‘The irony is that we send troops over there to fight the Taliban. They come here saying, ‘but we’re fleeing the Taliban’, and we say, ‘doesn’t matter, go back; you’re not really under threat’. -Jillian Hocking
“IF YOUR house was on fire, would you form a queue?” Those were the words of an Afghan woman to Williamstown resident Jillian Hocking, who recently returned after a year in war-torn Afghanistan working for the United Nations Assistance Mission. Ms Hocking used the quote to debunk the notion that boat people are queue jumpers.
“I wish more Australians would have some sympathy and compassion towards these people,” she said.
“The people who are coming up by boat are Afghan Hazaras and they are persecuted by the Taliban.
“It’s a historical thing; it goes back a long, long way, but the reality now is that they are a persecuted minority.
“They’re Shia Muslims where the Muslims [majority in Afghanistan] are Sunni, so that’s one part of it.
“So they know that once the NATO forces pull out, the Taliban will come back and they will be slaughtered. And so they’re jumping on boats.
“To stay is suicide. They have no choice.
“If they were my boys, my sons, I would say get out, get out of the country, otherwise you will be killed.”
She said many of the Hazaras had fled years ago to Quetta, near the Afghan border, but there they were persecuted by the Pakistan Taliban.
Ms Hocking said it was “utter hypocrisy” for Australia to refuse to accept Afghan boat people while our soldiers were protecting them from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“The irony is that we send troops over there to fight the Taliban. They come here saying, ‘but we’re fleeing the Taliban’, and we say, ‘doesn’t matter, go back; you’re not really under threat’.
“They’re fleeing the very people that we’re there to fight.”
She said it was impossible for Hazara asylum seekers to go through legitimate channels because there were none.
“It’s a war zone over there,” Ms Hocking said.
“You turn up at the Australian Embassy in Kabul and they’ll send you away.
“These people come from rural areas where they don’t even get a birth certificate; they have no papers.
“It’s not like a queue.
“As one young Afghan woman said to me, ‘If your house was on fire, would you form a queue?’
“And it is not illegal – this is something else Australia has to understand that the media never mentions – it is not illegal to seek asylum.
“We have a moral obligation to help these people.”
AFGHAN ART ON SHOW
An exhibition of artworks by young Afghan Hazaras is running until Saturday at the art studio Signal, in Flinders Walk, Melbourne.
The Bamiyarra Not So Still(s) exhibition combines photojournalism, video projection and sound to give the Australian community a deeper understanding of who asylum seekers are, where they come from and why they come to Australia.
Bamiyarra links Melbourne’s Yarra River with the Afghanistan province of Bamiyan, home to many Afghan Hazaras, and of the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban. Exhibition hours are 1-5pm, with screenings after dark.
