Sarah Stephen
A year ago, few people had heard of Peter Qasim. Now he's rapidly becoming a household name, a symbol of the Australian government's harsh and punitive policy of mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers. In the first week of March, Qasim was visited by three dissenting Liberal Party parliamentarians and "buy Australian" advocate Dick Smith. His case has been championed in opinion pieces in newspapers, and his name has been raised in parliamentary speeches.
For Qasim, the increased attention on his case and the resulting pressure on the government to consider his release couldn't come too soon. In 2005 he began his seventh year in detention, having spent time in Curtin, Woomera and Baxter detention centres.
Qasim is from Indian-occupied Kashmir, where the United Nations has documented continuing and severe human rights abuses over many years. His father was murdered and Qasim was tortured before he fled Kashmir.
He ended up in Singapore, stowed away on a cargo ship to Papua New Guinea, and spent six months in prison there. Rather than deport him, the PNG authorities released him with no right to work. For eight months he tried to get by, surviving on the charity of church groups, but the situation was unsustainable. Eventually his friends helped him make a dangerous boat trip to the nearest Australian territory — Saibai Island in the Torres Strait.
Although Qasim had little English and no legal advice when he arrived, his immigration case officer generally believed his account. However, the sole Refugee Review Tribunal member who heard his case decided that every detail was untrue and Qasim has been locked up ever since.
Since 2003, as Qasim's prolonged detention became unbearable, he tried to make arrangements to return to India. He believes that he would still face the risk of arrest and torture there, but would prefer that possibility to dying in detention in Australia.
Greg Egan, one of Qasim's staunchest supporters, explained in the February 17 Melbourne Age: "Despite a language test putting him squarely inside its borders, India does not accept that Peter's nationality has been proved beyond doubt, and his turbulent life in a conflict zone has left him with no papers and no fellow citizens able to vouch for him."
A decision by the High Court on August 6 upheld the Australian government's legal right to detain stateless asylum seekers like Qasim indefinitely — potentially for the rest of their lives. The only way Qasim can hope to be free now is through the personal intervention of the immigration minister.
Qasim wrote in an open letter in September: "I have asked 80 countries to take me but all have refused. I have committed no crime but I have a life sentence. Please give me freedom. I would work hard with a grateful heart. But I cannot live imprisoned forever without hope."
Three Liberal Party MPs, Petro Georgio and Phil Barresi from Victoria and Bruce Baird from NSW, went to Baxter on March 2 and met with a number of long-term detainees, including Qasim. Barresi told the March 3 Age that he had been "very taken" with Qasim. "He's a fellow who in the normal sense of the word has really served his time", describing Qasim's situation as "heart-wrenching".
"If we can't break the impasse with India, we should be looking compassionately at letting him stay in Australia", he added. Georgio has become increasingly public in his calls for an end to mandatory detention.
Emerging from Baxter detention centre on March 1 after a one-and-a-half hour meeting with Qasim, Dick Smith told the waiting media that he would lobby PM John Howard to release Qasim into the Australian community. He told ABC Radio's PM: "It's cost over a million dollars to keep him there so far. If we let him out he's no threat to anyone, he'll be a hard worker, and he can actually earn money and in the meantime they can still work on whether they can get the evidence of where to send him ... it's just completely untenable to keep someone locked up for the rest of their life with no way of getting out."
Smith added: "I've said to him, and with his approval, I'm prepared to go up into Kashmir, quite a risky area, I don't want to go there, but to see his village, which he described to me exactly. He obviously used to live there. He described it so well. I'll go and see if I can get evidence so we can get the Indian authorities to allow him to go home. In the meantime, I'm going to see if the Australian government will show a bit of compassion and a bit of pragmatism and let him out while the issue is resolved."
In a September 14 media release, immigration minister Amanda Vanstone tried to challenge Qasim's credibility, arguing that he has failed to fully cooperate with the immigration department to resolve his nationality, and that his story has been inconsistent and some times contradictory.
A February 19 media release from Rural Australians for Refugees answered these accusations. "Peter was born in the disputed region of Kashmir, which has been a conflict zone for more than 50 years. Government offices in Rajouri District, where Peter lived, have routinely been commandeered for use by the security forces, with obvious consequences for the state of official record-keeping. Peter was orphaned at a young age, and neither his original nor his adopted family could afford to pay for Peter to attend an official school.
"After being detained and tortured as a young man, all of Peter's adult years were spent as an itinerant, deliberately avoiding contact with authorities. Though several people gave him shelter and assistance at this time, most would be unwilling to acknowledge it to officials. Compounding this is the fact that people in Peter's area have frequently been forced to move as the security situation deteriorates, and it has now been more than seven years since Peter left India.
"In these circumstances, however frustrating it is that Indian authorities have been unable to locate documents or witnesses to verify Peter's identity, it is completely unreasonable to suggest that this failure implies that Peter has been untruthful or uncooperative.
"More than a year ago, the department arranged a language analysis to determine Peter's background. Three expert analysts independently concluded from his speech that Peter was from the Indian part of Kashmir, and this conclusion was further bolstered by his knowledge of the politics and geography of the region.
"After six-and-a-half years, Peter Qasim remains in detention through no fault of his own. As Indian authorities persist in refusing to acknowledge his citizenship, the appropriate humanitarian solution would be to allow him to join the Australian community, where he has many committed friends and supporters prepared to assist him to rebuild his life."
One-hundred-and-eighty-seven people have spent more than three years in immigration detention. Some of them are stateless, and in positions similar to Qasim's. Others remain in detention because they can't be returned to their country of origin.
Reflecting the increasing public pressure on Vanstone, it was reported on March 4 that 23 Iranians in the Baxter detention centre, who had all exhausted their avenues of appeal and faced deportation, won permission to have their cases fully reviewed under the "48b" review arrangement of the Migration Act. There were around 60 applicants, many of them Iranians who had converted to Christianity and feared persecution if they were deported home. The applications are expected to be reviewed within a fortnight.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 9, 2005.
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