The Hon Julie Bishop
Minister for Foreign
Affairs
House of Representatives,
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
24th Feb 2014
Dear Minister
Why
would a wealthy country like Australia even consider offloading refugees that
arrived in Australian waters onto a poor country like Cambodia?
Cambodia
is a country in which 40% of children are malnourished; a country in which one
in five live below the poverty line; a country which, year after year, is voted
one of the most corrupt in the world; a country in which the Hun Sen regime’s
response to garment factory workers on strike, seeking the $160 a month wage that
the government itself acknowledges is the bare minimum needed for survival, is
to call in heavily armed soldiers shoot to kill? These soldiers, none of whom
have been charged, belong to an army that receives military aid from Australia.
And this army is controlled a government that receives around $100 million in
aid from Australia each year – a substantial part of which winds up directly
and indirectly lining the pockets of corrupt politicians.
Is
Australia’s $100 million being spent to alleviate poverty in Cambodia or is it
contributing, along with donor dollars from elsewhere in the world (up to $1
billion a year), to propping up what is essentially a dictatorship?
As
I mentioned in my last letters to you of 26th and 29th
Jan, receipt of which has not been acknowledged by your office, you need only
look at some of the footage available to you online to get some sense of the
sheer scale of the Hun Sen regime’s human rights abuses. And this is the
government into whose care you wish to entrust refugees who arrived on
Australian shores?
Will
40% of the child refugees joint the ranks of the malnourished? Will one in five
of the refugee families that are deported to Cambodia live below the poverty
line? No, it will be considerably more than one in five because these refugees
will arrive in a country that has no social services to speak of, a country in
which they do not speak the language, a country in which there is so little
work for Cambodians that garment factories can get away with paying garment
workers just half of what is required to survive?
It
is hard to imagine why Australia engages in diplomatic relations at all with a
government whose victory in the July 2013 elections is in very serious doubt.
Every independent observer of the elections acknowledges that fraud on a massive
scale occurred. Many countries, including Australia and the US congress, called
for an independent investigation into the election results. Then, last October,
Prime Minister Tiny Abbott congratulated Hun Sen on having won elections that
few outside the Cambodian People’s Party believe he won. Was it in October that
the Tony Abbott government conceived this plan to offload refugees onto
Cambodia?
“We will cease our calls for an
independent investigation of the election results, Mr Hun Sen, and pump another
$100 million into the Cambodian economy next year in foreign aid if you will
help us with our refugee problem?”
Is
this the reality behind the spin that will ultimately be presented to the
Australian public if this deal is sealed? Given that you did not take questions
at your Phnom Penh press conference, we in the media will never have an
opportunity to put this question to you and get an answer.
Not
only is your plan to offload refugees onto Cambodia an abrogation of
Australia’s duty of care for people who arrive on our shores seeking refuge,
not only is it inappropriate to ask a poor country to shoulder the burden and
prop up a corrupt government in the process, it is also virtually guaranteed to
fail. And when it fails there will be plenty of representatives of the media in
Cambodia, including myself, who will inform the Australian public of this
failure – in all likelihood at a time when the Abbott government is trying to
convince the Australian public that its policy of stopping the boats has been a
success.
You
should abandon this misconceived idea immediately.
best
wishes
James
Ricketson
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