Post by pim on Apr 16, 2013 20:14:54 GMT 10
Will the UNHCR have to introduce a new category of refugee? Pacific islanders such as on Kiribati (pronounced Kiri - bass) appear to think so.
It isn't a political football in these elections - and thank goodness for small mercies! - but forget about Abbott's vow to reduce our refugee intake by 6000 a year. That's just Abbott and Morrison playing to the redneck gallery in their populist scare campaign to win government. It'll work for them and Abbott will be PM in mid-September. That'll be the easy part done & dusted. Then comes the hard part ...
An Abbott government may well be the government that finds itself accepting 1000s of Pacific Islanders notwithstanding its appeal to the bigots and xenophobes while in opposition. Climate change could be the issue that forces the Australian refugee intake back up to 20 000 a year - and beyond.
Here's part of an op. ed piece on the problems faced by Kiribati that will force them to relocate as their country sinks beneath their feet. You can read the full article at www.theglobalmail.org/feature/kiribati-a-nation-going-under/590/
WHAT WE DON’T YET KNOW is how much faster the seas will rise around Kiribati. What we do know is that President Tong wants his people to start leaving — and many want to go.
Last year in Auckland — New Zealand’s largest city and the world’s largest Polynesian city — a Kiribati man who had lived in the city for six years tried to avoid deportation to his home country by arguing that he would be endangered if he were returned to Kiribati. New Zealand’s immigration officials — they would not identify the man — heard his case but decided the International Refugee Convention does not, yet, provide protection for those claiming to be endangered by climate change.
Nevertheless, the case was closely monitored by the Kiribati government, which believes many people will need to leave so that the islands and atolls can at least sustain a smaller population. President Tong’s government has also been giving much thought to the so-called Atlantis syndrome; how can a small island state actually remain a sovereign nation if most of its people leave and much of the land disappears beneath the waves?
President Tong’s government has also been giving much thought to the so-called Atlantis syndrome; how can a small island state actually remain a sovereign nation if most of its people leave and much of the land disappears beneath the waves?
One potential saviour identified by Kiribati’s president is a speck in the ocean, far away to to the east of the main atoll of Tarawa. Banaba Island is a geographic, political and cultural anomaly. It is much closer to Nauru’s national capital than that of Kiribati, and it is administered from another country — by a colony of Banaban Islanders relocated to a Fijian island who still carry Kiribati passports. Yet it remains Kiribati’s most easterly point. While only 100 people live on Banaba’s six square kilometres of ancient coral, it is Kiribati’s highest point — 81 metres — and that renders it of potentially great strategic importance. President Tong has proposed that in a worst-case scenario an outpost of the Kiribati government could be established on Banaba atoll, retaining a government presence on Kiribati — overseeing its fishing rights and deciding its votes on world issues — even if most of the country’s people and institutions, eventually, had to flee.
That, is admittedly, a still distant scenario. And as the University of NSW law professor Jane McAdam has written, small islands states such as Kiribati will be become uninhabitable — likely because of fresh water shortages — before they disappear under water. McAdam, a specialist in international refugee law, says that an absence of people — rather than territory — may be the first sign that a country no longer displays all the indications of statehood.
McAdam wrote: “Planned and staggered migration over time — the solution favoured by Pacific Islanders — if in situ adaptation to climate change is not possible — may ultimately start to erode longer term claims to continued sovereignty and statehood, since the state’s ‘disappearance’ may begin once the bulk of the permanent population has moved abroad ...”
Among possible — although uncertain — options canvassed by McAdam for disappearing countries to attempt to keep their legal status is the relocation of their population in another country’s territory. Kiribati’s President Tong last month raised international suspicion that he might be planning the latter when he announced Kiribati was buying 6,000 hectares of land on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu. But the president insisted in an interview with The Global Mail that the land in Fiji was an investment for Kiribati — not a site for the relocation of his people. Other high-ranking Kiribati officials said the land would be used to grow food to supply Kiribati.
The spectre of mass emigration is a delicate issue. As Tessie Eria Lambourne, Kiribati’s New Zealand-educated foreign secretary, explains, people do not want to be seen as climate-change refugees.
“We prefer to be called displaced people,” she says. “We do not want to be called refugees because that is very painful for both the people involved and those who are seeking help and those who are helping people look for new homes.”
“It is a last resort for us,” says Lambourne. “Our people are not being forced to leave but we want to give them that option. The government wants to give them all the tools, in terms of job training, they need so that when they decide to leave, they will go as dignified people. They won’t go as burdens to the countries receiving them. They will contribute.”
The purchase of the Fiji land and the spectre of setting up a government outpost on a remote island may also be designed with publicity in mind — an arm of President Tong’s strategy to keep Kiribati on the radar of international donor nations. There’s no doubt that Tong’s doomsday scenario for his nation — and his savvy media skills — have generated much attention for Kiribati. In late 2011 the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, also focussed international attention when he visited South Tarawa and planted mangroves to ward off sea erosion. A week earlier Tong had again garnered international headlines by putting forward a bizarre scheme that involved building floating metal islands off the Kiribati coast, at a cost of $2 billion.
Tong’s frustration — even desperation — with the slow pace of international action on climate change, even as he has his hand outstretched for its aid, is understandable.
He leads a country that barely contributes to climate change, but which has everything to lose because of it.
It isn't a political football in these elections - and thank goodness for small mercies! - but forget about Abbott's vow to reduce our refugee intake by 6000 a year. That's just Abbott and Morrison playing to the redneck gallery in their populist scare campaign to win government. It'll work for them and Abbott will be PM in mid-September. That'll be the easy part done & dusted. Then comes the hard part ...
An Abbott government may well be the government that finds itself accepting 1000s of Pacific Islanders notwithstanding its appeal to the bigots and xenophobes while in opposition. Climate change could be the issue that forces the Australian refugee intake back up to 20 000 a year - and beyond.
Here's part of an op. ed piece on the problems faced by Kiribati that will force them to relocate as their country sinks beneath their feet. You can read the full article at www.theglobalmail.org/feature/kiribati-a-nation-going-under/590/
WHAT WE DON’T YET KNOW is how much faster the seas will rise around Kiribati. What we do know is that President Tong wants his people to start leaving — and many want to go.
Last year in Auckland — New Zealand’s largest city and the world’s largest Polynesian city — a Kiribati man who had lived in the city for six years tried to avoid deportation to his home country by arguing that he would be endangered if he were returned to Kiribati. New Zealand’s immigration officials — they would not identify the man — heard his case but decided the International Refugee Convention does not, yet, provide protection for those claiming to be endangered by climate change.
Nevertheless, the case was closely monitored by the Kiribati government, which believes many people will need to leave so that the islands and atolls can at least sustain a smaller population. President Tong’s government has also been giving much thought to the so-called Atlantis syndrome; how can a small island state actually remain a sovereign nation if most of its people leave and much of the land disappears beneath the waves?
President Tong’s government has also been giving much thought to the so-called Atlantis syndrome; how can a small island state actually remain a sovereign nation if most of its people leave and much of the land disappears beneath the waves?
One potential saviour identified by Kiribati’s president is a speck in the ocean, far away to to the east of the main atoll of Tarawa. Banaba Island is a geographic, political and cultural anomaly. It is much closer to Nauru’s national capital than that of Kiribati, and it is administered from another country — by a colony of Banaban Islanders relocated to a Fijian island who still carry Kiribati passports. Yet it remains Kiribati’s most easterly point. While only 100 people live on Banaba’s six square kilometres of ancient coral, it is Kiribati’s highest point — 81 metres — and that renders it of potentially great strategic importance. President Tong has proposed that in a worst-case scenario an outpost of the Kiribati government could be established on Banaba atoll, retaining a government presence on Kiribati — overseeing its fishing rights and deciding its votes on world issues — even if most of the country’s people and institutions, eventually, had to flee.
That, is admittedly, a still distant scenario. And as the University of NSW law professor Jane McAdam has written, small islands states such as Kiribati will be become uninhabitable — likely because of fresh water shortages — before they disappear under water. McAdam, a specialist in international refugee law, says that an absence of people — rather than territory — may be the first sign that a country no longer displays all the indications of statehood.
McAdam wrote: “Planned and staggered migration over time — the solution favoured by Pacific Islanders — if in situ adaptation to climate change is not possible — may ultimately start to erode longer term claims to continued sovereignty and statehood, since the state’s ‘disappearance’ may begin once the bulk of the permanent population has moved abroad ...”
Among possible — although uncertain — options canvassed by McAdam for disappearing countries to attempt to keep their legal status is the relocation of their population in another country’s territory. Kiribati’s President Tong last month raised international suspicion that he might be planning the latter when he announced Kiribati was buying 6,000 hectares of land on the Fijian island of Vanua Levu. But the president insisted in an interview with The Global Mail that the land in Fiji was an investment for Kiribati — not a site for the relocation of his people. Other high-ranking Kiribati officials said the land would be used to grow food to supply Kiribati.
The spectre of mass emigration is a delicate issue. As Tessie Eria Lambourne, Kiribati’s New Zealand-educated foreign secretary, explains, people do not want to be seen as climate-change refugees.
“We prefer to be called displaced people,” she says. “We do not want to be called refugees because that is very painful for both the people involved and those who are seeking help and those who are helping people look for new homes.”
“It is a last resort for us,” says Lambourne. “Our people are not being forced to leave but we want to give them that option. The government wants to give them all the tools, in terms of job training, they need so that when they decide to leave, they will go as dignified people. They won’t go as burdens to the countries receiving them. They will contribute.”
The purchase of the Fiji land and the spectre of setting up a government outpost on a remote island may also be designed with publicity in mind — an arm of President Tong’s strategy to keep Kiribati on the radar of international donor nations. There’s no doubt that Tong’s doomsday scenario for his nation — and his savvy media skills — have generated much attention for Kiribati. In late 2011 the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, also focussed international attention when he visited South Tarawa and planted mangroves to ward off sea erosion. A week earlier Tong had again garnered international headlines by putting forward a bizarre scheme that involved building floating metal islands off the Kiribati coast, at a cost of $2 billion.
Tong’s frustration — even desperation — with the slow pace of international action on climate change, even as he has his hand outstretched for its aid, is understandable.
He leads a country that barely contributes to climate change, but which has everything to lose because of it.
