Refugees have to gamble their lives if they are to save their lives or preserve their freedom. They have no protection from their own state - in fact, it is often their own government that is threatening to persecute them. Countries such as Afghanistan have had a long standing history of bitter and violent armed conflict with little regard for the local people robbing of their security. However, it is in the detention centres where asylum seekers, such as the Afghani Najaf Mazari, who was recently granted a visa, faced and still face the harshest consequences of powerlessness where they are not only forced to “place (your) their fate in the hands of other people” but also out of reach with the people that make them feel power, their family and friends. Constant scrutiny and anxiety affect detainees deeply, it “is never a happy situation”. Frustrated by their impotence, detainees are very tense and “begin to go mad”. They can easily become incensed by something as trivial as uneven amounts of food that they risk being sent back to their homelands. Autonomy is an essential element of a person’s humanity. Without power a person is not quite whole and eventually a repressed person’s soul will rebel. The recent riots on the Christmas Island detention facility that have attracted the attention of the media is just another example of the extent of refugees’ rebellion against the subjection they endure while waiting for the Immigration officials sitting at their desks in Canberra to make a decision about their visas, their lives.
Who are these powerful people that are once again making these asylum seekers powerless?
They are, indirectly, the people of Australia who are responsible for rendering these people powerless. The Australian Government receives a mandate from the people through elections and it is the Government’s responsibility to act on behalf the people. We, the Australian people are the powerful that are breaching their basic human rights. The refugee discourse has now been exploited on multiple occasions to gain votes from the Australian populace by both major political parties, with the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees suggesting that the Australian Government implement policies regarding the asylum seekers based on humanitarian not political guidelines suggesting scepticism about government motives. It has now come to “the two major political parties are bickering about whether it is better to send them to Malaysia or Nauru”, rather than helping them and spreading equality.
We are also responsible for the repercussive irrevocable psychological damage that affect asylum seekers after repressing, denigrating and dehumanizing them by leaving them in detention centres, isolated from society, “It is not that the Afghanis have chosen a path of suffering out of madness; no, other people have chosen that path for us”. With this powerlessness, the refugees either riot for attention, for their freedom of speech as demonstrated by the Australia Day Woomera detention facility riots or resign themselves to the sorry realisation that the future they had dreamed for themselves and their families “depended on things that (I) (couldn’t) can’t control”. We are breaking these people the worst way possible, breaking their spirit and consequently causing them to lose all hope.
We, the people with power have been continually breaking the spirit and hope of asylum seekers, sacrificing everything to find a safe haven from persecution. The asylum seekers came to this land of the fair go, not to be encountered with another conflict but to escape one, yet they are being re-rendered powerless, being subjected to constant fear and anxiety and being exploited for the benefit of the Australian Government. It is time to spread equality rather than let this cycle of conflict between the powerful and the powerless continue.
Written Explanation
This piece of writing was written as a persuasive opinion piece that could be found in a broadsheet newspaper such as The Age or The Australian, which have had continual coverage on the asylum seeker discourse. Therefore, the targeted audience was broadsheet newspaper readers who are aware and well-informed of the nominated topic. The language used was sophisticated, personal and critical, so that it could mirror the opinion pieces of the Age.
The contention of the piece is that conflict occurs between a more powerful party and a powerless party and that it is a conflict of an equality imbalance. This persuasive piece delves into the conflict between “the powerful” and “the powerless” by firstly exploring examples of conflicts between the powerful and the powerless and then mirroring the nominated issue to show that this conflict occurs. Thereafter, the identities of the powerful and the powerless are explored and how the conflict is happening between is shown. The writing was based on a quote from the text, “The Rugmaker of Mazar-E-Sharif”, “The feeling of having no power to make things happen gets you’re your heart and you begin to question whether you are really a human being”, which depicts how the powerless can be crushed by the powerful, just by oppressing their power.
The piece of writing draws other ideas from the text, such as the idea of leaving your future or fate in the hands of a stranger, which is based on the idea of asylum seekers having their fate decided by a Government official. Another idea was the feeling of powerlessness leads to the loss of hope, in the piece of writing the mental state of asylum seekers is explored after losing hope. As well as drawing ideas from the text, direct quotations and references to the main character, Najaf, were made to strengthen the bridge between the context text and the piece of writing.
Although, there is a lot of exploring within the piece of writing, but the piece stays true to its persuasive nature with a constant use of persuasive language.
Inclusive language, such as “we”, and rhetorical questions aimed at the audience, was used to include the readers and with this I appealed to the Australian people’s compassion and guilty conscience by lathering on accusations that were justified with evidence manipulated to support my view and accompanied with words that had negatively connotations . These sources of evidence were mostly quotes, however, they stemmed from people who are related to the issue in question. In this piece of writing, the repetition of key words such as “powerful”, “powerless”, “conflict”, helped give these words as well as the arguments that accompanied them more impact. The tone of this piece at first is that of a critical and authoritative one and further into the writing the tone transformed into that of a disillusioned and dissatisfied tone which was evident through the use of accusations.