evacuation - thegoodwills.com

christmas-afghanistan-burqa — Photo: ArmyAmber/ pixabay.com

A few days before Christmas, the US announced it was easing aid sanctions against the Taliban, rag-tag rulers of Afghanistan. The hard-line Muslims insurgents over-ran the capital, Kabul, in August. Thousands of citizens were evacuated from Kabul Airport, with tens of thousands left behind. Since then, Afghans have been forced into starvation by a combination of famine and US aid sanctions.

The US has been trying to use aid sanctions as a lever to force the Taliban not to suppress women’s rights, including access to education. The sanctions have now been eased to allow an exemption for aid providers.

The US Treasury has broadened the definition of permitted humanitarian assistance to include education. This includes salary payments to teachers and to permit a broader use of US funds received by aid organisations working inside Afghanistan.

Before the decision to ease aid sanctions, aid groups said, the US was at risk of driving ordinary Afghans towards starvation.

David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, said the humanitarian exception to sanctions on the Taliban will help organisations like the IRC to scale up and deliver lifesaving services without fearing legal repercussions.

“This couldn’t come soon enough as nine million people in Afghanistan are marching toward famine and Afghan families are bracing for an extremely tough winter.”

Miliband said foreign development aid to Afghanistan previously propped up 75% of all government spending.

“(The suspension of foreign aid) has wiped out the government’s ability to pay public servants and deliver desperately needed public services, including basic healthcare, to millions of Afghans.”

Christmas in Afghanistan might be a cute headline, but it was no fun for anyone, least of all the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Christians living in this landlocked emirate. Many reporters and diplomats were among those flown out of Kabul on domestic and military flights, so insightful news out of the country has been scarce. What we do know is that Afghans who helped the UN and coalition forces as guides and translators when they were based in Afghanistan, are now in hiding in fear of their lives and desperate to flee the country.

Surely this is when western governments should step up and fast-track intakes of refugees under Humanitarian visas.

At the outset, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia would provide 3,000 humanitarian places for Afghans in 2021-2022. The places will come from the existing annual intake of 13,750, rather than a special allocation, but Afghans will be prioritised.

The move falls far short of commitments made by Canada and Britain. Both countries pledged to take in up to 20,000 Afghan refugees over the next few years. Canada later doubled its commitment to 40,000 places.

Mr Morrison said Australia has “no clear plans” to operate a program of a similar scale.

“Australia is not going into that territory. What we’re focused on is right here and right now,” he said.

By October, there were 32,000 applications for Humanitarian visas to Australia, representing about 150,000 Afghans. Not one has been approved, a Senate Select Committee was told. Parliament has been dissolved for the year, as we know, and MPs, Senators and their families have gone fishing.

Some work was done before the office closed for Christmas. There were meetings between Afghan leaders in Australia and the relevant Ministers to provide an update on a $27 million assistance package announced on October 14. Most of the funds will be directed to help support groups to sponsor Afghan refugees and bring them to Australia. The package includes $8 million in grant funding to support community-led organisations to deliver grass roots and personalised support to the new arrivals. It also includes $6.4 million to increase legal assistance and support subclass 449 visa holders (for those who are forced to flee and for whom there are grave concerns for their safety) to transition onto permanent visa pathways. In an update posted on December 9, the Department of Home Affairs said further information on how to access each element of the package will be provided “as soon as it becomes available”.

It’s hard to imagine how hard life is in Kabul, population 4.45 million, particularly for women (who now need a chaperone to go anywhere), the Hazara people and anyone who helped the UN and coalition forces as interpreters or guides. It’s all very well to say why don’t we just fly them out, but they have to get to the airport first, and as can be seen by televised scenes of chaos on the ground, that is no easy task. Australia managed to evacuate 3,500 Australian and Afghan people with Australian visas, 2,500 of them women and children.

The ABC interviewed Afghans who now live in Australia, but at the cost of being separated from their families. Those Afghans are now worried that those left behind after the Taliban invasion will be forgotten. The ABC interviewed ‘Abdul’, who fled Afghanistan in 2011 after the Taliban targeted him for being a journalist.

Two years and three countries later, he boarded a boat from Indonesia and arrived on Christmas Island after a five-day voyage.

He has not seen his wife and five children in a decade — they are still in Afghanistan.

“Australia is a beautiful country. Nice people, lots of opportunities but when you don’t have your family with you … that’s jail for you,” he said.

Abdul is on a temporary protection visa (TPV) which grants temporary residency in Australia. But TPV holders are unable to sponsor family members applying for Australian visas.

Refugee support groups have been lobbying the government for years to grant people like Abdul permanent visas so they can hopefully reunite with their families. But the government’s hard line against resettling people who arrived by boat has left 30,000 people like Abdul stranded in Australia, some for more than 10 years, without permanent residency.

The argument about permanent vs temporary visas dates from Tony Abbott’s stop the boats campaign in 2013, which fed off John Howard’s defining statement in 2001 that no-one who arrived by boat would be permanently settled here. Temporary protection visas give rights to work and some welfare services but prevent permanent residency, family reunions and overseas travel. The Lowy Institute’s long-running series of polls on refugee issues shows that the TPV question sharply divides Australians (48% for, 49% against and 3% on the fence).

After all that is said, the government’s response (3,000 places from an existing quota), is neither admirable nor sustainable. Australia already has a strong connection to Afghanistan with 46,799 Afghans living here according to the 2016 Census. That was a 69% increase on the 2011 Census, so we could assume this figure has jumped to around 60,000 in 2021.

As chair of the Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network (SDRAMN), I’d encourage you write to your local MP, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Tell them that compassionate Australians want to see the Humanitarian intake from Afghanistan raised from 3,000 to 20,000.

Tell them to decide if the government will pay to fly people out of Kabul to Australia (at the moment that question is undetermined).

Above all, encourage the government to prioritise reuniting families divided by civil war and terror.

While you are writing to politicians, remind them about the 30,000 asylum seekers/refugees who have still not been granted permanent residency. Why ‘stick to a principle’ that is causing so much suffering and has no deterrent effect?

That’s a lot to get in one letter, but if you visit Rural Australians for Refugees, you will find some helpful templates.

Happy New Year one and all.

FOMM back pages

Oops- the tail light is out- better get that fixed! Fast forward to King St. Mechanical in Warwick. John came out and promptly fixed it- ‘No worries, mate. No charge’! It would have been the perfect introductory day in a new town, had it not been for the pall of bushfire smoke hanging over Warwick and communities to the east. At Yangan, 18 kms East, smoke from two fires burning in inaccessible country around Swanfels infiltrated the town. Residents closed windows and doors and tried to stay indoors as much as possible.

A tired looking bush fire brigade chap having a cold ale at the local pub told me he’d never seen it as bad in this district, Yangan and Swanfels were not alone. As today’s photo attests, the fires are still burning. It is probably overkill, but we have packed an emergency evacuation bag.

Bushfires, grass fires and controlled burns that got out of control have been burning all over South- East Queensland and Northern New South Wales for weeks. When we drove from Maleny to Warwick via the Lockyer Valley, the mercury peaked at 40 degrees Celsius, which even a Kiwi could tell you is unseasonably hot for Queensland in early October. The Lockyer Valley, ostensibly the region’s premier vegetable producing centre, looked brown and dead, bar a few irrigated fields. Up in the hills, fires were burning. A friend rang us while we driving through Ma Ma Creek.

“Why are you in the Lockyer Valley? Don’t you know there are fires burning and you need to leave there at once!”

We saw the smoke plume to which she referred and had heard on the radio news that a house was destroyed in Laidley.

So we kept on driving and emerged on the Toowoomba-Warwick road, just as a blood red sun was setting behind a shroud of smoke.

People who know about such things were predicting a long hot summer and an early start to the ‘bushfire season’ back in August.

As Yangan residents fretted and waited for a possible call to evacuate, I mentally prepared an emergency kit: phone, charger, keys, wallet, essential medications, scrips, passports, journal and pen, change of clothes, water bottle, dog food (and bowl). Strange feeling it is to compress one’s life into one essential package.

This is second nature for residents of Australia’s more bushfire-prone areas such as the Blue Mountains and the uplands of northern New South Wales.

The Guardian’s Lisa Martin wrote that fire authorities were bracing for a challenging bushfire season across the continent. The Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre’s seasonal outlook warned six States they faced ‘above-normal’ potential fire threat because of very warm and dry conditions and below average rainfall.

Queensland and New South Wales bore the brunt of it in September, when gusty winds and high temperatures fanned relatively small grassfires into uncontrollable bush fires. In Southern Queensland and Northern NSW, fire authorities dealt with 1,200 fires in the first two weeks of September, with 130 fires erupting in just one day. Fifty-five homes were lost and the iconic Gold Coast hinterland tourism attraction, Binna Burra Lodge, was destroyed.

Travel journalist Lee Mylne wrote about the determination of Binna Burra’s owners to rebuild. Amidst the rubble, the bell which hung in the lodge dining room since1934 has been found intact – a symbol of hope, Lee wrote.

The adjacent campground and café was spared and the Binna Burra board says it plans to open for Christmas holidays. It is also hoped the Sky Lodges can be repaired in time for the summer holidays.

Coincidentally, I am reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, a blunt instrument of a book which beats you about the head with unassailable facts and frightening scenarios about what will happen to our bodies as the planet warms. So I was more sharply concerned to read an ABC story yesterday which asserts that Australia is not prepared for what lies ahead. Key points of the story are:

The national aerial firefighting centre (NAFC) still awaits a Federal Government decision about its urgent request two years ago for $11 million in funding;
The Government has not guaranteed funding for the only national body researching the future of bushfires;
Emergency services experts who asked the Government to consider the threat of climate change in fire planning have not received a response.

Australia’s former chief scientist, Ian Chubb, said it was clear the climate was changing.

“It’s not just some passing phase that it didn’t rain this decade,” he said. “The implications of that for fire are pretty obvious.”

Recent fires in NSW ushered in a new phenomenon in firefighting dubbed Black Swan events. This describes what happens when a bush fire has reached such a point of ferocity that it interacts with extreme weather events.

The Sir Ivan fire near Dunedoo burned through 55,000 hectares, creating its own thunderstorm about seven kilometres high, according to a report by the NSW Coroner’s Court. Clouds of smoke shot lightning bolts up to 80 kilometres away, starting more fires.

Emergency experts and senior scientists have told a joint ABC investigation that a comprehensive national plan is needed to tackle the fires of the future. They are concerned about the lack of financial commitment from the Federal Government for resources and research.

The ABC’s Background Briefing cited documents that show the proportion of federal funding for NAFC has more than halved since 2003. Minister for Natural Disaster and Emergency Management David Littleproud said he would raise the business case at the next Ministerial Council meeting.

“We haven’t made a decision around the aerial assets,” he told Background Briefing. “We’ll continue to work with the states in a mature way.”

Mr Littleproud told Background Briefing the Government did acknowledge the role climate change had played in escalating fire risks.

“I haven’t seen this in my life before and I don’t know where it’s going to end,” he said. “I think it would be remiss of anybody not to suggest that it is not climate change that has caused a lot of this.”

As I write, a storm has brought decent rainfall to the Yangan district, which should help firefighters no end. Nevertheless, given my asthmatic tendencies, I’m staying indoors today, curled up with a good book. The choices are (a) persevere with The Uninhabitable Earth or (b) Carl Hiaasen’s Stormy Weather, a satirical yarn about a couple of con artists trying to capitalise on the aftermath of a hurricane sweeping through Florida.

In Chapter two of Wallace-Wells’s book he reminds us about a deadly European heatwave in 2003 which killed as many as 2,000 people per day. On page 47 he cites research that by 2050, 255,000 people are expected to die from direct heat events. Already a third of the world’s population is subject to deadly heat waves on at least 20 days of the year. Blimey, so let’s hope the old folk’s home has air conditioning for 101-year-old me.

Meanwhile in chapter five of Stormy Weather, a Rhesus monkey has stolen Max’s video camera, on which he had filmed the aftermath of the hurricane (with the aim of selling footage to a TV station).

His new bride, Bonnie, who is beginning to go off her exploitative husband (who has mysteriously vanished), is befriended by a strange fellow scouring the Everglades for (escaped) monkeys.

It’s no contest, really.

FOMM back pages, August 2017:

https://bobwords.com.au/bushfires-burning-hot-early/

Tag: evacuation

Christmas in Afghanistan

Where there’s (bush) fire there’s smoke