Irritant or Toxic Waste

You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body;

You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, 

how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
    all the stages of my life were spread out before you,

The days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.

[Psalm 139:14-16]

My last trip to Sri Lanka just happened to coincide with the visit of Navi Pillay (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights). For the first week I seemed to be following in her footsteps. [We were staying in the same Hotel, and on one morning I literally tripped over a member of her security detail.]

I visited Mulaittivu in the North East, otherwise known as the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka, and sight of some of our AusAID funded Psychosocial work the day after she had visited. Since May 2009 the area has been littered with the mechanical remnants and wrecks of war, but in the week before her visit, corrugated iron fences were erected to screen off these sights.

It’s in this district that some of the people who spoke with Navi Pillay about ‘the disappeared people’, including a Jesuit Priest and the family of a ‘white Van’ recipient, were visited by Government Security Police and warned to keep quiet. It’s in this Northern Province that women at a Design workshop I ran in Jaffna, in May, told us of a woman who the week before had been taken into the jungle, raped and killed – by Sri Lankan military. After you pass through the Military Checkpoint into the Northern province, the first sign welcoming you to the North is a huge concrete sign which says, “Welcome, from the 58^th Brigade” (the brigade that infamously wiped out over 100,000 people in the Killing Fields in 2009). And every few kilometers from then on Military bases remind you that this place is “free and at peace”!

Mulaittivu is also the origin of many of the asylum seeker boats not welcome in Australian waters today! It’s here that the Australian government has erected numerous billboards telling people not to get on boats because they will not be welcome in Australia.

Last Friday night, Emma Alberici interviewed Navi Pillay on Lateline (ABC TV). One of the things she asked was:

Just today our very new Prime Minister Tony Abbott has expressed the hope that asylum seekers that arrive by boats would be no more than a passing irritant for his Government and for the Indonesians. How do you feel about a world leader describing asylum seekers as irritants?

Navi Pillay:

I am deeply concerned by statements such as that because they promote a stigmatisation of a whole group of people and are totally against the vision and concept of the convention on refugees to which Australia is a party.

Australia is actually known for having provided sanctuary and safety for many refugees, from the region and other parts of the world, Australia is known for readily rescuing people who are in distress, in boats that are unsafe and against this good record I am appalled at statements such as this which justify discrimination against a whole group, a minority group, people who are coming to Australia, because conditions in their own countries are unbearable.

And let me emphasise again - these are poor marginalised men, women and children who are seeking safety in Australia, they should be rehabilitated and will be of benefit, migrants, refugees, must be seen for the value they can add to a country, rather than as some kind of irritants or toxic waste.

[…these are human beings we are dealing with, they're entitled to fundamental rights and one of them is individual screening to understand their situation and obviously no indefinite detention of people on so-called security grounds on which the human rights committee has ruled against Australia in August.]

My trip and this interview cause me to reflect on many issues and I do not have the time to develop those thoughts here, so let me jump to one of the more personal reflections: the attitudes of privileged people to “being put out”.

I wonder if sometimes I am too busy to remember the people behind the programmes. I wonder if sometimes I am guilty of unintentionally treating the people as irritants, because let’s face it, if it wasn’t for people - development theory would be much cleaner, designs would be so much more predictable, budgets would be so much more manageable and logframes could be so much more logical. I wonder if sometimes I am not guilty of hoping that the most vulnerable might just be a passing irritant.

I think we should be outraged by our Prime Ministers words; but I wonder if sometimes our outrage is not in part fuelled by an (unspoken, buried) self-realisation that we are all guilty of treating people as irritants at times – the difference is in what we choose to do about it, how, having recognised our irritation we then act towards others.

So…

May we focus on the people impacted by the process,

May we see the individuals behind the indicators,

May we know the lives as intimately as we know the logframes,

[May all our irritants be procedural rather than the most vulnerable and marginalised]

May you always know that the Architect of your life is interested in you and is looking for your interest in Others.