An Invitation of Kindness and Security
For almost a whole decade now, I have been in touch with Australian women and children living in displacement camps in northeast Syria. I have been with them since 2015, making sure they are okay. It might be surprising, but a few of these kids have lived their entire lives in a barbed-wire enclosure. They are born and brought up in a world with severe lack, trauma and unpredictability. The political upshots call for them to be left into killing and suffering, and let their fathers’ sins or their mothers’ bad choices be forever-marked signs on them. Nonetheless, I am standing here to prove wrong the first idea coming to one’s mind: it is not a weakness but an important step to make Australia safer to bring these people back.
The Truth about the Camps
The camps are, for example, Al-Hol and Al-Roj, not psychiatric hospitals. They are pools of radicalisation and misery. The absence of proper teaching, treatment, or a psychiatrist leads to children being raised in a space where the unorthodox ideologies thrive. Hence, by leaving them over there, we are not managing a problem; instead, we are managing the problem in a new way. We are in a manner of speaking outsourcing our security issue to a poorly run and unstable area and are holding on to the hope that it will not come to us again. This is a dangerous self-deception.
Managed Repatriation: The Safety First Approach
Repatriation is a complicated and delicate process, yet it is a process we can manage. Australia is equipped with strong security agencies, legal systems, and social services. Bringing these people back in a well-managed, discrete way and agency-by-agency plan is deeply effective, as we will be able to assess risks, give deradicalisation support, and ensure ongoing observation. The alternative would be to abandon them which in return guarantees that they stay an unknown and unmanaged risk. These women and children are not something like a solid block. Numerous of them are even victims, i.e. they have been manipulated or coerced against their wills. Their narratives are intricate, and our response has to be that way too.
A Matter of Our Society
This issue goes deeper than that of our national responsibility and is about common sense too, i.e., these are Australian citizens and their kids are too. Leaving them alone goes against our legal and moral duties. It also results in a deep and permanent underclass of stateless people who are traumatized and rightly feel that they are betrayed by the country they thought was their home. Such a feeling of betrayal is turned into a power distribution tool for the people who don’t want us to be at peace. Integrating them into the society once again, with the help of properly lived and safeguarded measures, will be a way of closing that grievance down. This shows that our justice system is working and also that our community is really powerful.
Securing Australia demands active, smart strategies instead of mere shaking fists. We will counter this suicide problem by bringing these family units back and thus we will be in the position to apply the rule of law directly. Finally, we will reduce the resentment that is a basis of promoting extremism. This may be still the harder path, but it is, in fact, the correct approach to our security and also to our spirit as a nation.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
