DECLARE PEACE ON REFUGEES

PEACE – EQUALITY – NO RACISM

Everyone has the right to live in peace, with justice and equality, AND THAT INCLUDES ALL ASYLUM SEEKERS.
By declaring war on refugees, the Australian Government is alienating and dehumanising people who come to our country seeking the help we promised sixty years ago when the Menzies Coalition Government signed the United Nations Refugee Convention.

• close detention centres, on shore and off shore

• house asylum seekers in the community

• global and regional program to help people fleeing war and persecution

War causes refugees - 80% of refugees are women and children. We condemn terrorism, by any person, group or government, but war is not a solution. Many of us believe we should reject all forms of violence. Australia is now out of the Iraq occupation and the Afghanistan War, where many refugees come from. Millions of Syrian people are dis¬placed right now. Now we must make Australia really help reduce the level of conflict which makes people flee their countries looking for protection. This means reducing the dangerous tension between the United States, China and Japan. It means addressing the terrible repression in the Philippines, and Sri Lanka.

Government policy brutalises children, by locking them up indefinitely in inappropriate facilities. Not knowing the term of your imprisonment induces anxiety, depression and self-harm, yet Government policy subjects over a thou¬sand children - and more adults - to this psychological cruelty.

After the deadly violence against refugees on Manus Island, this has to stop!

• resolve international conflicts peacefully through the United Nations

• address poverty, racism, environmental destruction and inequality

• vigorous response to climate change to do justice to future generations

• no new nuclear arms race – end Australia's role in the nuclear cycle

• use national and international courts to bring terrorists and war criminals to justice

• oppose the threat to civil liberties in anti-terrorism laws.

Australian policy now promotes greater inequality - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people h ave less rights than others under the NT Intervention, Muslims are demonised, single parents with young children are forced onto poverty-level NewStart, women's wages are much less than male wages, women face their old age with significantly less than men, workers' rights to organise and bargain are under attack, jobs are being wiped out. Yet government generously subsidises the superannuation, health insurance and private schools of the wealthy.

• a caring society instead of one of winners and losers!

• raise our voices for equality and fairness in the lead up to the May Budget!

Like the 1980s Palm Sunday Committees, and the 2002 Palm Sunday Committee, our 2014 Palm Sunday Committee is broad, with representation by invitation across ethnic, religious, social and political divides, with no group dominating.

SPONSORED BY: Anne Symonds (former MLC); Arab Council Australia; Assoc to Defend Freedom & Human Rights in Iran; Aust Manufacturing Workers Union; Aust Services Union; Benedictine Nuns Jamberoo Abbey; Blue Mountains Greens; CANA Communities; Carmelite Commission for Justice & Peace; ChilOut; Common Action; Construction Unio n (CFMEU); Edmund Rice Centre; Evatt Foundation; Finance Sector Union; Fire Brigade Employees Union; Josephite Congregation; Josephite Justice Office; Labor for Refugees; Maritime Union of Australia; Medical Assoc for Prevention of War; Metropolitan Community Church; Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Peace & Justice; National Tertiary Education Union; NSW Teachers Federation; Pax Christi; Quakers NSW Peace & Justice; Refugee Action Coalition; SEARCH Foundation; Socialist Alliance; Solidarity; Sydney Peace & Justice Coalition; Sydney Trade Union Choir; Unions for Refugees; Uniting Church Synod NSW/ACT; Woman & The Australian Church.

Contact: Fr Claude Mostowik 0411 450 953; Dianne Hiles 0425 244 667; Ian Rintoul 0417 275 713; Peter Murphy 0418 312 301
Facebook: search for Palm-Sunday-Sydney-2014

DONATE: Make a direct deposit or send a cheque to Sydney Peace & Justice Coalition, PO Box K941, Haymarket NSW 1240. BSB: 082-024 Account Number: 56 140 1082

OLSH STATEMENT: DECLARE PEACE ON REFUGEES

We are all well aware of the plight of refuges in our own country. One has only to pick up a paper or switch on the TV, to read or see something of the current thinking of Australians on the issue of refugees and people seeking asylum.

We, the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, both here in Australia and throughout the world, are committed to welcoming refugees and displaced people.

Today, more than ever, there are millions of people suffering trauma and grief and extreme anguish and our charism calls us to alleviate suffering wherever we find it.Our last General Chapter recommendations stated that, as Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart:

''We are working with, advocating for and empowering the poor and all who suffer, particularly women and children through our ministries" among refugees and displaced persons

'Immigrants dying at sea, in boats which were vehicles of hope and became vehicles of death ... These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace; they were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death. How often do such people fail to find understanding, fail to find acceptance, fail to find solidarity. And their cry rises up to God!'

Pope Francis

An alarming aspect of the pictures drawn by children detained on Christmas Island, and revealed by the Human Rights Commission's national investigation into their plight, is what is blanked out – the children’s boat IDs. In every detention facility I have visited, children sign their artworks with this ID; they respond to this ID; they know each other’s ID numbers. The institutionalisation of these children is all-pervasive and will take a very long time to recover from if they are ever released into society.

The sadness and pleas in these drawings are fairly evident, sometimes literal. ‘I need your help. ples help me’ says the speech bubble above the girl with curly hair. A child is crying out for help, pleading to strangers. Parents know they cannot help their own children. These drawings show the complete breakdown of the family unit.

Inside detention, parents are stripped of the right to make nearly every basic decision about their child: what will he or she eat, shall I set a nice family table for dinner, what type of education will my child receive, what will he or she wear? Cultural norms cannot play out, and adults break without a purpose. Children with broken parents suffer - they create drawings calling out to strangers.

Most of the drawings feature bars and locks. Photograph: Human Rights Commission

Nearly every drawing references bars…….

…..The sun shines but it cries.

Sophie Peer, The Guardian.

HANNAH ARENDT

The MSC Justice Desk recently printed quotes from philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

The quotes are featured. Around Australia, a film, called Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase, 'The Banality of Evil' after witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann.  The SIGNIS review is included below.

'Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.'
Hannah Arendt

'No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.'
Hannah Arendt

'When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.'
Hannah Arendt

'Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.'
Hannah Arendt

HANNAH ARENDT

Germany/Israel/Luxembourg, 2013, 113 minutes, Colour.

Barbara Sukowa, Janet Mc Teer,

Directed by Margarethe von Trotte.

Hannah Arendt was a significant thinker in her time. She had written on the Origins of Totalitarianism and was appreciated as a philosopher. Jewish, she had escaped with her mother from Germany in the late 1930s to the United States and became an American citizen. She lectured in New York and was esteemed as a woman of depth and intelligence.

This is a film which is of interest to those who know about Hannah Arendt, her life and career. It will also be of interest to those who know little about her but want to find out her contribution to 20^th century thinking. If an audience is not interested in Hannah Arendt and her work, they will find this sometimes detailed look at her and her philosophy hard going, or too-hard going.

The director, Margarethe von Trotte, has had a long career in film but has concentrated so many times on significant women and women’s issues. Her leading lady for Hannah Arendt, Barbara Sukowa, has appeared in several of the director’s films playing, amongst others, Rosa Luxembourg and Hildegard of Bingen. Here she creates a very strong impression as Hannah Arendt.

The principal focus of the film is Hanna and on Adolf Eichmann, his being taken by Israeli agents in Argentina, his extradition to Jerusalem and his trial, where he was held in a glass cage, and ultimately found guilty of the charges and hanged.

Hannah Arendt asked the editor of the New Yorker to report on the trial. Her husband, Heinrich, was against her going. But, wanting to ground her philosophical reflections in facts and experience, she was determined to go. The film has some brief scenes of the trial, Hannah sitting in the benches, working in the press room watching the television screen, and some actual television footage of Eichmann himself, the prosecutor and the judge. There are several re-enactments, as well as footage, of some of the witnesses and their emotional response to the treatment of the Jews and the Holocaust. Looking at Eichmann, we see a small man, very ordinary-looking, a bureaucrat rather than any charismatic leader. This was to be the core of Hannah Arendt’s comments on the trial.

After the publication of the articles in the New Yorker, there was a groundswell against Hannah. Jewish authorities and many of the Jews, whether they had read her articles or not, felt that she had betrayed her people, especially with her comments about the complicity, witting or unwitting, of some Jewish leaders with the Nazi authorities and so being responsible for more deaths of Jews. For many this was incomprehensible, leading to hostile phone calls, letters and death threats.

But Hannah Arendt was a strong character, accused of arrogance (which is displayed in the film) and a lack of feeling. However, influenced by the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a relationship when she was a student, rejecting him when he affirm Nazism and later visiting him to ask him to make a public apology, she was a philosopher who was also passionate, invoking ‘passionate thinking’.

The dramatic finale to the film is a lecture she gave at the New York New School, in the presence of the University officials who wanted her resignation, and to a full room of students. It is here that she speaks the phrase which most people know, even if they do not know who originated it, ‘The Banality of Evil’. Eichmann was an ordinary man, a bureaucrat, not a man with a vision or leadership qualities, but someone who obeyed orders because he believed in the authority and that the authority should be obeyed, passing on his orders to others who fulfil them while he was detached, not even knowing necessarily what the consequences were. This is a particularly important message at any time, but particularly now, where communications and social media give us immediate information about all kinds of laws, persecutions, atrocities.

Perhaps this film is more of a visual lecture about Hannah Arendt than an inventive cinema experience. But, to the extent that it portrays Hannah, her ideas, and the controversies about the Eichmann trial and her reporting, it is worth seeing.

GLOBAL FREEDOM NETWORK

Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest has launched a global network, along with the Vatican, the Anglican Communion and a leading Muslim institution, to end human trafficking worldwide by 2020, reports CNS/The Sydney Morning Herald.

The new accord, signed during a Vatican news conference yesterday, launched the beginning of the Global Freedom Network, which hopes to expand to include all the world's major faiths. The global initiative aims to prevent modern forms of slavery; to protect, rescue and rehabilitate victims; and to promote concrete measures that condemn or criminalize human trafficking.

In a joint statement, the accord's signatories called human trafficking and modern forms of slavery 'crimes against humanity' and called for urgent action by all faith communities to join the effort to 'set free the most oppressed of our brothers and sisters'.

'Only by activating, all over the world, the ideals of faith and of shared human values can we marshal the spiritual power, the joint effort and the liberating vision to eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking from our world and for all time,' the joint statement said.

Signing the agreement were:

Andrew Forrest, founder of Walk Free Foundation -- a major partner and organiser of the new network; Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, representing Pope Francis; Mahmoud Azab, representing Ahmad el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a leading Sunni Muslim institution in Cairo; and Anglican Archbishop David Moxon, the archbishop of Canterbury's representative in Rome.

CLIMATE CHANGE OPINION

Lord Deben was once Margaret Thatcher's minister for the environment. He is now head of the British committee on climate change – the model for Australia's Climate Change Authority. The Tory pulled no punches in his comment on the Abbott government's push to change established climate change policies:
'It lets down the whole British tradition that a country should have become so selfish about this issue that it's prepared to spoil the efforts of others and to foil what very much less rich countries are doing ... It's wholly contrary to the science, it's wholly contradictory to the interests of Australia and I hope that many people in Australia will see when the rest of the world is going in the right direction what nonsense it is for them to be going backwards.'

Christine Lagarde was France's conservative finance minister before taking up her current post as managing director of the International Monetary Fund. On the eve of departing for the February G20 meeting in Sydney, her natural diplomacy did not disguise her thoughts on repeal of Australia's carbon laws:
'Climate change issues and progress are critical ... Australia was very much at the forefront and was pioneering in this field and I would hope that Australia continues to be a pioneer.'

Conservative Australians usually consider the position of United States governments on major international policy issues with respect. Yet here is what Secretary of State John Kerry said in Jakarta last month:
'President ... Obama and I believe very deeply that we do not have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society ... It is time for the world to approach this problem with the co-operation, the urgency and the commitment which a challenge of this scale warrants.'
I hope that many people in Australia will see when the rest of the world is going in the right direction what nonsense it is for them to be going backwards.

In sharp contrast, Prime Minister Tony Abbott asked the visiting Canadian foreign minister late in February for confirmation that climate change was a fad. But even the Canadian government – probably the closest to our own in its reluctance to take strong action on climate change – has accepted the reality of global opinion if not of climate science, and is taking seriously its commitment to match the US target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020.........

from Ross Garnaut, The Saturday Paper, March 15th 2014

'The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.

Give the world the best you have anyway.'

                                            Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council

[From the MSC Justice Desk]

NATIONAL LAMENT, LENT 2014

The CRA Justice committee has organised a time of National Lament during Lent to raise consciousness of the Asylum Seeker Issue facing us and many other countries in the world.

Following is the basic outline you may wish to use in your parishes, schools, communities:

NATIONAL LAMENT

"We are a society that has forgotten how to weep." Pope Francis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

We acknowledge the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia.

As you take your next step remember the first people who walked this land.

OUR LAMENT

We lament the lack of compassion for people seeking asylum in Australia.
We lament the denial of human dignity and freedom
We lament the indifference
We lament our inability to turn the tide.

OUR CHALLENGE

"The other" is no longer a brother or sister to be loved, but someone who disturbs my life and my comfort....

In this globalised world, we have fallen into globalised indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn't affect me; it doesn't concern me; it's none of my business!

Pope Francis, Lampedusa 8.7.2013.

OUR PRAYER

We beg forgiveness for our indifference to so many of our brothers and sisters. God, we ask your pardon for those who are complacent and closed amid comforts which have deadened their hearts;

We beg your forgiveness for those who by their decisions on the global level have created situations that lead to these tragedies.

Forgive us, Lord.

Pope Francis, Lampedusa 8.7.2013.

FOR REFLECTION

Jesus said, "An evil spirit of this kind is only driven out by prayer and fasting" Mark 9:29

OUR RESPONSE
• Make Friday a day of prayer and penance
• Write to your local member and to the minister, Scott Morrison, expressing your lament for people seeking asylum in Australia.

HOW BIG IS THE PROBLEM OF ASYLUM SEEKERS?

In 2012, developing countries hosted over 80 percent of the world's refugees. The poorest countries were host to 2.4 million refugees. Pakistan was host to the largest number of refugees worldwide (1.6 million), followed by Iran (868,200), Germany (589,700) and Kenya (565,000). Australia hosted 30,000, or 0.3% of the global total.

Downlands Buys Bales for Rural Families

In a fundraiser that started only last week, Downlands College has already raised $3748 for the Buy A Bale campaign, supporting our rural communities in drought.

"We know families are hurting and are regularly in touch with current and past Downlands families, to do all that we can to help", said Stephen McIllhatton, Downlands College Principal.

Downlands chose to support the Buy A Bale campaign as they believe the money is being put to very good use, supplying hay, diesel and Farmers Cards to the families that need it most.

"We raised over $500 at our recent Community dinner and have had more parents, past students and even complete strangers who have heard me speak on radio, send through many thousands more to support the cause", Mr McIllhatton continued.

If you would like to help Downlands continue to support drought affected families, please click through on our website

[From the Downlands College website]

ASYLUM SEEKERS, PNG BISHOPS

Dear Bishops and Friends,

This is the statement on the Asylum Seekers issue (edited and sent by Abp.Douglas Young, pictured):

The Catholic Bishops Conference is appalled to hear of recent disturbances at the Manus Island detention centre resulting in death and injury for the asylum seekers. We wish to convey our sincerest condolences to the family of the Iranian man who lost his life and our solidarity with those who appear to be the victims of violence.
The CBC has consistently spoken against off shore processing in PNG of asylum seekers who are seeking asylum in Australia.

In statements on this issue in recent years the bishops have called for a truly humane response to those fleeing danger in their home country.

When the Manus detention centre was reopened in the context of a deal with the Australian government the CBC protested in the strongest terms.

We questioned how it could be right, in the light of the PNG Constitution's protection of freedom (section 42), to bring into our country and imprison people who have not broken our laws.

We were concerned that the rhetoric of a righteous campaign against people smugglers actually seemed to be more a question of political convenience. We were offended that settlement in PNG was presented in such a negative light so as to act as a deterrent to asylum seekers. We noted that" according to a report from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, arrangements for the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre do not meet international protection standards, and the present situation on Manus is likely to lead to increased levels of psychosocial harm." This unheeded warning now seems to be proven all too true.

And so we repeat again out respectful encouragement to Australia "to find a more humane solution to people seeking asylum in their country. Asylum seekers are human beings who deserve respect and recognition of their dignity."

Detaining people against their will in PNG, even if it "works" as a deterrent is not a just solution worthy of a great nation otherwise proud of its human rights record. It clearly places an intolerable strain on the capacity of PNG to manage, and might lead to even more deaths, injury and trauma. Close the centre and manage the problem in Australia.

Douglas W. Young, SVD Archbishop of Mount Hagen Papua New Guinea Phone: +675 5421285 Fax: +675 542 2128

Fr.Victor Roche,SVD
General Secretary
CATHOLIC BISHOPS CONFERENCE Of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands
P.O. Box 398, Waigani, NCD
Papua New Guinea

Ph: (675) 325 9577(L); 7220-2828 (M)   Fax: (675) 323 2551   Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.