Protecting People not Borders, or Vica Versa?

I had the opportunity recently to see the documentary “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” http://deepblueseafilm.com on its recent National Tour. I found viewing it a confronting experience, with its interviews with asylum seekers in Indonesia, because I had to watch the faces and listen to the voices of real people, whose fate I was to learn at the end of the documentary. At the end of the documentary I wandered out into the sunshine, wiping the moisture from my eyes reflecting on the meaning and moral significance of the term “border protection” in current political debate. Why aren’t we concerned with protecting people rather than borders? Why do “borders” need “protecting” anyway?

There is I know a verbal ambiguity in the phrase “border protection”. In current political rhetoric it carries the connotation that borders protect us, the citizens of Australia, though exactly what we are being protected from is never made explicit. The phrasing suggests that if borders are crossed by people without our prior permission, the border is therefore violated, and we as Australian citizens are vulnerable to some unspecified threat. What damage is done, or threatened by the crossing of the border is never clearly explained, merely hinted at.

This ambiguity in the usage of the term “border protection” has a whiff of the sacred surrounding the phrase. The “border” offers “protection” and at the same time must not be violated and therefore stands in need of protection. The ambiguity is consistent with the attachment of a sacral character. You can’t define the sacred or it will no longer be sacred and lose its power. How are then to ‘protect’ the “border’, and at the same time ourselves?

Lo we have solved the problem, and protected the sacredness of the border from profanation by redefining what counts as the border of Australia for certain categories of persons, specifically those seeking asylum. It has been decreed by the passing of a law that the borders for certain purposes cannot be crossed by asylum seekers, because the map has been drawn to exclude Australia from having a border that asylum seekers could cross, while at the same time the border for all other purposes remains in existence, and is therefore “protected”. Ye verily this is as great a magic as ever has been exercised by the wizards, the defenders of the sacred character of the state, known as lawyers. The border is protected and its sacred character is saved from profanation by those who might seek to cross it in search of asylum from persecution.

Borders are clearly of human invention, though attracting the character of the sacred in political rhetoric, and media commentary. They are without feelings, passions and bodies. Asylum seekers on the other hand are of flesh and blood, capable of being killed, tortured, starved, made to feel fear and pressed to act against conscience with respect to matters of political belief, faith commitment and practice.

Why do we wish to “protect” borders, or be protected by borders, which are when stripped of their sacral character simply legal creations set up to assist human flourishing and well being at the expense of causing suffering to actual human beings by not welcoming those in search of freedom from persecution?

Christians and church communities need to answer this question with reference to the life and teaching of Jesus if they wish to give substance to their identification as his followers.

Who or what would Jesus “protect”? A reading of the Gospels with an eye for this theme makes it abundantly clear that Jesus did not have much time for ‘borders’ whether they were of geographical, legal, or religious character where they were inimical to human well being and healing. Jesus had much to say, of a critical character about the privileging of laws at the expense of human beings under the cover of religion. The Sabbath he observed was made for humanity not humanity for the Sabbath. He commented pungently on the use of legal definitions by the well off to enable them to reinforce that privilege and he regularly transgressed the borders that that were used to keep society “safe” from “dangerous” and “different” people.

For Christians to take a stand on this issue will probably result in our coming put into conflict with a majority of Australians for whom the sacredness of borders overrides other moral claims that arise for Christians from their commitment to following Jesus. The call to discipleship means that we cannot get out of difficult situations by ignoring his teaching.

There is another consideration here that reinforces the point I am trying to make that can be expressed in terms of the primary identity for Christians that arises from their baptism. Baptism inducts us into a community broader than the nation state. The borders of the community into which we enter through baptism are not coterminous with those however legally defined and manipulated of the Australian state. Immigration and refugees admit of no policy package that will solve the problem. The issues are structural and rooted deeply in the dynamics of global capitalism and the exercise of neo-imperial power by a range of nations.

The Christian church has little choice, I would argue, as to what its priority should be if it is to take its transnational character and the expansion of its borders through baptism seriously. People need protection not borders. Baptism, properly understood is a subversion of the borders of the nation state. Christians should be prepared to live out that subversion in refusing to acknowledge the claim to the sacredness of borders at the cost of the lives and wellbeing of flesh and blood people. People need protection, not borders.

Doug Hynd

PS. My thanks to Jessie Taylor, those responsible for the documentary particularly the asylum seekers who shared their stories and to Michael Budde for his collection of essays reflecting theologically on the Christian Church and globalisation, The Borders of Baptism: Identities, Allegiance and the Church (Cascade Books, 2011).

Lack of focus

I was struck by a news item on the ABC this morning. It was based around the substantial increase of Iranian refugees getting to Australia through Indonesia. The percentage of refugees from Iran has increased over the past two years from 6% to 50%.

This is a really significant shift. So what is the Australian Government doing? The are going to talk to the Indonesian Government about trying to cut off the channel for Iranians getting to Indonesia from Dubai.

Hullo? did I hear right? What about what this increase might tell us about the situation in Iran this is giving rise to this increase? Could this have anything to do with the Iranian Government response to US policy in the region? Could it be the result of action by the Iranian Government in its crackdown on dissent?

Wouldn't this prima facie evidence of increased persecution of dissent and minorities be an issue that might be of concern to Australians?

Apparently not - not is all about us and refugees reaching us - not issues of human rights and the possible impacts of US policy.

The tragedy of asylum seekers and other displaced people

I didn't watch the ABC documentary on the Tampa last night because that issue is one of those guaranteed to make me very angry - I feared it would become "a near occasion for sin".

However I did find myself drawn into watching some of the Q&A afterwards. As I thought about the way the questions and responses went it occurred to me that the lack of clarity about the numbers of people who are refugees and the different categories of refugee enabled us, as Australians debating the issues to avoid facing some important questions.

No matter how large the numbers of those seeking asylum are on a global scale, they are nowhere near the total number of refugees across the globe. Many are displaced people within their own countries. Many more are displaced people outside the land of their origin who want to go home.

The moral issue of how we deal with asylum seekers and refugees who seek to come to Australia is important. No question but we need some perspective here. The number of people coming via boats is in the order of 2-3,000 per annum at the moment. The number who seek asylum after arriving in Australia by air is around 9,000 per annum. The fear and anger in the Australian community over this number of people coming by boats is out of all proportion to the numbers involved - contra Scott Morrison.

Surveys have shown that most members of the Australian community think the numbers involved are much larger, 100 times larger and neither of the major political parties have seen fit to get out their and educate people about the facts. Instead we have appeals to fear and prejudice and blatant attempts to de-humanise the people involved. Why we are so vulnerable on this point is an issue that needs thought and self critical reflection that will take us beyond simply using labels like xenophobia as David Marr did last night.


Beyond that the focusing on the relatively small group of asylum seekers coming by boat enables us to dodge consideration of the reality of the much larger groups of displaced people in the world and our implication as a nation or as consumers in helping create the situation that led to that displacement.

For example, our involvement in the war in Iraq helped fuel a massive displacement of people both within and outside Iraq. Our ongoing involvement in the war in Afghanistan implicates us not only in the creation of Afghan refugees but also in the flow over effects into Pakistan and the displacement of people within that country.

On the economic front some of the immense displacement of people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and surrounding countries in the Great Lakes region of Africa has been fueled by the push for minerals to sustain our consumption of the goods in which they are incorporated and I won't even go on to discuss the displacement of people in civil warsarising from struyggles for the control of diamonds.

So by all means let us explore thoughtfully the issue of how we are as a nation-state to respond to the claims of the vulnerable and displaced who come seeking asylum. Let us not become so obsessed that we assume that even achieving a relatively just and compassionate policy will exhaust our responsibility towards the displaced people across the globe. We are all deeply implicated in their condition. We are more truly and deeply than we might want to acknowledge our bother's and sister's keepers.

Refugee policy - a defining issue for Christians and to live beyond anger

Browsing through some columns that I wrote for Zadok Perspectives back in 2002, I came across a column on refugees. It was written after the events surrounding the Tampa. Though some things have changed since then, some critical things haven't.

I have therefore reproduced it in its original form. What is truly sobering is that it would take very few editorial changes to bring it up to deal with current issues. The pastoral issues as to how we can live faithfully in such a time as this remain as does the anger that I need to deal with.

Prophetic Patience - Active Waiting -  Refugee policy as a defining issue

Despite the inescapable impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, for many Australians the treatment of refugees became the defining issue of public policy in the year just past. The divisions in Australian society revealed by the Coalition Government’s handling of the “Tampa” event, the “Pacific solution” and mandatory detention seem likely to be with us for some time.

The issues raised by the current government policy stance on refugees are complex and ramify out to include questions of church state relations, indigenous reconciliation and the atrophy of public debate on political issues. They will have to wait for another time. What I want to engage with in this column is the reality that I find myself called to live out my discipleship in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in the wider Australian community toward the stranger and the refugee.

I have been shocked at the depth of my own anger at the events that have unfolded over the past year and the cynical willingness of the government to demonise the stranger in the form of refugees for their own political ends. Overlaying this has been a deep frustration and helplessness that almost no one was speaking for me in the public realm. Their was no debate during the election. The two major parties were trying to out macho each other over border protection and were quick to silence dissident voices amongst their candidates.

While I know that many Christians do not share this interpretation of  what has happened, I am also aware of a significant number who share my state of mind. There is a significant issue of pastoral care and witness at stake here and I can only ask those for whom this is not an issue to stay and listen.

What resources do we have to live as disciples, to live humanly in a time of fear in our community and anger within ourselves? How can we avoid becoming conformed in our reaction to the violence which we are called as Christians to overcome? For many this has been a moment when the automatic and unquestioning identity between being a Christian and being an Australian has been jolted.  We have been made aware of the possibility that there might have to be a gap between the two identities if we are to be faithful to the Gospel.

What Isaiah has to say

Biblical reflection seems an appropriate first step. During the election campaign, in which the appeal to a variety of fears seemed to have become the staple fare of both major political parties, I found myself reading through the prophet Isaiah. The following passages from Isaiah 8 snagged my attention like a woolen jumper on an obtruding nail.

Do not call conspiracy

All that these people call conspiracy;

Do not fear what they fear,

do not be afraid of them.

It is Yahweh Sabaoth,

 you must hold in veneration,

him you must fear,

him you must dread.

….

I bind up this testimony,

I seal this revelation,

In the heart of my disciples.

I wait for Yahweh

Who hides his face from the House of Jacob;

in him I hope

…

Distressed and starving he will wander through the country

and, starving, he will become frenzied,

Blaspheming his king and his God

Turning his gaze upward,

then down to the earth,

He will find only distress and darkness,

the blackness of anguish,

and will see nothing but night.

Is not all blackness where anguish is.

There is a passion in the prophet’s message which makes most of the preaching in our churches sound anaemic. The recovery of such passion and an honesty about our emotions and the violence within us and around us is an important step within the Christian community if we are to overcome violence.

The passage quoted above from Isaiah though it is honest and unsparing in its account of the darkness of the prophet’s time offer us some clues about the virtues and spirituality that we need to embody if we are to be faithful to God’s calling.

Truthfulness

The prophet calls us to truthfulness. We need to find the words to truly describe what is happening, which is to say that we need to learn how to speak truthfully.  … do not call conspiracy all that they call conspiracy… For the prophet to speak truthfully is to draw out clearly the dimensions of the tragedy while opening himself to the reality of the pain of those who are entangled in lies. The virtue of truthfulness will be as much a public and political activity as it is a spiritual discipline. It requires us in this context to research the reality of refugee policy and the experiences of those who have been refugees and not accept without question the official definitions and language.

That will be hard enough. But Isaiah pushes us further. We need to learn how to fear appropriately, that is we need to learn how to fear rightly. In our case we need to learn not to fear the stranger and the refugee but to fear God. The God that we are called to fear is not the god of violence and destruction but the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We are to fear the God who comes to us in the form of the servant and the powerless.

Patience

We will also need to learn how to wait, how to be patient. Isaiah announces that he will wait for the right time for his message and for God’s action. The prophet is committed to a patience and a waiting in which he shares the pain and the darkness of his community.  The prophet speaks not from a position of moral superiority and distance but as someone who allows the darkness to reverberate within his own being.  The kind of patience Isaiah is called to has its analogue in the New Testament embedded in the Lord’s prayer.

Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in their wonderful account of the Christian life Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life (Abingdon, 1996) highlight the importance of patience.

We have just prayed ‘your kingdom come”, a petition full of hope. Now we are taught to say “your will be done” a petition for patience…. Indeed our hopes as Christians can make us dangerous if they are not schooled by patience. Without patience we are tempted to storm the walls of injustice, destroying our enemy and thus betraying God’s way of forgiveness. Instead we are called to be a patient people schooled as we are by the patience of our crucified God so that the world might know that love not violence rules this world. God’s way of dealing with us and our evil is called the cross, the unlimited suffering patience of God. We are called to take up our cross and follow God’s patience. (p.65)

The patience that is called for here in the Lord’s prayer has nothing to do with passivity. It is an active waiting which is expressed in service. For my wife and myself that active waiting has taken the form of joining a local community refugee support group. The group has no formal church connections but the vast majority of the members are active in a number of local Catholic and Anglican parishes.

While the group works with the immigration authorities in the resettlement of refugees under the humanitarian resettlement program it has also committed itself to providing active support for refugees with Temporary Protection visas: that is to say refugees who have arrived in Australia and whose claim on arrival to refugee status has been accepted by the government, but who receive little assistance from the government to access their entitlements.

Christmas Eve found me as part of a group of over a dozen people helping shift furniture into a flat for an Afghani refugee family on a temporary protection visa, and in the process committing myself in a small way to learning the patience called for in the Lord’s prayer and something of the truth of the refugee’s experience. The first English words learnt by their two year old daughter after 11 months in Port Headland detention camp were ‘Hullo officer.’ That says a lot. As we manoeuvred the furniture up the stairs it occurred to me what a highly appropriate way it was to commence my Christmas celebration.

Church, state and refugees

Joshua Ralston in Refugees and the Role of Religious Groups draws attention to the central role that religious organizations play in the long resettlement journey for refugees that begins with forced exile, moves through a sojourn  in a refugee camp, and ends for some at least with resettlement in a new country.

Church World Service, Jewish Family Services, World Relief and many other denominational organizations are involved in every step, from the handling of interviews and applications to determine refugee status, to meeting new arrivals at the airport, and providing the first few months of housing. The relief or mission agencies of churches and synagogues are integral partners in the government's response to refugees.

This appears to be a perfect symbiotic relationship, with the state providing what only it can - a political polity and the possibility of citizenship - and religious groups offering what they are best equipped to provide - hospitality. The political limbo of statelessness, which consigns refugees to "bare life" outside the law (as Giorgio Agamben describes it), can apparently only be overcome through the joint efforts of religion and state.

Ralston questions whether the church can be totally comfortable with the terms of this partnership and moves to articulate an approach that treats the church's own distinctive character seriously.

While much of the religious involvement in resettlement is laudable, it still regularly falls short of the call of Jewish and Christian scriptures to love the alien as "one of your own citizens" (Leviticus 19:33). Central to the biblical narrative is a reminder to love and treat the stranger as a neighbour.

However, partnership with the state presses Christian mission increasingly away from this biblical mandate and towards what the German Jesuit theologian Johan Baptist Metz calls "a service providing religion." Under this model, refugees are not new neighbours or possible joint-members of the body of Christ, but clients to whom a political service is owed.

Bretherton is right to worry, then, that "involvement with the state often exacerbates social divisions and forces the church to mimic the state in its form and practices." At times, the church's response to refugees resembles something like the Department of Motor Vehicles. Once the service is met - with a pick up at the airport, a quick welcome, and few months rent paid - the church's mission moves on to its next project.

What is lacking in this model is the kind of long and patient friendships that nurture community, alter the national character of the church, and challenge the state's assumptions about citizenship and human identity.

 One way that the church might enact this is to follow what Bretherton calls "doxological politics," which "hallow" or bless the lives of refugees through acts of listening, community organizing, offering sanctuary to asylum seekers and shared worship. All of these acts serve as ad hoc ways to move beyond the service-oriented logic of resettlement and toward genuine encounter and mutual enrichment.

Another model is found in the Jesuit Refugee Service's practice of physical accompaniment, which signals God's presence alongside those excluded from national polity.

The church can thereby hold a mirror up to liberal democracy's claims of inclusion and human rights by demanding the state live up to its own ideals. As political philosopher Selya Benhabib argues in The Rights of Others, "There is not only a tension, but often an outright contradiction, between human rights declarations and states' sovereign claim to control their borders as well as to monitor the quality and quantity of admittees."

Hallowing the life of refugees and accompanying them beyond the services of resettlement includes advocating for just national and international immigration policies that are grounded in something more than the economic needs of the welcoming nation.

This is not to say that the church, or other religious organizations, should abjure their roles in resettling refugees. However, if they are to partner with the state in this process, they must also stretch their imagination and political commitments beyond the borders of the nation-state and the national rhetoric that accompanies debates on immigration.
The church would then act as a public and political witness to the presence and dignity of refugees, both locally and worldwide. In so doing, the church might be surprised to find itself following the way of the God who, in Karl Barth's wonderful phrase, journeyed into the far country for our sake.

Refugees and intellectual freedom

Rowan Williams throws a different angle on the issue of immigration and the role of the refugee in his address Refugees make us strange to ourselves.

So the refugee intellectual brings into our insular discussion the knowledge that justice is vulnerable and has to be defended against the silencing of discussion and the silencing of particular classes or racial groupings. ...  And there are two interconnected issues that come into focus as a result of this recognition.

One is about the need to sustain a culture in which genuine and strong disagreements over the shape of the 'good' society are given space to unfold and interact - the need for a robust public intellectual life, supported by a university culture which is not simply harnessed to productivity and problem-solving.

The second, closely related, issue is about the need for access to these arguments on the part of all citizens. An intellectually lively society nourished by a vigorous and independent academy, appears actually to presuppose certain things about universal education and democratic accountability, the imperative to resist the restriction of argument to those already possessed of ideological and material power.

It might be objected, of course, that this formulation itself takes for granted a pluralist and democratic society and thus stifles any discussion of whether society could or should be otherwise - whether absolute monarchy, say, or religious uniformity enforced by law, might be the form of a good society.

But the point is that as soon as you are asking whether absolute monarchy is a possibility for a good society, you are granting that it needs to be - and could be - justified. You are allowing that an argument could be mounted for absolute monarchy; and this implies that absolute monarchy is not the only thinkable shape for society - which is already a decisive move away from the historic understanding of absolutism.

If you want a theological reference in the margin here, you might recall St Augustine's deep scepticism about any suggestion that this or that social order could be identified with the City of God. History, in his eyes, certainly has a momentum and an overall story, but it is not one that moves inexorably towards the perfect human society. The task of the citizen with Christian conviction is to work for the changes that reflect the justice of God - and always to recognise that such changes can be reversed, in a world of endemic rivalry and acquisition.

The need for 'argumentative democracy', as it has been called, is not to be confused with either a passive tolerance for diverse points of view that never engage with each other; nor is it a recipe for a Babel of populist prejudices. The former - as Michael Sandel put it in his excellent recent book, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - can mean "suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it." Whereas the ideal situation is neither suppressing nor avoiding but engaging.

Engaging, however, is possible only when there is an assumption that it is safe to say what you believe, and that there is a process in which you will be heard, so that any ultimate outcome will have at least registered your own conviction even if it does not endorse it completely. Passive tolerance suggests an underlying nervousness about conviction of any kind and a serious lack of confidence that there are processes and contexts that make disagreement bearable.

Beyond this account of the conditions for a pluralist society Rowan Williams goes on to draw attention to an important theological warrant for thinking about the Christian as a migrant.

... one of the mainsprings of Christian self-understanding in the formative years of the Church's life was the idea that the believer was essentially a 'migrant', someone who was in any and every situation poised between being at home and being a stranger. In the New Testament and a good deal of the literature that survives from the first couple of Christian centuries, one of the commonest self-descriptions of the Church is in the language that would have been used in the Mediterranean cities for a community of migrant workers, temporary residents.

As a 'resident alien' in whatever society he or she inhabited, the believer would be involved in discovering what in that society could be endorsed and celebrated and what should be challenged. The Christian, you could say, was present precisely as someone who was under an obligation to extend or enrich the argument - sometimes indeed to initiate the argument about lasting social goods in settings where there was previously no possibility of thinking about what made a social order good or just or legitimate.

In the context of a religiously diverse modern society, something of this role is bound to be played by all communities of faith, to the extent that they operate with different ideas of accountability from those that mostly prevail around them; they believe they are accountable to transcendent truths or states of affairs. But it is worth noting how deeply and distinctively this language is embedded in early Christian literature. And this suggests that, if it is the case that the stranger is always necessary to make any society think about itself both critically and hopefully, the believer's role is always, in modern societies, going to show some intriguing parallels with that of the refugee intellectual.

Perhaps we may understand the social role of the religious believer more adequately if we think of it in terms of extending or enriching argument, offering resources for thinking about social pluralism rather than either deploring it or reducing it to the passive tolerance I mentioned earlier.

Borders and Refugees

The politics of refugees and policy responses in Australia raise questions about how we understand the role of borders and the moral responsibility and status of nations. This later issue is one that the Christian community or movement needs to do some serious thinking about given its fundamental theological commitments regarding ecclesiology, the character of the church, and its practice of mission.

The ABC religion and Ethics website has recently re-listed a number of articles relevant to this issue.
 Luke Bretherton in The Moral Status of Borders frames the moral issues at stake in the following way:

Mass migration is a central feature and consequence of globalisation and will continue to be a major factor of social, political and economic life for the foreseeable future. Mass migration is, of course, not a new phenomenon, but it is morally and politically problematic for two key reasons.

It is politically problematic because it involves crossing borders between different nation-states and therefore it involves the re-negotiation of the fundamental political and legal status of the individual concerned.

It is morally problematic because current immigration policies adopted by all nation-states favour the needs of the strong (the existing members of a polity) over the weak (asylum seekers and vulnerable economic migrants).

The underlying options shaping the political debate and policy response to mass migration seem unable to cope with either reality. We seem to be forced either to prioritize the needs of the strong, and so have closed borders with tight immigration controls and large-scale deportation of illegal immigrants in the hope that this will deter further migrants; or we prioritize the needs of the weak and have open borders.

Bretherton then sets out two major ethical stances that are prominent in the debate:

• Liberal utilitarianism starts from the principle that democracies owe an equal duty of care to all humanity and that by implication borders should be open. What is critical here are the rights of the individual and that these should in general take priority over the existence of a particular political community.
• A communitarian approach takes the stance that borders are not only practically necessary but morally required and needed to sustain the life of the community.

Christians, Bretherton argues, have difficulty with utilitarianism because of its abstract account of the individual. We are called to love, as the parable of the Good Samaritan exemplifies, particular people in particular places. On the other hand, the cultivation and maintenance of a distinctive national life as argued by the communitarians, cannot be an end in itself, but must be subordinated to the concern for a broader international order of justice and freedom. Though Bretherton does not develop this point, there is a case here for viewing concern with such an order from the perspective of the catholicity of the Christian movement, a commitment that is not confined within the limits of the world of nations.

The true end of humans lies neither in family, nor in a particular culture or nation, nor in some kind of worldwide polity, but in communion with God. The way we order the relationship between the needs of migrants and the needs of existing citizens needs to be set within this bigger picture.

... we need to see borders as a face that we, as a nation, present to the world. A face is what says that I am somebody who deserves respect, that I am not simply a piece of land to be bought and sold or a thing to be used for a time.

It says that I have a personality and a history and a way of doing things, but also that I am made for relationship and without coming into relationship with others who are different from me, then I do not grow.

Ultimately, it says that I am a face who seeks to look upon the face of God and who finds the face of God reflected, not in the faces of the strong and powerful, the skilled and the economically capable, but in the faces of the orphan, the widow and the refugee - and this is who God bids invites me to be hospitable.

To think of borders in terms of the metaphor of the face re-orientates us to see there is value to be placed upon the existing community, but the existing community is not an end in itself. It is only fulfilled as it moves beyond itself and comes into relationship with those around it.

On this basis Bretherton provides a quick sketch of the policy stance that would follow from the metaphor of borders as the face of a community.

Borders are a means of framing and structuring this relationship, and orientating places like Britain and Australia to the rest of the world in a way that presents an enquiring, confident, hospitable face rather than a closed, incestuous, hostile face that abjures its responsibility to the poor and vulnerable.

By understanding a nation's borders as a face, we can express pride in our national character and history. We can also require that those whom we welcome learn our language and commit to the economic, social and political life of this country.
But it also requires that we move beyond mere humanitarian concern or isolated charity, and toward authentic long-term relationships, and it is this that enables strangers to become citizens.

So much for the first of these articles. The question left hanging here relates to the role of the church in arguing for and articulating such an option.

The poor will suffer - again

One element of the latest version of the Australian Governments' commitment to policy by opinion poll, the proposal to establish off shore processing of refugees in East Timor is particularly despicable.

 East Timor faces huge problems is getting its development process under way and delivering basic health and educational services. Its capacity in terms of the human skills and administrative capacity to drive development at the pace needed to support the poorest people in its community is still severely limited.

So what does the Australian Government do?  It attempts to find a way out of a political issue at home that is rooted in its lack of willingness to show leadership and engage the community on the issue of asylum seekers by loading its problem on a near by neighbour, one of the poorest communities in the region that is still struggling to overcome the trauma of 25 years of conflict and violence.

The potential of this proposal by the Australian Government to distort and derail the fragile political leadership and the administrative infrastructure of East Timor from its primary responsibility to support the poorest members of its community is unconscionable and displays a selfishness and short sightedness that must not go unchallenged.

I must be slowing down ...

I am trying to put this all together - but am struggling to make sense of it all.

• The Australian Government has ceased processing claims for refugee status for people from Afghanistan because of anticipation of an improved situation there removing the grounds for well founded fear of prosecution. 

But at the same time:

• The Australian Government's travel advisory for Afghanistan states that the security situation is extremely dangerous.
• Two Australian soldiers were killed yesterday and the Prime Minister advises that we face a difficult path ahead.
• Human rights and the rule of law seem t b largely absent across most of the country particularly for minority groups.

This does not make sense. The only conclusion I can draw is that the Immigration authorities aren't talking to Foreign Affairs and Defence and vice versa.

Explanations welcome.

Getting beyond the panic

The headlines over the past couple of days had me caught between groaning with frustration, breaking into tears or giving way to a feeling that I was caught in Groundhog day, 2001 revisited.

It isn't quite that bad. On the actual issues there is a good coverage in Bernard Keane's article in Crikey,
Refugees that sets out the real scope of the issue. The Canberra Times provided a front page story from an Afghani asylum seeker now undertaking tertiary study in Canberra.

Kerry Murphy in Eureka Street highlights the significance of the situation in Sri Lanka as part of the push behind the current increase in asylum seekers.
What is truly depressing is  that the Government is making no attempt to put the issues in a realistic context nor attempting to provide a moral framework within which we can debate the issues. Instead we have "tough talking" that feeds off, while trying to capture the moral panic being whipped up by some sections of the media.

The Christian church, along with all other advocates of the voiceless victims of violence, will once again have to direct their attention and energy to providing a voice, affirming the humanity and working to bind up the wounds of trauma by those who make it to Australia and making it clear that if the media doesn't like "do-gooders" and "bleeding hearts" and the Government is uncomfortable with being addressed in language that presses the moral claims of flesh and blood human beings against the claims of abstractions such as borders then that is how it has to be.

For the churches such action, such a stance is part of its core identity - in following Jesus who directed us to provide hospitality to the stranger, to show love to the enemy, the other, the one who is different.

Refugees and Pilgram Marpeck

The recurrence of fear -mongering and mean spirited politicking by members of the Coalition over the tragedy surrendering the refugees at Ashmore Reef this week, brought me back to the appeal by Pilgram Marpeck the Anbaptist civil servant and pastoral theologian in his final response to the Strasbourg council, at the point where they were about to chuck him out of Strasbourg on an issue of conscience:

I hope that you completely avoid any persecution of the miserable people who have no place in the world and who flee to you, especially if they are innocent of crimes, to find a haven from their misery without any coercion of their conscience.

Remembering Refugees

A viewing of the movie "We shall be remembered for this: A film about Australia" last week brought back to me the deep anger that I experienced during the years from 2001, the deceptive language and fearmongering of the previous Government's refugee "policy", and the deaths of the people on the SIEV X.

The simple road movie of a trip to Baxter refugee camp put together by a young Christian activist, now a lawyer, http://wewillberemembered.wordpress.com/about/ provided a helpful benchmark on where we had come from during a week in which there was an announcement of a substantial change in government policy.

A simple story that is worth going back to, to be reminded of how people were de-humanised and put through severe trauma from simply trying to exercise their right to seek asylum.

We need to remember our shared humanity - for Christians the fundamental claim that all share in the image of God, or as the Quakers put it, acknowledge that there is "that of God" in every human.

Christmas in context - violence, grieving and refugees

Jim Barr in his sermon at Canberra Baptist this morning for the fourth Sunday on Advent drew attention to the gaping difference between the nostalgic sentimentality of Christmas in the current consumer and church culture and the stark realities of Matthew's gospel account in chapter 2.

Matthew gives us a story of political realpolitik, genocidal violence and refugees fleeing their homeland. There is in the text a triple layer of reference to grieving - the children massacred by Herod, the quotation of Jeremiah with its grief at the exile in Babylon, referring in further back to Rachel, a mother in the line of the patriarchs in her grieving.

Here is a story that resonates through so much of the experience of the Jewish diaspora for the next twentieth centuries and a story that could be claimed by Palestinian civilians in refugee camps, Gaza and the West Bank today.

The Christian church in its Christendom embrace of empire has frequently aligned itself on the side of practitioners of realpolitik and has ended on the side of Herod rather than the refugees and those who are grieving.

No wonder we in the church, let alone the wider community, collectively avert our eyes and close our hearts to the hard challenging edge of a story that speaks of the coming and presence of God as vulnerability in the midst of violence and grief.