The Refugee Journey

Did you know that the journey that refugees make is often as dangerous as the place they have escaped from? Refugees are subjected to many perilous situations on their journey to safety including:

• running in fear of death
• being bombed
• facing violence including rape
• attack by pirates
• having to pay bribes to border guards
• staying in dangerous places with little food or water.

Some refugees say that the journey never finishes, because they can never return home.

Why would anyone use a people smuggler?

Everyone who regards themselves as a refugee is entitled to apply for asylum or resettlement. The Australian Government has the job of deciding who can migrate and who is a refugee. Applying to come here can be very difficult. In some countries there is no Australian embassy. In many countries, Australian officials do not visit camps to see if people might need to be taken to safety. Often there are roadblocks, curfews and travel permits that make it dangerous and expensive to travel to the capital city where a refugee might try to make application.

For some, it is also impossible to go to neighbouring countries to seek asylum because it is also dangerous there. Asylum seekers who use people smugglers are mostly desperate people whose options have run out. They see this route as their only opportunity to escape to a safe place.

Ali's Escape

I lived in a village in central Afghanistan with my father, my mother and my older brother. My father was headman of our village and had a shop at the front of our house. We are of the Hazara tribe and the Taliban who ran the government did not like the Hazara people. One day when I was seventeen a group of Taliban armed with guns arrived in our village in their trucks to take the young men away to join their army. My father and some of the older men tried to defend our village but he was shot and killed in the main street.

The Taliban took all the young men including me in their trucks to an old fort outside the village. They told us that unless we joined their army they would beat us. The Taliban had just killed my father – I refused to join their army. So they beat me and kicked me and kept me in the fort. I don’t know how long I was there.

When the Taliban left our village I was very sick for a long time and my mother had to look after me. She sold our farmland and her jewellery to get me out of Afghanistan. She arranged for me to go with a people smuggler by truck to Turkmenistan, a country north of Afghanistan. I don’t remember much about this journey, as I was still sick. From there he flew me to Indonesia and put me on a fishing boat to Australia.

The fishing boat was old and overcrowded and many of us were seasick. The boat arrived at Ashmore Reef and we were all put into a Detention Centre for many months. I have now been released but I am only allowed to stay in Australia for three years.

Most refugees just want to go home. Sadly, they can’t

Not all refugees want to come to Australia! Most just want to go home. They love their country, their families, their language and their culture. Many owned land before they had to flee. Many of them wait in countries of asylum for many years for the first chance to go home. In 2000 Iran and Pakistan each had over a million Afghan refugees. The world’s poorest countries carry the real burden of assisting refugees. There are an estimated 5 million refugees in Africa.

It is very difficult for asylum seekers to travel to Australia. The journey is long and dangerous. It is much easier for people to reach European countries. In the year 2000, more than 300,000 refugees arrived in Europe to seek asylum in 2000. In 1999-2000, 4174 asylum seekers reached Australia by boat and 1694 by plane.

Enga's Story

In 1999, I was one of 10,000 people who fled from war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and settled across the border in Northern Zambia with local villagers. Conditions were very bad and we suffered a lot. As refugee numbers increased and it was certain that the war was going to continue, UNHCR and the Zambian government tried to find a better and more permanent camp for the us to live in. They chose a campsite about fifty kilometres from the border. We would not move. Even though the conditions in the new camp would be much better, we did not want to go beyond walking distance from our homes and fields. We were scared that we would lose our land and never return. We did not want to be away from our country, but we did not want to die.

Every day we could hear the bombs dropping across the border near our homes. But we waited close by for the first opportunity to go home when the bombs stopped. We wanted to return home as soon as possible, in time for the next planting season, we did not want our farms to be ruined. Things became very bad in the temporary camp on the border, but we only agreed to be moved to the new campsite when UNHCR promised that buses take us home the moment the bombing stopped. They finally understood that we only wanted to go home. We did not want to stay in a foreign land.

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