On this page:  Bishops: humane approach to asylum seekers     Transporting 60 people    KNU & Burmese government - peace talks    The vultures prey     Women of Burma

The Catholic Bishops Commission for Justice, Ecology and Development has called on political parties to mark Australia Day by working towards a common approach to asylum seekers - and put a limit to their time in detention, the bishops said in a statement.

"Further, and more immediately, to honour the Australian sense of justice and compassion, there must be a defined limit to incarceration in detention centres for people who are not criminals," the statement said.

The Bishops are calling on the Government to limit detention to three months.

Four of the Bishops who signed the statement minister directly to asylum seekers in immigration detention centres located in their dioceses. Bishop Julian Porteous, Auxiliary Bishop in Sydney, supported the opinions of the other Bishops who have direct involvement in the pastoral care of asylum seekers in detention.

"Prolonged and indefinite detention in these facilities can only produce psychological damage", he said.

"In citizenship ceremonies around the country on Australia Day we will again celebrate the great contribution migrant families have made to this great nation", said Archbishop Adrian Doyle of Hobart.

"We should be particularly proud of Australia's generosity over the years in providing refuge to vulnerable people fleeing their homelands. It is important that we also remember the men, women and children currently being held in detention centres."

Bishop Gregory O'Kelly SJ of Port Pirie said: "Minister Chris Bowen announced last November that the Government would issue around 100 bridging visas each month for the community placement of asylum seekers.

"This announcement recognises that prolonged detention does serious harm to vulnerable people. While this brings the Government closer to its 2008 commitment that detention would be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time, the dire circumstance of many detainees requires more immediate action.

"In Port Augusta we have thirty young people, nearly all minors and some in primary school, who have been in detention now for twelve months, at Christmas Island and there.

"The secondary school age minors have not been permitted to attend school.

"They are taught English for one hour a day. Apart from that one hour a day there is only an occasional activity to occupy them. Imagine how harmful the tedium is to growing young spirits.

"Despite a letter issued by the Minister last September, even though the minors are Catholic they are not permitted to attend the nearby Catholic school.

"We know that no parent and no politician would want their own children to undergo such a regime for so long," he said.

Jan 24, 2012

After more than six decades of uninterrupted armed resistance to Burmese rule, the leaders of the Karen National Union (KNU), Burma’s oldest ethnic armed group, have signed a ceasefire agreement with the government.

The historic agreement, the first since the KNU began its struggle for Karen autonomy shortly after Burma achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1948, was signed at 2:57 pm on Thursday following talks between a government peace delegation led by Railways Minister Aung Min and KNU representatives led by Gen Mutu Say Poe at the Zwegapin Hotel in the Karen State capital Pa-an.



Under the agreement, the two sides will initiate a ceasefire and allow each other to conduct unarmed patrols in their respective territories.

The KNU will also be allowed to set up liaison offices in government-controlled areas.

According to a local source who asked to remain anonymous, the KNU delegation will travel next to the Mon State capital Moulmein and later visit Pegu, a central Burmese city near Rangoon with a large Karen population, where the KNU is considering opening a liaison office.

The KNU representatives arrived in Pa-an on Wednesday, where they were greeted by thousands of Karen people and attended a dinner hosted by the government peace delegation.
 
Several KNU central committee members, including David Taw, Roger Khin, Ah Toe, Aung Maung Aye, Kwe Htoo Win and Brig-Gen Saw Johnny, as well as representatives from all seven KNLA Brigades except Brigade 5, accompanied the peace delegation.Ngwe Soe, who helped to broker the talks, said that both sides agreed to meet again for further discussions.

A meeting is tentatitively scheduled to take place in Naypyidaw in 45 days, he added.

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Despite the unusually upbeat tone coming out of the talks, however, there was still a note of caution in some of the comments coming from those close to the negotiations.

“This time they didn't ask us to give up our arms, they just want to work for equal rights for ethnic groups.

This time we trust them,” Saw Johnny told Agence France-Presse, before adding: “We have been fighting for 60 years and one meeting alone will not end it.”

Several other ethnic armed groups, including the United Wa State Army, the Shan State Army-South, the Chin National Front and the National Democratic Alliance Army, have also recently reached ceasefire agreements with the government.

As a key member of the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), a coalition of ethnic armed groups formed in February 2011, the KNU has called on the government to enter into an inclusive dialogue with all UNFC members to reach a lasting political settlement that addresses ethnic concerns.
 
However, according to a UNFC source, the group has agreed in principle to allow its members to enter into individual ceasefire agreements with the government, on the understanding that this will later lead to political talks involving all of the groups concerned.     

Founded in 1947, the KNU formed its military wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), in 1949 and immediately began an armed insurgency against Burma's central government.

Although the group has never signed an official ceasefire agreement with the government, in 2004, the late KNU leader Bo Mya and former government spy chief Khin Nyunt verbally agreed to halt hostilities following talks in Rangoon.

However, the fragile informal truce soon broke down.

The Irrawaddy
Jan 12, 2012

You have probably seen this photo before; it was taken back in 1993.

Again you shake your head and wonder why, using such a photo, I write such melancholy stories so close to Christmas time.

After all, as the huge Christmas tree in central Martin Place Sydney declared, this is the season of "peace, joy, hope and love".

The photo was taken on the 23rd March 1993 by photographer Kevin Carter on his trip to southern Sudan.

He took this iconic photo of a vulture preying upon an emaciated Sudanese toddler near the village of Ayod.

Carter said he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would fly away. It didn’t. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away.

(The parents of the girl were busy taking food from the same UN plane Carter took to Ayod).

The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993 as a grim image for Africa’s despair.

Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived. Her ultimate fate was unknown and Carter came under criticism for not helping the girl. 

“The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” said one editorial.

“Carter eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo, but he couldn’t enjoy it. “I’m really, really sorry I didn’t pick the child up,” he confided in a friend.

Consumed with the violence he’d witnessed, and haunted by the questions as to the little girl’s fate, he committed suicide three months later.”

Again, why the photo? Is it to disturb? To make us feel guilty?

No, although I am disturbed and I do feel guilty, but the reason I use it is to acknowledge that we have such a long way to go to make the words on the tree a reality in our troubled world.

Sadly, I also use the photo to recall (how easy it is to forget) that once again in 2011 we have been confronted by the harrowing images of thousands of starving Africans trudging through the desolate wastes of the Horn of Africa in their quest to survive.

The stories this time are equally graphic and unnerving. One in particular weighs heavy on my memory.

Among the hundreds of thousands of refugees was a woman with four children.

Because all her cattle were dead, her crops withered, and she was unable to feed her children, she set out on bare foot (not Running Bare) from her village in Somalia to a Refugee Camp in Kenya in a desperate effort to save her children.

Without food and little water she carried, dragged and urged her children along in the burning sands of the desert tormented by furious dust-storms and raging thirst.

On the way one of her children collapsed unable to continue.

The mother was faced with a horrifying Sophie’s choice: stop and stay with the sick and probably dying child and risk the lives of the other three children or abandon him in the desperate hope of reaching the camp and saving the others.

She left him. But she will forever carry the haunting look of fear, despair and desolation in the eyes of her child as she turned to go.

His fate is unknown but she and all those ragged, emaciated, suffering lines of humanity seeking safety knew only too well of the hyenas opportunistically dogging their heels for any who fell by the wayside.

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After 18 days the mother and her three children arrived at the camp in Kenya.   

Caritas reports that the 2011 drought is the worst drought in 60 years, almost all the new refugees are from Somalia.

They are arriving in shocking health and nutritional conditions.

Over the last seven weeks, Ethiopia’s population in need, increased from 3.2 to 4.5 million; Kenya from 2.4 to 3.75 million and Somalia from 3.2 to 4.5 million*.

This is a far-reaching crisis affecting women, men, children and the elderly. (Compare these staggering numbers with the trickle of refugees permitted each year in Australia- Limit? 13,700 which may be increased to 20,000 on the condition of accepting the morally bankrupt  Faustian trade off of accepting the Malaysia Solution)

I also chose this photo as a metaphor for a far more pervasive, insidious and destructive kind of vulture than the feathered variety in the photo.

One that prowls the world in pin striped suits- and is known as the buyer and holder of Vulture Funds
.
And what are Vulture Funds? I am grateful to the “Guardian” for helping to explain

It has been 16 years since most of the world began writing off the debts of the poorest countries, but the vulture funds, a club of between 26 and 35 speculators, have done almost everything to ensure that these countries do not have a chance to get back on their feet; they have ignored the debt concerts by pop stars such as Bono and pleas from the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to give the countries a break.

What happens? Vulture funds operate by buying up a country's debt at a great discount when it is in a state of chaos.

When the country has stabilised, vulture funds return to demand millions of dollars in interest repayments and fees on the original debt. New York vulture fund FG Hemisphere has gone to Jersey Island (a tax haven) to claim $100-m from the DRC, because a legal loophole means that the Island remains free of anti-vulture laws that were passed in the U.K. last year.

It purchased the $100 million debt for the bargain price of $3.3 million and is likely to win its case. How venal can one get?

Contrasts: The DRC should be one of Africa's richest countries. It has a mineral wealth estimated to be around $24-trillion (£15-tn).

There are huge deposits of cobalt, diamonds, gold, copper, oil and 80 per cent of the world's supplies of coltan ore — a valuable mineral used in computers and mobile phones. (How many of us use these?)

Yet 100 women a week are still dying in childbirth and 16,000 children under the age of five die every year. One in three children in the DRC will never get anything more than primary education.

 So far, according to the World Bank, the top 26 vultures have managed to collect $1-bn from the world's poorest countries and still have a further $1.3-bn to collect.

Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister and long-time Finance Minister in Tony Blair's administrations, has described the payouts as ‘morally outrageous.”  

As we prepare to farewell 2011 and welcome in 2012 can we justifiably expect that things will change?

Can we realistically hope to make a difference to the lives of some who like that little child whose kneeling posture seems like a plea to us for help?

Maybe we can make a difference in a small way in the coming year so that next year’s letter will be filled with reasons to hope, to be filled with joy, to live in peace and to be reconciled in love.

Posted, New Year, 2012