries. Although in Australia's case no Hazara is currently facing deportation back to Kabul.

For Dari readers; The entire original text by Faiz Mohammad Katib is viewable here: http://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0009_download.pdf

Back to the primitive past: Pashtuns stoning, trampling with horses and burning their victims with impunity

Kamran Mir Hazar, Vikki Riley | Darwin, Australia — 2012-01-31T06:23:18Z

A new documentary made by Hazara director Ali Mohammadi, seen by Kabul Press^? shows a hitherto previously unseen dimension to the spectre of Pashtun Kuchis crimes against Hazaras in Behsood and Daimirdad district of Maidan province in Afghanistan in 2007. In this 48 minute documentary, Hazara captives are shown to be stoned by Pashtun Kuchis who then rode horses on the victims' bodies and finally incinerated by petrol.

Shockingly, the documentary also shows Hazara properties and homes looted and burned by Kuchis, when thousands of Hazara families attempt to flee to neighboring provinces like Bamian and Kabul. This is 2007, not the 1970s when Pol Pot was internationally condemned for enacting similar atrocities in Cambodia.

Also featured in the film are members of a government investigative delegation appointed by Hamid Karzai to visit the scene of these crimes, but instead of hearing testimonies from the victims themselves are seen defending the Kuchi perpetrators. Fully armed Kuchis stand behind them alongside Taliban symbols such as their white flag.

For more than a century, Kuchi Pashtuns have persecuted the ethnic Hazaras, going back to 1880 when Afghan (Pashtun) dictator “Abdurrahman” claimed power. After the defeat of British troops that year and their subsequent retreat in 1881, Abdul Rahman Khan, the cousin of the previous despot Amir Shir Ali Khan returned from exileand immediately declared himself the new Amir, using his influence as a wedge power between Tzarist Russia and British colonial India. His first strategy was to rule over all ethno-linguistic groups and Islamisize them in the process by enacting fierce pogroms on horseback across the country. Historian Iraji Bashiri writes “To begin with, Abdur Rahman decided to settle the affairs of the 15 tribes (340,000 members) of the Shi'ite Hazarah who occupied the Hazarajat. Between AD 1229 and 1447, thirteen of the tribes had recognized governmental authority but not the 44,000 strong Uruzgan tribe. In fact, once Abdur Rahman Khan set out to reform the affairs of the kingdom, including the affairs of the tribes, the Uruzgan tribe rose in revolt. Frustrating the Khan's attempt at segregating the elders of the tribe and taking census for tax purposes, they created untoward confusion and anarchy in the land. In retaliation, the Khan fielded 100,000 troops and tribal levies against the Uruzgan. He also incited his Sunni followers to wage a Jihad against the Shi'ite Hazarahs. Even more than that, he took the Hazarahs' pastures and flocks and divided them among the Durrani and Ghilzai tribal confederations. As a result, by 1893, most of the Hazarah were enslaved. The rest went into exile in Iran.”1.

We do know now that the Hazaras indeed fought back, but the punishment was severe. As a reward for suppressing their resistance, Pashtuns were given land in Uruzgan province. Historian Beverley Male writes that in addition , “Hazara pastures, their main source of livelihood, were seized by the state and sold to the Pashtun Nomads….and together with the destruction and dislocation of the war led to the dispersal and dispossession of the Hazaras”2.

The involvement of British political and military aids in the last decade of the nineteenth century saw Abdul Rahman Khan collude further with the Pashtuns and he was promised Hazara lands from Kandahar, Zabul, Helmand and Oruzgan to Daikundi, Ghor and Bamian. Tens of thousands Pashtun tribal men and Kuchis who lived in what is today Pakistan ,joined the army and captured Hazara lands in what was clearly a British led ethnic invasion of sovereign Hazara soil. Not too dissimilar to their overtaking of Zulu land in South Africa or Aboriginal land in Australia, by using an outside ethnic group to do the dirty work of disposing of the original inhabitants of Hazara provinces with rich arable soil. Royal decrees were issued by the Amir, giving them land titles and ownership over Hazara lands. According to historic documents over 60% of Hazaras were massacred and thousands where sold as slaves, while according to databases on indigenous minorities Hazaras made up nearly 67% of the total population of the state before the 19th century.

Systematic crimes against the Hazaras have continued since that time. During the Islamic Emirate of Taliban, Kuchis had an open hand to attack Hazaras , loot their homes and kidnap their women.
In the last decade, after the fall of Taliban regime, the Pashtunist government of Hamid Karzai has facilitated the continuation of Pahtun nomads, the Kuchis , as they resurrect the pogroms and the genocidal behavior against Hazaras. The government support to the Kuchis is totally coordinated with the Taliban.

Mr. Mohammadi's documentary is titled The Drum of Democracy and these systematic crimes and terrorist attacks happen when over

hundred and fifty thousand international troops, from Australia and the USA, are in Afghanistan apparently to stop terrorism. Although by now it is clear that those troops are marching in on a different drum beat to the tune of millions of dollars propping up the Karzai regime whose agenda is not on the same page as Australian Prime minister Julia Gillard or President Obama. Still the Australians and American servicemen die at the hands of those they are there to “assist” them move Afghanistan on into a transitional democracy or so the hype goes. Night after night on Australian television viewers are reminded why their sons are there, “defending democracy” like some kind of advertising mantra for an ongoing soap opera which sees young guys from Darwin, Adelaide and Hobart returned in flag draped coffins.

Current attacks on Hazaras are not limited only to Pashtun Kuchis attacks. Taliban block the roads to Hazaras, target them by suicide bombers and the Karzai government is putting more pressure on Hazaras by the systematic discrimination in Hazara populated areas. The Hazara asylum seekers in detention in Australia constantly have to prove to their interrogators this long and bloody history which has caused them to flee in the first instance. Yet immigration officials say that Afghanistan is safe for Hazaras to return to and as we publish this story a young Hazara awaits an Australian High Court decision appealing his deportation on these very grounds. Karzai's regime may have all the trappings of a Western style coalition of groups in consensus but that's just in the photo opportunities. Pashtunwali, the famous “way of the Pashtuns' as it is euphemistically called, is still the dominant code of conduct that governs social and cultural behavior in Afghanistan. These customs, centuries old, overrule human rights codes of conduct the rest of the world maintains as a benchmark since the formation of the UN in 1948, regardless of whether individual countries like Australia ignore them or not. They remain as principles to adhere to, and the Refugee Convention clearly states that ethnic persecution is a basis for refugee status.(see 3 below for example of code).

In Pakistan the same Pashtun terrorist groups and their allies are revisiting the contemporary history of Hazaras by spilling blood. Deporting Hazaras back to this situation is not only a form of hypocrisy on the part of Australia and now Norway, but an indictable crime in itself.

1. http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/Afghanistan/AfghanOverview.html

2. Revolutionary Afghanistan, a reapparaisal by Beverley Male, Published byPalgrave Macmillan (May 1982)

3. For example, Badal (justice) - To seek justice or take revenge against the wrongdoer. This applies to injustices committed yesterday or 1000 years ago if the wrongdoer still exists. Justice in Pashtun lore needs elaborating: even a mere taunt (or "Paighor") is regarded as an insult - which can only usually be redressed by shedding of the taunter's blood (and if he isn't available, then his next closest male relation). This in turn leads to a blood feud that can last generations and involve whole tribes with the loss of hundreds of lives. Normally blood feuds in this all male dominated setup are then settled in a number of ways

FROM THE BOATS TEARS COME

Vikki Riley | Darwin, Australia — 2011-12-20T05:58:38Z

Three days after the asylum seeker boat incident off the coast off Indonesia fifteen people have been spotted on a remote island beach bringing the tally of total survivors to a meagre forty seven only. Young Esmat Adine, a young Hazara man, is one of fifteen Hazaras he knows of who survived the tragedy off the coast of Java, Indonesia, in the wee hours of Saturday morning when a boat fit for only one hundred was packed liked sardines with two hundred and fifty asylum seekers, eighty per cent whom were Hazara from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Esmat, rescued by local fishermen who braved the Monsoon swell to save lives is now in a hotel room onshore and says that many of the dead included teenage boys from Quetta, or UAMS as they are known by the Department of Immigration here in Australia – unaccompanied minors. The people smugglers who took up to the equivalent of $5000 AUS are named as Sayed Abbas, Mohammad Ali Chotta and Ismail Haji , all Hazara themselves. According to Australian media back in August 2011, Sayed Abbas was to be arrested by Australian Federal Police and extradited to Australia for trial. The Jakarta Globe reported on August 27 that he had indeed been arrested by Indonesian police with Inspector General Sutarman stating “Abbas is now being interrogated by the National Police's anti-people-smuggling task force while awaiting his upcoming extradition to Australia.”

However that event did not happen, either in a diplomatic cock up between Indonesia and Australia or suspected corruption within Indonesian circles which has seen former members of the Indonesian military involved in such operations at a higher level. Abbas has lived in Jakarta for ten years in the Kebon Sirih district of Jakarta, home to asylum seekers and smugglers alike. It is no secret that Indonesian military control or operate detention centres across the islands from Kupang to Makassar. In Kupang alone there are hundreds of asylum seekers languishing in detention subject to violence, disease and starvation. Foreign media, including mainstream press in Canada are blaming Australian policies for the tragedy. Asylum seekers are currently pawns in a political chessboard played out by the two major parties. Despite figures released showing more than 60,000 visa overstayers from the UK, USA and Malaysia going unchecked, the “boatpeople” as they are called, still remain the Achille's Heel in Australia's immigration policies. Caught between a rock and a hard place, the Hazaras fleeing Afghanistan and Pakistan end up in limbo in Indonesia once they arrive, forced to either remain illegally or risk their lives to journey to their ultimate destination. Yet the irony is clear as day. Indonesia welcomes all who fly into its various cities and islands but then acts as a punitive Islamic state by incarcerating those caught in public places or on boats. Then when asylum seekers are intercepted and detained by Australian authorities they usually spend at least a year in detention. Each person makes $90,000AUS profit for their gaolers, the British company named SERCO.

Sayed Abbas in August 2011 (The Australian newspaper)

Hazara in detention wins prestigious Human Rights Art Award in Darwin, Australia

Vikki Riley | Darwin, Australia — 2011-12-09T16:14:47Z

For the first time, a Hazara has won the annual Human Rights Art Award in Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory, presented by Mrs Tessa Pauling, the wife of the Chief Administrator, representative of Queen Elizabeth here in Darwin. Chosen from a large pool of entries that included aboriginal artists and contemporary painters and sculptors as well as other artists in detention, the exhibit My Dream Boat by Javad Javadi was the show stopper of the two works he submitted with the judges unanimously declaring him the outright winner.

My Dream Boat by Javad Javadi

Javad Javadi is a plasterer from Bamiyan Province in Afghanistan although he hasn't been home for more than thirty years, having fled as a child to Iran like many Hazaras from the region who feared the murderous Pashtun warlords who roamed the region and eventually took power under the Taliban government, destroying the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. In 2009 he and his family found themselves in Quetta, Pakistan, after the Iranian government evicted Hazaras there in exile and it was then that he fled to journey to Australia via Indonesia . There he boarded a fishing boat, was intercepted in Australian waters and then began what is now almost two years in detention , currently in Darwin. During that time he has become a prolific and accomplished artist and model maker of astonishing skill. His attention to detail and ornamentation is legendary and his work can be enjoyed by all age groups as they exude a timeless beauty and sense of adventure and wonder. Using felt, icy pole sticks, dishcloths, discarded plastic containers, magazines and glue this boat is a cross between an Indonesian fishing boat and an Australian ferry,updated with GPS satellite,radar unit, beds, rest rooms and eating areas. Territory and ACT flags adorn the top alongside aboriginal flag colours. A quote is placed on the helm:

“Nests can't be made in the cages. I wish I were free. I would do a lot more than this creativity”

Interior of Captain's cabin with GPS laptop and radar navigation

His other exhibit, My dream house is a combination of a traditional home in Afghanistan and an Australian home complete with swimming pool, car,garage, towels on the clothes line, neat grass and people inside. Made from balsa wood, dishcloths, felt, icy pole and matchsticks and plastic, all recycled here to astonishing effect. Trees made from earbuds. Rooftop picnic tables with Afghan carpets . Like the Dream Boat many hours of precise positioning of small objects and a complex level of juxtaposition certainly won over the hearts of many small children at the event who could relate to the narrative at work in the model. Home ownership may be still part of the Australian dream for some, and that certainly includes Hazara asylum seekers who risk their lives in boats to come here in the hope of one day bringing their wives and children to settle in a safe country where the opportunity of literacy and a life without violence is golden. One can only imagine a real life scale model of a house for Mr Javadi and his family in the future as an Australian resident with incredible skills to offer our society.

My Dream House by Javad Javadi

STRANDED IN KUPANG

Vikki Riley | Darwin, Australia — 2011-09-07T05:08:18Z

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