LATEST ON TAMIL Asylum Seekers : Melbourne Indymedia

LATEST ON TAMIL Asylum Seekers

Dear Friends,

At 1pm Christmas Island time (5pm Eastern summer time) 82 young men and boys including the underage minor will be loaded on a charter flight in the custody of 68 immigration staff and Australian Federal Police and taken to the impoverished island of Nauru where they will be detained in this island gulag until the Howard regime is over.

In response to the exposure of the Governments action in denying lawful requests for legal assistance from these young men, the department has today issued each person with a letter stating u201cWe will give you lawyers and legal advice on Nauruu201d and telling them that they can apply for Australia or another country when they are on Nauru.

Naturally the Government will not tell them what they have told us u2013 namely that they will never be allowed to come to Australia or explain where these u201clawyersu201d will come from since there are none on Nauru.

There is no question that many if not all of these young men have strong claims for protection.

Many have been tortured, beaten, imprisoned, seen family members killed or had friends and family disappear.
* Many have pieces of shrapnel lodged in their bodies from being caught in crossfire or in direct attack.
* All are young men in late teens or early 20u2019s, a group at risk of being press ganged into fighting or killed by either side.
* All are Tamils from Sri Lanka- a country at war with itself in a violent and bloody conflict
*

None of this concerns Howard and his lily-livered minions. They are obsessed with the u201cdeterrent factoru201d. It really is time that a government which treats the arrival of one boat of asylum seekers as a national crisis, was dumped.

Thank you for your many kind offers of phones but as you have probably guessed, mobile phones are of no use where these young men are going. Even the Telstra phone system has been broken for months. The local phone system is very expensive-1dollar per minute to Australia and there are only 2 phones for over 90 people.

Regards,
Pamela Curr
ASRC Campaign Coordinator