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No escape from persecution
The Age, Friday May 10 2002 p. 13 (NHS)
The followers of a minority religion fled Iran to avoid discrimination, but their case has gained little sympathy in Australia.
Russell Skelton reports,
When a young Iranian non-Muslim girl attempted to serve food at the mess in the Woomera detention center in December, she suddenly became the center of a fierce and violent outburst by a group of irate Muslim men and women. A witness to the confrontation said the 18-year old girl was verbally abused as a “dirty, filthy infidel” who had no right to be handling food for Muslims. “She argued back, but she was pushed to the ground and kicked and abused”, the witness, a former Woomera employee, told The Age.
The girl was isolated by Australasian Correctional Management staff and spent three days confined to her room, frightened and distressed. The violent clash is just one of scores that ACM employees and church workers say take place each month in detention centers around Australia between groups of hardline Muslims and non-Muslims, usually Christians.
They say the clashes come in waves and are often provoked by Afghans and Iraqis. Staff say they are also difficult to prevent because the targets of the violence often refuse to be placed in isolation, fearing it will only make their circumstances worse.
“The situation is very bad right now”, a concerned church worker said. “When the numbers in detentiondrop, tensions and conflicts among those who remain just intensify”.
In this particular incident, the girl was a Sabian Mandean, a follower of a tiny pre-Christian religion dedicated to the teachings of John the Baptist. Although Mandeans number no more than 15,000 in Iran's population of more than 60 million, their numbers in Australian detention centers are proportionally much greater, accounting for an estimated 40 per cent of the total Iranian detainee population awaiting deportation.
Until very recently it was not a crime for a Muslim man to rape a Mandaean woman.
Church chaplains, pastoral workers and ACM employees have told The Age that the Mandaeans and Muslims who convert to Christianity are regularly targeted by devout Muslims, often Shiites, who also refuse to share bathrooms, toilets and even laundries with them. There have been violent incidents, including the stoning of a group of Christians at Woomera last year which left one man blind in one eye.
Some assaults have taken place under the cover of darkness when guards find it hard to monitor movements. In March, the Catholic chaplain at Woomera, Father Jim Monaghan, reported that a blind man had been seized, defecated on and locked in a toilet.
“At present the families there are very vulnerable. There have been attempted suicides and other forms of self-harm … they are often desperate”, he wrote after describing a number of incidents involving the victimization of Mandeans that included the harassment of women and children.
The president of the Sabian Mandean Association in Sydney, Kosrow Chohaili, said that most of the Mandeans fled to Australia to escape harassment and victimization only to have their claims for asylum rejected.
Australian immigration officials and the Refugee Review Tribunal have ruled in the majority of cases that Mandeans are discriminated against in Iran, but not persecuted. Of the 18 cases involving Iranian Mandeans that went before the tribunal, only two Mandeans were found to have awell-founded fear of persecution, and were granted visas. Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said generally Mandaeans did not have a problem with persecution, although he conceded that some individuals might.
For Mandaeans from Iraq, it's a very different story. Of about 70 appeals heard by the tribunal, only three were rejected. Chohaili cited the case of a 38-year-old widow who has been held with her two sons in the remote confines of the Curtin detention centre for almost two years after her plea for asylum was rejected. "She fled Iran because an Islamic teacher was going to forcibly convert one of her two sons to Islam, but nobody believes her," he said.
"During the recent riots she was threatened and abused by Muslims who reviled her as an infidel. She was removed at her request by the ACM guards and is now being held in a separate part of the camp for her safety. But how is it that the Australian Government can say Mandaeans are not being persecuted, when the persecution is going on in detention camps on Australian soil?" he said.
The persecution has become so chronic that Mandaeans in Woomera conduct their services in secret, while in Curtin, Amnesty International believes that services are not held at all because authorities are concerned about physical attacks. Even Christian services at Curtin, including baptisms, have been severely restricted by immigration officials.
Father Monaghan concluded in his report, which was sent to the Federal Government by the Mandaean association in Sydney, by saying: "These people (Mandaeans) are all adamant that they will not return to Iran. In view of the dreadful conditions they are experiencing in Woomera, I can only conclude their situation in Iran was unbearable."
Amnesty has also written to Ruddock, asking him to urgently investigate the victimisation of Mandaeans. Amnesty has requested that the Mandaeans scattered through Woomera, Port Hedland and Curtin be taken to Sydney's Villawood centre where they can receive pastoral care from the local Mandaean community, be allowed to practise their religion which requires flowing water for constant baptism and be served traditional food, rather than the halal food they are restricted to at Woomera and Curtin.
"Mandaeans are a persecuted minority that have never in their long history tried to impose their religion on anybody," Amnesty refugee case worker, John Clugston, said. "They are not a threat, yet they are locked up in long-term detention here and face being returned to an Islamic country where they have been demeaned and discriminated against."
Evidence gathered in Iran by human rights groups paints a grim picture of discrimination and repression against not only political opponents of the regime, but religious minorities.
The Shiah-dominated government has been condemned by the US State Department, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch for its persecution of Baha'i Muslims. Muslims who convert to Christianity still face the death penalty, either by hanging or stoning. The State Department and Amnesty report that non-Muslims are prevented from attending universities or holding government jobs. Until very recently it was not a crime for a Muslim man to rape a Mandaean woman. The murder, jailing and disappearance of students and journalists at the hands of security police and Basilis (state-sponsored vigilantes) is also well documented by US human rights agencies.