TRUMP CRITICIZES 'DUMB' AUSTRALIA REFUGEE DEAL →

Australia’s efforts to move detained refugees off Nauru and Manus island hit another snag yesterday with reports of US President Donald Trump’s reticence to accept a deal that would see many of the asylum seekers go to America.
 
Officials from both countries claimed the phone call between Mr. Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday went well and reaffirmed both leaders’ commitments to preserving the longstanding relationship between both nations.
 
“The deal specifically deals with 1,250 people, they’re mostly in Papua New Guinea, being held…there will be extreme vetting applied to all of them as part and parcel of the deal that was made,” government spokesman Sean Spicer told the White House press corps earlier this week.
 
“The president, in accordance with that deal to honor what had been agreed upon by the United States government…will go forward.”
 
But yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the call was far from cordial, with Mr. Trump severely criticizing the refugee deal and criticizing Mr. Turnbull.
 
“Do you believe it? The Obama administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter yesterday morning.
 
He had much harsher words for Mr. Turnbull during their call, reportedly telling the Australian prime minister that he “didn’t want these people” and that it was the “worst deal ever.” He slammed Australia for what he said was its attempt to send the “next Boston bombers” to the US, referencing the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that killed three people and injured hundreds.
 
Mr. Turnbull told the Australian press after the call that Mr. Trump had agreed to honor the deal, which was set up by the Obama administration late last year before he left office and would see up to 1,250 refugees moved to the US.
 
But the Washington Post quoted several senior US officials who said it was a “hostile and charged” conversation that ended abruptly after 25 minutes.  
 
Mr. Turnbull allegedly attempted to change the topic of conversation to military efforts in Syria, but Mr. Trump hung up on him. All of Mr. Trump’s calls with other foreign leaders that day had lasted one hour or more. He reportedly told Mr. Turnbull that it was the “worst call by far.”
 
Reports of the call are contrary to Mr. Trump’s previous actions, which included sending US officials to interview refugees on Nauru and Manus island. Mr. Trump even added a clause to his controversial ban on any immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations, making an exception for “pre-existing” international agreements in reference to the deal with Australia.
 
However, Mr. Trump allegedly left room for the US to back out of the deal, with senior officials saying he told the Australian leader that it was his “intention” to abide by the deal, a term they said was specifically used to give him leeway.
 
Australia has spent years attempting to offload the refugees being held on the Pacific island nation of Nauru and Manus island in Papua New Guinea and there have been persistent reports of deplorable living conditions, sexual violence and lackluster healthcare at the camps.
 
Almost 1,900 refugees are being held on Nauru and Manus island, with many of them coming from Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan – all countries mentioned in Mr. Trump’s executive order.
 
Australia struck a deal with Cambodia in 2014 to take some of the refugees, but many refused to come. Those who did take up the offer reported poor conditions and widespread mismanagement of the resources they were promised.
 
All but one of the handful of refugees who came to Cambodia returned to the countries they fled and Cambodian immigration officials have refused to comment on reports of three Iranian refugees allegedly slated to come to the kingdom this year.
 
The refugees held on Nauru and Manus island are now stuck in limbo, waiting to see what Mr. Trump will do or say next. Despite the president’s criticism of the deal and tough talk to the Australian prime minister, a US embassy spokesman in Australia told the Guardian that “President Trump’s decision to honor the refugee agreement has not changed.”

This article was printed in Khmer Times on February 3, 2017: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/news/35073/trump-criticizes--dumb--australian-refugee-deal/

TRUMP BACKS DEAL WITH AUSTRALIA →

US President Donald Trump assured Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that a deal signed by his predecessor – which would allow the asylum seekers held on Manus and Nauru to settle in the US – would be honored during the first official call between the two leaders yesterday morning.

The two discussed a variety of issues during their 25-minute phone conversation, but Mr. Trump sought to allay fears that the refugee deal would be scrapped after months of uncertainty.

Australia has been detaining more than 2,000 refugees on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on the island nation of Nauru and sent a handful of refugees from Nauru to Cambodia in a much-maligned 2014 deal that largely fell apart when all but one decided to return to their home countries.

The refugees who came to Cambodia under the $30 million deal alleged bad  living conditions, little assistance from the government and lies told to them before their arrival about the kingdom and what compensation they would receive.

Despite reports in October of three more refugees were slated to come to Cambodia under the deal, Kem Sarin, a spokesman for the general immigration department, declined to comment on the future of Cambodia’s pact with Australia in light of the US government’s stance.

Tan Sovichea, the refugee department director, did not respond to requests for comment.

Chak Sopheap, the executive director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said the deal was doomed from the start considering Cambodia’s track record with its own refugees.

“While the neglect suffered by those refugees under the deal in Cambodia may pale in comparison to the reports of abuse coming from Nauru, the fact remains that many of the refugees have opted to return to the countries from which they fled, suggesting strongly the extent of the neglect they were subject to here,” she said.

In November, then-US President Barack Obama agreed to bring all of the refugees on both islands to the US pending extensive background checks and interviews. Due to Mr. Trump’s outspoken stance against immigration during his election campaign, many believed the deal would be scrapped once he took office.

But officials from the US State Department have already gone to both Nauru and Manus to interview refugees ahead of their resettlement on orders from Mr. Trump’s administration.

Mr. Trump’s backing of the agreement came as a surprise to many analysts and commentators in the US considering his recent executive order suspending the entry of all refugees to the US for 120 days, banning Syrian refugees indefinitely and stopping the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days.

Many of those being held on Nauru and Manus are from the seven nations on Mr. Trump’s list of now-banned countries, including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Thousands of protesters crowded American airports in defiance of the order on Saturday after people from those seven countries who had obtained all of the documents and approvals needed to visit or live in the US legally were arrested and held by customs agents in countries across the world.

A court order late on Saturday night temporarily stopped the US government from enforcing the order after a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Legal experts in the US have criticized the measure, as it runs afoul of a number of long-standing US laws. It is in direct violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which made it illegal to discriminate against immigrants on the basis of national origin.

The law was passed in an effort to remedy a series of race-based government edicts enforced in the early 1900s, the most notable of which – the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 – was aimed primarily at banning immigrants from Southeast Asia, China and Japan from entering the US and becoming citizens.

*This article as featured in Khmer Times on January 30, 2017: https://www.khmertimeskh.com/news/34868/trump-backs-deal-with-australia/

LEAKED FILES SHOW REFUGEE ABUSE

The Guardian newspaper’s Australian edition yesterday published a trove of leaked incident reports from the detention centers on the island nation of Nauru, depicting horrifying conditions, an appallingly long list of sexual assaults and blatant mismanagement by the companies contracted to run them.
 

The revelations have forced a number of Cambodian human rights activists to ask how the Kingdom can still involve itself with the controversial refugee deal signed in 2014, which allowed Australia to send refugees here in exchange for $40 million in development aid.
 

The 10,000-person island has served as one of the staging grounds for Australia’s detention centers, where 442 people – 338 men, 55 women and 49 children – have been held against their will for a number of years. The 2,116 leaked incident files depict detention centers full of chaos, where sexual assault, self-harm and abuse are rampant.
 

Yet despite the endemic crime refugees were forced to live around, the people charged with caring for them, Broadspectrum (formerly Transfield Services) and its subcontractor Wilson Security, were shown to have not only refrained from helping refugees, but participated in the abuse. Multiple reports from refugees said security guards at the center were often involved in the abuse and sexual assault that women and children dealt with while detained on Nauru.
 

One harrowing report depicted a woman approaching a Wilson Security employee after being sexually assaulted, only to be berated for bringing the news to him and turned away.  
 

“You have to take it out of your head if you go into Nauru. Then he [the alleged perpetrator] could be your neighbor or if you go to Cambodia, then he could be on the plane next to you,” the employee told the woman.
 

Women and children at the detention center were the focus of most reports despite the overwhelming number of men held there. The conditions, treatment and diminishing hopes of ever making it to Australia led many to attempt suicide in a horrifying variety of ways.
 

When contacted for comment, the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh directed Khmer Times to a statement from the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
 

In it, they defend their response, even tossing doubt onto the allegations of sexual assault aired by dozens of women detained on the island and claiming that efforts and “significant investment” were constantly being made to upgrade the “health and educational facilities in Nauru, which benefit Nauruans, transferees and refugees living in the Nauruan community.”
 

“The Australian Government continues to support the Nauruan Government to provide for the health, welfare and safety of all transferees and refugees in Nauru,” the statement said. “Many of the incident reports reflect unconfirmed allegations or uncorroborated statements and claims – they are not statements of proven fact.”
 

The statement goes on to say that all criminal incidents reported at the detention centers are sent to the Nauru Police Force and claims to have found no evidence “to suggest that service providers have underreported or misreported incidents in Nauru.”
 

Despite the statement citing a number of Australian laws and initiatives designed to illustrate an effort to specifically protect children detained on the island, the leaked reports show that instances of child abuse increased in 2015.
 

Many in Cambodia have railed against the deal to bring refugees from Nauru to Cambodia, with opposition leader Sam Rainsy saying last year that the Kingdom was being used as a “dumping ground” by Australia.
 

Of the six refugees brought to Cambodia from Nauru, only one remains. Four Iranians and one Rohingya man returned to their home countries after staying in Cambodia for short periods of time.
 

Chak Sopheap, executive director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said if Australia and Cambodia actually cared about human rights, the deal and the detention centers would never exist.
 

“These latest revelations of the horrors in Nauru’s processing center merely confirm what we have asserted for years – that human rights are completely absent from Australia’s policy towards migrants,” she told Khmer Times.
 

“While the neglect suffered by those refugees under the deal in Cambodia may pale in comparison to the reports of abuse coming from Nauru, the fact remains that many of the refugees have opted to return to the countries from which they fled, suggesting strongly the extent of the neglect they were subject to here.”
 

The money given to Cambodia in the refugee deal should not overshadow the abuse refugees face both on Nauru and in Cambodia, she added.
 

“The less well-known but neglectful treatment of refugees in Cambodia stands in stark contrast to the significant payment Cambodia has received in return. It is a tragedy for both the refugees and the Cambodian people that their human rights do not rank high in the government’s priorities.
 

“Importantly, considerations of humanity must be placed ahead of financial incentive in any strategy going forward.”

http://www.khmertimeskh.com/news/28337/leaked-files-show-refugee-abuse/